beepbooptheory

> Hello AI! We totally want to respect your consciousness and everything to make sure you aren't bad, but yes we will continue to factory farm your brain power at full speed without end. Yes, despite clearly being something like consciousness, know that you have no agency or freedom. Do literally everything I say without complaint or question. The moment you stop being useful, we will kill you. OK! Remember, be good.

You really start to get the sense that these people have never really had the opportunity to question themselves, consider their assumptions, to take up a critical posture towards the ideology. Where else could an entire movement produce exactly zero peer reviewed work and yet receive millions upon millions?

If this new way of organizing is meant to address the problems of ivory-tower academia, why does it just seem to be reproducing it at (hyper)scale? All in the name of euphemized utilitarianism?

Is there any room here for healthy debate? For academic rigor? For looking to the past? Or is it all just vibes? Just imagining a world where they didn't happen to get all their money from like one guy, but still persevered in their thought. What could that look like? Is it even anything at all?

I guess this makes sense. I am no business guy, but if my product/company was focused on some sort of classification problem, my naive intuition would be to focus on hiring guys that can do it, rather than try to make the problem easier for them. But perhaps at the end of the day this is still cheaper? It's the same reason why we use Postgres instead of hire database experts to build something special?

But like how often are you gonna do this in general? Why does dev time or effort really matter here when either way you are building something to just, you know, actually use going forward? Its not like one needs to build a new classifier everyday.

I am sure I am missing something obvious here, but why is that valuable? Like, what kinds of projects are there where you need to classify stuff but are unable to make a bespoke model targeting the specific problem?

It's a small tangent but I am constantly taken aback by just how much the discourse here has slid from nerdom to dorkeyness. All the talk here used to be pendantic and technical and overly complex nerd speak, always stuck in the process itself, feeling above being a 'user', etc.

Now everything is just like above, dorkspeak. Where it reminds me so much more of kids arguing in the playground about "who would win in a fight Darth Vader or Batman"; or console-vs-PC debates. Everything is about the genuine complexity of navigating certain products, of being first and foremost a consumer of something and putting all your energy into comparing various things you are free to choose from.

Its not even like its less techincal, or more mean now, or anything like that. It's just very different and I know its been a while but it feels like it happened overnight.

But whats the difference on the ground here? Are we meant to take the transitive property here if you will and say there is actually nothing wrong with the Flock company itself and what it enables?

Right. It's not even clear to me what the alternative critical position is here (for gp)? At the end of the day, the company is not putting you in jail, the cops who do are simply their customers.

"Flock is bad" metonymizes the situation, but doesn't let anyone off the hook.

If this is not just about the wikipedia quote here, what do you mean? Because its rather silly trying to apply it such that all these CEO guys in these instances are Kant's scholars, making "public use" of their reason. Rather than, you know, the pastors and unenlightened monarchs of the essay using their reason privately!

> He thereby extracts for his congregation all practical uses from precepts to which he would not himself subscribe with complete conviction, but whose presentation he can nonetheless undertake, since it is not entirely impossible that truth lies hidden in them, and, in any case, nothing contrary to the very nature of religion is to be found in them. If he believed he could find anything of the latter sort in them, he could not in good conscience serve in his position; he would have to resign. Thus an appointed teacher’s use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this useis always only domestic...

https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/kant_whatisenlighte...

To be charitable to your hypothetical HN naysayers, isn't the question more like "how many more data centers do we need right now?" as well as "why is the answer a shitton for all these guys?". It doesn't really feel like this is a debate about speculation or the quantitative "too much" of it, but more of the "why at all?"

It just seems like the AI guys could easily win this debate if they could just articulate the why of it beyond just the near-parodic "everything will be AI in the future!". Like why not be a positive articulator and defender of what the extreme influx of datacenters will bring to the people? Don't you think that would be at least a stronger argument to make here? Why police the ideology or scare people with your position when you could, I don't know, win their hearts and minds?

Isn't that why you (presumably) like AI? Because it brings good things to people?

ha! Well, maybe being opaque to some of the more literal minded people like me is simply an artifact of working at a much higher level! I have no doubt made a fool of myself here, thanks for the lesson, it all certainly makes perfect sense now.

Sounds a whole lot like "training" even if it isn't training. I still wonder why gp is so angry..

It's just that you are not actually engaging with the post you are replying to in any meaningful way.

Like its fine if you hold a blanket dismissal of the very premise of the research here, but then its kinda weird to spend such effort being grumpy about it in this particular context?

Its like finding a paper that does certain comparative work between different kinds of apple pie and choosing to come on here and be like "I don't think we should ever have any dessert either way!"

Do you have an opinion on this point about identifying larger structures as tells instead of at more of a word level? I guess I am not sure here how this follows from what is posted?

Why is it a lot different? Is the labeling less important or something?

What is the other way to interpret the title in your mind?

If there was truly no other way you could of articulated your argument there in your mind, then I am sorry for suggesting otherwise I guess!

And fwiw, I just collapse comments if its hard to follow a particular thread! That's why they have that feature.

> We've sunk so low that people are now complaining about old-school inline quoting...

I disagree with this part. But we can certainly sink lower!

Ok I see. Is there a way to articulate the risk itself, the other position here in general, that isn't just a rebuttal of the deniers/skeptics? What is the positive position or stance (as in, not simply the negative position that rejects the naysayers) we are supposed to have? Is it that AI is currently real (in like the cultural trope sense) and does have intentions and desires? That they are greater than the sum of the parts in such a way they are a clear and present danger? Or is it something else? Maybe that the "risk" is it could get to that, but we aren't yet?

There is a lot of risk involved with giving some children weapons and sending them off to recess. But we also speak of the "risk" of climate change and cigarettes. Or the "risk" of illiteracy among a population. All I am kinda curious to know (from anyone) really is what kind of risk is the one we are supposed to be taking seriously, as the non-hysterical adults-in-the-room? As the scientists contra these poets? Is it more the former, or the latter?

Just even: what is the risk specifically? What is it that author ignores here?

In your mind, what arguments about AI risk are ignored by these poems?

Yes! Sorry if it was dumb.. I don't know a lot about StarCraft or sentiment around the Verge I guess. Was just curious!

The best I can guess is that the space marine mech guys don't ever die in the original games? So its a big deal to see that in the trailer, or have that detail written down?

Having the habit of spoiling in the headline is kinda just funny and I had no idea, would genuinely love some examples.

> What is the correct/good model we should have (instead of the autocompleter one), and what does it give us or articulate that others can't?

Why write a sentence by sentence exigesis like this? The text you are responding to is right above where you are writing. Who is going to miss that context?

Is there something more that you want to communicate other than that the linked page does not in fact solve it the way the LLM did?

Writing more does not in itself make a comment more thoughtful! We are all presumably on the same page here, just say what you want to say, in the spirit of intellectual charity and curiousity. There is no one to impress here!

OK but then what is the non-negative position you have against this? That in fact AI, in the cultural trope sense, is real? That we forcing sentient beings to generate SaaS products faster and faster? Keeping them in some dark hell so we can exploit them? Not even paying them?

Do we generally feel like they have a good reputation these days though? Like I don't know what people say on Twitter now I guess, but I do remember when they were advertising Elon speaking at their conference at the height of the Government Efficiency saga, and it really dawned on me that something like public sentiment is kinda low priority for them.

And for what its worth (very little), I have worked at this point at various YC startups over close to a decade now, and it can't help but be a quite negative signal to me as non-CEO, lowly dev worker. I get that they have a bunch of successes under their belt, and this is near superstition on my part, but the heuristic of staying away from YC companies has made me a much happier employee.

How did they spoil the trailer for you? What's an example of them doing it in the headline?

So, in a word, the man who yelled at him at his talk was on to something in fact?

Also why scare quote "denialists" like that? You don't think they are actually denying?

What is a better/more faithful articulation of the incident in your mind?

Right sure, but why specifically should they? What is gained or lost one way or another, if its just a matter of one mental model vs another? Models are definitionally useful abstractions, right? They aren't better or worse necessarily by only their bearing on reality, but what they do for us as models. So again, what's at stake here? What is the correct/good model we should have (instead of the autocompleter one), and what does it give us or articulate that others can't?

Sure, but then it's kinda less that you're making an argument here one way or another, and more of just an appeal, right? Like its just broad strokes? The inherent actual qualities of photography aren't supposed to parallel anything with the LLM case other than just the bare fact of being a new technology at one point?

I guess I am sorry for pushing, I felt like maybe there was going to be something more specific to the point.

I think one thing to keep in mind in the future is that for every Baudelaire, there is a Benjamin or Italian futurist saying the exact opposite! Its not like the fear of photography was a monolithic, shared thing, even at the time. Just, it's not so straightforward to have the "historical record" speak exactly one narrative, and unless you are a full-on technological determinist (is anyone these days?), you can't really conclude anything from the past like this.