BoiledCabbage

> The primary issue is Social Security.

No it's not. It's about 15% of the 2 trillion dollar defecit. Whoever told you that mislead you.

Yet another incompatible definition - here first principles thinking is define as "how do reach a solution?". If that were true, then it wouldn't be any different from "problem solving".

I think I'll stop commenting in this thread as it seems like no two people in this thread are using compatible meanings of "first principles" thinking. Forget about equivalent meanings of it.

"First order" thinking from my knowledge is an entirely different concept.

This is a nice anecdote about Hibernate, but in the world does it have to do with "first principles" thinking?

That's the type of comment people make when they don't want to understand what the others side's actual views are, so instead they tell themselves a simple story they can believe rather than engage with the actual reason.

Both sides do it, but that's a prime example of one of the popular ones from one side.

Sounds very similar to the "interpreter" or "virtual machine" pattern (can't recall the exact name).

But essentially a component receives a list of high level instructions / description of what the user wants done, and it translates that into descriptions of "lower level" commands that should be performed. And those commands then get executed separately.

Anythinf statefule / io is contained in the commands and can be tested easily with external dependencies. And the complex logic is all pure in decided what to do and how to do it based on what was asked for.

That's pretty crazy - if you get too hungry you turn back into a baby.

Hard to even imagine what that would mean in humans.

And everyone remember when months back Anthropic said: You can use our tools, but don't use them for automated attacks - you have to keep a human in the loop because LLMs (including theirs) aren't reliable enough yet for solely making those decisions.

Remember that? And they were widely mocked by the right for it.

Yeah, well this is exactly what they foresaw, and they didnt want a hallucination to trigger a major power war. And somehow so many people were against them for it (including here on HN).

Yet again it seems like there are so many people who can't envision event the most obvious consequences of decisions until they actually see it happen. Why is this so common?

Same thing with the AI Safety and Hugging Face incident. Now all of a sudden many people are connecting "hmm if models get just a bit more capable, a poorly directed or poorly aligned model might do serious damage to critical systems - even as a side effect of some goal, let alone if done intentionally.

> Weird question to ask, that is pretty obvious.

For something the the prior statement it is never a weird question to ask of there actually evidence of this or just it seems like it should be true so we believe it.

There are tons of things that seem like they would obviously be true, but it turns out they aren't.

Regardless of my opinion on the greater subject, I find these arguments to be fairly weak.

Paraphrasing: "Just because and AI may exist that is capable of acting independenly of us and dangerously out strategizing us for resources doesn't mean it will. AIs up until now only follow human instructions."

So your safe bet is that of this AI is created that not one of the billions of people on the world will ask it to do that? That seems unlikely.

"Yes and AI may have an IQ of 1500 but that doesn't mean it's qualitative better than us like we are compared to monkeys. We have better tool use and society."

Yes that's true, but generally increasing IQ also seems to come with qualatative advantages, I don't see why that pattern would stop above human IQs.

Because our universe is actually the inside of a blackhole.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_cosmology#Evidence

Do you have a desire to kill people?

Is this serious?

It's because the country went through the great recession and was attempting to pull out and avoid financial collapse.

Look at Revenue per year as a % of GDP and look at Expenses per year as a % of GDP. It's pretty clear.

Expenses went up avoiding a depression which was done successfully, and revenue dropped due to the falling economy. The president was handed a collapsing economy and saved it.

The issue is the other party that keeps getting handed great economies since the late 90s and fails to do anything but make the problem worse.

> mediocre - of moderate or low quality, value, ability, or performance

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mediocre

Clearly they were using the word to mean low quality. Why would you ask this odd question?

It would be correctly dismissed as irrelevant to the discussion.

> What happens when any AI lab in the world stops caring about this? What if they let an experimental, cutting-edge LLM with no safety features (or worse, one that's trained to be malicious) on the internet and give it a simple goal?

Almost sounds like what those AI safety and alignment people were talking about years ago. The people in these various companies who kept tabs on AI risk out in public and were continuously mocked on HN. All of this stuff is viewed as "future sci-fi" until suddenly it's not.

I've really come to realize recently that there is a very large set of the population of smart people that really has difficulty envisioning future problems unless they directly seem them impacting them today. Otherwise those topics will be continuously dismissed. It explains for me a lot of what I see (both opinions and behaviors) in the broader world that I couldn't understand.

> They didn't propose a solution, they proposed an end state.

What are you talking about?

Things they explicitly listed: "(China's camps, Japan&Korea's immigration policies)"

China's camps are a process, not an end state. Immigration policies are a process. Clearly they are advocating for a process.

And, no I don't think re-educations camps are a good thing for society.

It's incredible this stuff has to actually be said.

> I don't care if it will do X in 2 or 5 years.

Yes, but for should care if it's 2 years vs 50 years. That's why timeline are important for predictions.

Anyone can predict lots of things that given enough time will eventually be true. "The sun will burn out", "humans as a species will no longer exist", "the US will collapse". That's useless. But those become meaningful if they will happen within the next three years.

It's the reason the saying "the market can be irrational longer than your can stay solvent" has such important meaning.

> you're applying black and white thinking on what should be a gradient.

You're the one introducing absolutist thinking here. Essentially saying the world should have Chinese style re-education camps because a Vietnamese woman rejected your offer to play a board game due to a miscommunication.

Clearly that hurt you, but your "solution" is insanity. Not to mention I'm pretty sure way more millions have died from people trying to implement your "forcibly convert others to our culture and language" plan throughout history, than from wars started from a language translation error.

Exactly. It's incredible how partisan some peoples information bubbles must be to not see this for what it is.

All of these changes are based on the president making comments like the following:

> "the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,"

Which he has attempted to prove going back years. And every time it's been found that it essentially doesn't happen. And I believe, the few instances of voter fraud that have been found have been majority republicans and not democrats as has been accused.

So to begin with, anyone arguing for these changes need to acknowledge the well established fact that there is effectively zero voter fraud at all levels throughout the country in anyway impacting elections. As has been investigated and shown time and time and time again. If they aren't beginning with the well established state of the world then they are in fact are the one entering with an extremely partisan hat.

Now if their argument is "yes it's true voter fraud has been investigated countless times, and continuously shown to effectively be smaller than a rounding error, does not impact elections, is know to not be a problem, but I still want to make sweeping changes right before an election." Then sure that's a point of discussion. Then I think the simple question then becomes "why"? But if they aren't willing to begin with an accurate discussion of the facts and state of the situation (there is no voter fraud problem), then any comment they make following that has little credibility.

Why is he pushing to outlaw mail-in voting when there is no issue with mail in voting? Is it because one party votes by mail more than the other?

Or the change in the date mail can receives a postmark? Previously mail was transported to the facility to the same day so would get postmarked that day. Now, as this year, mail won't get post-marked the day it's dropped in a mail box - so any zipcode's mail boxes can now be marked as being sent too late to count, even if they were dropped off before election day.

> While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location.

If the administration actually cared about getting an accurate vote, why aren't they opening more voting locations? Why don't they mandate one voting location per every x number of citizens? Why would the Department of Homeland Security decide who is allowed to get ballots via the mail?

If it's so bad, why has the administration failed time and time again to produce any evidence it's actually bad? If it's so horrible, and wide spread why is it impossible to find evidences that supports this? Or shows it overturning elections or anything close?

It's the same scheme. Make a bunch of baseless assertions, repeat them frequently enough and people in an information bubble will begin to believe it. And that's clearly what's happening here. Just like "we've won the war in Iran" 20 times now. And "Iran has agreed to peace deal where they surrender" 15 times now. And how every weekend for months there were claims about the work on Friday that somehow magically fell apart by Monday. And yet somehow there are still people who give these false claims, and the people claiming them, any amount of credibility.

Voter fraud is not a problem in this country. It does not rig elections, it does not sway elections. So sudden last min drastic changes in the voting process right before an election, by someone who has previously attempted a coup (not the protest on the capital but the actual coup attempt), has said they admire the leader of a country who dismantled its democracy (Orban) - and previously pushed the govt to make false claims of vote fraud to keep him in power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

> The Trump fake electors plot was an attempt by U.S. president Donald Trump and associates to have him remain in power after losing the 2020 United States presidential election. After the results of the election determined Trump had lost, he, his associates, and Republican Party officials in seven battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin[1] – devised a scheme to submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the Electoral College vote in crucial states. The plot was one of Trump and his associates' attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.

Then, when that failed:

> Trump pressured the Justice Department to falsely announce it had found election fraud, and he attempted to install a new acting attorney general who had drafted a letter falsely asserting such election fraud had been found, in an attempt to persuade the Georgia legislature to convene and reconsider its Biden electoral votes.

Like I think there are people in such an information bubble that they aren't even aware these are well established facts. Not partisan talking points, but a recounting of facts of the lengths that have already been attempted to remain in power illegally. And now sudden sweeping changes to voting right before an election amid false claims of rigged elections.

I've generally heard the two concepts discussed as abstraction vs generalization.

Abstraction hides unnecessary detail. Generalization finds/surfaces commonality among items.

> oop - What's the difference between abstraction and generalization? - Stack Overflow - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19291776/whats-the-diffe...

Creating a procedure/method is a form of abstraction. Allowing it to accept parameters is a form of generalization (by allowing it to be used for a number of similar inputs).

Simply creating an integer data type is a very simple form of generalization. Allowing operations to work against generically against any integer.

You're proving my point.

You just want to talk about rent control. Even when it's not the issue at hand. It's the equivalent of watching a kid fall and skin his knee and someone steps forward to get on a soap box about rent control.

Rent control can be bad, but it's not even close to the cause of every problem in housing. Most importantly, it's not the cause here, and it's absurd to say it is.

Incredible

> If landlords are pricing accurately but not monopolistically, this should reduce turnover, reduce vacancy, and...

Ah yes one of my favorite lines of argument: "We don't need laws, if companies are just behaving properly and against their financial interests to behave in a way that harms legit market pricing..."

Except as we know companies won't behave well without incentives. Which is why we need laws on it.

> Landlords switch to raising rents in unison by the maximum allowable amount every year

Blaming this on rent control? This entire take is absurd. Because of the simple fact that landlords, especially using this software, do this in cities without rent control.

Unless now type arguing that Berkley rent control forces landlords in cities without rent control to seek maximum rents...

Rent control is flawed, limiting housing stock is flawed. But blaming landlord's pricing behavior on this is obviously false. Simply because it happens without rent control.

> no not perceptibly but it does.

Similar to how a single particle of dust landing on your shoulder makes you weigh more.

Yes it does - but anyone arguing that is completely missing the point.

Is that the "Amazon Tax"? I thought the Amazon tax was their goofiness practice of taking a very large % of all sales in their site, and banning companies from selling their same goods for less on any competitor site.

Meaning if Amazon takes 30% of the sale and Walmart online can only take 15% with those savings being passed on to the customer, the company is not allowed for that lower price to be on Walmart.

And does Claude respond "and in this fantasy world can I be spiderman?" or does it just quietly pretend as if that were legit?

Power users don't want sandboxing and security??

You have a wildly different understanding of what a power user is...

Except GEICO probably believes it gets no more money from improving the app. Instead they will attempt to improve their general risk modeling as that's where they think the money will come from.