bena

Also Jevon's Paradox: the more efficient a system becomes, the more it gets used, making it use more resources rather than less.

No, it means there is no general solution to the problem of proving software correct. You can prove if a specific program will halt or not given certain parameters. You cannot write an algorithm that will work to prove if any arbitrary program will halt.

Not even a minute in. "Oh, he's protesting Cop City, got it. This is just police harassment."

Technically, the article isn't about the title. It's about the limits of LLMs/AI.

It posits that smart people aren't happier because "living a good life" is a poorly defined problem and smart people aren't any better at figuring out poorly defined problems than anyone else.

And that may be fair. And I guess my conjecture is a bit in line with that.

Just because you know how the system works, does not mean you would be good at working the system. For instance, let's pretend that the easiest way to live a good life, it required you to do things that you felt were morally repugnant. Well, I'd have an unhappy life, because I won't do those things.

Or, let's say that you found out that in order to live a good life, you had to meet some physical requirement. Like, if you wanted to live a good life as a man, you had to be at least 6'0". I'd be fucked. And nothing I could do could fix it.

And in all honesty, there are a lot of factors that go into things like success and leading a good life. And while intelligence does help, it's not a guarantee. And I would think that intelligent people would also figure that out. And it's frustrating knowing that even if you do everything right, you could still fail through no fault of your own.

That's a bit of a wild interpretation of copyright law.

I mean, Anthropic isn't going to fight it because it lets them do the thing they want to do, so I can see how this never gets beyond the court that allows them to do the thing they want to do.

But would this argument would have flown in the past?

It wasn't even attempted in Sony v Universal. Or any copyright suit up until this point. That doesn't smell funny to you?

No. A copy is still a copy even if you destroy the original.

If artificial intelligence is achieved to that degree, it will be effectively alien to us.

This is navel gazing at its most linty.

Already, assuming the intent of other humans is fraught with problems. Even when outcomes are disastrous, we cannot completely assume the instigating human intended for that outcome.

But here we are, assuming the intent of a hypothetical future intelligence that we have defined as more intelligent than us.

I’d be flabbergasted at the hubris if they’re conclusion wasn’t the standard variation of “so let us do what we want and restrict everyone else”.

That they have the duty to vet their delivery people is why they should be on the hook for damages.

> If you're trying to imply nobody gets rides from craigslist and therefore we don't need to worry about this edge case

No, I don't know where you get that.

Why are you so hard up to protect Amazon from any liability?

You do see how that's different, right? Me, contracting a sole individual to perform a task.

I do not have the means to completely vet the person I hire. To ask me to do so is a bit insane. Especially for a one-off trip. Not to mention, the driver in your hypothetical would be the company providing the service.

I mean, look, you have to put all these caveats on your hypothetical. I can't hire a taxi, because then the taxi company would be liable. I can't Uber, because that's a whole mess of who's liable. Etc.

Things are different from me personally hiring a single ride to the airport and me operating a transportation company to shuttle people to and from the airport.

If someone paid me to find them a ride to the airport and the person I hired to do the job wound up running over a kid, then I would be liable. Because then I've taken on the responsibility of vetting the driver.

Fair enough, I missed the exact article used.

However, in that case, it's just a matter of delegation. When one city dominates the state, it will dominate everything about that state. So unless the governor of New York wants to spend most of their time handling New York City problems, it's best for them to let the mayor sort that.

New York City has a greater population than 38 states.

Why should the governor of South Dakota (pop 935,094) have more clout than the mayor of New York City (pop 8,804,190)?

So if an Amazon delivery driver driving an Amazon delivery truck delivering Amazon packages causes an accident with millions of dollars of damages, Amazon should not be responsible?

Also, I'm not talking about what the law says, I'm asking if it's ethical.

Because we should construct our laws to favor ethical outcomes.

I mean, what if the law said that no matter what, I dunno, Target was responsible for all damages in the state. You'd shrug your shoulders and say "Well, that's what the law says".

Yeah, but this time it was. And if it is, they should be on the hook, yes?

Part of the problem is that sometimes the subcontractors are small enough to play by different rules. Or they don't have the means to support the staff when things go sideways. Or sometimes they're independent drivers, in which case the drivers themselves are responsible for the vehicle and any accidents, etc.

The subcontractors can just fold as well, leaving drivers in the lurch.

However, Amazon gets to dictate everything else about the job. The subcontractors have no authority or autonomy, but are made responsible for the heavier costs of the process.

Amazon wants to have an employer-relationship when it comes to dictating terms, but a contractor-relationship when it comes time to giving benefits or resolving disputes.

It's probably more mundane than that.

Let's say Mars sells the bars to distributors for 20 cents and it costs 10 cents a bar to make and package.

A pound of milk chocolate costs $5 and you can get 250 bars out of it. Meaning, every bar has 2 cents of chocolate.

Chocolate prices go up to $6/pound. Now, every bar has 2.4 cents of chocolate. You can maybe eat that cost. Depending on the price increase of other ingredients. Eventually, chocolate hits $10/lb and you are spending 4 cents per bar on chocolate.

You can increase your price, OR you can use less chocolate per bar. You can slightly shrink the dimensions of every bar and use a thinner layer of chocolate to get your costs back in line with 2 cents per bar.

Everyone is going to notice your prices increasing. Fewer people are going to notice your sizes decreasing.

I forget when it was required to list ingredients. But I'd also imagine the regulations were more relaxed, you could list "Milk chocolate product" and have it pass.

“You have a fever because of the ghosts in your bones”

The number of Walmart workers on some form of government assistance is significant.

Significant enough that Walmart couldn't operate without them. Not to mention, Walmart manages to capture those government dollars through accepting EBT and such.

And the goal is to make WalMart pay regardless of how they try to weasel out. If you say "only full time", then they employ thrice as many people and give no one enough hours to make a living. Same if you prorate to hours worked.

Essentially you need to stop inventing rules and systems that can be gamed. Because Walmart is incentivized to game them. Push them in the direction of hiring people full time and paying them a fair wage for their time.

I would say a corporation's taxes should, at the very least, cover the tax burden generated from not paying their employees enough to make a living wage.

So if their employees are on government assistance, the cost to provide that assistance is inherently their burden. One way or another, every employee they employ will be earning a living wage from them.

I don't even care about overlap. If both Target and Walmart have to pay the difference between the full cost of government assistance for the same person, that's fine. Build a fucking library or something.

> You'll see this often in the social democracies of Scandinavia, like Sweden or Denmark. These are countries with strong welfare states, and yet, the corporate tax rates are often lower than the U.S., even if you look at the most red states.

This is only true if you look at the standard tax rate. The effective tax rate of a lot of US corporations is appreciably lower.

It works in places like Scandinavia because they don't give corporations ways to lower their tax burden

Name one that is not "one's a policy and the other is not".

What's the actual difference, because you haven't actually supplied one. You've just said "They're different. One is a thing, and one is a criticism of a thing".

So, does the criticism not hold value? Because a large part of "supply-side economics", a term coined in the 70s, is reduction of taxes and regulations. With the idea that that extra capital will then be used to create jobs.

And if that is not what's happening, then I don't care about the semantics of whether or not "trickle-down" is the appropriate term of art to be applied here. The core concept of "giving rich people more money spurs job growth" is apparently false.

It's not. Peak homicide recently was in 2022 and it was 280 deaths for the year.

While not great, it's not "dodging bullets every day". New Orleans is also experiencing their lowest rate of homicide in years.

No, D2F only matters if you're trying to optimize stroke between two hot-swappable participants.

And then it's really if an angle allowed by Base to Floor (B2F) and Length (L) is compatible with an angle allowed by the other participant's B2F and L.

A single woman trying to derive pleasure from a single man has a totally different set of criteria she needs to qualify.

I think that's one thing people truly forget when they ask "Why can't we do things like this anymore?"

AT&T paid people to fuck around. Claude Shannon, father of Information Theory, founder of Artificial Intelligence, and namesake to Anthropic's flagship product, was also busy building flame-throwing trumpets and rocket frisbees while creating entire new fields.

Most of those things were invented by a company granted a government monopoly on communications and not allowed to directly profit off of any of those advances.

AT&T threw money at smart people and said, "Do stuff. Then we'll see if we can use it"

No one does that anymore.

If incidences of cancer of any type are 1 in 100,000 for the population at large, then generally any slice of that population will have similar odds. Which includes people with cancer.

So those who already have cancer, have a chance to develop a second cancer.

It is very not fair.

Because lobbying is essentially just the process of petitioning the government. Mostly.

It's buying dinners so you can talk with a Representative or Senator one-on-one. It's traveling to D.C. or the Congressperson's home state. It's paying for studies and etc to support your points. It's financing campaigns of politicians who already agree with your viewpoints. It's not "here's money, make law".

Than what? It's 21oz compared to the 7oz regular size and 12.4oz "Pantry Size".

It's like $5-$6 for the box. That's been true at both the local grocery and WalMart.

I'll admit that I tend to implicitly trust that the larger boxes on the shelves contain more. I haven't checked the price-per-unit in a bit. Granted, my closest grocery is not a WalMart and I'm typically purchasing mass-produced sundries. Basically, the "Family Size" of Cheez-its is the same at any store.

One thing I have noticed is that 5lb bags of flour/sugar haven't been standard in a hot minute.