I have not had the, ahem, privelege yet of installing Gentoo. I gave up on Linux a while back after I bricked my computer because I missed an update on Arch Linux (no joke). Got a macbook and I’ve been happy ever since…well, at least until I was trying to shareplay Mulholland Drive with my girlfriend while she’s out of town and discovered that the only way to manually adjust audio levels of facetime vs, say, the movie we were trying to watch, which was nearly muted because of the call, was to purchase and install a $20 piece of software. Now, I could go ahead and buy a windows machine which comes preloaded with this feature, but let’s be honest, windows sucks major ass and there is virtually no advantage these days to using it over Linux or a Mac. The software might be a little screwed up but Tim Cook really made some magical consumer grade hardware that outperforms virtually all its possible competitors…still, the audio levels.
I don’t have time to futz around installing Linux distros instead of getting laid like I did as a teenager. I have a job and a girlfriend and more than enough of a social life to keep me busy day to day. But something keeps nipping at my heels, telling me to return to the pen—-the sun is setting on my long sojourn in the warm fields of average life, the long night of idle tinkering approaches once more, that I might sooner forget the morning before it ends.
No, these are developed off of the assumed uses of the models (predictive autofiller) rather than their actual, cognitive and potential industrial use (developing large scale frameworks for industrial production, automating systems that normally require human monitoring), and uses that we have not yet discovered, because we have not figured out all the constraints and limitations of these models. If Karpathy was in the game like he used to be, he would be on real product. Right now he’s probably so lost by the very thing he helped create that he is stuck doing these mini projects for his own personal interest, without anyone really critically engaging with his work.
Foucault is a very subtle thinker. His second dissertation was a translation of Kant’s anthropology, with a very long and thorough introduction[0]. It is quite important to the rest of his thought. Remember his advisor was Jean Hyppolite, France’s leading scholar of Hegel at the time, so it is kind of interesting that Foucault decides to return to Kant. But Discourse and Punish is a philosophical anthropology, similar to Hegel’s project, that reads Kant in terms of force and Violence (Gewalt), which is central to, say, Heidegger’s reading of Kant, his pinpointing that negative pleasure in the face of death that, for him, constitutes the ontological structure of Dasein. Foucualt is able to retain the structural force of Heidegger’s ontology without falling into the trap of Dasein’s basically ethical stance that also relies on a “phenomenological destruction” of the cartesian cogito that is never achieved. Foucualt, on the other hand, understands that the fabric of history is determined architectonically, and he achieves a schematic, positive anthropology that even contains its own absence in the figure of a violence that vanishes in its activity, as seen in the examples of the schools, the prisons, the panopticon, etc. Not a Hegelian negative or even a metaphysical one, but a positive force that is always already vanishing as it appears, as constituitive of an architectonic structure—say, and architecture—of violence that acts as the horizon of epistemology as such. Thus, the public executions relied on a dialectical relation: the audience must legitimate the sovreign’s exercise of power. In the modern period, such a sight is foreclosed, violence structures but is always absent in its appearance, it derives its force, even, from its insistent absence, as we see in the example of the panopticon.
We could say that this is a reintepretation of Kant’s “ding-an-sich” that goes beyond what either Heidegger or Hegel could achieve, which is perhaps why he reaches toward Nietzsche, who makes a similar move in his work, if not as far.
Very few people are even beginning to understand the constraints of these systems, and none of them have yet been elevated to high enough positions of prominence to rise above the noise of all the hype. Give us some time man, jeez
The models are trained on expert data for important inquiries, this gets “hard coded” so to speak, and allows them to differentiate between the gunk online. For hyper specific references like this, it really doesn’t matter if its “true” since its not like someone’s life depends on it.
It’s not about highly specific knowledge: none of these questions are justifiable for a graduate level program, they are better served as prompts for essays that Americans write in their college applications. With these questions you are not going to be engaging with anything particularly deep, but you may produce something that sounds deep. But sounding deep and having actual depth are very different things, and the latter can often look very boring or painstaking, whereas the former always appears profound—and it seems like all of these questions are meant to help the student produce something “profound,” not necessarily something thoughtful or difficult.
I am generous towards the authors cited (Schiller, Benjamin), and I am unimpressed. Most of these questions constitute the “high middle brow” of intellectual thought: that thought which takes itself too seriously. Is this a recent development at Oxford, or has it always been the case that the university churns out relatively talented but predictably radical students, certainly ones who will not produce anything truly challenging, but whose work will at least seem challenging to those who have not really developed a strong method of inquiry on their own.
I wanted to do a tour of the All Souls College last year but it was closed, unfortunately, on the day I walked by; I was only there for a two day conference and had to leave early the next morning.
I don’t know if that’s true, I made a little web app for displaying the schedule for my team based on our billable hours, and I didn’t do any of the scripting myself but I did have to think a lot about what the app would do and what it would look like and what kind of functionality I wanted, tradeoffs between functionality and specific use cases, etc. It just made the scripting part go faster, that’s all.
Yeah I noticed today, I had it work up a spreadsheet for me and I only got 3 or 4 turns in the conversation before it used up all my (pro) credits. It wasn't even super-complicated or anything, only moderately so.
I’m not familiar with Alinsky, I’m more broadly influenced by the CCRU, although I suppose that makes my reading of Marx fairly idiosyncratic, though I do remain with him at the letter.
As to 2., the whole of this narrative in the Phaedrus is ironic, considering it depends on the written word for its transmission, this dialouge being fully reported by Plato, filled with literary allusion, dramatic setting. Cf. "Plato's Pharmacy," by Derrida, and the work of his student, Bernard Stiegler.
I would be perfectly happy to support your so-called humanity when you are capable of providing a rigorous definition of what it consists of, and one that does not require the concept of a "soul" or otherwise some basically racist, phrenological standard for the body. Because when you say humanity all I see are objects that are standardized almost too closely to the commodities they produce, a single standard that would unify and homogenize everyone in the world. That's why I don't care for "humanity," I care about power, physical power, creative power, what any individual is capable of with the right tools.
The economy is not a monad, some sectors grow rapidly, others shrink precipitously, and still others are very stable for many decades. Just because AI is booming right now does not mean that other areas will not experience deficits. And the AI boom is an international phenomenon, not restricted solely to the US, so it would be hard to measure the value of any labor input strictly according to US economic data.
Yes well you are trusting your instinct, meanwhile the actual postings for RLHF work keep increasing, and the rates contractors accept keep going up. But who knows, maybe some superAI is going to take all their jobs away soon.
All productive labor, profitable labor, involves creating something that reduces labor time. The people who manufactured looms took away the jobs of the weavers
If you talk to the average individual outside of California or NYC about AI, or even Waymos, they will get increasingly irate and start spouting off about “water usage” and everyone’s jobs getting taken away—as if RLHF contract work is not available to basically anyone with a college degree. I hate to say it but you cannot trust “the masses,” Marx never said mob rule, he said rule by the proletarian, the class which knows, on account of their labor, the best integration of the human organism into mechanical production. No, there is no concern for the “masses” living in pre-industrialized agrarian communities or those who have been mystified by reactionary ideas (like this so-called majority), he was referring to those whose existence was an exception, that which was free and not predictable, contingent in the operation of the economy. It is by their exceptional circumstance that radical social change is even possible, not because of any moral need to raise humanity out of its savage condition. The masses, without the right understanding, will just become a lynch mob and start burning everything in sight, as they tend to in most circumstances.