In a perfectly simulated universe, all decisions are predictable, including any decisions you make after learning the future and learning that you learned the future etc, recursively, forever, blah blah blah. This is not a narratively or philosophically interesting concept. Quantum mechanics aside, ultimate determinism and therefore hypothetical foresight given total information and a fully comprehensive universe model has been the default assumption among most smart people for a long time. Chiang does nothing in the story to say anything interesting about this at all.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t mean defensively, I mean aggressively. European (and other) platforms can’t easily block Mythos from accessing them, which means true or x type risks remain global.
2rafa
2d ago
I think nobody deserves to make one cent less than the amount they can fairly negotiate. IQ and demographics do not indicate a great superiority for American tech workers. US companies achieved dominant global positions because of larger domestic markets, far more readily available capital, network effects and superior entrepreneurial culture. But none of these suggest US engineers are far better or smarter than their European peers. That would be unlikely.
2rafa
2d ago
If that was the issue for them they’d have fired all the expensive American software engineers making $300k years ago and replaced them with French, British and Germans making a quarter or a third of that.
2rafa
2d ago
Dario is just a very autistic guy who seems to have some California / Obama libleft views on account of having grown up in SF etc, and he can’t mediate them around Trump. If you read / watch interviews with him this is immediately obvious. Musk and even Altman historically were very scared of AGI but around Trump they’ll say it’s amazing and will create millions of jobs and secure American dominance forever. Amodei is the kind of guy who says he’s really afraid of ASI and bores the president by trying to explain foom over a Mar a Lago table.
Altman is clearly a mostly skilled operater who will say what he needs to, Musk is often foolish with his words but the right likes Twitter and Trump respects his wealth, and the other big tech companies have been around long enough to play Washington like you said.
2rafa
2d ago
Not really because American AI can’t be walled off from Europe without (at the very least) shutting down the internet, and probably world trade.
In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time.
The original work is very interesting although I’m not sure it’s very good. It raises some interesting philosophical questions. The story is probably the best possible story you could write about a form of pseudo-precognition in hindsight that makes immediate, near-term sense to a reader.
But its deliberate ambiguities exist more to paper over the questions than to answer them. Gwern presents the most plausible explanation which is that nothing physically / cosmologically interesting is going on, the protagonist is basically just ‘reflecting’ on her life, in the standard past tense, in a kind of holistic way enabled by the alien language. But that also makes the story a lot less interesting.
Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will.
I don’t think it even does this. I think it just lets you view your life, in hindsight, in a way that projects memories of the future you actually experienced (in normal linear time, you’re old now) onto your younger self.
2rafa
2d ago
Some Thoughts in a Conversational Style
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“It’s actually quite easy to block or pause AI development because the compute required (as seen in NVIDIA/TSMC/memory manufacturers/etc’ share prices) is so big that you can’t hide training a major frontier model”.
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“So what?”
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“This is actually bullish for humanity because it means some guy in a lab probably can’t build an AI that can destroy the human race without anyone noticing”
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“But wait, Deepseek and other models have shown that within just a few months of a frontier model’s release, vastly cheaper models can be trained to show similar performance. And even if inference is blocked, local models (which will always leak eventually even if they’re trained with a lot of compute) are probably no more than a year or two behind frontier models. So at best this is holding back the tide by what, months?”
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“Yeah, and in the current geopolitical situation, if US businesses complain that Chinese firms have access to more powerful models capable of more efficient and effective work than American businesses, even though America has better frontier labs, because those labs’ models are being blocked from public use by the US government, that will be quickly reversed”.
2rafa
2d ago
I think there was some funny evidence that in Poland women were as likely to be as anti immigration as men, which is untrue in Western Europe, so maybe not.
2rafa
2d ago
Most East Germans don’t think about Jews at all. If asked explicitly they may or may not express mildly antisemitic opinions, but it’s not the same as it is in corners of Poland (which also have no Jews) where some minor parties have whipped up a moderate amount of antisemitism in the last decade, although even there Jews are usually hated third or fourth after Ukrainians, Muslims/non European migrants and sometimes Germany.
2rafa
3d ago
Sure but it’s a reality of emigrant demographics that means that British people see a lot of Roma as Romanian or Bulgarian (who are themselves usually conflated) rather than a separate ethnic group. This makes a lot of Romanians and Bulgarians upset. Gypsies also is more used locally to refer to either Irish Travellers or longstanding local Romani gypsies whose ancestors arrived a century or more ago.
2rafa
3d ago
The problem for Bulgarians (which is a lesser problem for Romanians, although still an issue for them) is that despite all the /r/Europe posting of blonde girls in traditional outfits, many of the natives are relatively dark haired and swarthy for ethnic Europeans, and so to the untrained (and not proficient ethnoguessr regular) North-Western European commoner eye, blur into a continuum with the Roma population (who themselves are after all only part Indian, many are much lighter skinned than the average actual Indian).
I have Spanish and Southern Italian friends who have faced actual ethnic abuse by random native drunks in eg Sweden and Denmark who assumed they were Arabs (and again, this has happened to two people I’ve encountered and discussed it with, so it cannot be all that rare). An (Ashkenazi) American Jewish guy I know (who is far more the Trotsky or Woody Allen phenotype than the Levantine Warrior one) was accosted by some people in a small town in East Germany where he was visiting for a wedding by people who assumed he was a migrant of some sort. People are not that good at differentiating races.
2rafa
4d ago
There is no such thing as ring fenced private capital in a crisis. VCs are backed by private equity backed by family offices backed by stakes in public companies intrinsically tied to the public bond market. You can’t stop contagion. Banks are a central leveraged financing source behind the current private credit boom as the recent MFS collapse here in the UK showed. Big private equity and credit players like Apollo bought insurers and then funnelled 20%+ of net assets into private credit, if AI reveals those SaaS companies to be largely worthless and they can’t fund their obligations that’s another major systemic problem because that leads to asset fire sales and a repricing of the entire credit market, which is catastrophic. Some Silicon Valley VC yoloing a few million on seed rounds isn’t systemic but that’s a tiny fraction of private capital.
I’m fond of the argument that the 2018 correction represented the ‘natural’ end of both the post-2009 asset pricing boom and the broader (and obviously intrinsically related) credit cycle. That would be a relatively standard timeline for that kind of thing.
The response from the Fed (under Trump) but also other central banks was to supercharge the asset pricing bubble, cut or reverse planned hikes aggressively, and reinflate the bubble. Then came Covid and infinite money printing, which accelerated the real inflation that had been avoided through most of the QE era by falling prices for some goods that offset service price increases, plus slowing velocity of money and finally some rate hikes when they became impossible to avoid.
So we’ve been in a weird liminal era for almost a decade now, and it isn’t really clear how it’s going to end. I don’t think it’s viable for the American government to allow markets to experience a prolonged correction. A short, sharp, quickly-recovered-from 30% drop? Sure. But any longer, or any deeper, and big public sector retirement funds, 401ks and so on suffer to a degree no politician can survive. Thats different to previous generations in many ways. At the same time, you can arguably only fight gravity for so long.
2rafa
5d ago
No nothing specific. Just Cummings’ many throwaway comments on his blog, in interviews and on panels on his handling of the ‘Boriswave’ and his abrogation of any responsibility therefore.
2rafa
5d ago
People are getting generous PIP for ‘severe anxiety’, something that a single generous psychiatrist (is it time for @self_made_human to do the British would-be-NEETs of TheMotte a favor?) can diagnose you with.
2rafa
5d ago
I really think Cummings is probably the single best example of a midwit and a midwit magnet there is. Shirking responsibility is one thing, it’s hard to ‘hate’ Boris for the Boriswave because really he’s clearly never thought much about anything and likely signed off on it without thinking. A terrible leader and vacuous jester of a person who cheated on every woman who ever loved him? Sure. But there was no pretense of anything else. Cummings painted himself as an intellectual and then pretends he was bamboozled at the consequences of his actions and words and every bad thing was just someone betraying him or not listening correctly.
2rafa
5d ago
It is a stretch but it’s also a stretch when people like Farage and Cummings claim they have no responsibility for the broad character of the debate, especially in the latter case.
2rafa
5d ago
Yeah but even there you had Farage implying that multiple times through the campaign, so calling it a total bait and switch is questionable.
The bigger example is Boris’ 2019 election victory and subsequent Boriswave.
2rafa
5d ago
It’s not so clear cut. Yes, voters often vote against mass immigration but not always. The votes for Hollande and Macron in France were for center-left candidates who had at most the mildest dislike (if at all) of mass immigration. In England, the Labour Party destroyed the Conservatives in the election campaigns of 2001 and 2004, in which the top Tory message (in both cases) was about stopping Labour’s mass immigration experiment. Carney won in Canada recently.
The electoral record shows that the public is occasionally betrayed, yes, but it also has not consistently voted against mass immigration for 30+ years as some in the right say. Even since 2015 the most anti immigration candidates haven’t consistently won.
2rafa
5d ago
Even being homeless with zero ‘gibs’ (and there will never be zero) in Western Europe is better than being an average person in a true hellhole country. This guy was from Sudan. That is one of the worst places in the world to live, either in the desperately poor and violent south or in Sudan proper which is undergoing an extraordinarily brutal civil war in which countless people have been killed.
Even if you rely on handouts and charity, you get more in a rich place than a poor one, that’s why beggars (and trick or treaters) classically go to wealthier and more trafficked neighborhoods. Better to starve on the streets of Belfast than Sudan. At least in the former you are less likely to be gang raped and tortured before dying, and someone will probably take pity on you. These people are never ever ever going home voluntarily.
I remember a decade ago when Benedict Cumberbatch, that darling of late 2000s / early 2010s Tumblr fandom, got married, older versions of the same woman were equally if not more despondent. And he got married to a very appropriate and posh intellectual English theater director type in her thirties. So it seems to me it’s really more about the man being off the market than who he’s with.
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