Lodgers. You live in the house, they live in a part of the house (potentially a big part). Subletting is probably the wrong word for letting a subsection.
Corvos
1d ago
It's not going to happen, and even if it were, unless massive changes were made they would just become assets in the same way. Britain's housing market is hugely dysfunctional because houses are assets first and shelter second: it's hugely sticky, people just point-blank refuse to sell if the market starts turning down and they have very little incentive to. The market is so sticky that prices almost can't change.
Corvos
1d ago
decrease price but limiting supply (by???)
Eh? No? If you assume that most renters would prefer to own, which in my experience is true and is also the default assumption of the vast majority of discussion, then most people are paying rent when they would prefer to be paying mortgages but can't because landlords have driven up the price of housing to sell it back to people, often literally making you pay their mortgage in the process. The point is to increase the supply of buyable houses, driving down the price of the asset and moving them from 'financial asset and moneyspinner with that income priced in' back to 'shelter'.
The main problem is transferability of mortgages but buy-to-let pretty much has to be predicated on rent being greater than mortgage payments in any case so I think it must be possible to work something out.
Your reply doesn't seem to deal in any way with the consequences of making housing abundant. The picture you are painting is just 'like now, but you aren't allowed to rent any more', and you don't seem to be engaging in any way with the massive systemic changes that would likely result in effectively 2Xing the amount of housing in the country and vastly increasing the buy/sell frequency of houses.
(Only 60% of housing in the UK is owner-occupier, and if we assume at least another 5% of that is second-homes, that's 2X the housing stock.)
EDIT: not 2x because obviously you have renters living in the houses already, I'm being thick.
Corvos
1d ago
Probably, but that's a biiiiig space. Neurons are weird. Like, really weird. As with junk DNA there's a huge chunk of them which exist purely to mediate the interaction of other ones, they change their behaviour based on the +ve/-ve sign of the timing between electricial signals, all the individual connections are running surprisingly complicated and hard-to-tease-out statistical models of their own. Plus you have all the area specialisation: speech areas, vision, motor, limbic etc. and all the heritage structure from evolution.
It may turn out that these are really a very bad, overtuned method of running a simple system, which is what the RL and the predictive-coding people are hoping for. It might also turn out that the brain is a lot cooler and weirder than we know. I don't think we're even in a position to speculate at the moment.
Corvos
1d ago
Subletting seems ok. The idea is to prevent massing property empires, as e.g. the Swiss do by requiring that every building be partially occupied by a Swiss person. But if you zoom out I think this question becomes pretty similar to the question of what to do if you can't afford rent: you do something with your life so you can afford rent, like move, or you're homeless.
Obviously the paradigm assumes that if you free up the 40% of UK homes that are not currently owner-occupier then it produces a big, big drop in price. If not, you've failed and should put the previous paradigm back in.
Corvos
1d ago
I think it's a good policy. Shelter is not like other goods - you can literally only use one house at a time, and you must have one house as a roof over your head. So you enforce no superfluous houses per person, and if you want to move, you sell your house and buy another house. Obviously you need a few other bits to make it work: hotels for people who need to be somewhere temporarily, sublets for people who can't afford a full house. But freeing up the majority of the supply and making the market much more fluid should do a lot of good work.
Corvos
1d ago
"It’s not a new thought, it’s just one that’s been proven correct."
Point of order: that a model can, under certain conditions, replicate aspects of behaviour does not in any way indicate that the brain operates using those principles. Every time we make a new mechanical process, people decide that's how the brain works on some fundamental level. Switchboards, electrical fields, computer logic. Last decade it was Reinforcement Learning (S.A. still asserts this is settled science in his posts and in academic neuroscience it's popular but far from settled), this decade it's autoencoders (predictive coding) or LLMs.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying we're far, far off proving it's true.
FWIW I agree on the core point that statistical analysis is batting much stronger than formal logic, but against that you do have to weight the fact that for some reason LLMs need 10,000x the amount of data to go the same distance. Probably some combination of specialised circuits and us missing serious statistical factors IMO.
But also it doesn’t make sense as presented.
I know what they’re trying to do: the D&D simulation where there’s a tiny chance (1/20) even on an easy shot that your foot will slip or they duck at the wrong moment or a grenade throws off your aim or something. And that works in an on-paper sim.
But when you can see in 3D and the whole thing is animated it’s just this guy getting a dreamy look on his face and aiming his gun three feet to the left for no reason.
Corvos
2d ago
all we've really done is streamline their rejection of reality.
Poor old Scott Adams. This would make a great Dilbert punchline.
This is just a helpful young man, of the type that LLMs were originally designed to imitate. A little sycophantic perhaps but that’s entirely fair in an interview.
he rephrased everything we said back at us in the interview, and then asked for confirmation
This is a technique I was taught as a child to make sure you’ve understood your instructions, and something I routinely do with both clients and superiors.
the way he excessively narrated everything he did before he did it
Because he’s being interviewed and good interview technique is to talk a lot so your interviewer knows why you’re doing what you’re doing and gets familiar with your thought process.
the glazing and "You're right, I'll fix that" whenever there was a mistake
He’s being interviewed, the poor bastard. You have the power to say if he gets a job or not, what do you expect, a middle finger?
Corvos
2d ago
The Simon and Schuster page contains a "Raves and Reviews" section for all the blurbs it's got (pre-sale). Best of all is:
‘Jason Arday is a remarkable and brilliant man’
– James O’Brien, Sunday Times bestselling author of How To Be Right
(Emphasis mine.)
Um.
Corvos
3d ago
At least in Japan what happens is that if for some reason you are overstaying your visa (in my case the main overseas moving company was booked up until the day after my visa) you go to the visa office and apply for a two-week extension. It helps if you have clear evidence of intention to leave (like a plane ticket) but also Japan tracks you much more closely (I had an alien ID card and my address was registered). In my case everything got sorted out before the deadline anyway, but it's very routine.
It's like ice creams. If you get two scoops, they'll be smaller than 2x a single scoop.
What you do is get a single, wait till they're done, say actually you'd like a double (b/c the new scoop will have to be the same size) and then...
...get ice cream all over your shoes because 2x a single scoop doesn't fit in a cone, and swear off lifehacks from the internet.
Corvos
4d ago
My read is that convenience store food / takeout is really just the old tradition of having food made by Cook or your landlady, it's just that now Cook lives in a warehouse instead of downstairs.
Ordinary Joe putting up an amateur flyer is only copying what he sees other things doing, and he's not going to know anything about "this is why you do such a thing"
That moment of, "oh, shit, I have no idea why I'm actually doing this thing," is how you learn and grow, though. I've been there dozens of times. I just think that it's bad if the response becomes "I paid $10 for this piece of shit and it can't even do what it's told!" instead of, "okay, I need to sit down and think for a minute and learn some stuff and figure out what I actually want".
The former is a waste of time that, as @gattsuru says, isn't going to work well with most human professionals either. The latter is how you gain experience and expertise. I'm not being condescending to our hypothetical Joe, it's exactly the advice I'd give a friend or junior.
I agree with you that to the extent LLM companies aren't open about this it's bad.
Corvos
4d ago
To be fair, the Canadian church burnings in fury at the discovery of blatantly fake 'mass graves' was pretty bad, as was the conspicuous disinterest of the government. Drawing a line from that kind of attitude to something worse requires being a pessimist but not a maniac. And I don't think people are worried about 'literally banning Christianity' as much as 'making it impossible to state an increasingly large subset of Christian views' and just letting the religion die.
As I read this thread, I'm noticing a similar and similar implied arguement crop up - the 1% that can use LLMs beautifully naturally assume the moment the general masses they will be freed like a butterfly bursting from it's crysalis into something beautiful and everything will be wonderful.
It's a possibility, though I hope not. One part of me thinks that it would be better if LLMs were never mentioned again outside technical documents - the public would be deprived of something that I think is an immensely important resource that could edify them, but on the other hand we would be safe from the kind of spasms of public morality that caused the censorship of social media.
The other part of me thinks that this is a temporary moment, where LLMs are used only by the most curious, and is looking forward to seeing what a generation of people now in their teens do with the tech, in the same way we saw in the flowering of internet culture 2000-2010.
I'm not trying to argue that we shut down LLM development. What I'm trying to say is that a good chunk of LLM development and movement and usage isn't from honest improvement but from sales department buzzwords and artificial push.
Then we have very little quarrel. I broadly agree with what you've said, and I think the LLM marketers and grifters are doing more to damage the field than a thousand 'can't spell STRAWBERRY' bugs.
you immeadiately and covertly imply that they're just luddites(in your case - like, c'mon, really?)
Really not my intention. This anonymous forum is where I can be totally open about my feelings because frankly none of this matters. I was trying to provide examples of cases where good, honest, clever people looked at something, concluded correctly that they had no personal interest in it, and concluded wrongly that it had no long-term value. I think it's an easy trap to fall into, and I feel the same in other areas.
A single datapoint is data, yes. But it does not equate to an overall data trend. I've no doubt that you and people like this guy can do alot with LLMs, but I've yet to see any broader overall concrete benefit to the world at large nor any market uptick that would imply this is making things better.
In all sincerity, I've got my fingers crossed.
Corvos
4d ago
As Sir Humphrey once said, "It is necessary to get completely behind a man if you wish to stab him in the back". The point is that people will resist the open implication, especially if it comes with apparent malice, but if you keep the relevant data points in front of their face long enough they will come to the conclusion you want themselves.
Corvos
4d ago
That’s good. Never pick a name you can’t scrub the floor in, and never pick a name that makes you look like a try-hard. If after a year you decide that the anglicisation isn’t enough, then change.
As a metaphor take cosmetic surgery - one should always get somebody else to decide the procedure or one just ends up with a face structured around your insecurities.
Corvos
4d ago
No, well-dressed men in their seventies who remember the Cold War and feel strongly about the necessity of Standing Up To Russia.
Weren’t the Taliban basically popular because they suppressed Bacha Bazi?
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