I remember seeing a story awhile back about someone who’s built a motor-activated mirror setup. They have a mirror on a motor next to their back window. When they press a button up front, the mirror tilts up.
I really like this solution as you’re literally just shining their own light back at them.
LLMs as tools,
Yes, in the same way that buying a CD from the store, ripping to your hard drive, and returning the CD is a tool.
It’s not about hampering proliferation, it’s about breaking the hype bubble. Some of the western AI companies have been pitching to have hundreds of billions in federal dollars devoted to investing in new giant AI models and the gigawatts of power needed to run them. They’ve been pitching a Manhattan Project scale infrastructure build out to facilitate AI, all in the name of national security.
You can only justify that kind of federal intervention if it’s clear there’s no other way. And this story here shows that the existing AI models aren’t operating anywhere near where they could be in terms of efficiency. Before we pour hundreds of billions into giant data center and energy generation, it would behoove us to first extract all the gains we can from increased model efficiency. The big players like OpenAI haven’t even been pushing efficiency hard. They’ve just been vacuuming up ever greater amounts of money to solve the problem the big and stupid way - just build really huge data centers running big inefficient models.
There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.
Westoids? Are you the type of guy I feel like I need to take a shower after talking to?
I love the fact that the same executives who obsess over return to office because WFH ruins their socialization and sexual harassment opportunities think think they’re going to be able to replace all their employees with AI. My brother in Christ. You have already made it clear that you care more about work being your own social club than you do actual output or profitability. You are NOT going to embrace AI. You can’t force an AI to have sex with you in exchange for keeping its job, and that’s the only trick you know!
There are many clear use cases that are solid, so AI is here to stay, that’s for certain. But how far can it go, and what will it require is what the market is gambling on.
I would disagree on that. There are a few niche uses, but OpenAI can’t even make a profit charging $200/month.
The uses seem pretty minimal as far as I’ve seen. Sure, AI has a lot of applications in terms of data processing, but the big generic LLMs propping up companies like OpenAI? Those seems to have no utility beyond slop generation.
Ultimately the market value of any work produced by a generic LLM is going to be zero.
How to address superintelligence, if that is actually something we realistically face:
Make creating an unlicensed AI with over a certain threshold to be a capital offense.
Regulate the field of artificial intelligence as heavily as we do nuclear science and nuclear weapons development.
Have strict international treaties on model size and capability limitations.
Have inspection regimes in place to allow international monitoring of any electricity usage over a certain threshold.
Use satellites to track anomalous large power use across the globe (monitored via waste heat) and thoroughly investigate any large unexplained energy use.
Target the fabs. High powered chips should be licensed and tracked like nuclear materials.
Make clear that a nuclear first strike is a perfectly acceptable response to a nation state trying to create AGI.
Anyone who says this technology simply cannot be regulated is a fool. We’re talking models that require hundreds of megawatts or more to run and giant data centers full of millions of dollars worth of chips. There’s only a handful of companies on the planet producing the hardware for these systems. The idea that we can’t regulate such a thing is ridiculous.
I’m sorry, but I put the survival of the human race above your silly science project. If I have to put every person on this planet with a degree in computer science into a hole in the ground to save the human race, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. Hell, I’ll go full Dune and outlaw computers all together, go back to pen and paper for everything, before I condone AGI.
We can’t control this technology? Balderdash. It’s created by human beings. And human beings can be killed.
So, how do we deal with ASI? You put anyone trying to create it deep in the ground. This is self defense at a species level. Sacrificing a few thousand madmen who think they’re going to summon a benevolent god to serve them is simple self-defense. It’s OK to kill cultists who are trying to summon a demon.
I like how practically the whole article is people who just fucked it, in absolutely historic fashion, sharing their wisdom.
Exactly. Here’s an idea. How about a simple rule for accountability? If you are a high-ranking leader in the DNC or a hired consultant in an election season, and the party loses the presidency? You are ineligible to serve in such a role for the next 5 years at least. If you are holding such a role and the party loses complete control of government, a Republican trifecta? You are permanently prohibited from holding such a role.
Yes, this is a bit harsh. But the purpose of these high level positions is not to provide jobs to people or to be fair. It’s about winning elections. Sometimes there very well be elections that simply can’t be won, and this rule might throw out some reasonably qualified people. But that is simply a necessary cost to pay for holding leadership accountable. There are no shortage of potential leaders out there. There are tens of thousands of people who can work their way up to roles like this. Being at the top of political organizing should be like holding a world leader athletic position - incredibly hard to get and easy to lose. Because in politics, like in sports, winning really matters.
Before seeing this was the Onion, my enthusiasm at the headline diminished precipitously as I read each word past the first few.
I don’t really follow what you’re trying to say. “Sex marker” does describe the meaning in the most straight forward way one can.
“Sex marker” has a pretty unambiguous meaning. It’s something anyone of even low intelligence should be able to figure out from context. It’s a marker that indicates sex on a document. If not, the term is easily searchable. And the term applies to any ID document, not just passports.
People need to learn new words all the time; we’re not born knowing vocabulary. This isn’t even something that requires a lot of theory or justification like oddball neopronouns or something. It’s a pretty straightforward thing. If you have any kind of ID, it almost certainly has a sex marker on it.
Do we need to exhaustively define every word in a headline? There will always be some people who don’t know the meaning of any given word. What if someone grew up in the tropics, never had an education, and doesn’t know what freeze means? Should we expect the headline to provide a definition for that word as well? Or hell, why should we simply assume the reader knows what a passport is? “Sex marker” is a pretty common term. More people probably need to look up who Marco Rubio is than need to search what “sex marker” means.
Ultimately in order to make text at all readable and headlines at all concise, you need to assume some basic intelligence by the reader. You cannot exhaustively define each and every term. You don’t want to use incredibly obscure terms. But “sex marker” is hardly obscure. And it is something that can be learned very quickly with even an iota of effort.
Did you really think sex was binary? “Male” and “female” are just two ends of a bimodal distribution. But about 1% of the population has some form of intersex condition. The X market is for intersex people and those who identity with a nonbinary gender.
Oh dear lord in heaven, I’ve apparently become a Dickensian villain…Did I just recreate the poor houses? Oh dear. Yeah, maybe separate rooms are better. There’s spartan, and then there’s “we built a prison.”
Seriously. I want a world where everyone can have the basics of subsistence without qualifications. UBI is one way to do it, but even direct provision is fine.
Universal healthcare is an obvious one, but for as wealthy as developed countries are, providing basic food and shelter shouldn’t be that difficult either. For food and shelter, I think we should just offer anyone that wants it the basics of life.
Every county should have a government depot in it that you can go and get a certain quantity of basic staples per month. Rice, beans, flour, that kind of thing. It need not be fancy or the best food on Earth, but enough of what people need to keep them alive. And you keep the demand for the service reasonable not by putting in place applications and qualifications, but simply by personal preference. Not many millionaires are going to go down to the depot every month and get their government-issued bag of rice, even if they could if they wanted.
Same thing with housing. There should be state-run dorms or boarding houses in every city in the country. Need a place to stay? Go down to the city dorm. I would build them just like college dorms - small shared rooms with bunk beds and communal cooking/bathing facilities. And anyone, from the richest to the poorest, can stay there if they need to. If Bezos wants to go live in the government dorm, he can. You keep demand for it low, and the cost of providing it reasonable, through personal choice. Most people don’t actually want to live their whole life in a dorm room. Keep things clean. Keep them sanitary. But keep them simple and utilitarian.
Even within existing capitalist societies, we can provide for the basics of life for everyone. And instead of putting strict requirements, you open the programs up to all. You keep the demand for the services low by focusing on utilitarian versions of the benefits you provide. Anyone down on their luck can stay in the government dorm if they want, but very few people actually want to unless they really need to.
You have to be willing to walk away from and ignore corporate media platforms, or else they’ll never be defeated. And content creators need to also learn to not post their stuff to these platforms.
Biden also announced he wasn’t enforcing the law. The TikTok operators saw the writing on the wall and realized they need to bend the knee to Trump.
Don’t get too hung up on specific dates. Laws are not some physical law like gravity that are present and universal. They exist within a fuzzy context of enforcement and interpretation.
Biden made clear he wasn’t going to enforce the law. Trump made clear he was going to make a decision based on how well Tiktok flattered and bribed him. So that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Due to two facts:
The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think
The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.
It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.
There’s no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.
Democrats when they lose 49-51: Which minority do we sacrifice?
Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.
Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.
You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn’t ever actually in their field of view.
Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.
This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?
You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.
Many will say that World War Three cannot happen, that nuclear weapons will prevent it. However, this assumes that World War Three has to be global thermonuclear war, rather than some repeat of the previous world wars.
Cities don’t have to be leveled for nations to fight a world war. The US fought two world wars, and we never had our cities and infrastructure decimated. What I can imagine is a future world war where all the major players fight the war in the same way the US fought the two previous wars. Both sides contribute massive resources, adopt wartime economies, throw their whole populations behind the effort etc, but at no point do the various combatants directly attack the main territory and population centers of the other side. You could have a conflict where both sides lost millions of troops fighting it out in some third party territory, but the nukes never fly as all sides realize that invading the home territory of the others is suicide.
Trump will do a Reichstag fire…literally. As in, he’ll try to stage a false-flag attack modeled after the one the Nazis did. Except, he’ll screw it up in the most moronic way possible. Instead of setting fire to the US capitol or some other US target, he will have the literal Reichstag - the actual German parliament building - set on fire again.