DirkH

Assuming employees are not incentivized by $$$ here seems extraordinary and needs a pretty robust argument to show it isn't playing a major factor when there is this much money involved.

What's so shady about it?

Read their third paragraph. They completely agree with you

This is about as bad and ethically compromised a take as someone who hates crypto-bros and would immediately cease all contact with anyone they identify as pro-cryptocurrency (say believe it superior to the current financial system) and blackball them from all business interests. Justifying doing so to protect their wealth because they know for a fact that all those damn crypto-bros are utter pieces of shit.

I have a good friend who is a communist I strongly disagree with. I believe quite-bad things about communism as a philosophy and what it inevitably leads to. As of yet I have not excluded all people who are communists from my life or business interests due to believing their philosophy makes all or them bad people. I can say the same about Christians or Jehovah's Witnesses or Randian libertarians or Kantians.

I strongly disagree with all their ethical worldviews and metaphysics, but I don't automatically believe people are evil in those categories nor believe they would stab me in the back if they could, even it I believe the philosophies in question can lead to more backstabbing behavior.

It's simply discrimination and would morally compromise me to hate any group of people for what they believe. It wouldn't surprise me if also very illegal, especially if you decline to hire someone who identifies as EA.

Let's not pretend our industry doesn't immediately up the prestige and desirability of anyone who has worked at Google.

I can already think of a friend off the top of my head who worked there. They will tell me their engineering work at Google is not even that impressive compared to her other technical accomplishments. Our industry doesn't seem to care and she gets immediate extra-prestige just from having "(ex-)Google" on her resume independent of her actual technical accomplishments at Google.

Those Stanford grads aren't dumb. They are reacting to the incentives of our entire industry and making a wise decision that favours their professional growth through accruing status and wealth - both resources which can catapult you to finally having what you need to go do "the thing" you actually want to do. Hence all the ex-Google startup founders.

It's not the same thing for the same reason that a shiny billboard for an ad right outside your bedroom window that you can't not see every time you look outside is not the same as a text ad on the first page of a book you want to read.

A text ad on the first page of a book is not a slippery slope to a billboard right outside your window.

I use a Linux terminal everyday. I completely forgot it has any ads at all until reading this thread. I have to put conscious effort to find where the ad is.

It would be impossible for a daily Windows user to forget their OS has ads.

My 2 cents at any rate

Those words have meanings. Look them up it you don't understand them. They're well used in this context to get the author's point across.

I dunno if I agree with the author. I've never been to Burning Man, but their word usage certainly helps me - a casual onlooker - better understand their frustration.

I guarantee you that abusive cultural norms exist and many poor individuals stuck in cultures with abusive norms wish they were living in a different culture.

You've learnt a lesson and grown from it. There's no reason to blame others for your own actions.

This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your understanding on how difficult the scientific process is to your friends.

Telling your friends you have changed your mind on everything you told them earlier because of new evidence should be something you take pride in. Because only true scientists change their minds, and even discard their most cherished theories, based on new evidence.

Different people can have pretty different experiences with different drugs.

Just because you have an alcohol tolerance (assuming you do) doesn't mean others do. Just thinking of myself, I'm always surprised how little it takes for alcohol to alter my psche to the point that I can't find my wallet and am speaking in tongues because I'm a huge lightweight. For some it even represents an existential risk due to overwhelming dependence. Also, if forming an difficult-to-break addiction to alcohol (super common) isn't something messing with your psyche long-term you and I have drastically different views of what constitutes "messing with your psyche."

Also I call MASSIVE BS on nicotine not doing anything significantly to the mind. Good lord, have you ever Googles "What Nicotine does to your mind" and tried reading some papers? Cognitive decline, dependence (classified as highly addictive which is a direct long-term change to your brain. How can anyone argue this isn't a significant change to your mind?), dementia, brain volume decrease, memory+attention impairment... I could go on.

What Nicotone doesn't do is cause a significant change in people's behaviour that is immediately apparent that makes them want to act in ways that are socially stigmatized - like get all cuddly... Or hug a tree... or act like a slug and laugh hysterically.... all which psychedelics tend to induce.

Again, social stigma attached to certain behaviour is the primary culprit. These are usually harmless behaviours, even if annoying.

None of which matters because as the scientific literature will attest and what I as someone who used to be strongly anti-drug will also say is:

"Despite the contrary perception of much of the public, psychedelic drugs are not addictive and are physiologically safe.[20][21][10] As of 2016, there have been no known deaths due to overdose of LSD, psilocybin, or mescaline."

If the things called Nicotine and alcohol that might fucking kill me and destroy my brain to the point I need state funds to get me rehabilitated if I'm not careful are fully legal for recreation, why in the name of all that is evidence-based do we make the thing with ZERO documented deaths illegal?

Because it is socially, culturally and politically stigmatized completely independently of its relatively low negative health impacts. Ergo, it either stays illegal or we don't use it.

I'll even end with a fresh example: in a recent lecture my friend's neuroscience prof went through the negative proven health outcomes of various drugs and concluded there really is no health-related reason for psychedelics to be illegal. At all.

You know what happened next? Some undergrads argued with the professor. Not with peer-reviewed counter-evidence or asking clarifying questions no. They responded with vehement confidence that the professor "must be wrong" and even got angry with him with complaints apparently filed. I couldn't believe it. I still struggle to.

All he did was dare to publicly break the taboo of even implicitly suggesting psychedelics should be legal recreationally because it isn't a big deal.

Last I checked there is a thriving techno-political culture of decentralization and privacy rights fighting this. A lot of people are in fact doing a lot. Don't worry kiddo! The adults are working on it even if it seems futile.

FYI it isn't a strawman to ask whether you have a cogent argument for why technofeudalism isn't happening.

You asserted the proposition that technofeudalism isn't a thing (strongly implied) The respondent didn't construct a superficially similar proposition (I.e. a strawman) and simply asked what support you have for your proposition.

A strawman would have been like if someone argued against your proposition that "But the Snowden leaks showed we live in a surveillance state!" This is a Strawman because it constructs a superficially similar position to "technofeudalism is a thing" without actually at all arguing against the position that technofeudalism is not a thing.

TIL my concern that Big Tech is progressively centralizing power to the detriment of society writ large is exactly as shortsighted and dumb a fear like the moral panic that DnD is satanic. /s

"So many people don't do it because they recognize the dangers and if you do do it you will forever be changed and be a different person for the worse. Don't become a bad person so you would be stupid to take psychedelics."

This comment here supports my social stigma hypothesis as the actual reason people don't take psychedelics as much.

Remove unfounded stigma not supported by the neuroscience literature (my strong anti-drug stance literally switched in university when my neuroscience professor pointed out how completely divorced drug legality is from their health affects) and we will all see more widespread usage.

No, the overall usage is low because they are tabooed socially. Alcohol and nicotine are more dangerous and yet if you replace the taboo with widespread societal normalization or even nudge far enough that not doing alcohol is taboo then you see widespread rampant usage - and in some countries medical systems become strained.

I call bullshit on anyone saying societies are rational enough to identify which substances are dangerous to a stable mindset or not and that is why some substances are not used much. We aren't nearly that thoughtful with what we ingest. It is always "what will so and so think of me if I do or do not do this" as an overriding directive. Mind you, what others think of you and how that affects your social status has very strong causal mental health effects, so it is worth taking seriously. But obviously then this means the bad health effects are sometimes divorced from what the substance actually does to you independently of how worried you are others will see you.

In Vancouver Canada psychedelics have been decriminalized. You can buy shrooms for instance in stores that sell them publicaly and openly and legally with neon-capitalism ads telling you what strain will give you what kind of trip (are you looking for a hint of more socialization or more introspective?).

Accordingly bumping into random people at parties or public parks where people are high and happy to share they are high is orders of magnitude more common now. Said people are no longer as afraid that their behaviour will associate them with someone who is unlawful or a high risk taker or a leftist hippy or insert-negative-association-here. Less stigma = more usage.

You're unaware there are people who more easily get into elite schools because of their parents?

Educate yourself. It is a widespread systemic problem often called affirmative action for Whites: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences

"Nepobaby" (as in nepotism baby) or simply "Legacy" is more commonly used.

This skips what is supposed to be a meritocracy and can quite straightforwardly be argued to be perpetuating an oligarchy and plutocracy

So yes, it's negative.

It is not a problem that has been solved if I understand your last sentence correctly. It is a problem that many people have different solutions to and each group proudly proclaims they have solved it.

So um... I just started playing with ChatGPT's new code interpreter today. Have you seen it? What it can do is insane. My mind is blown. Math is no longer an issue for ChatGPT. Possibly what it is doing now is analogous to having human system 1 and system 2. It didn't used to have a deep system 2 until now with strict logical steps. I.e. writing and executing code much like how someone doing math follows logical careful steps.

Maybe it only had an intuitive find-patterns system 1 before.

As for your Large Abstraction Models thought, Look up Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle's work. Neuroscientist that proposed that the whole neocortex operates through a common principle through cortical columns. Any Large Abstraction Model might well just be a distributed epiphenomenon of the network without any single nexus. If that is how we as humans work, wouldn't be surprising if just scaling LLMs up is all we need to do to get it to do anything a human can do online. Bye bye a lot of white-collar jobs if true.

I hope your skepticism is warranted though and just scaling it up is not enough because our institutions are not ready for this kind of change.

I used to think this same way, especially given I have a biology background. It is indeed true if you look at the internals of chatGPT it is doing a lot of basic and dare I say dumb suboptimal things.

However I find the analogy to flying compelling. It was thought to be decades days before the Wright Brother flight because of how simple, and seemingly dumb the engineering was relative to evolution's design in making a bird fly. There is a TED talk on this. It took us well over a generation later to build bots that can fly the way a bird does. That's how much longer it took us to understand biological flight. Yet by that time we had already made machines that can fly faster than any and all birds. We didn't need to mimic biology's design to get something that outclasses it.

Could be the same with AI. We might be able to use engineering methods that are dumb relative to how biology sculpts intelligence, and yet still create an AI that outperforms all humans on all intelligence tasks. We may well create AGI that we end up coexisting with for over a generation before we figure out how intelligence in the biological brain works.

And because we keep comparing AI currently to how biological intelligence works I am concerned the same thing will happen where a few days before it is released most people will be saying AGI is decades away.

For me at least, this consideration makes "centuries away" look off and "decades away" seem far more likely... Which is in my lifetime. Yikes!

I'm not convinced human intellect isn't doing a similar thing with math when we are doing it fast. When I solve an arithmetic thing in my head I actually am not understanding or going by "the steps." I've just seen it so many times I have a kind of "sixth sense" so to speak. I.e. I'm kinda just pattern matching in the vector space of my memories. When I do this am I no longer using my intelligence?

When we do math mistakes it is a form of hallucination just like for the LLM. In such instances you can ask a human to show their work and go step-by-step in which case they are less likely to "hallucinate."

Do the same with an LLM and likewise you'll get a better answer as expected. In your example though it is true you're unlikely to get a LLM to converge on the correct answer. Humans also struggle to reason well to some things beyond their understanding though.

LLMs can very well give their reasoning and steps and understanding for some things but not other things. Why isn't your response to this not that we just haven't taught LLMs the other things well enough yet and that we will probably get there soon enough? Would it be that surprising for GPT-5 to be able to show all of its mathematical reasoning for the question GPT-4 fails to answer now?

This is all besides the point. If AI is created that outperforms humans on everything and anything by several orders of magnitude then some response along the lines of "it isn't REALLY intelligent" just sounds like either some high-falutin' semantic jostling being done by an academic divorced from real-world implications or a human drinking some serious copium wanting to still feel special for being human.

I don't care how it works and that it is using processes completely different from human psychology. I care whether we can create AI in my lifetime that will outcompete me for any job I could ever hope to do. That and the totalitarian state implications of such power in the wrong hands.

I'm surprised nobody has pointed out how terrible its selling feature - its AI - is. I tested it out and it was practically useless at classifying my images. Simple things like an obvious image of a cat it misses tagging as a cat so it isn't searchable.

Did I conceivably mess up the setup or is this other's experience as well?

Google photos AI is so far ahead of Photoprism it isn't even a contest unfortunately. Which sucks because I am more than willing to pay for a viable alternative (still looking...).

Possible difference is "The Game" actually ends as a warning to those who just see it as a games and doesn't skimp on the emotional turmoil men go through that refuse to stop tying their self-worth with how much they get laid.

Dunno if this book does the same where at the end it does a 180 and shows you how damaging it can be to tie one's self-worth to getting married.

Thank you for the review. You caused me to re-bookmark it after reading a warning that it is badly written.

Thank you for the warning. You caused me to unbookmark it.

"You decline the PhD offer and end up happy with an intellectually satisfying six-figure role in tech. You are surprised when you learn that your older colleague with a PhD earns just as much as you do."

Thank you for offering to answer questions.

Is Cinder something that could help optimize real-time streaming? We had a UDP stream and then through multiple gstreamer and nvidia deepstream magic (which I believe the senior dev implemented in Python) we perform some ML inference on the stream in real-time.

However, latency is a major issue here and to get to our MVP we didn't really prioritize optimization, as is tradition.

So now I'm wondering if Cinder as something that can be used to optimize real-time data streaming is a thing or whether me asking this just shows I don't understand its use case.

Either way, thank you advance for your insight.

(Also we used Django which I am now wondering if I should have switched out for FastAPI, but that's a separate question)

I hate that you're right

I think "good" might better be replaced with "useful"

I have it synced to mobile using syncthing no issues. Has been working great with very few hiccups for months

This app works great on Android: https://www.f-droid.org/packages/com.nutomic.syncthingandroi...

Just don't sync to the cloud. Use syncthing and any privacy concerns are solved. That's what I do. Works great syncing between my 3 devices

Everything ChatGPT seems gray area and might which is probably why we are where we are.