bronz

burn rate? so they are still running on vc? i guess it doesnt surprise me. they arent the worst thing to get massive vc. i will be very entertaining to see when the next recession hits and all these shitty companies dry up overnight. and it will be nice to have fewer arrogant tech peoples around who only have money because of misguided investors who have more money than sense.

well AMP was the death rattle and this is the flat-line. Google is officially dead. Another corporate zombie. if you want to be plugged in to new and exciting things, look elsewhere. What a crazy ride its been.

back before UI was designed by committee and guided by feedback from brain-dead iPhone users.

AGI is not the next iteration of humanity because it will not resemble humanity in any way besides being sentient in some capacity. you will feel quite silly if you get to see it in your lifetime.

for the same reason theranos used to come up all the time. because investment and hype didnt appear to align with the true value of what the company in question was offering.

well there is something wrong if you want the company to be run well. if leaders of a company are selected by any other trait than merit, then the company will under-perform. if the company has a monopoly, that means a long and drawn out period of that particular market not achieving what it could or maybe even damaging peoples lives if the market is important.

how does this game claim to only need 100MB of ram? small maps sizes?

edit: woops i remembered wrong. i wonder how sales are going for this game?

factorio generates terrain on the fly so this isnt possible. also you alter the terrain by placing stuff on it.

harmonic gearbox

AGI is the most urgent existential threat. If you are concerned about AGI, please join us at https://www.reddit.com/r/PeopleAgainstAGI

what is a retailer? does this mean that if i make a website to sell my small indie game, i have to follow all the ephemeral accessibility rules or else be sued?

so he was mostly unresponsive but could still feel pain. they were doing stuff with his tubes with no pain meds for almost two decades. that has to be one of the most horrifying things ive ever imagined.

im not sure what you mean.

im very glad to find a person who shares my feelings. every time i open my feeds and i see a headline about some kind of machine learning or ai breakthrough, i feel physically uncomfortable. every time i open one of those links there is a chance that it will change the equation of life.

the other day i opened one of those links and it was GTP-2. besides all the insane implications of GTP-2, what bothers me is that i am no longer able to assume that any internet comment is written by a human, no matter how convincing. there are still comments that GTP-2 could not write but anyone who points that out is pretty short sighted because it wont be long before there are vanishingly few comments that could not have been generated. i kind of liked knowing that a person was typing out (almost) all those comments.

one of the biggest realizations ive had recently is that technology does not cut equally in both directions. everyone in my generation has thought of technology as a neutral entity: for every benefit of a given technology, one can point out a corresponding disadvantage. on the surface it seems like the scale dips neither for the societal disadvantages nor for the societal benefits. this is a very fundamental belief. and its wrong. its funny how people put so much faith in such fuzzy logic.

the implications of that realization are difficult to swallow. it means that with every new technology introduced into the world, there is the potential for it to harm peoples quality of life. or improve it. but there is no regulation of technology so its a crap shoot. weve been rolling the dice for a long time and we didnt even know it. and i think weve been winning. but i think that high level automation is not going to be a win for us.

besides all of that, there is absolutely no debate that these advancements in ai are to our generation what personal computers were to the baby boomer generation. without close attention, we will fall behind and our kids will have fluency in the new world of automation while we cling to very old and outdated patterns. in other words, it makes me feel very old.

people in here keep on saying that uber is not making profit. where is the source for that? i remember people saying the same thing about tesla. complete dogma. nobody seemed to understand that tesla was investing huge amounts of money into the development of other cars and expanding their factories. so what are ubers expenses? it does not pass the smell test. what is the expense that is killing them?

and people in here also dont seem to appreciate that uber can change their prices. they cant right now, but they will be able to soon. all the investor money floating around means that their competition may be able to operate in the red for extended periods of time. when the investor money dries up and everyone is surviving on profit, prices can go up. and they will go up because rideshare is the most efficient and cheapest way to do taxis -- nobody is going to come in and disrupt uber. except for driverless cars. but driverless cars arent going to happen. not anytime soon.

edit: i just looked at the chart in the document and as far as i can tell they are 3B in the red. not really sure what the units are in that chart. ok, well there are a lot of expenses where i cant tell exactly what they are, but their marketing expenses were 3B. 3 fucking billion dollars -- am i reading that correctl? thats the same amount by which they are in the red. i also see some very high numbers for management. all uber has to do is cut the fat and they will be making a nice profit.

maybe its silly but i think california will always attract lots of great people because the weather everywhere else fucking sucks. i did a huge road-trip across the US last year and the biggest lesson i drew from it was that california is paradise compared to the rest of the country. i never traveled as a kid, so i assumed that things were nice in other places too. seriously, i dont understand why anyone chooses to live somewhere else. other places are cheap but they also suck massively. and people who live in NY? its just as expensive over there, even more restrictive gun laws (you cant even carry a fucking taser) and the weather SUCKS. why someone would know about both places and choose NY over CA is a mystery to me.

i dont know why people think there is a paradox. the way that life springs from barren rock is not known. if we dont know how that works, then we cant assign a probability to it happening on a given planet. people just assume that the probability is very high. it could be next to nothing for all we know, small enough so that even the entire universe only produces one. the paradox is all based on huge assumptions. there is no paradox until we prove that the probability is high.

well thats not true, because you need life but you also need intelligence. and again, everyone assumes that if you have life it will eventually become intelligent. and people assume that if life is intelligent it will eventually build space shuttles. its all a huge, huge assumption. look at all the animals that qualify as intelligent. some birds and monkeys are hugely intelligent, but they dont build space shuttles. this shows that intelligence doesnt equal space shuttles and that even when life springs up, and even when it becomes intelligent, it still could be super unlikely that it will build space shuttles.

hell, there are even humans that might have never built space shuttles. there are indigenous communities all over the planet that never developed technology and probably never would have. when you live in a warm climate and food is abundant, there may never be a reason to.

it is unproven that it is likely at all for space-shuttle level intelligence to spring up from bare earth. there is no paradox. its probably just really unlikely.

i meant that i cant trust whether or not it was written by a human, not whether or not i can trust the correctness of the comment. edited for clarity.

> We are aware that some researchers have the technical capacity to reproduce and open source our results. We believe our release strategy limits the initial set of organizations who may choose to do this, and gives the AI community more time to have a discussion about the implications of such systems.

i wish people would stop pretending that there is some good way to bring this technology into existence. yes, its nice to try and let the good guys use it first but its just irrelevant in the long-term. ultimately the result is going to be total proliferation of this technology in all areas where it has utility, and it will be used to maximum extent in every application it is suitable for, including the really bad ones. the roll-out will make the transition smoother but it wont change whats actually important: the end result on the lives of our grandchildren.

growing up around rapidly advancing technology, i thought of technology as a double-edged sword: it cuts equally in both directions. but after thinking about it for a long time, i now believe that, in relation to human well-being, the presence of a given technology or combination of technologies can be a net positive or a net negative as well as neither. we need to think more carefully before letting these genies out of their bottles.

this is not an example that i think will be very negative, but its very powerful and unexpected for me at least. the next powerful and unexpected thing may not be benign. banning development of these kinds of technologies should not be off the table.

after reading this: https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/#sample8 and browsing reddit for a while, i have realized that from now on i cannot assume human origin for 90% of the comments i read on reddit. this is insane.

your comment is rude. the emotional nature of your comment reflects the fact that you find something in my comment troubling but do not have any way of proving it wrong. what you do instead is attack the character of the person who said it. do you seriously think that you are able to see into the mind of a person based on a terse and straight-forward relation on the economics of AI? can you not recognize that this is impossible? if you have any actual, substantive counter-argument to what i have said, i will gladly receive it. otherwise, i must say that it is you who should keep comments to oneself.

i never understood people who think that there will be water wars. RO plants like these are all you need. there was some scare-mongering about brine-cakes, and i never understood how anyone fell for that because the amount of salt produced by these plants compared to the volume of the ocean is beyond minuscule. lo and behold, this article says the brine problem was found to be a false alarm after being looked at again. slap a solar field on this baby and youve got sustainable, mostly disaster-proof water. exciting times.

technologies having inherent political traits is a consequence of a much deeper and more important aspect of technology -- that it has inherent traits of human economics. if you take a set of technological realities that might be imposed on some society, it leads to that society eventually reaching exactly one stable state.

a very simple example is the technology of guns. this technology leads inevitably to a state of the world that is characterized by the presence of gun-utilizing nations. this is because the world is a kind of market, and when guns exist the only entities that are competitive are those that use guns.

right now, market economies dominate the world. even china utilizes markets for its own internal economic affairs. when AI comes, this will turn on its head -- market economies will no longer be competitive and centralized ones will replace them. this will be a pretty shocking change.

also, rather soon, humans will stop being present. this is because they will no longer be competitive, their existence will be vestigial and therefore fragile and vulnerable to the slightest perturbation. it will be similar to endangered animals in the present -- no longer competitive, their existence no longer perpetuates itself and therefore is terminated for any old reason, such as condominium developments or pollution.

doesnt this make you think that we shouldnt give websites the ability to control so much stuff? why cant we have a browser that has basic video, photo, text, forum, etc functionality baked in, with no nonsense like a turing-complete programming language and all the complexity and exploits that come with it?

i dont mean to be negative but ML and even conventional computing are starting to make me tired. im always wondering what it will be next that ML can do better than humans. what is next up for automation? will this be the one to send a shock-wave through an industry / the economy? i feel like i need to constantly watch and keep track of the progress thats being made. and im starting to get tired from having to re-think life again and again.

for example, google has published voice synthesis samples, voices generated from text, that are indistinguishable from real human speech. it hasnt been perfected yet, but i think most people would agree that we basically now live in a world where voice recordings cant be automatically trusted the way they used to be. it completely changes the way you think about and navigate the world. it will open up a universe of new schemes, methods of fraud, etc etc that we will have to adapt to.

then there are deepfakes. there are limitations, and the results arent perfect, but its very early days. again i would say that the consensus among us is that we now live in a world where video evidence is basically no longer intrinsically trust-worthy in the way that it used to be.

i practically grew up inside a computer. but i am now sensing that as ML fills in, its going to be a very uncomfortable ride for me personally -- and i dont understand how it couldnt be for anyone else. and what about when AGI comes? just curious to see if anyone else shares my experience with this.

what is tracing?

kind of a side note here, but the one thing, the one and only thing preventing me from uninstalling chrome is the fact that i need to use chrome to make google voice calls in the browser as far as i can tell. when i try to do it in firefox, i just get a strange message about it not being supported. this is really annoying!

granted

right, but what is missing here is the observation that all the duties of a citizen also carry power to do harm. therefore, in order for society to prosper, its citizens must be able to handle guns and draino, because voting and going about their everyday lives have just as much potential to ruin things.

it could be that these immigrant areas are host to immigrants because they are poor areas. immigrants coming in with no connections or history in that country, and who probably came from a less wealthy country, would naturally take up residence in a poor area. and in a poor area, crime is higher. including acid attack crimes.

i would view this as a good way of making bad behaviour expensive.