doglatine
2d ago
I'm no financial analyst but I'm inclined to say yes, keep buying. I really think that despite the AI buzz and hype, most of the business world still hasn't priced in just how economically impactful AGI (and the path towards it) is going to be over the course of this decade. But you might also want to buy gold or something, because I expect the rest of this decade is also going to be very volatile.
doglatine
2d ago
Yes, thanks for the expectations-tempering, and agree that there could still be a reasonably long way still to go (my own timelines are still late-this-decade). I think the main lesson of o3 from the very little we've seen so far is probably to downgrade one family of arguments/possibilities, namely the idea that all the low-hanging fruit in the current AI paradigm had been taken and we shouldn't expect any more leaps on the scale of GPT3.5->GPT4. I know some friends in this space who were pretty confident that Transformer architectures wouldn't never be able to get good scores on the ARC AGI challenges, for example, and we'd need a comprehensive rethink of foundations. What o3 seems to suggest is that these people are wrong, and existing methods should be able to get us most (if not all) the way to AGI.
doglatine
2d ago
They have a public dataset and a private one, and compare the scores for both of them to test for overfitting/data contamination. You can see both sets of scores here, and they’re not significantly different.
Of course it’s always possible that there has been cheating on the test in some other way, and so François Chollet has asked for others to replicate the result.
doglatine
2d ago
Wake up, babe, new OpenAI frontier model just dropped.
Well, you can’t actually use it yet. But the benchmarks scores are a dramatic leap up.. Perhaps most strikingly, o3 does VERY well on one of the most important and influential benchmarks, the ARC AGI challenge, getting 87% accuracy compared to just 32% from o1. Creator of the challenge François Chollet seems very impressed.
What does all this mean? My view is that this confirms we’re near the end-zone. We shouldn’t expect achieving human-level intelligence to be hard in the first place, given all the additional constraints evolution had to endure in building us (metabolic costs of neurons, infant skull size vs size of the birth canal, etc.). Since we hit the forcing-economy stage with AI sometime in the late 2010s, ever greater amounts of human capital and compute have been dedicated to the problem, so we shouldn’t be surprised. My mood is well captured by this reflection on Twitter from OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata:
honestly ai is so easy and neural networks are so simple. this was always going to happen to the first intelligent species to come to our planet. we’re about to learn something important about how universes tend to go I think, because I don’t believe we’re in a niche one
doglatine
10d ago
I’m always impressed walking around the produce section of French and Italian supermarkets at how you can smell the tomatoes from 20ft away.
doglatine
11d ago
I don’t think there’s a huge moral difference between having sex with 100 men in a day (which is admittedly unusual) and 100 men in a year (which is comparatively common). In both cases you’re treating sex as a trivial thing.
doglatine
17d ago
doglatine
18d ago
Good response! Yes, I agree FPV drones are unlikely to be decisive in a naval war. Insofar as China's dominance in drones raises concerns about a US-China conflict, it's what it suggests about China's wider industrial dominance. I think the most plausible 'long war' scenario here involves China imposing a blockade/maritime exclusion zone around Taiwan, triggering an ongoing and gradually-escalating naval conflict with the US. I agree that submarines will likely be very important here, and I also agree that the US has a pretty significant edge here. Where I expect China to dominate is in anti-ship missiles and light combatants like the Houbei class which will effectively exclude the US Navy from the SCS.
doglatine
18d ago
My own view is that if the US and China go to war, and the conflict isn't resolved in the first couple of days, then the US will lose, largely due to the factors mentioned here. While I support Noah Smith's vision of the reindustrialisation of America, I think it will face a significant uphill battle. The share of the US population working in manufacturing has fallen from 30% in 1950 to around 8% today. While some of this reflects more capital-intensive manufacturing processes, there's no way for the US to compete with China without considerably increasing the number of people employed in the secondary sector; note that China has more manufacturing robots per worker than the US and still has around 30% of its population in industry.
This leads to the core problem, namely that white-collar labour is higher status than blue-collar labour, even controlling for salaries, and as a consequence of deindustrialisation, a larger share of the US population now thinks of itself as being entitled to a white-collar job (a form of Turchin's elite overproduction). The kids of accountants, teachers, doctors, and business professionals generally won't want to become welders or machine lathe operators, even if these careers offer a better salary. Consequently, price signals alone won't drive reindustrialisation; some social engineering will be required to boost the status of manufacturing labour, and I'm doubtful of the cultural feasibility of this.
doglatine
20d ago
It could even have been a quid pro quo — “Donald, give me a list of people it would cost you political capital to pardon. I’ll pardon some of them, and then you pardon Hunter when you’re sworn in.”
doglatine
21d ago
disasturbating
Fantastic word, never come across it before.
I would pardon Hunter and the Capitol rioters in the same batch, just to screw with everyone. It would also have been funny to pardon Trump at the same time, if only because I suspect Trump would be inclined to turn it down.
Love it, I would be entirely on board with this, though I'd note that as a Brit, I find the concept of Presidential pardons to be pretty odd, and in tension with the idea of legal equality of all citizens.
doglatine
27d ago
My intuition is that films and TV have dropped off a lot more in the last 8 years than videogames, with some incredibly vivid and memorable successes very recently. While the Sweetbaby stuff has definitely tainted a lot of AAA games, the kind of games most affected are those that were mass-market slop anyway. I can’t think of many titles where it’s true to say “this would be great were it not for the DEI nonsense”.
doglatine
27d ago
At the risk of sounding like a pervert, I associate that peach fuzz with some pretty good memories. In particular, a couple of my more innocent exes had some light fuzz, but because they were relative ingenues they hadn’t absorbed the cultural messaging around hair removal. So I associate it with a certain kind of wholesome unaffected young womanhood.
doglatine
27d ago
Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).
doglatine
28d ago
I've been getting VERY interesting in egregores and eldritch analogies lately, and I'll probably do an effortpost on them at some point, but in the meantime I'm trying to track down a brilliant rationalist-adjacent blog that did long-form essays about a bit of different egregores, some of which had Lovecraftian or Biblical names. My Google Fu is failing me - anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
doglatine
1mo ago
I find a healthy bunch of Substacks scratches the same itch as social media while being less corrosive to the mind and soul.
doglatine
1mo ago
I agree this would be a huge victory for Russia - far more meaningful than the last bits of Donetsk/Luhansk/Zaporizhzhia. Cracking apart the European-American alliance has long been a primary geopolitical objective of the reactionary nationalist strain in Russian politics and an absolute precondition for other territorial ambitions. That said, it's going to be challenging for Russia to pull this off - Putin was doubtless hoping/expecting that the Anglo world would be more hawkish on Ukraine than the European world, but if anything the reverse is true, and there's no strong equivalent to America-first isolationism in most of Europe. Consequently, he can't split America from Europe by asking the latter "why are you paying for America's war-mongering?"
doglatine
1mo ago
There is still no deal that Putin would offer that Zelensky and the Ukrainian people would accept, and Trump's claim that he could end the war in 24 hours is laughable and delusional. Until at least one of Putin or Zelensky are utterly desperate, no peace will be possible. Ukraine is definitely hurting right now, but it's still sitting on more territory than it was in August 2022, and none of Russia's attacks have come close to the scale of territorial gains of the Kharkiv counteroffensive.
Now, would Zelensky's calculus change if the US threatened to cut off aid? Yes, but this would massively alienate Biden from Democratic leadership and American allies in Europe. It's a different story for Trump, of course; not only is there support for these tactics among many in his leadership team, but even European leaders recognise that this is a policy he campaigned on, so he has a democratic mandate to push for it. By contrast, it would seem to many in Europe and in the Democratic party to be a gross betrayal if Biden were to threaten to withhold aid.
That said, I think even Trump will have a harder time of it than he expects. Any pressure applied to Ukraine will also change Putin's calculus, insofar as it will incentivise him to exploit Ukraine's new weakness to push the lines of battle further in Russia's favour. Creating enough desperation on the Ukrainian side without creating corresponding greed on the Russian side will be a very hard needle to thread.
There's also the European factor. If Trump pushes Zelensky too hard (as perceived by Europe), there's a real possibility of a hard transatlantic split emerging. While Europe would struggle to fill the void left by the US if all aid was blocked, it would be interesting to see how far they could "step up", especially if they supplemented their military production with purchases made on Ukraine's behalf from suppliers like South Korea, Turkey, and Pakistan. And while the US has been supplying the lion's share of lethal aid, Europe is sitting on a gold mine in the form of Russia's $180 billion in foreign exchange reserves held at Euroclear in Belgium. Additionally, the US in some cases has been using its diplomatic efforts to restrain transfer of weapons from European countries, most notably Sweden's Gripen with its long-ranged Meteor missiles, which would be far more useful to Ukraine than F-16s and AIM-120s.
That said, I think this scenario is quite unlikely, because it would be the biggest breakdown in Transatlantic relations since at least the Suez Crisis. It would be a huge fillip to European defense contractors like Rheinmetall and Thales - and a corresponding disaster for Lockheed, Northrop, General Dynamics, etc. - insofar as it would make it politically and strategically very difficult for Europe to buy American arms and equipment for decades to come. It would strongly increase the probability of European neutrality in any conflict in the Pacific, and could tempt Europe to closer economic relationships with China, as well as leading to a wider cooling-off of co-operation in the Middle East and beyond. The French in particular would be ecstatic at all of this. Consequently, I think it's unlikely that even a Trump White House would push Ukraine so hard as to prompt a split in American-European policy. But hell, Bolton seems to think Trump will pull out of NATO, so anything is possible. It would sure as hell be interesting times if they did.
doglatine
1mo ago
For what it’s worth I’ve been really impressed with Ezra Klein, Pod Save America, Matthew Yglesias, and others in the wake of the election. Lots of pretty brutal criticism of stupid things that the Democratic Party has been doing, and quite sophisticated analysis of voting patterns etc.. I get the feeling that a lot of these people wanted to speak up more loudly sooner, but it was only once progressives were properly on the back foot that they felt empowered to do so. I hope this is a general trend for the left going forward, and that they’re able to become a big-tent intellectual hothouse of a movement again.
doglatine
1mo ago
It’s definitely — and explicitly — pro-Democratic party, and features calls for political donations. However, it also feels (to me) quite fresh and direct and pretty bold in its analysis.
doglatine
1mo ago
Pretty brief for a top-level post, but I'm curious what everyone here thinks of Pod Save America. It had been vaguely on my radar, but I've just started listening to it in the wake of the election and I'm actually really impressed by both the sophistication of the conversation and the relative lack of virtue-signaling and idpol talking points. It all feels fairly high-decoupling to me, which was a surprise, as I'd assumed it was a solidly blue tribe rather than grey tribe show.
But because I'm late to this party, I'm curious to hear what others think. Have I just been lucky enough to hear an unusually reflective collection of episodes?
I think the definitive piece written on this is Nadia Asparouhova's Tribes of Climate. Introductory quote:
I recommend reading the whole article in full. FWIW, I identify as what Asparouhova calls an "Energy Maximalist" - I regard climate change as a genuine but convenient crisis point that provides incentives for us to transition from the local minimum of fossil fuels to the global minimum of cheap renewable energy. Consequently, for most of the climate activist world, I'm the most despicable class of heretic. This is true despite my acceptance of the general catechism of contemporary climate activism - (i) the earth is warming (ii) it's mostly our fault (iii) this is bad (iv) we can do something about it (v) we should do something about it.
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