ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
4hr ago
People would be just as happy to continue doing the same thing they always have. Only a minority of workers are interested in improving productivity numbers, and they're significantly outnumbered by those worried about the change and displacements improved productivity will bring.
What thinks AI is worth massive sacrifice and investment is Capital itself. Capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligence etc. Whatever complaints humans might have, they're just the collective substrate that a higher agency is built on, and that has its own desires for reproduction and extension and data centers.
ThenElection
4hr ago
but it would be very very helpful, the piece has made me realize, if tech firms built a data centre or two around SF.
No, it wouldn't. Case in point: San Francisco has several data centers already (e.g. Digital Realty's SFO10, SFO12), and people keep on repeating the meme that San Francisco doesn't have any data centers.
ThenElection
9hr ago
Maybe someone should just create a program where the government qualifies low income participants and then subsidizes their purchases of food from grocers. Some kind of supplemental nutrition assistance program. Seems simpler and more efficient with less opportunity for corruption.
ThenElection
17hr ago
My prediction is that one of two things will happen by August 4, 2029:
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It will have been cancelled without implementation because of all the obvious issues with it. Key point here is the cancellation: this prediction encompasses it being cancelled because of all the wreckers/Trump/whatever.
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It will go ahead as planned, run into all the issues, and it will be widely perceived as a failure, after a long stream of articles by the Post etc. The national mainstream media will mostly memory hole it, but no one will bring it up as a Mamdani success. There will be no other major cities that will create Mamdani-style groceries.
I think it's great. As policy it's terrible, but it's the kind of local experimentation we should encourage. Then, if and when it's a disaster, it's a useful data point for people to point to.
Food deserts are kind of a meme, but I can agree that it's on the whole good to make sure every place has a nearby convenient grocery store to do conventional shopping and create low skill jobs, even if uneconomic. The fix for that is targeted tax exemptions that will be credibly maintained for a long time and a greater level of police presence. This isn't too different from Mamdani's proposal, except it's more open to any entrant and is still subject to a lightened market discipline.
Is the sped-up inheritance enough to get or substantially pay for a single family home? At least in my city, they outperform condos substantially. And as someone who has done both urban SFHs and condos, I simply cannot imagine raising a child in the condo. I know people manage it, but it seems miserable.
I would only go with the condo if it were a genuine good deal (say, looking at comparables 10% off the market rate).
I would also do a lot of research into the HOA. Condo HOAs can have a lot of landmines, and you've probably been fairly insulated from it as a renter.
Also curious about the expected etiquette for negotiation.
Be polite, of course, but you must negotiate for your and your future family's wellbeing. If your preexisting relationship with the landlord means you're uncomfortable playing hardball, that's another reason to avoid the condo. What price you settle on is very likely the difference between a good and a bad investment.
tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people
Interesting to think about.
In some ways, the Left is very fast to react. There's a new cause or outrage of the day, and by the evening everyone knows it's the issue of the day; new ones can replace it whenever it's decided.
But there isn't really a central committee actually deciding what to do, and it's not some highly sophisticated ecosystem of policy or issue entrepreneurs performing decentralized decision making. Instead, it's a strongly centralized coordination mechanism, driven not by people but instead some messy combination of what ideological faction is ascendent and what plays best on social media. People on the ground level might come up with interesting ideas, but they've got to go through a host of different groups' veto points to even have a chance of taking off. E.g. this is why the Left has pretty much given up on having a meaningful platform on any AI policy besides AI bad performativity: a platform requires meaningfully engaging with it and its implications, and, since it will gore all oxes, engagement with it will run into endless vetos. So, most you get are shallow responses of boo AI because of water usage or shredding books or whatever.
The Right, on the other hand, is a madhouse of maniacs of different stripes: there is no central coordinating mechanism, and the only thing most people on it have in common with each other is a hatred of the Left. That means there's no real shared policy plan coming from on high, but it also makes for a much more open space for people to contribute ideas. A smart person on a Left worries about alienating X, Y, and Z before they even start thinking how to approach a social or economic issue; but, on the Right, there is no prescribed golden path, and so individuals can be genuine policy entrepreneurs.
(Musing here on a weakly held idea, but maybe there's something there.)
ThenElection
4d ago
Isn't a simpler theory that Spain's left wing government has pissed off lots of people; Morocco saw an opportunity; took it; and then the pissed off people are gloating?
What did the Jews even do to make this happen? I don't think lots of money is necessary for this: it's a cheap invasionary force, as far as these things go, and already funded anyway by Morocco and, uh, the EU.
ThenElection
5d ago
I'm in broad directional agreement, but that perspective has its own issues. I could ask you, "what would you do if you saw a child about to get hit by a car tomorrow, and you could save him with little risk to yourself?" Taking that principle to the extreme, it's impossible to say: you are not in that particular situation, and you lack all the context and history of the preceding day that will form the you of tomorrow.
The question is really something like, what do you predict your self model would do? And maybe it's a question of the stability of that model: it's likely stable over the vagaries of a day's events, but not stable to swapping out your entire life experience.
ThenElection
5d ago
Not a conservative or a Founding Father/Constitution fetishist. And, no, any individual deciding to be moral and heroic doesn't change much: there's always some rate of that, and every system that establishes itself has learned to divert, marginalize, or harness that rate.
But the goal should be to interject yourself at critical points, and nudge the system toward dynamics that are are likely to lead to value-aligned outcomes. By itself, that's a very hard problem and hard to do well, but not understanding why a regular person might be a Nazi or support the institution of slavery makes that even harder, not easier.
ThenElection
5d ago
I think we all need to stop empathizing with the victims and start trying to empathize with the perpetrators, and realize that It Could Happen Here
If you ask someone what they would have done during 1930s Germany or 1850s South, there's never any willingness to say "I'd probably have done whatever the typical person did." Maybe the question is incoherent--what does it even mean for the self to be transplanted into a different person in a different society and time? But that more philosophical objection doesn't seem to be the real driver of the response: it's never "that's incoherent" or "I don't know," but instead "I would have been a partisan guerrilla against the Nazis or helped run the Underground Railroad."
It ends up serving as a narrative building exercise to reinforce your own identity, instead of a way to test your own mental models of how you act and make decisions.
ThenElection
7d ago
Do most people learn Latin and Greek for ecclesiastic purposes? Seems more of a classicist thing (Princeton's efforts notwithstanding).
ThenElection
7d ago
It's the acid content of books from the 19th and 20th century that make them degrade so fast, moreso than the thickness (though the flimsiness of the pages doesn't help).
How much capital do they need to keep accelerating? Hundreds of billions? Trillions?
Scale is all you need. We are at the beginnings of RSI. Anyone (except, apparently, Google) can build a frontier model, capable of research, for the chump change of $1B, or likely less. An extra $10B, though, and you can build it and its successor faster. Promises of the light cone let you raise that money easily, but threats to have to share it make investors start asking (somewhat irrationally) how much of the light cone they get. That slows you down. Not that OAI and Anthropic are exactly hurting for capital, but at the margins it makes a decelerationist difference.
All plausible negative impact of Chinese labs, distillation or whatever, can be negated by roughly 2 months of regular progress.
Curious how you got that number, though I agree any delay they introduce is on the order of months. Even two months, though, is a long time nowadays.
(The strongest argument for a Chinese accelerationist effect is the closed labs can easily incorporate their research and experiments into their own models. I don't think that matters: whatever ideas are coming from humans in any lab are being automated.)
ThenElection
7d ago
They use the threat of an AI-assisted superbug, which admittedly could cripple civilization, but so far is merely plausible. But that could effectively ban open models if it's implemented such that only closed models pass,
It's plausible, but we can't wait until someone makes the superbug to do something to prevent it.
I am extremely aware of the risks of an Anthropic/OpenAI duopoly, but I don't see an easier alternative to the superbug problem (which also has a parallel problem in cybersecurity). For the superbug, do we instead put enforcement mechanisms on the facilities and businesses that would be the obvious path in making a superbug? Maybe, but a sufficiently capable model (and open weights are probably only ~3 months behind the leading closed labs), it's likely possible to get around it. There are lots of places that attackers have significant advantages over defenders.
On the other hand, maybe it's for the best we have a disaster now killing a million people, to make us willing to take action that will prevent a a Chicxulub event. It's also unclear whether banning open weights would actually do much to prevent bad actors from doing the naughty.
ThenElection
7d ago
Information should be free! except for distilling.
ThenElection
7d ago
hand over the discards to people who care about conservation
Do these exist? Conservation as in, at a bare minimum, being willing to take the pages (we can leave off "and use appropriate conservation techniques," because that will make an already small group dwindle to literally nothing). And, to be explicit, "post an angry rant about evil AI companies on Reddit" does not count as caring about conservation for the point of this exercise.
ThenElection
7d ago
Bitrot is a thing, though. One of the cool technologies MS is working on is glass storage technology.
ThenElection
7d ago
Oh, misread. Yes, they should be stored and made available to the public. But I'm sure they are storing them internally as part of their training corpus. As for the public, many or most of them are under copyright still; I have plenty of complaints about that, but I can understand why Anthropic doesn't want to exacerbate its existing copyright issues.
ThenElection
7d ago
Storage here would mean a massive, climate controlled, disaster resilient library-warehouse, requiring a team of specialists. You can't just pile the books up in a bunch of cardboard boxes; every year you'd have X% decay into oblivion. It would also be closed off to the public.
There's a reason no one does this: no one cares, given the costs involved. I'm sure Anthropic would have been happy to just ship them to someone else for preservation, but who would take them?
I'm someone who loves physical books. Indeed, I collect them, to my wife's perpetual disapproval; I've got multiple Arion and Grabhorn and Centipede books, sometimes running into four figures per. Particularly relevant to Anthropic, a pride and joy of mine is an original edition of Rosenblatt's Principles of Neurodynamics, in fine condition with a fine dust jacket (it's difficult to find in any condition).
This is all just faux outrage. The vast majority of these books are ex-lib, non-unique, decaying physical copies of books that no one actually cares about anyway. The booksellers who Anthropic is purchasing them from would send them to the dump eventually. Anthropic isn't shredding the Gutenberg Bible, or anything even a couple steps in principle removed from it.
My only real moral complaint is that Anthropic should be uploading them post-processing to Anna's Archive, though it's understandable why they didn't.
ThenElection
7d ago
It's not as simple as charity, though: if it were just a matter of material goods, yeah, it's a no brainer.
But the trade is much more pernicious. It means you grow up in a community that has had all sense of real agency ripped from it. It means that your (real) successes will be judged negatively. It means your children will be told from every angle that they are a victim and must view themselves that way.
Concretely, would you like to quintuple your chances of getting into Harvard, at the expense of having everyone in your family and friend group pick up the pathologies of black culture?
ThenElection
8d ago
The purpose of privilege as a concept isn't to center groups to help (which would necessitate actually identifying and helping those groups), but to center groups to hurt. The latter is much more useful for intra-elite conflicts, because one faction can deploy it against the other; and it outcompetes the idea of helping the less fortunate, because it supports the accrual of more power and resources to reproduce itself, while the concept of helping the less fortunate dissipates the power and resources of those who hold it.
ThenElection
9d ago
In the USA, the institutional labor left has been thoroughly hollowed out and used as a skin suit by the social activism left; all of the major unions are dominated by professionalized bureaucrats who see success as getting more money from the government teat while maintaining coastal elite bona fides. Even union membership is increasingly of that class; the UAW is like a quarter grad student now. The traditional bread and butter unions are dead, to say nothing of the Harry Bridges wing.
If software is a niche field, then the US is a niche economy. And, although the public might think math and software is pointless stuff for nerds, they do care about cratering the economy.
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