domain:twitter.com
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
15m ago
I'm generally convinced that at least getting the vaccines was sensible (and pushing their roll-out was good policy, though the compulsion to take them was deeply illiberal), but this data doesn't seem too compelling to me considering the obvious confounders. I would assume Red America to have a significantly larger number of old and unhealthy people with inadequate access to medical care.
Rov_Scam
26m ago
It's also possible that we get a lone alien craft who was drawn here following an amateur radio signal after his home planet was destroyed in a nuclear war, which he survived because he was in the orbital guard at the time.
quiet_NaN
32m ago
Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building
That sounds awfully confident given that we can make no assumptions about the utility function of the aliens. Perhaps they just want to fuck koala bears and think wiping out humanity is easier than convincing them to leave 95% of Earth's land mass to the koala brothel project.
Perhaps they are the superhappy people, who would simply invade because Earth allows kids to experience pain on the level of stubbed toes.
Perhaps it is just a science fair project on conflict in the early nuclear age.
Even if you assume that any alien life could only have an instrumental interest in Earth, we have a ton of species besides humans. Not that capturing or subjugating a few billion humans will do them much good -- much easier to transmit the human genome and synthesize humans on their home world if they need humans for some weird reason.
FistfullOfCrows
35m ago
>you meet the space elves
>they are hot
>Immediately they start calling you monkeigh
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
41m ago
A couple things;
The natural assumption should be that they're making good margins on inference and all the losses are due to research/training, fixed costs, wages, capital investment.
This is a fun way to say "If you don't count up all my costs, my company is totally making money." Secondarily, I don't know why you would call this a "natural" assumption. Why would I naturally assume that they are making money on inference? More to the point, however, it's not that they need a decent or even good margin on inference, it's that they need wildly good margins on inference if they believe they'll never be able to cut the other fixed and variable costs. You say "they aren't selling $200 worth of inference for $20" I say "Are they selling $2 of inference for $20"?
Why would a venture capitalist, who's whole livelihood and fortune depends on prudent investment, hand money to Anthropic or OpenAI so they can just hand that money to NVIDIA and me, the customer?
Because this is literally post 2000s venture capital strategy. You find product-market fit, and then rush to semi-monopolize (totally legal, of course) a nice market using VC dollars to speed that growth. Not only do VCs not care if you burn cash, they want you to because it means there's still more market out there. This only stops once you hit real scale and the market is more or less saturated. Then, real unit economics and things like total customer value and cost of acquisition come into play. This is often when the MBAs come in and you start to see cost reductions - no more team happy hours at that trendy rooftop bar.
This dynamic has been dialed up to 1,000 in the AI wars; everyone thinks this could be a winner-take-all game or, at the very least, a power low distribution. If the forecast total market is well over $1 trillion, then VCs who give you literally 10s of billions of dollars are still making a positive EV bet. This is how these people think. Burning money in the present is, again, not only okay - but the preferred strategy.
Anthropic is providing its services for free to the US govt.
No, they are not. They are getting paid to do it because it is illegal to provide professional services to the government without compensation. Their federal margins are probably worse than commercial - this is always the case because of federal procurement law - but their costs are also almost certainly being fully covered. Look into "cost plus" contracting for more insight.
What evidence points in this direction of ultra-benign, pro-consumer capitalism with 10x subsidies? It seems like a pure myth to me. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
See my second point above. This is the VC playbook. Uber didn't turn a profit for ever. Amazon's retail business didn't for over 20 years and now still operates with thin margins.
I don't fully buy into the "VCs are lizard people who eat babies" reddit style rhetoric. Mostly, I think they're essentially trust fund kinds who like to gamble but want to dress it up as "inNovATIon!" But one thing is for sure - VCs aren't interested in building long term sustainable businesses. It's a game of passing the bag and praying for exits (that's literally the handle of a twitter parody account). Your goal is to make sure the startup you invested in has a higher valuation in the next round. If that happens, you can mark your book up. The actual returns come when they get acquired, you sell secondaries, or they go public ... but it all follows the train of "price go up" from funding round to funding round.
What makes a price? A buyer. That's it. All you need is for another investment firm (really, a group of them) to buy into a story that your Uber For Cats play is actually worth more now then when you invested. You don't care beyond that. Margins fucked? Whatever. Even if you literally invested in a cult, or turned your blind eye to a magic box fake product, as long as there is a buyer, it's all fine.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
43m ago
Heh, I'm old enough to have owned a pocket electronic spell checker at one point. The hash table seems the right way to do it these days, but it will take up more memory (640K shakes fist at cloud). And sometimes you do want to scan faster than the user types, like opening a new large file.
PatellaFarmer
43m ago
I am sorry to ask others to do the leg work for me but I have vague memories of a thread about eugenics on Twitter (2018? very unsure) created by someone (possibly a woman?) that I'm hoping to find again. Their post was a series of polls that had examples and asked readers "do you consider this to be eugenics". Questions were along the lines of "Dave and Adam are a gay couple looking to conceive a child. With gene editing technology they can reduce the chance of their child having a debilitating disease by 90%. Is this eugenics? Is this good? What about a 30% chance?". Other similar questions with different couples and different setups. I'd hope to find these polls again because I remember the questions making me believe that people are for eugenics but they just wont say it. When I sat and actually pondered the questions I almost always ended up saying "yes this is eugenics and yes I support/would do this myself". I want to give the same "quiz" to close friends and see their response/reaction.
FistfullOfCrows
46m ago
I love when people just project their favorite moral frameworks on higher inteligence aliens, no one considers that aliens could be yes chadding highly intelligent speciesism nazis.
The fact is that we are sitting at the bottom of a rather inconvenient gravity well.
The early modern European powers colonized the world because that was a very profitable thing for them to do. Crossing the Atlantic with a ship full of spices or gold was hard but doable.
By contrast, going to the Moon today is much harder today than crossing the Atlantic was in 1500. If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.
Settling Antarctica or the shallow parts of the sea is actually much easier than settling space.
At some point we will probably get Netflix to sponsor a human Mars mission as reality TV, but settling there?
Migrating to North America was a great idea for many because even if you made it across with just the clothes on your body, there was plenty of land (once you genocided the natives). You just had to clear the land and then you could grow your favorite staples from the old world.
By contrast, until we get von-Neumann machines, in space you will depend on Earthcrafted goods for a very long time. Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.
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