9,839 karma · joined March 22, 2011
The numbers here are so overdetermined that it will never be possible to do a causal analysis, and jumping to "screen time" is almost outlandishly unjustified.
A model (like a human) should be able to play a video game where decisions are made that in the real world would be terrible; if we remove that ability we intrinsically limit model capability. But in a Last Starfighter / Enders Game / JOSHUA scenario this could result in behavior in the real world that appears unaligned.
An agent is essentially an append-only context loop with an LLM, with a harness that can run tools at the LLM's request. This ends up being a very powerful abstraction, yielding something that can do things that an LLM obviously cannot.
The LLMs themselves are next-token predictors, same as always; they can't fetch a webpage or list the files in a directory or run a python script to test out an idea or even write content to a file. That's all agentic capability.
But a next-token-predictor is trained on a real corpus that consists of sometimes seeing evidence of people doing bad things; they are trained, for example, on the actions of comic-book level villians -- they have to be able to predict what Thanos or Lex Luther or Skynet would say or do next in a certain situation.
Everything else is downstream of that.
My default position for a long time has been that all results in the social sciences are garbage. If they go against intuition or my biases, then they are most likely garbage. If they confirm my intuition or my biases, then they are definitely garbage.
You could not give me enough money that I would trade down to a 2000-era cell phone from my current phone. "Technology was a tool, not a lifestyle" -- well, guess what! It's still just a tool, not a lifestyle. I'm shitposting here instead of on slashdot, big whoop. My lifestyle is completely unrelated to this.
The "physical world"? What if I want to listen to a song that I heard on the radio the other day, or that I heard playing in a store or something, or that someone told me about? I can't just "pop a CD in the player", there's a whole thing where I have to literally purchase the music from a store that sells music. How is that possibly better than the world where I can just pull up the album and play it? Pop in a DVD? Are you insane?
"There was a very obvious boundary between being online and being offline. Today that boundary basically doesn't exist. You wake up online. You work online. You eat while watching something online. You walk while listening to something online. You go to bed while scrolling online."
So ... maybe the "work online" thing applies. But none of the others do. Maybe the listening while walking too; but I had a crazy thing called a "walkman" (I'm old) and "ipod" (but not that old) back in the day too. I guess circa 2000 I might have had an mp3 player. But the others I opt out of because I don't want to. It's easy ... just don't do that?
"Social media" -- I absolutely hate this term because it combines two unrelated things; friend networks and user-generated content. Most of my friend networks have abandoned online social media almost entirely, and I in turn will almost never use it. User-generated content is fun but I'm a lurker and a consumer, I have no hopes or dreams of becoming an "influencer" or "going viral" or whatever. I understand that for some people that is a dream, like being a rock star or a movie star was when I was younger, but I simply opt out of this and it doesn't affect my life.
I could go on and on. I simply don't understand how the author finds themselves in this bind where they are "forced" to use technology they don't want to use. Just ... don't use it.
From the literal title of the article:
> Early 2000s were peak of humanity
The invalidation comes from the fact that this is clearly retaliatory behavior for speech; and the evidence for this is fairly strong since the administration has made public statements to that effect.
The evidence being weak means that it is clear that there is no reasonable belief that the cause of action is anything but an attempt to apply a penalty for the use of protected speech.
But as I keep saying, there are people on this thread that are saying they are literally equivalent. I don't know if I believe them, but that is what they are saying -- talk to them!
I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this to get some sort of baseline though.
But there are lots of people on this thread who are saying "well, of course you can't *see* the apple, it's just a helpful metaphor", but there are a lot of people (including yourself) who say that you can. I want to see if I can pick out that difference. I almost wish the survey instead said "No, of course I can't *see* it, nobody can" to really nail down that perspective.
In terms of the triangle attaching, is it that without drawing you would not be able even to say what the resulting shape is? If I threw in a third triangle you wouldn't be able to tell me what the shape is now? I'm trying to see if I can get a clear discriminator that tells me whether I am different from you in how I am able to visualize or if we're just using different words (or if I, too, am aphantashic and that other people have powers beyond my ken).
I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers. I can imagine shapes and faces and objects just fine, and can rotate them around if necessary, etc., but I cannot see them because my eyes are not involved; when I close them the imagined images do not disappear. The visualization is *akin* to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them.
Some people on this thread claim that they can see imagined objects in their field of view. I cannot do this. I don't know if I believe that other people can. But a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see'" -- I'm not interested in you, you are like me, I'm interested in people who say that they can "see". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365#49469495
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
It is quite possible that this is drawing a line, as you say, between hyperphantashia and regular phantasia, though I'm not yet willing to give up on the idea that we are just giving subjective names to the same phenomenon.
To wit, when I "hear" things with my "mind's ear" I can "hear" them very well in all the layers and components, I can "hear" drums and guitar and bass and voice, etc., but they are very clearly in my head -- they do not have a location in real space the way that real sounds do; I can't "hear" a sound so loud that it makes me cringe or so quiet that I have to strain to hear it.
Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply.
I can imagine a song, and "hear" it in my "mind's ear", but I am not confused about whether it is occurring through my ears or just in my brain. I can easily imagine the tones and voices and tell you what the bass line sounds like, etc.
My visual imagination works the same way -- I can't make the object appear in my field of vision any more than I can make sounds appear in my field of hearing, but I can definitely imagine the visual aspects of it. If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram. But I can't actually *see* it.
It would take a lot to convince me that phantasia or aphantasia actually exist, and nothing I see on this webpage convinces me.
Far from agreeing with the Trump administration; his view would effectively end birth tourism but preserve birthright citizenship (and maybe even stronger) for the children of non-citizens, legal or otherwise, who are domiciled in the US.
As for it being cut and dry, do you earnestly believe that "and subject to its jurisdiction" is cut and dry? You might have your view, you might have some historical receipts for it, others have other views, and historical receipts, and others rely on common law readings. There's no single unambiguous interpretation of this phrase. Thomas's dissent is well reasoned and has ample historical antecedents and if adopted would have been the best possible interpretation.
EDIT: turns out that my keychron, at least, is compatible with QMK/VIA and there are already open source alternatives [1] that do the job.
In many ways this is symptomatic of larger trends in society and managerial culture of looking for ways to measure things rather than confronting the messy subjective non-measurable reality.
The only time we'll get a true counterfactual is when a competitor arises who can meet Amazon's very high bar for logistic excellence but can offer a more appealing interaction, and then Amazon retail will die off without anyone understanding how or why it happened.
Way worse than Amazon because at least Amazon is just showing you products and telling you how much they cost.