Corvos
4hr ago
Like tattoos. I’m not implacably opposed to them on principle but there are very few stickers that look better than no stickers.
Corvos
19hr ago
Honestly, I do think that's basically cultural prejudice. Coupled with perhaps an unusual amount of time spent with other ESL speakers.
I've known Russian professors etc. who were basically incomprehensible, the Indians have no monopoly on that. Rather that than chavvy London accents.
Corvos
22hr ago
I knew a very nice Japanese girl with impeccable middle-class credentials. She spoke Japanese with a pleasant Tokyo accent (which the Japanese equivalent to RP these days) and she spoke English impeccably... except that she'd been to university in Plymouth and had picked up an incredibly gutter accent and speech patterns that she seemed to be completely unaware of. It was incredibly disorienting.
I think that's a broadly artificial separation. In my opinion the vast majority of new tools / technologies / methods / routines / research come from some combination of:
- Observation of something interesting during a routine process.
- Application of something routinely used in one context to another context.
- Common-sense extension that has only now become available because of advancements in another area.
I have observed AI doing (2) and it makes (1) and (3) considerably easier.
If my project works it will be an entirely new way of doing desktops, and I guess it was my idea not the AI's, which is maybe what you mean? But I got a lot of the techniques from another area and 90% of the design is the AI's suggestion and uses techniques I'd never heard of, so it's still more complicated. I'm quite happy for the top-level what to stay my job and leave the how to the machine, of course.
As Napoleon once said, quantity has a quality all its own.
My private project is a graphics thing for ricing. To get what I wanted, I would have had to become proficient in desktop compositing, OpenGL, wayland, and several disciplines around graphics and rendering. Then I would have had to write several thousand lines of fairly finicky boilerplate, including several false starts and bad assumptions.
If I were retired and had the time and the energy, I could do that. In practice, though, switching from 5% ideas 95% grind to 60% ideas 30% reading 10% grind means that it’s fun and I’m a good chunk of the way there after maybe three good evenings of work. Without AI that just wouldn’t have happened and it would go into the bin of ‘someday’.
For my startup, again, AI is not a superintelligence but it sirfaces good papers, explains the maths when I get stuck, implements diagnostics in minutes that would take me hours. It’s not like having a Nobel winner in my pocket, it’s like having a textbook that can talk to me and a bunch of PhD students on Speed. Very senior people in very serious organisations are using it for proof of concepts and your projects.
TLDR: no individual thing it does is truly revolutionary except maybe the maths from my perspective, but I find the ease and quality and speed with which it does it is revolutionary in aggregate.
Corvos
1d ago
I think he means it in the sense that "a nice man on the phone told me he was from BitPanda and asked me to read my password to him so he could check if it was secure" or "SBF stole all my money" can't be detected by enforcing code correctness. All of the badness has happened outside the code, everything inside the code is a perfectly valid transaction.
Corvos
1d ago
I think crypto isn't such a good analogy. I never saw anyone get value out of crypto qua crypto. As an asset and an investment, yes, and occasionally as a way of paying for mildly shady or super-techy things, but in general the value proposition just never seems to have manifested to me.
Whereas I get massive value out of AI. For writing, for my hobby projects. My startup would be facing much larger headwinds without AI for coding and research. I think the hype is still kind of overdone, but only because the hype is so strong that only the immanent eschaton could live up to it and because it's not clear how much of a directly-related ecosystem there will be for third parties.
With respect, I think that you are veering close to the "if you didn't buy so much avocado toast, you could afford a home" meme, both by overestimating other people's frivolous spending and by underestimating the amount it costs to get ahead.
The vast majority of people are not ordering doordash McDonalds for breakfast. For the few who are, it doesn't cost $30. It costs $10 max including coffee, and maybe another $5 for delivery. The people I know who travel regularly and aren't rich and established do so as cheaply as possible - they're staying in fleabag hostels in grubby parts of town, taking budget redeye flights, etc. My acquaintances who live like your paralegal are rich as hell.
Then on the other side. I've had a big and maybe temporary salary boost lately, but before I was on a pretty decent above-median income. I could probably have bought a house by being very thrifty over ten, twelve years. That's with a PhD and a good upper-middle-class job, and for a very mid-tier house in a very mid area.
I don't think that the ordinary middle class, let alone the working class, can aspire to own a nice place with a picket fence just from cutting down on restaurants and vacations. Especially if they're not DINKs. If anything, the shift towards 'buying experiences' stems from assuming that our standard of life as children was normal rather than a freak bubble, and a deep skepticism that scrimping and saving will result in achieving goals that seem to accelerate away faster than one approaches them (b/c a lot of them are limited and competitive goods).
Corvos
1d ago
There was a funny bit in the first episode of new Doctor Who along those lines.
DOCTOR: How can you hide something that big in a city this small?
ROSE: Hold on. Hide what?
DOCTOR: The transmitter. The Consciousness is controlling every single piece of plastic, so it needs a transmitter to boost the signal.
ROSE: What's it look like?
DOCTOR: Like a transmitter. Round and massive, slap bang in the middle of London. A huge circular metal structure like a dish, like a wheel. Radial. Close to where we're standing. Must be completely invisible.
(Rose stares over his shoulder pointedly.)
DOCTOR: What? What?
(The Doctor turns and looks at what Rose is staring at on the south bank but the penny doesn't drop.)
DOCTOR: What? What is it? What?
(He finally catches on to what Rose is looking at. It's called the London Eye, it's on the south bank of the Thames, it's lit up like a Christmas tree, and it was the biggest Wheel in the world when it opened in 2000.)
DOCTOR: Oh, fantastic!
Corvos
1d ago
Now, as a gentleman enthusiast of the literary arts, how to find these people...
Corvos
1d ago
Isn't a huge chunk of increased prices for premium grocery products (meat, cocoa) competition with huge new markets in China? As you say, the market is global.
Corvos
2d ago
Yes, later self-play could be used to learn different games (and the original DRL was applied to many Atari games) but AFAIK nobody successfully made one of these agents learn chess and Go.
You know, I never thought about heroin/cocaine/fentanyl saving alcohol’s reputation but when you say it I can see what you mean. That’s a very interesting perspective.
Corvos
2d ago
Yes, I think the ‘bitter lesson’ is the other thing that came out of this, but AlphaGo’s intelligence didn’t generalise to simultaneously learning even a single other game.
Finding that sufficient data could lead to expertise in massively distributed domains came as a huge shock to me, professionally, and completely destroyed my notion of how intelligence could work.
You might have lost a lot of that money. Almost none of the tech used in AlphaGo lead to LLMs and it produced a frenzy of research and startups that mostly looked in the wrong direction. I guess RL for behaviour tuning made it in.
Corvos
3d ago
Shepherd Book works, although he’s a little harsh.
“Father, don’t the bible have something to say about killin’”?
“It does. It is however a mite fuzzier on the topic of kneecaps.”
Ultimately social sanctions are backed by something. Whether that’s losing your job as with Twitter mobs, or punishment from the state. In certain societies judging stares and shunning can work, but those kinds of places don’t legalise drugs and they still tend to be running on a legacy of extremely harsh legal enforcement. England’s Bloody Code, Japan’s 99% conviction rate, etc.
People do stuff that’s not cool all the time, especially if they’re stoned. And legalisation so far has AFAIK pushed up usage considerably.
To be perfectly honest, I suspect your suggestion results from a dislike of coercion more than genuinely feeling that your suggestion is the most effective way to limit antisocial weed usage.
It was a reductio ad absurdam of course, but my point is that prejudice along many axes is an inherent part of any interaction.
For a more realistic example, if someone asks me for directions, I’m going to decide whether I’m comfortable pulling out my phone based on a number of factors, one of which is race.
Then you get to the social level. In London, a black man is 8x more likely to kill than a white man. Should we be focusing police attention based on this fact? If you’re a policeman and find two parties are in a he-said she-said situation and one of them is black, or homeless, are you going to let that affect your judgement or are you going to wall off all knowledge about relative aggression knowing that it’s going to make your judgements less correct?
Unless you’re going to email the credentials to your bank account to every American, and see which ones are actually thieves, you are going to end up pre-judging them in one manner or another.
“Sometimes kindness comes from unexpected places and people aren’t what you expect” does not mean “and therefore you must turn your brain off and clap your hands over your eyes until you have enough information to judge people on an individual level, and statistics are the work of Satan”.
Do I feel genuine sympathy for someone who has a harder time because they belong to a group with a bad reputation? Yes, certainly. The tend to be fine once they demonstrate a good character but they still find it a lame harder than many others. I *don’t * feel so bad that I’m willing to ignore really obvious group differences.
To be honest, I don't think he's wrong on this. Lowly American citizens are as apt to demand their government Do Things about the objects of their consternation as citizens are anywhere else. In the spirit of goodwill between nations, I'll concede maybe they're a bit less likely than some, but it's such a high bar it makes no odds.
Even here, where many are supposedly libertarians, @Amadan and other mods complain that lots of users hammer the Report button in response to posts they disagree with. I also note that many American citizens seem to quite like their government getting its way by muscular means, so long as it works and they aren't inconvenienced.
I don't write this to dunk on Americans specifically, only to say that having the citizens of a foreign power in charge of the internet is very likely to cause issues no matter which power that is, because people are people. It's certainly true that much of what the American government does is pretty unpopular with American citizens, much more so when it affects those citizens, but even if the American government suddenly turned into a direct democracy I still wouldn't particularly want to be beholden to the American public.
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