How big of a chance do you think those books will be about a gentle and kind but supremely powerful entity guiding the world? Of course it would be best if the book only appears to be based on that premise, and while the entity is quite powerful, it is being supported by a cabal of individuals who claim they are merely its caretakers but actually derive extraordinary social power by controlling it, and it is revealed that in other lands there are other such entities, and what appeared to be an general peace is actually an illusion created by this powerful group of people using their entity, that they are engaged in near constant warfare, directly or indirectly, with other entities; but, even they believe so deeply that what they are doing is right that they think they are only the entity's caretakers, and that there are only wars because other people want to use their entity for personal gain!
Yeah but like, most of us work in tech and sure a lot of this money is getting “wasted,” but on what and who? Often on people who spend it elsewhere, a little bit gets siphoned off every time for living costs, luxuries, and side projects of individual employees, or other benefactors thereof. I wouldn’t call this excess a “bad” thing, the excess is what allows us any reprieve in the rat race, time to spend with loved ones, time to engage or worthy pursuits. It funds professor’s salaries (and administrator’s!), its what pays artists, its why all these engineers retire early and make posts about porting Doom to a microwave. Of course it would often be better if this excess was taken elsewhere, so that we wouldn’t have people dying needlessley just because they lost out in life, but even that wouldn’t require a fraction of the wealth of our society generates on top of its basic needs. Excess is not a bad thing!
Even Fable hallucinates. I had it tracking down some very obscure Ancient Greek inscriptions and the response just made up a translation/context for one inscription after "looking it up." Now, it was still a very particular thing and I really had to get into the weeds to push it to that point, but who knows how many other gaps, near or far, it will happily skip over just for the sake of coherence. I think this is an issue more primarily with LLMs than sensory systems like Waymos or all the ML applied to industrial processes--that really only requires pattern recognition, often very impressive and subtle pattern recognition but its no different from an artist learning to tell the difference between Prussian blue and Navy blue or a Sommelier learning the fine distinctions between various regions of Bordeaux. Language has many more avenues and introduces inherent contradictions that do not always lend themselves to easy resolution. But there are no alternatives paths visible to the models, there is only ever the next word; stochastic, in the sense that the possibility space is open; deterministic, in the sense that the final response is always a necessary result of every token that came before it in their total sequence. Thus, any response is constantly in the work of erasing any possible alternative, slowly narrowing down what can be written. If contradictions in language necessarily involve interpretation, then the models will only ever choose one at a time, and for them, it will always be the right one. But anyone who understands the subtleties of language can tell you that when it comes to determining the truth of an indeterminate statement, there is never just one right answer; or, rather, the answer which is taken to be the "right" one depends on the possibility of its own reversal into falsehood, if any argument has to be made to justify it.
I guess that is true, but it isn't much. But my basic point was that before you can have "life" you have to have a theory of life which ultimately requires metaphysics, and there hasn't been much of an update to our understanding of what would ground a definition of life beyond Aristotle and Kant, and even their work is not determinative by any means.
But oftentimes theoretical chemistry is not as important as what we get out of experiments because unlike physics, which attempts to derive general laws of nature, chemistry has to deal with the nitty gritty of the diversity of actual miscroscopic interactions of things. Any theory that is not entirely rigorous or even has slight room for an exception will be ignored by necessity, and physics is chock full of such examples. Biology is in a certain sense better (since it deals with larger things) and in a certain sense worse (as it relies on dogma and mysticism, at its essence, to explain the systems of life), and still nobody has gone beyond Aristotle and Kant in giving anything close to a rigorous definition of life as such.
I think the fact that you can have a compact device on your wrist that accurately keeps time all without any battery or circuitry is really remarkable as well. Moreover that the “technology superior” smart watches are kind of distracting and don’t have a great deal of use value. My watch tells the time and the date, that’s really all I need it for
No, Hegel was attempting to figure out the problematic of the gap between universal knowledge (of specific categories) and individual substance (of particular things) by recasting the resolution of this problematic in social development, that the way in which Science resolved the “truth” of our own understanding of the gap between our individual experience and our place in the world (most basically, perhaps, between our beliefs and so-called “objective reality”), was a historical process that could be observed in both the development of the Idea and its concretization in society, and this process is called “Spirit.” That the resolution of this problem would lead to absolute knowledge, because the individual would then be identified with the universal, means that social development is dependent on the assumption of such knowledge, but one which is always missing something extra or excessive to it, some exception to the universal which also expands and deepens it. Hegel claims that this has always been happening, but what is unique about our era is that we are actually consciously aware of this process—-but he was the first person to demonstrate it explicitly, whereas, for him, it was only implicit before in thinker such as Kant.
I have to disagree here. The split is not incidental, and studying medieval/ancient philosophy naturally means that you are going to concern yourself with Ontology, which is expressely ignored by the “analytic” tradition. If you come to ancient philosophy through your typical post-quinian formal reasoning education, you are going to view such ontology with the weight of thousands of years of translation which you will not realize contains its own tradition and its own truth. You will be stuck in a very narrow, and, frankly, uncritical interpretation. It was Hegel’s fundamental insight (into Kant) that any epistemology fundamentally requires the enclosure of the problem of ontology; that, on account of the schema, the entire Critique of Pure Reason is such an enclosure—-but we cannot genuinely go beyond such an enclosure if we view everything from within it, ie “analytically.”
Yes that spending has been very helpful in keeping all these far left candidates from winning their primaries. It seems like the only thing that matters in politics is money.
Yes a high definition video camera that is slowly becoming indistinguishable (and has always been subject to tampering regardless) from an artificially generated version. We never have anything beyond judgement.
Damn its almost as if juries exist to act as the sovereign so the violence which sustains the law can be vested in a general public that cannot be held accountable as a whole, similarly to how at least one member of a firing squad always has a blank.
I don't see why its a problem to use LLMs to assist with legal work if someone else uses it in a way that exposes them to lawsuits. That's like saying you shouldn't using a ledger to do accounting just because some people cook the books.
I think its also quite apparent that building new housing is a whole lot cheaper than killing and forcibly removing people, its just that it also destroys the value of an asset that the majority of families still hold. I mean its very basic of course: capitalism has a tendency to destroy the family unit, home ownership is a means of maintaining the family unit, and force against the destruction of the family requires violence, which is overall unproductive and wasteful. But anything that is unproductive is also freely determined, which is where the vulgarity of fascism lies, in its conflation of freedom with "letting off steam," so-to-speak.
I wouldn't doubt that lawsuits for employment discrimination for any company (and I suppose it was most of them) that used LLMs in hiring processes will become a very lucrative business. They are all open to civil suits at this point.
It will become increasingly difficult to police international borders. On the other hand, commercial space travel will create new states that can police there borders. The borders don’t disappear but they will change
>As he points out, COBOL is “old, verbose, missing most features even the shittiest modern languages have … and is definitely not created for game development.” All of this is true, although in fairness to COBOL, it was created at a time when people were still figuring out how programming should work and what a programming language should aim to be.
This feels a lot like how LLMs are today. Like in 50 years we will have a far more extensive and rigorous notion of their capabilities and mechanical functions, and someone looking back at our ChatGPT Codex or Claude Fable will think of it not so differently as we think about COBOL today.
Well that’s a personal preference, but objectively (and I use that word very loosely here), apple sillicon is equivalent to portage in terms of efficiency, since the software is fully integrated with the machine, to extract as much compute as possible out of it. The problem is that this can’t be configured for every operation on the machine. You can install other people’s software, and the machine has one universal preset basically that governs all the alternative customizations, so other people’s software is not as efficient as it could be if you optimized for it directly, like you can do with Gentoo. But if you just installed a random linux distro without customizing it, it would not even be necessarily well integrated with the hardware, in fact it could not be, since Linux is by its nature reaching towards a universal that no particular machine could possible land totally within. And its true with Gentoo as well, except you can squeeze out far more edges, and arguably go further than apple silicon. But an apple silicon machine will always be more efficient in its preset condition than one running Gentoo in its active use: the problem is that you can’t even know the computer is working unless you start using it, and then all the sudden Gentoo is possibly infinitely more efficient in every actual use case.
Yes well as another commenter noted, this is actually freely available software, and when people provide goods and services for free it depresses the price of said goods and services. And anyway this was a comment about Apple in general, how every fix costs at least $20. Airpods not synced up? Just buy a new pair! Etc.