Radim

In times of great turbulence, it pays to hold on to fundamentals. Partly because they're a stable beacon that helps one muddle through; partly because there's little else to hold on to anyway.

On that note, a few observations:

1) We're biological animals. People love profit, but ultimately need other people to realize and enjoy that profit. To your point, in the limit, what good is being the wealthiest man on Earth, if you are the last man on Earth?

The rich and powerful are hardwired to flaunt their power and wealth and social status too, just like the apes we all are. Which puts a lower cap on how much they want to reduce the outside human population, whether consciously or as a 2nd order effect of their "whoopsie, I never!" actions. At some point on the concentration-of-wealth vs population-size curve, capitalism self-aligns with humanism, simply to preserve the biological substrate that powers it.

2) Taking off the human-centric goggles, "profit" is a function (one of many) to optimize. Humans love to optimize because Nature loves to optimize.

Nature's favourite goal appears to be bulldozing energy gradients, reducing free energy, increasing entropy. Everything else a downstream corollary: chemistry, biology, humans, civilizations, ecology.

So any plan to pause or subvert this optimization process is immediately suspect. Especially if that plan lacks a clear articulation of the process and ways to counter it. You and who's army? You think putting ink to paper to draft a regulation will do it? Because "Democracy" and "Will of the people" and "We humans are special"?

That's not a call for cynicism or despondency; just an observation of nature's directionality over the past few billion years. You'll be up against some formidable forces; Nature's rat-race to always do more with less is real, and us men and women merely players.

Having a way to model this space rigorously and explore the various equilibria and inflection points would be cool. Rather than humanity bouncing off the walls with new 1st-order-effect ideologies and religions all the time; a few million murdered here; a starvation there; an economic collapse yonder.

From my https://rare-technologies.com/performance-shootout-of-neares... benchmark of kNN libs:

"Brute force doesn’t care about the number of neighbours, so its performance is 679ms/query regardless of “k”. When run in batch mode (issuing all 100 queries at once), average query time drops to 354ms/query."

This was 500 dimensions over a 3.7M dataset (the English Wikipedia), in 2014. So, ~700ms/search, or half that if you can batch several searches together at once. YMMV.

We're entertaining actions the rich take in preparation for a societal meltdown: build a bunker vs build a community. They take them now (hence the article).

Starting to build a bunker (or a community) in a post-apo world would indeed be a little too late for Mr. Zuckerberg & co.

> A really serious plan would be to stockpile goods/food/a means of production

You need loyal people first and foremost. Leadership and trust. Otherwise disloyal people (historically, your own guards / companions) take whatever you've stockpiled. Yours is that Grade B strategy I was talking about.

Your "goods/food/a means of production" are only useful insofar other powers uphold the overarching social structures & rules. To the extent that premise is fulfilled, I'd call such meltdown only a minor temporary hiccup. Beyond that, your stockpile and remote fortress is not much use. You need loyal people.

I mean, it takes a pretty dumb billionaire to not realize that when a real crisis hits, you'll be a sitting duck (mostly for your own guards / security), in your fancy bunker or forest ranch.

That's more of a naive plan for your run-of-the-mill rich guy, the lower echelon of "rich". Mere $100M-1Bs.

I always thought Zuck-level money gives you better options, such as building your own loyal community. At least village-sized and quite diverse. Which is what you really need when the shit hits the fan.

But maybe Zuck's building that too? And the bunker only a red herring, a hedge for minor temporary hiccups.

Where did this myth that European healthcare is some sort of panacea originate?

Maybe from far away, if you squint really hard, through ideology-tinted lenses?

Or some viral study referring to 1990s Sweden?

You want to avoid the public healthcare system like the plague. GPs, dentists, specialists, palliative care… always look for the "private" option first. I scare-quote "private" because the industry is heavily regulated so that even private care must be half-public, in order to operate legally.

The resulting public system is depersonalized, bureaucratic, uncaring, underfunded (inevitable corruption and inefficiency of mind-boggling proportions rather than lack of funds as such). The system survives through heroic efforts of overworked & abused "public" doctors and nurses.

In my home EU country (CZ) the medical staff are either revolting [0] or resolving to good old bribery to restore the market conditions [1].

And CZ is just middle of the pack: most European countries have it worse, according to the Euro Health Consumer Index [2].

[0] https://www-seznamzpravy-cz.translate.goog/clanek/domaci-ziv...

[1] https://www-seznamzpravy-cz.translate.goog/clanek/domaci-ziv...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_Health_Consumer_Index

You'd think the people of Poland and Hungary (who voted in their leaders, democratically, repeatedly) have horns and drink baby blood. This undermines your other valid points re/ privacy – who'd want to hitch their moral wagon to someone this naive?

The "Spaniard" part was in reference Spain being the bedrock of fascism (via Spaniards…), and remaining a dictatorship long after WW2. In stark contrast to the struggles of Poland's "immature" democratic republic during the same period. The irony was too sweet to pass up.

> (Norway) the most robust democracy in the world (which also happens to be a EU member state)

Norway is not in the EU.

> Hungary and Poland, are still immature barely-liberal regimes with more than a whiff of political repression (“flawed democracies”)

Coming from a Spaniard? Go fuck yourself.

Like tripu, I am strongly and vocally in favour of privacy and individual agency. But some of the ideological drip in this piece left a bad taste in my mouth.

What a bizarre non-sequitur.

I actually count this as the primary positive outcome of COVID.

So many people woke up to the reality of state power during that period. No more "this couldn't possibly happen here" or "they'd never!".

And even more after COVID, once the propaganda relented and the veil dropped even further. You'd have to be really obtuse (or otherwise invested) to not get the memo by now.

The pool of people who got a taste of the oppressive medicine has extended from "fringe" / "criminal" to wide swathes of "normal", middle class population. A costly lesson for sure, but extremely valuable.

On the topic of Iliad, I always found it puzzling that the (supposed) war started at the wedding of Achilles' parents, i.e. before Achilles was born. Yet Achilles apparently participated in the war as an already grown and famous man?

And then later on in the story, the son of Achilles (Neoptolemus aka Pyrrhus) hides inside the wooden horse and helps sack the city. How old was Achilles, really? What's the timeline here?

Of course, a part of the answer is fiction being fictitious. But some classical authors assume more nuance to the chronology, with there being two Greek expeditions – first floundered – so the whole enterprise took 20 years rather than the popular 10; Achilles fathering Neoptolemus at the age of 13; etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/comments/kza1ji/achilles_a...

Not all of us! Please trim your paintbrush. Europe comprises dozens of countries, with hundreds of millions of people.

My personal divorce from "banking with will-you-think-of-the-children-and-oh-all-the-nasty-criminals" here in CZ happened when I went to withdraw ~14k USD in cash. My Fio bank, that I've been with for 10+ years, asked me, "what do you need the money for?"

After collecting my jaw from the floor my answer was of course "none of your business". But the clerk claimed to be "just following the law" (maybe true, I wouldn't know on the spot), that they cannot give me my money without a valid reason.

So I said "I want to withdraw it in order to keep it in cash" (doh!). They made a face and said that's not a valid reason.

So I asked what is a valid reason then? Is there a list that I can see and choose from?

They made a face again and said no, but suggested – trying to be helpful – that most people say "I want to buy a car". Yet I wasn't buying a car and having to lie about this – being advised to lie so a bureaucrat can tick some children-saved-criminals-thwarted checkbox – felt quite surreal. A Kafka-esque exchange. Especially when everybody knows the real money laundering is done by government officials & government-adjacent crooks – in CZ and in every other country under the sun.

In the end I got angry and said I'm about to buy a lot of dog food and refused to budge. They backed down, and I learned a very important lesson about "my" money that day.

I expect the cost/benefit analysis of "handrolling postgres on a beefy Hetzner server" vs "navigating the menus and options of AWS services" would be different for different teams.

Has the debunking itself been debunked? It's hard to keep track.

[0] https://www.osel.cz/3436-radon-neskodi-a-mozna-i-prospiva.ht...

When poor people talk about "taking from the rich", they typically mean (well) salaried people. Their bosses, managers, higher up employees… folks they personally know, just with more income.

The truly wealthy you describe are of course unaffected. But they're also off the radar for most – too far removed from their daily experience. And difficult to fleece for the state. So the sacrificial goat always ends up being the middle class.

Don't worry, your attention is abused only as long as it is of value. I.e. only to the degree said attention triggers an action that ultimately brings about profit.

The days when human attention was of paramount value, because the human activity it triggered was uniquely valuable, are coming to an end.

So on the contrary, rejoice! You may see fewer sponsored ads. In fact the whole "ads" discipline as we know it might disappear, as its economical foundation crumbles.

Since you believe that human reproduction is a de-facto property of the state, simply calculate how many women should have babies, for optimal society, and force them to?

No need to muck around with some tax incentives. Redistribute the true source "commodity".

As a bonus, if you're high up enough, you might even get to choose who mates with whom.

And then people being scared to even download said models because of "OMG IP!"

The asymmetry of power (and dare I say, domestication) is astounding.

Like, how many people do the wealthy/powerful actually need? What level of automation will allow maintaining their lifestyle, including:

1. Biological needs: Food & a sufficiently diverse pool of mates for themselves and their children.

2. A social hierarchy large enough to flex their power beyond mere biological survival (very important to primates). I'd expect this number to be strictly smaller than for 1), so likely not a concern: as long as there are enough people to biologically sustain a population, there are enough people to subjugate.

3. Technological scaffolding to produce, maintain and bootstrap (in case of calamities) said automation. Currently humans are a necessary physical substrate for the continued inflow of energy that automation needs. I don't have the numbers but the footprint to run even a single power plant must be tremendous: a large and complex society, once you include 2nd order effects. Without energy, the machines don't go "VRRROOM" and neither does AI.

And if the human population drops too low to interfere with any of these points, the automation was self-defeating. It doesn't matter how rich or powerful you were.

I mean, I'm sure someone somewhere ran the numbers and has a plan ready, while the rest of us wax lyrical about "just find a new job LOL" and UBI. Although to be fair, there are also preppers, who've taken the above analysis to its logical conclusion.

It's not the rich who will decide; it's the powerful. In the classical sense of "capacity to impose will" – up to and including the capacity to turn off {machines, humans, institutions}.

There's a strong correlation between wealth and power, but those groups are not identical. And neither are their staying prospects in the coming years.

You're on the same boat with Carmack if that's where you find the danger. Then his advice applies.

People have had their livelihood threatened since forever – that is not a new state of affairs. That anxiety we're well equipped to deal with, hard (and genocidal) as it sometimes is.

Just another gold rush for resources, and for status, and for reproductive success. A new caste of winners. Same old.

> so 20-30% of you will be out of a job in the next 15 years

My point was that jobs (and money, and market…) are a machine that serves human ends. The end consumer is always a human, that's our economy's anchor point.

Whatever energy is put to work is ultimately in service of someone getting laid or fed, or their desires/ideals (~firings inside their brains).

As long as that's true, "keep your eyes on delivering value to humans" is a safe bet – just like Carmack says.

Mine was a simple thermodynamical note on Nature (e.g. via one of its creations, humans) finding a more efficient way to bulldoze energy gradients, the true currency of the universe, thus unanchoring our "jobs and careers" system. By cutting out the very expensive middle man.

---------

Your remark on communism is also interesting in that sense. I see a parallel in that the concept of dissolution of individual into a commune, has been introduced several times in large societies, each time resulting in millions of deaths and general devastation. Yet it keeps bouncing back – some very strong attraction basin lurking there, evolutionarily speaking. Not to be trivialized by snarky political one-liners.

But Nature is about making better use of energy gradients, always doing more with less, the principle of least action. Using any surplus to do it again (i.e. evolved life). That's the properly grounded perspective. In that sense "Get skills to satisfy humans and you'll probably be fine!" sounds super myopic.

The anxiety we humans feel when confronted with AI is not only that we'll be out of our job as a programmer, or doctor, or driver, or teacher, or whatever.

It's the broader sense of unease that humanity's gradient-razing days, spectacular as they were all the way to nuclear fission and fusion, may soon be over. And "economy" as a useful tool advancing that Nature's mission will have evolved beyond us.

"Making humans satisfied" is not terribly relevant from that perspective. Vast swathes of the human economy are just scaffolding to support the rest: humans reproducing to keep the optimization machine going. The overhead is tremendous. Once Nature finds a way to do more with less, I have zero doubt much of that scaffolding will be optimized away. That's some definition of "fine".

Or maybe I misunderstood and Carmack is merely suggesting individuals try to adapt and hope for the best. What else can you do anyway? That would be the honest answer. Rather than bloviating about "Guide AI with your product skills to deliver value to humans" – an embarrassing category error.

Yes, I do.

In fact, I see that statement as nearly tautological.

I also believe that throwing people in jail if they don't value the same things as you is wrong.

Both of which are largely orthogonal to my original point though – which is that determination of value is a self-correcting process over evolutionary time spans. But I understand you wanted to shake your fist at the sky, in these difficult times.

Same with your OSS reference – I happen to publish several open source packages, used by thousands of companies around the world, which in total bring me about grocery-level income (~€500/month, pre-tax). So what?

If people consume "credible bullshit" and can't tell the difference, without consequences, then your thoughtful work isn't as valuable as you thought.

If on the other hand people consume BS and it comes to bite them in the ass (through reduced socioeconomic status and, ultimately, reduced reproductive success), then competing approaches become viable.

We may not be around to experience it – a variation of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent" – but you may find comfort in the fact that Nature has a way of optimizing away cruft. Most often through repurposing the obsolete-but-already-existing system for another function, and failing that, through atrophy and death.

Have you considered that rational decision may actually be a rational decision?

As in, something is actually wrong there, with the way banking is done?

It seems your thinking stops at "Rational actors would expose a problem with the current style of banking. Therefore, stop rational actors from acting, in order to PROP UP that same style of banking."

The moral hazard is real. People who point to it are simply one step ahead of you in how such actions necessarily pan out over time, not "missing the point by a mile".

On the resolution level of "The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" and "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it" and similar.

> The best part of having cold showers every day? You'll never get arthritis!

> The worst part? You'll have cold showers every day.

> Writing of the enthusiastic embrace of a fully computerized world, Weizenbaum grumbled, “These people see the technical apparatus underlying Orwell’s 1984 and, like children on seeing the beach, they run for it”

> a point to which Weizenbaum added “I wish it were their private excursion, but they demand that we all come along.”

Depends how the AI part is presented. Explicit or obscured? Upfront or shady?

For some people, that makes all the difference. I told my (non-technical) wife about ChatGPT when it came out, and she was revulsed. Not by the technology itself (which she couldn't care less about) but by its "feel".

When I prodded deeper, her revulsion came down to "I'd feel cheated if I realized I've been interacting with a machine masquerading as a human". Not the machine itself, but the successful masquerading.

I suspect she's not alone, and "being cheated" will be a visceral issue to a lot more people than the early money-grabbers and AI enthusiasts give credit for.

> Another correction suggests the AI tool plagiarized. “We’ve replaced phrases that were not entirely original,” according to the correction added to an article on how to close a bank account.

Yeah, right.

[0] from the linked CNET piece https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/25/tech/cnet-ai-tool-news-st...

Get "called out" how, exactly?

With the distribution channels centralized, how do you call out a lie by a "major news org", if the gvt (Google, Youtube, FB, Twitter…) decide to play along and suppress your message?

The EU Commissar of Truth, Vera Jourova, announced that "the era of the Wild West for free speech is over". She also cited "gentlemen's agreement" with the "big boy" platforms where legislation is lacking for now. Chilling.

To the degree that the censorship machine fails, it fails for technical reasons, not for a lack of appetite.

A resigned shrug and "ultimately what do I care" is increasingly common. It might be a self-correcting problem, on the evolutionary scale.

> If someone posted a video of the president eating a live baby I'd probably be more skeptical of my sources.

Isn't that because you've lived a life grounded (mostly) in physical reality? With free access to (mostly) uncensored information?

We might be surprised what's considered "extraordinary" with respect to a "sceptical threshold" in the future, especially once the pre-internet generation dies out. And digital information with digital influencers (AI or not!) beholden to a few centralized platforms shaping the consensus reality.

I got about $1 / hour from Otis and would have violently opposed anyone trying to "protect me" from that job.

The idea that they should have paid me $10 / hour instead (or whatever "fair" number in line with US wages) is laughable. Such fabulously sweet job would have been immediately snatched up by my boss' boss, or someone from their family – I'd never even hear of it.