No_one
4hr ago
There's little reason to believe D-T fusion will ever be employed for grid power generation. Here's a good read on it. Power density of D-T fusion reactors is inherently lower, so reactors have to be much bigger to have the same power.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/nuclear-fusion-power
Between nuclear reactors already being more expensive, a more expensive radiation-producing method of power generation doesn't seem likely to ever be employed at scale.
FistfullOfCrows
4hr ago
UGH, I will never be able to swallow watching this kind of shit. What kind of an incel would be school shooter keeps a diary? How OLD are teh script writers? Sure an incel might joke with his Twitter/Discord/4chan shitlord buddies about doing it online, but a diary?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
As I elaborated on in another comment in this thread, I do not think that some moving of goalposts is necessarily illegitimate. Our specifications can be incorrect, no one's immune from good old Goodhart.
Yet AI skeptics tend to make moving the goalposts into the entire sport. I will grant that their objections exist in a range of reasonableness, from genuine dissatisfaction with current approaches to AI, to Gary Marcus's not even wrong nonsense.
There is a more subtle issue with LLMs writing computer programs. We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-represented in the training data. Meanwhile, the bugs that evade human skill at debugging lurk indefinitely and are over-represented in the training data. We have created tools to write code with bugs that humans have difficulty spotting. Worse, we estimate the quality of the code that our new tools produce on the basis that they are inhuman and have no special skill at writing bugs that we cannot spot, despite the nature of their training data.
This is an interesting concern, and I mean that seriously. Fortunately, it doesn't seem to be empirically borne out. LLMs are increasingly better at solving all bugs, not just obvious-to-human ones. The ones in commercial production are not base models, naively concerned only with the next most likely token (and which necessarily includes subtle bugs that exist in the training distribution), but they're beaten into trying to find any and all bugs they can catch. Nothing in our (limited but not nonexistent) ability to interpret their behavior or cognition suggests that they're deliberately letting bugs through because they seem plausible. I am reasonably confident in making that claim, but I hope @faul_sname or @DaseindustriesLtd might chime in.
At the end of the day, there exist techniques like adversarial training to make such issues not a concern. Ideally, with formal verifications of code, you can't have unwanted behavior, ruled out by mathematical certainty. Of course, interpreting that you haven't made errors in formulating your specification is a challenge in itself.
One old school of AI imagined that the language of thought would be importantly different from natural language. The architecture of AI would involve translating natural language into a more rigorous and expressive internal language, thinking in this internal language and then translating back to natural language for output. LLMs do perhaps partially realise this dream. The tokens are placed in a multidimensional space and training involves discovering the latent structure, effectively inventing that training run's own, custom language of thought. If so, that is a win for the bitter lesson.
There's been a decent amount of work done on dispensing with the need for tokenization in the first place, and letting the LLM operate/reason entirely in the latent space till it needs to output an answer. It seems to work, but hasn't been scaled to the same extent, and the benefits are debatable beyond perhaps solving minor tokenization errors that existing models have.
Human language, as used, is imprecise, but you can quite literally simulate a Turing machine with your speech. I don't see this as a major impediment, why can't LLMs come up with new words if needed, assuming there's a need for words at all?
zeke5123a
4hr ago
Still in his Wikipedia. Here is a WaPo article strongly hinting it was made up with zero evidence (ie they took the five year plea because they were convinced they’d receive no justice—yet the paper didn’t include any of the evidence supporting the conviction). https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/george-floyd-america/policing/
HereAndGone
5hr ago
I wonder if it's because, Walz' attempts at "they're weird" to the contrary, Vance doesn't fit the "rich evil and dumb" or "poor evil and dumb" story about Republicans. He wasn't born rich, he made his way as an outsider into success, and despite anything else they can throw at him, he's smart (not a genius, but not Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel either).
He's supposed to be either the dumb redneck MAGA voter who is a failure by the Elite Coast metrics and so can safely be dismissed, or made his way out of dumb redneck hillbilly hell, went to the Big City and got a college education, and then adopted the classical liberal to mildly progressive values and so ended up in the Democratic Party. That was supposed to be his trajectory after "Hillbilly Elegy" where he did not glamorise the rural culture he was raised in: religiose, working-class, poor and mired in drug addiction and mediocrity (Alexander Turok should love that). That he did not do this, I think, is what is seen as a betrayal. That's why he has to be excoriated.
Rov_Scam
5hr ago
See my Pittsburgh entry on the Hill District from back in February for a related case study.
HereAndGone
5hr ago
All I'm saying is that the multiple traditions of "don't go to this area at this time of year, else you will disappear and not return until decades have passed, you have not aged but everyone you knew is old or dead" point to classic time-dilation effects of FTL travel. Can you deny this evidence and do you still maintain that human-alien contact did not occur until the mid 20th century?
birb_cromble
5hr ago
The actually poor whites and blacks won’t eat rice and beans.
Are you kidding me? That was a staple in my destitute Appalachian community growing up. When you could afford dinner, that was definitely one of the most common meals. Nobody liked it; it wasn't as good as half a can of tomato soup made with milk and a bunch of crackers, but it sure beat having a big glass of water for dinner.
2rafa
5hr ago
England is definitely much better on restitution but in the end harassment by litigation is just as bad because the definition of libel is so onerous for the accused.
2rafa
5hr ago
He could offer Murdoch some kind of solution to his inheritance battle (fought in Nevada, Rupert lost and now has to divide the estate between his older children; Lachlan, his heir, can’t have control). But I’m not sure that possible.
thrownaway24e89172
naïve paranoid outcast
5hr ago
Of course, when men are tricked in such ways the progressive line is that the men themselves are demonstrating a moral failure rather than being victims of misrepresentation. How convenient that we don't talk about women's fragility in falling for such misrepresentations and instead focus on how bad the people taking advantage of them are.
FlailingAce
5hr ago
The solution is to do a modified hokey pokey. You're signaling to your ingroup your resistance while refusing to let the outgroup dictate your actions. One perhaps silly example is that I will still draw a rainbow, despite opposing gender ideology, but will draw it in the classical style using just red, yellow, and blue.
I think this puts me on the side of using 'Fentanyl Floyd' at least directionally. I think I just disagree with that phrase in particular. It seems uncouth and disrespectful. You don't modify the hokey pokey by twerking in the middle of it because you make an even bigger fool of yourself.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6hr ago
Alright, well, this is news to me, and I'm not holding it against you, and Amadan isn't the only moderator warning you or banning you. I'm communicating all of this to you because I would like to not ban you. This is the same process we went through with TPO, with Darwin, with penpractice, with others. We assure you that yes, actually, we do appreciate your good posts, we insist that this does not give you unlimited leeway, and so on, and so forth.
You're not banned yet! You can totally keep it that way.
Tollund_Man4
6hr ago
I'm not sure if American Aldis are designed the same way as European Aldis but given the layout where you have to walk through the queues by the tills to leave it seems like an awkward place to steal from either way.
"Moving the goalposts" is a bad metaphor.
Putting literal goal posts in approximately the right place is easy. Just put them on the end line, at the middle. But sports are competitive. Players will not be happy with the goal posts being in approximately the right place. They have to be in exactly the right place. This too is easy. Goal posts are self defining; the right place for the goal post is where the goal post is!
Belabouring the point, I invite you to consider a soccer match. In the first half, team A score with a shot just inside the right post. In the second half, team B fail to score with a shot just outside the left post. In the post-game adjudication, it is discovered that the goal posts were two feet right of they ought to be. Team A's goal gets disallowed. Team B's miss becomes a goal. Moving the goal posts flips a win for Team A into a win for Team B. The absurdity here is not so much the motion as the neglect. We are neglecting that the goal posts define the goal.
Turning now to Artificial Intelligence, we notice that humans are intelligent [citation needed :-)]. Which raises the question: why are we bothering to create an artificial version of what we already have? Mostly because the devil in in the details; humans are intelligent, but ...
If Alice copies Bob, and Bob copies Charles, and Charles copies Alice, then who should David copy? Human intelligence has a circle jerk problem. Perhaps David should copy Edward, who has reasoned things out from first principles. Perhaps David should copy Fiona who has done experiments. But brilliant, charismatic intectuals lead societies over cliffs. I wrote a paragraph on the difficulties of empirical science, but I deleted it because I couldn't get it to replicate.
We want something from Artificial Intelligence. We want it to cover the gaps in human intelligence. If we could crisply and accurately characterise those gaps we would be well on our way to fixing them ourselves. We have (had?) exactly one example of intelligence to look at, and we are not happy with it. We certainly notice that it has a weak meta-game: human intelligence is bad at seeing its own flaws. We are not able to install self-defining goal posts.
Old people bring baggage from the 1960's to discussion of AI. The word Computer invokes images of banks of tape drives reading databases. Human written legal briefs have a sloppiness problem. Need a precedent? A quick skim and this one looks close enough. It is job of the opposing lawyers to read it carefully and notice that it is not relevant. (The legal system is not supposed to work like this!) One images that an Artificial Intelligence actually reads the entire legal database and finds precedents that humans would miss. When an LLM invents a plausible, fictional precedent that just doesn't exist, one is taken by surprise. One wants to mark the AI down a lot for that non-human error. Doing so involves both moving the goal posts and admitting to not anticipating that failure mode at all.
There is a more subtle issue with LLMs writing computer programs. We may be underestimating the effort that goes into cleaning up LLM messes. LLMs learn to program from code bases written by humans. Not just written by humans, maintained by humans. So the bugs that humans spot and remove are under-represented in the training data. Meanwhile, the bugs that evade human skill at debugging lurk indefinitely and are over-represented in the training data. We have created tools to write code with bugs that humans have difficulty spotting. Worse, we estimate the quality of the code that our new tools produce on the basis that they are inhuman and have no special skill at writing bugs that we cannot spot, despite the nature of their training data.
Notice the clash with old-school expectations. A lot of GOFAI focussed on formal verification of mathematics. Some early theorem provers were ad hoc (and performed poorly). The attention shifted to algorithms growing out of Gödel's completeness theorem and Robinson's work on resolution theorem provers. Algorithms that were provably correct. The old school expectation involves a language such as SML, with a formal semantics, a methodology such as Dijkstra's "A Discipline of Programming", and code accompanied by a formally verified proof of correctness.
A tool for writing code with bugs that humans cannot find sounds like the kind of thing that Mossad would use to sabotage Iranian IT infrastructure. It may be super‐humanly intelligent, but we still want to move the goal posts to exclude it as the bad kind of intelligence.
One old school of AI imagined that the language of thought would be importantly different from natural language. The architecture of AI would involve translating natural language into a more rigorous and expressive internal language, thinking in this internal language and then translating back to natural language for output. LLMs do perhaps partially realise this dream. The tokens are placed in a multidimensional space and training involves discovering the latent structure, effectively inventing that training run's own, custom language of thought. If so, that is a win for the bitter lesson.
On the other hand, LLMs learn the world through human language. I believe that humans suffer from linguistic poverty. Many of our disputes bog down for lack of words. When we have one word for two concepts our discussions are reduced to hopping instead of walking.(My missing words web page is neglected, my post https://www.themotte.org/post/1043/splitting-defensive-alliance-into-chaining-alliance was not well liked, I'm not managing to explain the concept of linguistic poverty.) I hope that AI will "... cover the gaps in human intelligence." but LLMs seemed doomed to inherit our linguistic poverty and reproduce our existing confusions. The dream was that AI would cure human intellectual weakness not copy it.
I think that it is legitimate to notice that LLMs are indeed intelligent, and to then move the goal posts, declaring that, now we have seen it, we realise our error and this is not what we had in mind.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
6hr ago
I agree that it's tempting to lib out on this one, but resist because it's unlikely to happen. The idea that THIS TIME he's up against old man Murdoch and that will mean he's met his match, is giving me "do you know what peshmerga means?" Vibes.
Though i will say I increased the odds of president Vance significantly when I saw they released news about Trump's health. Up until now they've basically maintained that he could play pro sports, or at least the PGA senior tour, tomorrow if he wanted. Just admitting normal elderly man stuff is a big step towards resigning for Trump.
WhiningCoil
6hr ago
Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username
I don't think so.
I know what your original account was on reddit (1). You switched to a new one (2), came here with yet another one (3), and I am pretty sure you went through a couple others (4+) along the way-I will admit I might be misremembering those (though I think I could name them). I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using.
Numbering is mine. Amadan seems to think I've had at least 4 accounts and is holding this against me in his moderation decisions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7hr ago
I see. Yeah, no, as far as I know that's just a reference to his reddit username, which is/was not "WhiningCoil." The mod team was discussing WhiningCoil's status just yesterday and no one made any mention of alt accounts at that time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7hr ago
That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.
Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.
Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.
Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:
I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup
Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle
None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts.
Two days ago.
Less than a day ago.
"I do know you have been modded and banned pretty regularly under whichever alt you're using."
Both from @Amadan.
Barfknuckle
7hr ago
Yeah, about that, I sent a modmail about this accusation that I'm running alts, because it's bullshit, and I'd appreciate a response.
You should just make some alts. The trick is that the alts should say absolutely nothing the least bit controversial at least until the current main is kaput. They should just make obvious little comments and build up a few points until it's time for them to become the new main.
By the time your new main goes from "newbie with a clean record so far" to being someone the mods remember in their own right, your last account getting banned should be old news.
Barfknuckle
7hr ago
I just got around to bothering to read this post 17 days later.
You're basically complaining that there isn't a reasonable 'win condition' against the scolds scolding him, and I am extrapolating on that.
I lightheartedly complained that there wasn't a way to avoid people bitching about what a rich guy's woman looks like. You just sound like some sack of shit whose wife left him, barging in all serious to tell us how actually it's because adultery is bad, like nobody else knows the context around this or why anyone might be mad at Jeff Bezos.
Fuck off, retard.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7hr ago
Hopefully you see my response. I am not aware of any accusations of you running alts. In the past year you have accumulated AAQCs, warnings, and bans in approximately equal proportion. These are always hard cases for us, because we can see that you're smart enough to understand and follow the rules, and you create excellent content for the community on a regular basis. So we actively resist banning you, but you blatantly violate the rules way too often for us to simply ignore. Your current balance is such that you really are flirting with a perma, or at least a very long term (90+ days) ban.
And you're basing this on what, exactly? Your intimate involvement with the "urban poor"? I can assure you that right now, the patronage of several Pittsburgh grocery stores in wealthy, white areas is close to half black, with jitneys lining the parking lots. These just so happen to be the closest normal grocery stores to "urban areas" without one.
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