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Jiro
1d ago
This is nothing but an argument from personal incredulity.
No, it's an argument "people don't think that". It is possible to observe people and draw conclusions about what they might think. "People don't think this" isn't an argument from personal incredulity.
No.
Yes. The government can spend money on lots and lots of things. Consider that the government actually has things like the Voice of America, subsidies to NPR, etc. The Price Press isn't all that different from that.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
I was able to hit a pr workwise clocking in 7.5 hours yesterday and 7 today. My biological clock is ticking and I am certain that I can do 8-9 hours daily of focused programming work, well 7 something and the remaining for math. So far, I have only been getting humbled in that I learn something, it quickly becomes apparent that I need to learn more and I try again; my progress has been slower and much more painful than I ever expected. Yet, this is the first time in my life I have worked this much at any level of consistency.
Today, like yesterday, I am too tired to work and just do not care about what is happening in the world, rather, things beyond my own life and my family, plus some friends. My time on twitter is nearly zero, I only open up Hacker News because I am on their telegram channel and since starting Twin Peaks, I have been using tv as my daily hour of leisure, since poor time management leaves me with not a lot of spare time before I sleep by 11 pm.
Many here may remember me from my rambling, incoherent updates from the past. I am a few weeks away from finishing off the entire python sequence on boot.dev, I will start C after that and finally do go after cleaning up data structures there. My mentor suggested this route and I will follow it through no matter what. So I do not have a weeping update like I did once. My sabbatical may take a few more months, but I will not stop or change things in the middle since that is how I fucked my life up two years ago.
On the workout side, I need to eat and sleep more. I kept missing days for the past few weeks; the worst I can do is quit or get injured. Getting humbled regularly has many benefits. I nitpicked people a lot to feel better, I never nitpick anyone. I mean, a lot of this was driven by Luke Smith's short blogpost on this. Life is short, I was told here to derive satisfaction from the stuff I am doing now, it took me 5 years to get the memo. I still sometimes remember my past life, all the opportunities I lost, the occasional fond memories, the dread of ending up the same, stuck in the same limbo I got into a decade ago. But I know things can change. I cannot appreciate any amount of progress, despite having done more than I ever did in my entire life, since I have so much more that I want to do, and whatever little I have done seems smaller than a statistical error. I have gotten to a point in life where I have less than zero confidence in any of my abilities, its not ideal, I was always overconfident, and life is better that way. Maybe never doing anything helped me cope with that, perhaps.
Frankly, I don't care about feeling good about what I do, I just want to do more and git gud for real. Anyhow, I will go back and finish off the first episode of season 2 of Twin Peaks and my dinner that I paused to finish my math for the day. If what I wrote seems incoherent, then do let me know. I am too tired to think properly, and I like it for a change. I will post a review of Twin Peaks season 1 this Friday. Please do not post spoilers, even hidden ones. My work setup is also slicker as I have nvim running the kickstart stuff TJ Devries works on, it feels like a breeze even though I only know 10 commands, including exiting and splitting panels lol. I hope I post another update after a few months, and it's better than this one. I also realised that I pee like 20 times a day, not sure if it's from working too much, drinking too much water or what. See ya!
5434a
1d ago
many Western environmentalists are only tooting the horn about climate change as a convenient pretext to instate global communism
I started drafting a top level post last week touching on a related trend but I didn't have enough to round it out. I still don't really, but I think there's something in there. Anyway, last week I saw a poster for an Alternative Pride March in my city. My CW radar was pinged, I looked it up and found out that it's explicitly Marxist ("Pride without cops or corporations!" etc). Events under the same banner are being organised in other cities suggesting it's unlikely to be a grass roots movement.
So now the social acceptance and establishment endorsement of LGBT is... bad? That doesn't seem convincing.
What I think is happening is that Marxists prey on these fringe movements. It's not that LGBT and environmentalists are eager for Communism. I think many of them are sincere that what they want is no more than reasonable policies addressing their defined political interest (gay marriage, say, or clean rivers). I suspect that Marxists court and enter these movements that are made of what are already soft radicals who are acculturated to being unhappy with an aspect of the status quo and begin efforts to turn them into hard radicals who will become convinced that the status quo has to be disposed of wholesale (our revolution is necessary for the sake of your own cause, Comrade).
That is to say it's not environmentalists who are tooting the climate change horn to instate Communism, nor is it LGBTs, it's Communists. The fact that these movements are already socially accepted gives them cover to expand the agenda because now they can condemn resistance to the veiled Communist ideology as eg ecocidal transphobia.
gattsuru
1d ago
It's certainly possible; even the bit where the Texas government swears in court that they won't bring these charges against those companies runs into the trouble where the Texas government includes Paxton. But it's even more common for people to panic when a country government has been sending nice letters informing them of their legal requirements and mentioning civil fines and criminal penalties.
And I'm skeptical that nVidia lacks lawyers who can read.
((I will admit one silver lining; we might get fewer NordVPN ads. But as tempting as that is, I'd rather keep my principles.))
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Personally, I would start neither a romantic relationship or therapy with an LLM which is not running on hardware I control.
As the saying goes, if you are not paying (enough) for it, you are not the customer, you are the product.
LLMs are still (I think) in the gold-rush stage where venture capital can substitute for balancing the budget, and it is more important for firms to build a userbase than it is to adequately monetarize that user base. You don't want to be the firm which ran a sustainably-priced service and thus got very little in the way of user interactions when other firms will burn through money just to gain that experience.
So your chats are what you are really paying to the AI company. They will be relentlessly mined to train the next model, but probably also be sold, get stolen or offered to the NYT as part of a settlement.
On the opposite side, I think that for romantic or therapy roles having the latest and greatest model is probably overkill. Unless you are extremely sapiosexual, you are unlikely to care how many of the IOC problems your virtual partner can solve. Assuming that the LLM has read all the relevant books on therapy during training, I think being a good therapist is more about Wisdom than Intelligence. Ideally you would want separate RLHF for that role, though. Virtual assistants are probably a bit too much yes-men. WIS is required both to know when your patient is lying to themselves, and also what the best speed to clear up the lies is. I honestly do not know if recent LLMs have made progress with that, and the Open Weight models might serve as a good-enough basis to run on your gaming rig. Only seeing the text inputs of the patient instead of a video feed might be limiting, though.
Index funds are hard to beat in terms of returns intersecting with zero thinking required. If you think you might enjoy a kinda rude but accurate quant's rationalization for index funds you can watch this.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Pretty much nobody could sincerely claim that the Price Force counts.
Why not? Frankly, I just don't believe this whatsoever. This is nothing but an argument from personal incredulity. I guess this is what you're left with after your prior tests didn't work out. There's simply not a single shred of reasoning here.
Creating the Price Press is something the government can do using its ordinary powers.
No.
With that aside, I'm not sure how other people see LLMs tackling problems of this complexity and then claim they're not reasoning.
Both the complexity, and also just the novelty. These LLMs were definitely trained with some stack-based languages, both historic like forth and modern assembly, but as similar as they might be from a conceptual perspective, the implementation philosophy and simple names are drastically different. And while there's a tiny number of HexCasting examples on the open web or on discord, but they universally take different approaches, and some of them (like my screenshot above) simply can't be read by any parser that doesn't already have a good understanding of the language: a completed Jester's Gambit, Rotation Gambit, and Rotation Gambit II are visually identical. And, of course, you don't have to write a spell from top-left-going-right-then-down like an English paragraph.
That's a fun example because it's got an easy third-party evaluation, but you don't have to make up a programming language to do this sorta thing. These problems don't have to be hard, just be being new they undermine a lot of these arguments, and these writers could run them, and just don't seem interested in it.
I'm not sure why you're ?paying for Grok 4. Grok 3 was genuinely impressive, and somewhat noticeably better than the competition at launch. Not the case here I'm afraid.
Yeah, I'm a little surprised. I didn't expect any of the LLMs to handle this great -- I'm kinda amazed that ChatGPT could do as well as it did, and even some of my gripes are probably downstream of the question being underspecified -- but the level of hallucination from Grok4 is disappointing, and I could see the arguments for dropping it.
Partly a politics and work politics thing. My boss is a big booster of everything Musk, so there's been a lot more value, separate from the LLM's specific capabilities, in both knowing the thing and knowing the limits of the Grok4. And while I don't particularly trust xAI, I neither trust nor like OpenAI.
Some of it's use case. I do find even Grok 3 more effective for writing, and reviewing writing than the ChatGPT equivalents. Compare this to this, or at the risk of touching on erwgv3g34's topic today, this to this (cw: discussion of an excerpt from nsfw m/m/f text; there's no actual sex or even nudity, but it's very very clearly smut.)
They're all sycophantic, and even where 4o is better at catching spelling and grammar checks, at larger consistency or coherence or theme questions I've had a hell of a time getting any of the early ChatGPT models to really push back with anything deeper than the Your First Writing Advice that amadanb's criticized.
Of course, I also haven't experimented that hard with them, or with the newer paid ChatGPT models. I probably do need to do a deeper and more serious evaluation; I've also just been lazy about actual hard comparisons for fields with strict performance results. My work programming goes into stuff that I'm either unwilling to upload to an outside service or is large enough in scale that models have had problems maintaining logic (or both), while my hobby programming or teaching is mostly simple enough that Grok3 or 4mini can handle it.
Tiber727
1d ago
I live in a college town. I honestly can't think of a single person right now in real life that I would describe as a hairshirt environmentalist. Online, I can only think of Greta herself and her refusal to take an airplane, and she's a massive outlier because she pretty much uses her influence to bum rides around the world on an eco-friendly yacht. A quick check of Just Stop Oil shows that most of their antics result in 50-ish arrests, which seems like peanuts to me.
Your average environmentalist is a middle class college kid with an iPhone. They aren't giving up much of anything except maybe biking more and eating less meat.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Sending a letter to a random attorney with 1000$ of cash and instructions to forward an encrypted message (or the decryption key) to the media in case of your death is something which could work
To the lawyers in the audience: are random requests like this common? I realize direct anecdotes might be subject to confidentiality, but are these sorts of things heard of?
Did you read the effortpost? At this time Epstein's known victims were 18+ish girls who willingly sought him out to fuck him for money. He doesn't sound like a good person but I can see how it might be hard to get the legal system fully fired up over this. Seemed like the feds couldn't even convince themselves to get involved, understandably.
Also, third paragraph in my reply. My own friend was not a well-connected celebrity and had the softest jail experience imaginable. He was poor, but what he had going for him was that he was likable and not dysfunctionally insane and his crime didn't fit neatly into reprehensible crimes like murder or assault with a deadly weapon.
I think it is an error to believe the legal system will by default inflict the appropriate amount of suffering fit for a crime, especially if the accused has any shred of sympathy and resists at all levels and can pull the right strings.
roystgnr
1d ago
Huh. I'd always imagined that one way we might get serious about ASI safety would be that non-superhuman AIs might do something Unfriendly enough to spook the normies ... but in this case, the anti-human risk probably reassures people, doesn't it? We optimize chatbots to be as persuasive and addictive as possible, but well before we get to some hypothetical "can wrap anyone around their little finger" point, we're at the "can seduce the most pitiful and low-status people among us" point, and the normal reaction to that isn't "boy, that could happen to me someday", it's "boy, I'm glad I'm not like those people and never will be!"
I wonder how far that generalizes. The Just World fallacy is a tempting one.
Corvos
1d ago
I was told by a psychologist that the vast majority of suicidal impulses last minutes or even seconds. The idea is that they don’t have time to seek out a substitute before the impulse wears off. It may appear later in other circs of course.
Jiro
1d ago
An Air Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
Pretty much nobody could sincerely claim that the Price Force counts. A huge number of people could sincerely say that the Air Force counts. The object level is important.
That's not how Constitutional grants of authority work.
Creating the Price Press is something the government can do using its ordinary powers. The free press clause isn't granting it authority at all.
The free press clause only comes into effect when the government tries to shut it down.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I (non-native English speaker) found ChatGPT's critique helpful with a recent application letter. I will grant you that it was a bit more formal than your choice of text, though -- I did not talk about drinking anyone's bathwater, time will tell if that was the correct choice or not.
Most of its suggestions were minor stylistic things (using a gerund instead of an infinitive in certain phrases, avoiding repetition of word constructs) which seemed to me to be improvements.
I will grant you that an application letter is probably a more central example of most of its training data than that perv diary entry -- it is a continuous text, for one thing. Also, unlike that diary entry, I did not start out with a (presumably well-formulated) draft in a foreign language which I translated to English and then asked GPT to correct my English without access to the original (which from what I can tell is what happened with the diary). Instead, I wrote me thoughts down in English, sometimes awkwardly, and relied on it to put them into a smoother form.
Mantergeistmann
1d ago
So what would it do to the abortion debate? Would robo-abortions be illegal (since you clearly wouldn't oh god i forgot about fetishes I'm going to bleach my brain have created a pregnancy with a robot unless you intended to have it carried through to term)? But then what does that say, that the sanctity of a robo-vat-fetus is more legally "alive"/protectable than one in a human womb? But somewhere out there is a future where, if it isn't made illegal, some youtuber is repeatedly aborting his pregnant robot for the hate-clicks.
And I think that's the worst sentence I've written in my entire life, but I'm still young. Even without longevity, I'm sure there's time for me to write worse.
aldomilyar
1d ago
I think it's more the raising of children that's the bottleneck at the moment.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I've heard (but not confirmed) that removing one suicide method (eg. putting fences on a bridge) reduces the total number of suicides by the marginal amount blocked by that intervention. In other words, there are bridge-jumping-suicidal people and pill-taking-suicidal people, but not suicidal-by-any-method people that would substitute one method for another.
I am very doubtful about that. Some of the suicides are likely by goal-oriented people following a long-term plan (e.g. in a MAID-like context), and for these I would expect substitution effects.
Even for spontaneous suicides, I think that there is some minor substitution effect. If a person had the worst day of their life and would jump off a bridge if not for the fact that it was fenced, I would expect at least a 20% chance that another convenient method (access to a tall building, a firearm, drugs) will present itself and be taken before they feel less suicidal.
ControlsFreak
1d ago
A Price Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
An Air Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
That's pretty easy to just state ipse dixit. But there's something missing that I would call "reasoning". So far, when we've tested your reasoning, it has led to many more questions that you've consistently refused to answer.
once the Price Press exists
That's not how Constitutional grants of authority work. At all. Honestly, if this is your understanding of the Constitution, there's probably not much more value in me continuing this discussion.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
That seems possible as applied to state government expenditures (likely subject to federal rules like the one in question, subject to future court rulings).
We never did get a ruling on California's attempt to boycott several red states, which at least seems related. But in a world in which the court accepts Wickard, I suspect the feds would win both the domestic and foreign state expenditures questions if it makes it to court.
roystgnr
1d ago
I follow JimDMiller ("James Miller" on Scott's blogs, occasionally /u/sargon66 back when we were on Reddit) on Twitter, and was amused to see how much pushback he got on the claim:
If I can predict what I doctor will say, I have the knowledge of that doctor. Prediction is understanding, that is the key to why LLMs are worth trillions.
On the one hand, it's not inconceivable that LLMs can get very good at producing text that "interpolates" within and "remixes" their data set without yet getting good at predicting text that "extrapolates" from it. Chain-of-thought is a good attempt to get around that problem, but so far that doesn't seem to be as superhuman at "everything" as simple Monte Carlo tree search was at "Go" and "Chess". Humans aren't exactly great at this either (the tradition when someone comes up with previously-unheard-of knowledge is to award them a patent and/or a PhD) but humans at least have got a track record of accomplishing it occasionally.
On the other hand, even humans don't have a great track record. A lot of science dissertations are basically "remixes" of existing investigative techniques applied to new experimental data. My dissertation's biggest contributions were of the form "prove a theorem analogous to existing technique X but for somewhat-different problem Y". It's not obvious to me how much technically-new knowledge really requires completely-conceptually-new "extrapolation" of ideas.
On the gripping hand, I'm steelmanning so hard in my first paragraph that it no longer really resembles the real clearly-stated AI-dismissive arguments. If we actually get to the point where the output of an LLM can predict or surpass any top human, I'm going to need to see some much clearer proofs that the Church-Turing thesis only constrains semiconductors, not fatty grey meat. Well, I'd like to see such proofs, anyway. If we get to that point then any proof attempts are likely either going to be comically silly (if we have Friendly AGI, it'll be shooting them down left and right) or tragically silly (if we have UnFriendly AGI, hopefully we won't keep debating whether submarines can really swim while they're launching torpedos).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1d ago
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
This is a failure of theory of mind.
As a general rule, when there's a situation where person A insistently tries to solve problem B with method C rather than more-effective method D, the conclusion "A is secretly a liar about wanting to solve problem B and just wants to do method C for other reason E" is almost always false, outside of special cases like PR departments and to some extent politicians. The correct conclusion is more often "A is not a consequentialist and considers method D sinful and thus off the table". "A thinks method D is actually not more effective than method C" is also a thing.
So, yes, a lot of these people really are socialists, but they're also environmentalists who sincerely believe CO2 might cause TEOTWAWKI. It's just, well, you actually also need the premise of "sometimes there isn't a perfect solution; pick the lesser evil" in order to get to "pursue this within capitalism rather than demanding we dismantle capitalism at the same time", and a lot of people don't believe that premise.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
Just have the robot waifu be able to bear children. Then we wouldn't need ELON money to have 30 children. If anything, this might actually fix the demographic collapse
Over a long enough time horizon all problems are self-solving, the question is what do we do in the meantime
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