AnimalMuppet

If they're poor and black, they're inevitably buying cigs, lotto tickets, and booze? Wow, man. Stereotype much?

> If the robotics are feasible their rise should be exponential, not linear

That totally does not follow. Robots can be feasible and their payback curve can still be linear or sublinear.

Take mining rare earth metals, for instance. The problem with mining rare earths isn't that it takes so much human labor. The problem is doing it without poisoning the surrounding 30 square miles. Replacing the driver of the earth mover with a robot doesn't fix the chemistry at all, nor (I suspect) does it significantly affect the economics.

The US isn't just a land. It isn't even just an economy or a currency. Most fundamentally, it's a set of rules that limit the power of government, and thereby allow more freedom for people. Everything flows from that, even the reserve currency. (Why put your foreign currency holdings in a currency where the government can arbitrarily decide to change the value? This is why the renminbi isn't catching on, despite China's power.)

That limited government is looking shaky right now. It's mostly Trump, but it's not just Trump - Congress has been increasingly worthless over the last couple of decades, and so the President has to rule more and more by executive decree. But Trump is pushing the boundaries of what the Constitution allows the government to do far harder than any President that I remember, even Nixon.

And if we lose the limited government, then within a generation or two, we're going to lose the rest. It won't be immediate (unless you fall afoul of the government), but it will come.

To the start of it? Maybe two years?

To the end of it? Maybe 40?

Depends on your metric.

I would say that the 1950s were better economically, at least in the US. If you were working class, you could make a living, and offer your children a better life than you had. That led to optimism.

But if you look at health, there were still a bunch of diseases that hadn't been conquered. Today is much better... if you can afford health insurance.

Technology? Today. No question.

Culture? They weren't on the 24th Marvel movie in the 1950s. Sure, there was a lot of schlock, too, but the original stuff was still original, not retreads of the same old stuff.

I like life now. But I'm not working class...

It's not just the Scrooges in power. Previous attempts to actually make a better world often made a worse one, and not just because of capitalist opposition.

If you use a computer to do something, training an AI to use the computer to do the same thing just takes the computer, which was there anyway. (Yeah, plus training the model, that's not my point.) But if you do something physical, replacing you takes something physical to be there.

We may eventually manufacture the robots to do all these things. We aren't there yet.

There was a YF-12 interceptor prototype that was a variant of the SR-71 prototype (A-12).

Rather than re-engineer the cart to use a different block? I mean, I guess when a part reaches end-of-life, your first move is to buy as many as you can, before you try to re-engineer things so it isn't needed, but... horsepower is horsepower. Torque is torque. It shouldn't be that hard to replace...

The claim was that there's an experience of a model losing power. Your claim amounts to "No, you are not experiencing what you say". That's quite a claim for you to make with no data and no argument.

If the virus didn't evolve the gene on its own, then "stole" seems like a fair description of how it got it.

That would require that Meta is carrying water for Trump. I don't think I see that as very likely.

Most humans will fail? How so?

Mind showing a source for IQ declining across the world?

So you use AI when it's all right to produce slop. That actually seems reasonable.

Reading this, my first thought is to worry about the security aspects of it. But if you're the author, I expect that you've spent a few brain cells in that direction...

It is easier to discover existing vulnerabilities and use them to cause massive destruction than it is to plug the existing vulnerabilities.

Is it time for legal consequences yet? Or does it have to get worse first?

What level of suppression of legitimate voters are we willing to accept in order to avoid voter fraud?

See, there are always two kinds of errors. In the case of voting, one kind is where you let someone vote who shouldn't, and the other is where you don't let someone vote who should. And when you try to decrease one, you increase the other, because you don't have a perfect system.

So, how much suppression of legitimate voters should we accept in order to decrease voter fraud? I think the answer should be "no more voters should be suppressed than there are fraudulent votes cast, and preferably fewer".

Well, how many fraudulent votes are cast? There is little evidence that it's a large problem. In the absence of such evidence, I do not thing that there should be large changes to try to eliminate the fraudulent votes that exist, because they are likely to cause more problems the other direction.

Note well: I do not approve of fraudulent votes. But even more I disapprove of creating a large problem to fix a small one.

It is easier to destroy than to build.

I think that, yes, it is rather unfair to hold AIs to a higher standard than humans in order to reach the "AGI" label, even though we consider humans to be "general intelligences".

But the definition I had in mind was the one in Wikipedia, "matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks." Well, if it's going to do that, it can't be stupider than capable humans nearly as often as it is.

By the most-accepted definition of AGI, if it's stupid sometimes, it's not AGI. At least, not if it's stupid as often as LLMs are.

Between Theil and the pope, I'm not sure that Thiel's judgment is the one I trust.

And, if the pope is doing his job, worries about whether what he says helps China are not supposed to be how he decides what to say or not to say. It may be one consideration, but it's not the only one or the top one.

Why would you care about architecture? Ability to implement the current feature, ability to implement future features, maintainability, and (at least sometimes) performance.

But why would you care when an AI can just rewrite it? Yes, but can it rewrite it to a good architecture? Or just to a different one?

Does a good architecture make code easier for an AI to maintain? I don't know, but I think it's at least not proven that it doesn't.

I'm not sure that an AI can truly evaluate an oral defense. My bias would be that it cannot, pending evidence.

Strong benefits, sure.

But in China, the CCP literally determines which candidates can run for office. The TN GOP does not determine whether Democratic candidates can even run.

Try voting the CCP out of power. Let me know how it goes.

Interesting. I had been interpreting "it's too dangerous; make us slow down" as hype to get more investment and/or customers. "We don't have the money to build out" is an interesting alternate interpretation.

It's easier to pay back the loans if they don't spend the money in the first place. This sounds like they can't spend the money, so paying it back should be easy, not hard.

A reasonably-written contract would have weasel words in it - something like "subject to zoning approval, and approval of the needed power and water and etcetera". Oracle has very expensive lawyers; they should have had those clauses in there.

Still, you write those for the known possible obstacles. Having the state government change the ground rules may not have been one of your known possibles. So, yeah, I could see force majeure being at least possibly reasonable.