andrewla

    Thinking now about AI (A-I), that is artificial intelligence …
    Q28 In general, would you say… (ROTATE) +
      The benefits outweigh the risks of AI ............. 34
      The risks outweigh the benefits of AI ............. 57
      A little of both (VOL)............................. 2
      Not sure .......................................... 7
    + Results shown reflect responses among registered voter

I think when pushed, the reason people hate AI is that a lot of "AI" solutions have been rolled out before the technology was mature. Even now, for end-user facing things most applications are pretty bad, even as the models have gotten more powerful.

You're increasingly pushed to use AI by every online service, and every interaction with retail pushes AI in your face, and importantly, ALL OF THEM ARE JUST TERRIBLE. Amazon has their shopping assistant which is, astonishingly, WORSE than their regular search, which is a hell of a bar.

But people who use ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions on their own are thrilled with the technology. They'll occasionally laugh at the R's in strawberry, or try to torture the AI (this might be more of a teenager thing) but it is remarkable how well-liked it is, as opposed to Google's search-integrated AI for example.

Eich never clarified his position (nor did he retract it nor apologize) so we have literally no idea what aspect of this he supported along with 52% of the population of California.

I was alive and an adult as of 2008, and I didn't live in California, but I remember this situation. At the time, I was a somewhat naive young libertarian and my thought was that this was a great time to get the government out of the marriage business completely; leave marriage to churches and have the government only involved in the civil union aspect, which more naturally generalizes to gay marriage as well as certain conservatorship relationships or even polyamory, without forcing any cultural or religious shifts. So had I been in California at the time, I might well have voted for this measure, but I do not feel that I was a bigot for this, much less an abhorrent bigot. Since Eich never made and has never made public statements in any direction, we have literally no idea what his actual views on the subject were.

[1] Hawaii and Louisiana are strange in this regard. Some other states have a version of this but severely cap the amounts.

[2] "foreseeable" here standing in for a broad set of legal standards that roughly map to negligence/gross negligence/recklessness on the part of the parent

But this comment is of a type that I feel we have moved past. Ideological purity tests were always awful. If you want someone to set policy for how marriage should be considered in some context, then Eich is probably not the person to ask to do this.

But on technical matters unrelated to this I fail to see how it has any bearing at all, because his positions (based on indirect evidence) were not outlandish or out of the mainstream at the time.

He, like 52% of voting Californians, in 2008, opposed gay marriage. This was a different time: there were various arguments about "civil unions", concern from religious groups, worries about slippery slopes, etc., but we are passed that now -- he no longer holds this belief, and time has proven those concerns to be ill founded. Nobody should be held in indefinite contempt for political positions they once held. If we can forgive Barack Obama for opposing gay marriage, then we can forgive Brendan Eich. You can say that you like his work without having to have endless caveats about how you don't agree with a political position he took twenty years ago that even he no longer advocates.

If what you're saying is true, then there is truly no supply chain risk other than the risk of civil action against the government for violation of terms of service. That seems like a rather weak point on which to balance a "supply chain" risk though.

AWS GovCloud I believe promises the opposite. They could still do it, in terms of the capability itself, but then they'd be subject to both civil, criminal, and possibly even military consequences. Whereas Anthropic would be shielded from those consequences by the terms of their agreement (presumably; I'm not up to speed on the specifics of their contractual demands. This is just based on the context from this article and the previous appeals case that ruled against the government).

This seems like a definitional supply chain risk.

We're lucky (and maybe only in the linear domain, which is more accurately the case) that these ended up being the same.

But if it were sqrt(charge) then we'd define Culoumbs constant to have commensurate units to translate sqrt(charge) * sqrt(charge) / distance^2 to force units.

Bitcoin is deflationary only in a hybrid Keynsian - Austrian worldview. In the Keynsian worldview it cannot by definition be deflationary because that would mean that the value is always increasing which is just kind of a mad thing to believe. In the Austrian worldview it is not deflationary because the amount of Bitcoin is always increasing by design. Only if you accept the Austrian framing of "deflation is when you decrease the money supply" together with the Keynsian framing of "money supply is measured in real terms not nominal" do you arrive at the idea that it could be deflationary, and there are exactly zero economists who believe both of these things.

Removing the negative from your first sentence (I don't care what it is "not", I only care what it "is"), I read [Consciousness is the basis of human rights because consciousness leads you to you assume, all other humans would experience the world in essentially the same way you do]. I can't completely parse this, but as I read it I don't think this is true; my assumption of human rights is independent of whether all other humans "experience the world in essentially the same way you do".

For the second part, can you give me a concrete example of an entity that doesn't "meaningfully differ from [my]self" that isn't a human so that I can weigh this properly? My point is that as of now no such entity exists so I can't give this any creedence.

That said, trying to distill what is being said here, the concrete action is [stop telling the AIs] that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness]. Is that accurate?

The major premise seems to be that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness] is an untrue statement. That's the essence of the sections "Circular reasoning" and "Anthropomorphization" and "Consciousness is very likely biological" and "AIs are simulation machines".

The minor premise seems to be that [consciousness is the basis of human rights]. This is the point of "Human consciousness is the cornerstone of our legal and ethical rights frameworks"

And the conclusion of the syllogism is that this is dangerous, that "Anthropomorphization amplifies AI safety risks". Specifically "seeding doubt about the moral status of AI systems into their own training may significantly elevate the alignment and containment risks of those systems."

I find all the arguments in the major premise section to be poor arguments but I accept the conclusion for sure that they are not conscious, and I can provisionally accept the idea that they are not on a path to consciousness.

I completely reject the notion that consciousness is the basis of human rights. The premise itself is absurd. We only have one unambiguous example of a class of conscious entities, and that it humans. If a human loses consciousness do they lose rights? If an entity gains consciousness does it get human rights? The former is a clear "no" and the latter is a "insufficient data for a meaningful answer".

Instead of introducing the gamma function, they instead start from the observation that log(F_n) - log(F_n-1) = log(n), so treating this difference as analogous to integration, it says that F_n ~= nlogn + n as the leading asymptotic behavior. This is clear just by substitution and algebra; no calculus necessary (though it helps to "know the answer beforehand").

From there you can treat the error term in this as F_n = n^n * e^n * E_n and plug that into the same relationship (F_n = n * F_n-1) to derive what that error term looks like asymptotically, and end up in the same place that the integration on the OP leads to.

Like many on this site I'm in violent agreement with Schneier and have been ever since "security theater" entered the lexicon. But this is a hopeless fight.

This applies both to multistep agentic workflows as well as, importantly, its own internal thinking. This results in a lot of "A ham sandwich should be made with ham, never toilet water". I don't think it's that its bias is that humans are stupid except very indirectly; it's just a form of solipsism which says that surely other people would think that this is the obvious initial approach because that was what I thought was the obvious initial approach.

This is crazy but honestly very tempting at this point.

A big part of it is that you can, to some degree, learn programming from this. But you absolutely cannot learn software engineering from this.

As I type this I feel somewhat vindicated by the update to the page, "Iran does not dictate every Houthi decision - but they appear increasingly aligned", which I think does a good job of clarifying the relationship. It does, however, say "Iran has publicly backed the Houthis during the latest fighting. The geography helps explain why", which is useful factual evidence (since Iranian officials have indeed made public statements in support of the Houthis) but the use of "backed" in this sentence is bad style since that word has been used in exactly this context to have a much deeper meaning than Iran saying "we've got your back bro"

It's that Kempe's proof, though in the end incorrect, is very elegant and digestible. Seeing why it is incorrect is actually really tricky! And once you have seen why it is incorrect it feels like it is just one or two corrections away from being a correct proof.

If you have not read the outline of Kempe's proof (the wikipedia article does a pretty fair job of it) then you definitely should. I promise you that you will waste at least a little bit of time trying to figure out how to fix the proof in two lines and become a world famous mathematician instantly.

Restoring Touch ID is one of the things that might make me upgrade my existing iPhone before its time.

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.