SoulFire
a natural neural network
Politics is the continuation of drama by other means.
Programmer and mind upload enthusiast from Finland. Trying to become a better writer.
User ID: 529
SoulFire
a natural neural network
7d ago
I'm not convinced LLMs are a net productivity gain for anyone, let alone with inference costs, and LLMs will require constant training or they'll eventually drift woefully out of date. In two years, I expect it to be as clear to everyone that OpenAI and Anthropic aren't worth anywhere near their current valuations let alone a trillion dollars, and we enter into a third major AI winter.
If LLMs have a future, it's going to be in cheap, open-source models. Even then, as they stand, they appear to be a net distraction rather than value add, atrophying professional skills, and reducing quality standards wherever they're implemented, leading to a lot of technical debt, which will have to eventually be repaid. Maybe in 20-30 years, we'll have an abundance of chips and memory, then we'll be able to continue the scaling experiment (which I believe any future successful more generalistic AI will need scale similar to current LLMs rather than some scientific, algorithmic breakthrough).
SoulFire
a natural neural network
7d ago
But is that downstream of natal biology, or of assumed gender during childhood and adolescence?
Does it matter? This just means that even if you concede that gender would be somehow separate from sex and defined by apparent looks or behavior, these people still code in the bucket of 'male'.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
How is husband material an insult and baby's daddy material isn't?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
That sounds hilarious! Is it possible to find discussion about this somewhere? I just found a Wikipedia article and an interesting Reddit thread. Apparently, including a 4Chan dataset will improve model performance, particularly measured 'truthfulness'. I wonder how large of a performance tax SotA LLMs are paying for excluding places like 4Chan and forums like this one.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
How heterogeneous to count? Finland has two official languages with a 5% population of Fennoswedes. The Sami also haven't seceded from any of the Nordics despite obnoxious activism.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
OK, but how do you square your definition with ring species? Would two animals which can't interbreed be of one species if there existed an intermediate animal which they can both breed?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
the gender identity found more commonly in people born with vulvas
And what identity would that be?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
Well, passing a law is an act of much larger magnitude than an individual firebombing regardless of whether the vigilantism is a net-positive or negative toward the cause on its own. I believe an event of every major government coordinating to throttle AI is equally in the realm of fantasy as an event of firebombings everywhere all the time.
Also if you preach a view of we need to stop AI no matter the cost, I don't see how you could fully distance yourself from followers who just happen to have a slightly different effectiveness calculus when it comes to the means.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
Sounds kind of presumptuous. Suppose the assassination succeeded in all its goals, and there's a global AI freeze. Then from a consequentalist view, oh, I suppose I supported individual violence, given it's effective after all!
That sounds like more of an argument of practicality then. Then it's a matter of whether it's easier to reach a democratic mandate in all major countries then autocratic buy-in from Russia and China vs. a small contingent of fanatic extremists of say 5% in each country leading in AI (which there's only really two) to throttle AGI until say leaders globally can be replaced by a younger generation which subscribes to threat models of extermination by AI. And even that's on the presumption that the violence is in fact counterproductive and you don't end up with a Shinzo Abe's assassin's type of case where the murder is the catalyst for political reform. Suppose Sam Altman burns to popular applause and leaders finally recognize just how unpopular AI is.
Though, I think the whole hypothetical is farcical since in reality, the only threat posed by AI seems to be wasting everyone's time and money, and flooding the internet with slop.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
Where's the consistency in calling for data centers to be bombed (presumably with employees) but declaring firebombing CEOs responsible for repurposing the entire global economy toward AI data center buildup to be a step too far? If data centers are valid military targets, then surely data center builders would be too.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
But prediction markets are a non-central case of gambling. They offer information into the external world. Hence, there are concerns about insider trading and leaking of secrets.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
2mo ago
Quarantine threads are where discussion goes to die.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
3mo ago
I think it's more just for the government to rug pull than to commit to a civilizational suicide pact even if the boomers and whoever preceded them promised themselves riches 3000 years ago off the expense of future generations. What obligation does the younger generation have to a policy where they're robbed during their youth and left with ruins when they're old? And to finish the civilizational KO, we're being replaced en masse where we have 3% of newborns being named Mohammed. We have a pincer maneuver of a labor shortage of short-supplied generations who can't support pensioners and a Boomertopia which is so rotten that you can't even find a job as a new grad.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
3mo ago
How is he going to do that? Donate weapons to Russia?
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
Southern marital culture
Martial or marital culture? I'm presuming from context that you meant martial as in military. Otherwise, I'm quite curious about the intricacies of the continued culture surrounding marriage from before the Civil War.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
Even that still depends on what those other people's kids to do the host society once they're incorporated. Replacing your population with foreign cultures doesn't necessarily mean the same society and culture make it through the other end.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
In some hypothetical future level of development, sure. But in its current or slightly improved form of LLMs, AI is mostly a threat to midwit pencil pushers and not to any genuine expert or intellect, whether a skilled artist or an engineer.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
I think your comment ended up as a reply to something completely different.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
It may not have been something they've invented, but they're sure the one's hoisting it upon the rest of the world. I know the perfidious Albion and her consequences have been a disaster for humanity as well.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
Well, sure if you're cooking so crudely that you don't even need to know the temperature, then there's no argument for one system one way or the other. Then would you support switching to Celsius in a context where the boiling point of water does matter? Like a lab where superheated liquid water might explosively flash into steam or if you're dealing with distillation. Even if you're, say, in Denver, it's easier to recognize and remember that 95°C is the local boiling point since it's close to 100°C.
SoulFire
a natural neural network
5mo ago
Why would the AI need to fool people (and not merely the average person but accounting for potentially infinite angles of error!) into believing an image was real?
Well, I believe even a midwit would eventually telltale signs of whether an image is synthetic or not, just they would learn slower.
The whole point of fiction is that it isn't true, it's more interesting than reality.
Interesting perspective on fiction, but not one I necessarily share. I find fiction interesting in how it speaks on reality, history, human instinct, and the thoughts and feelings of the writer. I guess I'm just skeptical that AI would ever reach the stage of creating anything quite so interesting, rather than the generic slop that it currently produces. At the current rate, it seems like humans and animals will continue to be more adaptive and interesting.
Okay, I'll admit LLMs probably increase productivity in these narrow areas with the caveat of reliability and accuracy issues. I'm more miffed by the flood of slop code and AI companies hijacking the market.
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