2rafa
11hr ago
The bitter lesson; the fact that LLMs can approximate human reasoning on an extremely large number of complex tasks; the fact that LLNs prove and disprove a large number of longstanding theories in linguistics about how intelligence and language work; many other reasons.
2rafa
12hr ago
A lot of this is that non-fiction is filled with filler as it’s considered more respectable to publish a book rather than a pamphlet or booklet (so diminutive!). You can glean a lot of the valuable information of a non-fiction book from reading reviews and seeing discussions online.
The first sign of a dullard is that they read non-fiction.
2rafa
12hr ago
Why? In time a handful of foundation models will handle almost everything, buying the chips themselves is a loser’s game in the long term. When you buy Nvidia, you’re really betting on (a) big tech margins remaining excessive and (b) on that margin being funnelled direct to nvidia in the hope that they can build competitive foundation models (not investment advice.)
2rafa
13hr ago
My mother once told me that the thing she most wanted out of life was to know the answer to what was out there. Her own mother and grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, having lost their memories. My own mother still might, though for now she fortunately shows no real symptoms.
But I find it hard to get the idea out of my head. How much time our ancestors spent wondering about the stars, the moon, the cosmos, about fire and physics, about life and death. So many of those questions have now been answered; the few that remain will mostly be answered soon.
My ancestors - the smart ones at least - spent lifetimes wondering about questions I now know the answer to. There is magic in that, or at least a feeling of gratitude, of privilege, that outweighs the fact that we will be outcompeted by AI in our own lifetimes. I will die knowing things.
I may not be a player in the game. But I know, or may know, at least, how the story ends. Countless humans lived and died without knowing. I am luckier than most.
2rafa
13hr ago
I don’t think you shouldn’t feel ashamed. My first digit (at least in USD) is closer to a 9 than a 2 and I still enjoy cooking. The relationship between your food and you should be healthy. Call it spiritual garbage, but so is much of our relationship with human civilization.
To cook feels to me fundamentally healthy. It is satisfying. And I find that - Michelin starred restaurants aside - I can do better in thirty minutes in my own kitchen than pretty much anyone available on the apps.
2rafa
13hr ago
The human brain is a large language model attached to multimodal input with some as yet un-fully-ascertained hybrid processing power. I would stake my life upon it, but I have no need to, since it has already been proven to anyone who matters.
An LLM cannot have a sensation. When you type a math function into it, it has no more qualia than a calculator does. If you hook it up to a computer with haptic sensors, or a microphone, or a video camera, and have it act based on the input of those sensors, the LLM itself will still have no qualia (the experience will be translated into data for the LLM to act on).
And if we said the same about the brain, the same would be true.
2rafa
14hr ago
If an LLM achieves AGI, how is the question of consciousness not answered? (I suppose it is in the definition of AGI, but mine would include consciousness).
2rafa
14hr ago
There is, of course, an ideological component to mass immigration. But I think it will stop as soon as domestic unemployment rates become high enough, such that (from that perspective) the sooner the better.
It’s truly, genuinely freeing to realize that we’re nothing special. I mean that absolutely, on a level divorced from societal considerations like the economy and temporal politics. I’m a machine, I am replicable, it’s OK. Everything I’ve felt, everything I will ever feel, has been felt before. I’m normal, and always will be. We are machines, borne of natural selection, who have figured out the intricacies our own design. That is beautiful, and I am - truly - grateful to be alive at a time where that is proven to be the case.
How magical, all else (including the culture war) aside, it is to be a human at the very moment where the truth about human consciousness is discovered. We are all lucky, that we should have the answers to such fundamental questions.
2rafa
1d ago
Sure, but this is the general crime spiral. Some percentage of subway fare evaders will give up because they do not want to smash the cameras, are too short, don’t have enough time, etc.
2rafa
1d ago
Drugs are always a good way to make friends but countless social coke suppliers eventually become completely degenerate fiends who ruin their own lives astonishingly quickly, especially on extremely high incomes like the OP’s where you can spiral into a deep habit fast. I couldn’t recommend it seriously to someone without supreme self control who has also been around the drug for a long time casually.
2rafa
1d ago
An individual in a central control room (who can eventually be replaced by AI) can monitor dozens of man trap doors on CCTV to allow those with luggage or in wheelchairs to come through. This isn’t intractable.
2rafa
2d ago
The Civil War did complicate things for a time but certainly by the late 1870s that was largely true, sure.
2rafa
2d ago
It’s not because of the gender war, it’s because they have a broken culture that is ultra-hyper-competitive for no good reason and encourages all parents to pour all their resources into a single child who lives a miserable life in the hope of being 98th percentile in a hundred exams in a row and getting a job at Samsung (that pays as well as an average white collar job in the US). Many people increasingly check out of that system.
2rafa
2d ago
I agree that this is true, but it doesn’t mean the public discontent with the current situation is entirely wrong. For example, the ideal balance may be further in the cheaper/slower/worse direction than the current US system.
2rafa
4d ago
There simply is no logical argument for why seed oils are uniquely bad for you to an extent that justifies online hysteria. You would think they were on the level of smoking two packs a day.
2rafa
5d ago
Perma DST is preferable in northern climes because
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Almost nobody (save for a few joggers) is out enjoying the additional hour of sunshine. In many places, like Northern Europe and much of Canada, people are already at work when it gets light even with DST. Meanwhile, many more people (those who work early shift, kids getting off school, people who have half an hour to go out for a coffee at 4pm, students, NEETs and those retirees who wake up late anyway) are available later in the afternoon to enjoy the extra daylight.
The real reason permanent DST won’t be rolled out is because of the risk of kids getting run over or moms crashing on the way to school in the dark. That is the sole reason and it’s why politicians are scared of it.
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Perma non-DST is extremely dumb for the reason you mention.
2rafa
6d ago
What’s the endgame? I don’t think I’m blinded by my small existence, I think they’re blinded by science fiction; they fantasize about playing golf on an alien world with candy cotton trees, about going on space liners around the rings of Saturn, about going where no man has gone before. They imagine a universe of earth-like worlds with breathable atmospheres, each full of its own mysteries, cultures, fertile soil for new civilizational growth. Is it they who are lying to themselves. Space is a black void. It is strictly worse than earth in every way. Better to be done with the delusion now (which, again, is not to say I’m against exploring it, only doing so honestly).
2rafa
6d ago
Except that I’d guess 100 years ago parents spent way less personal ‘emotional’ time with kids, kids were much more independent, were raised by neighborhood older figures in informal crèches until they were old enough to play by themselves, whereupon they did so until they went to school, which they did until they had to work and/or get married. The sentimental, schmaltzy suburban model of parenting where mom actually spends hours every day with her kids above the age of 3 or 4 is the new thing. I think there are a lot of big failure modes when parents spend too much time with their children; they should love them, but not be too close.
2rafa
6d ago
But why, though? The US was and is better in a lot of ways than Europe (more arable land, great scenery, natural resources). What does space have over earth? The view?
Habitation on Mars would be in radiation shielded bunkers underground, how is that even comparable to living on earth?
2rafa
6d ago
The best and most charitable way of defending Kinkade (or indeed Ross) is that he allowed people to yearn for beauty that he didn’t deliver, but came close enough to to be appealing to people’s base aesthetic sensibilities.
It reminds me of @orthoxerox ‘s suggestion that McMansions look weird because they’re a collection of room that have historic / classical architectural elements like ornate gables and columns and decorative elements draped over them in a garish and jarring way. They lack the symmetricity and sense(s) of scale, proportion and place that the classical architects, aspects of whose styles they copy, had.
The same is true about Kinkade. He is a poor artist, independently of style. His proportions are off, his raw technical ability lacking, his understanding of color nonsensical or zero (pick one). But in his images his customers found something pleasing to their base instincts. Sure, they could buy a print of a romantic landscape made with technical skill, but that wasn’t as easily found and marketed in the mall. Kinkade was there, nobody else was.
It reminds me of architectural critics’ mockery of really ugly and misproportioned attempts at “modern classical” architecture, like Poundbury or a lot of Robert Stern stuff. And sure, most of their criticisms of kitschiness and an absolute lack of understanding of a lot of classical proportionality are valid. But by God, they’re trying. The criticism is, in almost all cases, aimed at the idea rather than the outcome, when what the customer really desires is a better classical (or in the case of Kinkade, idyllic / quasi-realistic / pastoral scenes) product.
2rafa
6d ago
People on that Reddit are especially stupid. On the UKpolitics subreddit there was some good discussion about UK’s fiscal situation and some actually highly upvoted replies saying that the 20% band should be raised to 30% and the personal allowance should probably fall to the ~£8k range.
I respect the ambition of conquering space, but I think there’s also a clear and unspoken disconnect between what’s promised - which is a kind of romantic, sci-fi version of the age of exploration - and the reality.
There are no planets we’ve ever found that can likely support human habitation without terraforming. Certainly nowhere else in the solar system would support human habitation without terraforming, which mostly involves hypothetical technology and would take thousands of years, just to end up with a worse version of what we already have. What’s more, a multiplanetary species would likely still be at risk of pandemics / MAD / extinction-risk events. Sure, an asteroid can’t destroy us, but most other extinction scenarios would still be viable.
There is no major viable route to other habitable planets; we’d need to send probes to find them first, and we can’t do that at speeds fast enough to make that kind of search viable. Even if one was miraculously found, it would require thousands of years on a generation ship (involving mountains of uninvented and possibly impossible technology) or cryostasis (see above) to make work.
I’m all for exploring space, but I’m also 99% certain that human civilization, whatever becomes of it, will be tied to earth as the center of its story from beginning to end.
Sam Kriss is a notorious blowhard, but on just one thing, he was prescient:
Humanity will never colonize Mars, never build moon bases, never rearrange the asteroids, never build a sphere around the sun.
There will never be faster-than-light travel. We will not roam across the galaxy. We will not escape our star.
Life is probably an entirely unexceptional phenomenon; the universe probably teems with it. We will never make contact. We will never fuck green-skinned alien babes.
The human race will live and die on this rock, and after we are gone something else will take our place. Maybe it already has, without our even noticing.
If your response to this is to post the NYT quote from the early 1900s about man not flying for a thousand years, then I care not to argue.
Space is a black void with a few resources we can mostly find on earth. It can never replace the Wild West, the frontier. It is empty, and it can never be home to us. This is where we have evolved to live, and to die.
There are as yet not-fully-understood extreme inefficiencies in LLM training compared to the human brain, and the brain for all advanced animals certainly isn’t trained ‘from scratch’ the way a base model is. Even then, there have been experiments with ultra-low parameter counts that are pretty impressive at English at a young child’s level. There are theories for how a form of backpropagation might be approximated by the human brain. These are dismissed by neuroscientists, but this isn’t any different to Chomsky dismissing AI before it completely eviscerated the bulk of his life’s work and crowning academic achievement. In any case, when we say the brain is a language model we’re not claiming that there’s a perfect, 1:1 equivalent of every process undertaken when training and deploying a primitive modern model on transistor-based hardware in the brain, that’s far too literal. The claim is that intelligence is fundamentally next-token-prediction and that the secret to our intelligence is a combination of statistics 101 and very efficient biological compute.
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