camgunz

I kinda agree, maybe, but I don't think compiling code is a creative pursuit.

This is true, but there's also the cases where slight differences in prompt yield wildly different results. In any programming language, if I add a clause to a conditional like "if car is red or car is blue", that behaves predictably--and if it doesn't we can dig into the debugger, assembly, etc. If I do that with an LLM, that can change everything, and there's no way to "debug" it.

This kind of thing (plus the cost) really limits what they can realistically be used for. A lot of things are tolerant of even lots of fuzziness (suggestions you can ignore, work you can redo, etc), but that subset of applications doesn't justify the boggling capital investment or the ongoing compute needs.

So, my guess is we're probably in for a couple more years of discovering what these models are good for. Coding: meh, kinda. Hacking: wow amazing. Writing a novel: no. Reviewing your work: incredible. And so it goes. This is probably what pops the bubble: we find the small subset of applications this stuff is useful for, and then it's a bag holding race.

I broadly agree. I'll dig into the junior dev thing though. It's one thing if you're giving an LLM a task you can review. It's another if you're not reviewing the output, or you're putting them in critical paths.

The output of a compiler is predictable and deterministic. LLM output isn't.

> People who argue that anti-communism was simply used as a political tool to gain power have a very large hill to climb to justify their argument.

Again, Hitler didn't blitzkrieg GB because communism.

> Even if it has many contradictions just like most countries do, a lot of the essentials are there in the way they behave and strategize.

No, it's Han Superiority. That's why they haven't expanded south: they don't care about non-Chinese. Marxism is fundamentally a workers movement. The CCP is a lot of things, but a workers movement isn't one of them.

> China does not... need all of that in order to take Taiwan.

The Taiwan Strait is notoriously treacherous. Taiwan has few beachheads, tons of tall mountains, dense urban environments, and flat, open farm land. It would be a nightmare of casualties and would destroy Taiwan's economy for at least a generation. China doesn't want to suffer any of that.

> You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. ... Do you think the US has the most powerful military, the largest economy, the largest number of allies, the largest energy exports, the best universities and then suddenly the only exception is that it's just dumb?

Obama spent years getting the JCPOA. Trump tore it up, spent billions of dollars, caused a worldwide energy crisis, and Iran's ascendant. Some presidents have better foreign policy than others.

> This is not accurate. Venezuela was breaking numerous international laws and Maduro was a wanted criminal by countless countries.

Other countries had sanctioned Maduro and members of his regime, but only the Trump admin charged him with crimes.

> They were planning to invade Guyana which also has US oil companies in it (it's openly recorded in Rueters, Associated Press, United Nations archives, etc).

The Biden admin didn't think this was credible.

> Communists just love controlling the resources.

Here's a quote from Trump: “Now I love Venezuela. You know, I love it. We’re doing great in Venezuela. We’re taking a lot of oil from Venezuela, and we’re getting along great with them. Billions and billions of barrels of oil is coming out of Venezuela. … It’s the old-fashioned way, right? It’s the old-fashioned way. To the victor belong the spoils, right?”

Is Trump a communist or do more than just communists like to control the resources?

> Guyana was going to be their Taiwan and Ukraine. They were also working with drug cartels and engaging in various grayzone warfare against the US and the US dollar. They were collaborating with Cuba and Cuba has one of the strongest records of infiltrating the US government and sewing terrorism and training revolution inside the US. Venezuela also hosted Iran-linked terrorist groups. They also purchased military hardware from Russia and China and were in discussions to purchase long range missiles. We're also reaching the advent of AI drone warfare, which makes them an even higher risk. They also brainwash their population to hate the US, just like Iran.

This is pure conspiracy theory. Whatever algorithm you're in has broken your brain.

> So, the US has now structured a deal with Venezuela that limits some of these historic concerns and the new deal is worse than their old 1950s deal simply as a result of oil companies wanting a risk premium baked into the deal. Maduro was a criminal and this oil deal is pragmatic business for the country to return to prosperity. That's largely what is happening.

Mostly agree, but this was uniquely Trump and wildly unlawful. You can't just invade other countries and abduct their leaders. You also can't just blow up random noncombatants in the ocean.

> The way I see it, World War 2 was kind of a perfect intersection of the great depression creating a perfect opening for communist revolution as countries had seen during and after World War I and the protectionist contraction of trade during that time made matters worse.

I think when economies falter governments falter, and their philosophies are discredited. So it makes sense that governments were on thin ice in the wake of WW1 and the Great Depression, and that more radical parties from the left and the right were ascendant. I think something similar is happening now, if of lower magnitude. But, no way was this a door only communists walked through, anarchists, fascists, etc were all in the mix.

> The president of China has openly stated that he thinks Karl Marx was right and has been re-aligning compliance away from reform. With such a large military build-up, Taiwan could simply be the first domino to fall to complete their historical communist revolution.

China is far from a Marxist state, they're much closer to Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist statism. If you want Marxism you should look to the EU, specifically Spain, Italy, and Denmark (lots of worker-owned coops).

Second, China's military build up is likely mainly to fortify its hegemonic aspirations, controlling the region, shipping routes, providing security to allies, etc. An invasion of Taiwan would be extremely costly. It's far more likely they blockade it and manipulate the internal political situation as long as they need to until Taiwan "chooses" reunification. My guess is we'd try to prevent this because we still need TSMC.

> then military forces would be distributed to fight on many fronts and this would limit the west's capacity to interfere with China

You are ascribing way too much strategy to the Trump admin. They deposed Maduro because they could and for oil, all of which was dumb, and they tried to decapitate Iran because Trump wanted that on his resume (also to try and out-do Obama). Neither Iran nor Venezuela had any capability to strike the US or meaningfully strike its allies, definitely not on any long-term basis.

Finally, I don't exactly know what you mean by "focus on China." The West's relationship with China is complex, a lot of people are focused on it. The likelihood of direct confrontation with them is quite low, as it'd be disastrous for both sides.

Your underpinnings for your arguments are the classic infant/adult fallacy where the people you're not sympathetic to are adults with incredible agency and power, and the people you have sympathy for are helpless children with no choices.

Putin wasn't forced to invade Ukraine. What was he even putatively trying to avoid? NATO's not belligerent (you can't simultaneously argue that Europe's military is pathetically weak, but also that it was so muscular and menacing that Putin had to respond proactively).

Hitler chose to start WW2. He wasn't forced to invade France to stop communism. He wasn't forced to attempt over and over to invade Great Britain to stop communism.

China, Russia, etc aren't looking for openings to start WW3. It would be devastating to them--just the war with Ukraine has had generational consequences for Russia. They also aren't innocent nations who, after intolerable saber rattling by the West, will have no choice but to start WW3. It's further not the case that the only deterrent to these innocent nations regrettably starting an insane conflict is a heavily armed Europe. The US is pretty heavily armed! France and GB are nuclear powers!

> You gave me three different currencies which suggests you're picking and choosing, and ignoring taxes.

Even if I'm off by 100%, 410GBP is 41% less than 699. Quite a discount!

> The idea that a raspberry pi is worth a third a macbook, do you really believe that?

I think a lot more kids, etc. have 200 GBP than 700.

A MacBook Neo is 699 GBP. An 8GB Raspberry Pi w/ 32GB SD card, cable, housing, fan and power supply from Kiwi Electronics is 188 EUR (160 GBP). A monitor, kb/mouse, and SD card from Newegg is 70 USD (45 GBP). Total 205 GBP, which is 70.7% cheaper than a MacBook Neo. Quite a discount!

Pis aren't supposed to be for ultra-advanced users, they're even specifically marketed for kids. They're not gonna know if they got a bootlegged version or not.

No, RPis are very inexpensive computers. What you're advocating would considerably increase the price of a Raspberry Pi to pay for the additional support burden (if this is even reasonable--should they hire a bunch of people just to answer "you bought a RPi w/ bootleg RAM" over and over again?), and that defeats the point.

Also good advice for writing software with an LLM.

Being able to put a PC together doesn't mean you understand computers. If I ask you to make me a computer that runs a wristwatch, you'll likely be lost unless you have very specialized understanding.

I think we actually all know what "poorly understood" means. There's no need to play tedious semantic games.

Swartz was charged under the CFAA, like most hacking cases, and it clearly applies to the Anthropic and OpenAI cases.

> The need for Intelligence to fill the scarcity is unthinkable.

I just wanna say, I really admire the irony of this sentence. Maybe once we invent superintelligence it will be able to think enough to tell us how badly we needed it before we had it.

> The urgency is the highest, especially ever since simil-intelligence (LLMs) was implemented.

It isn't. If we stopped all work on LLMs and AI we'd be more than OK. There's no imminent danger or threat.

> To research Intelligence "safely" you simply do not give it agency (you do not let it control computers), for example.

Something can't both be smarter than us and completely controllable by us. The whole point of inventing superintelligence is so it can do things we can't. Humans can already break out of sandboxes, invent bioweapons, manipulate each other to invent bioweapons, etc. What makes you think superintelligence can't or won't do these things?

> To have "safety" in general, you cannot empower morons - humanity is doing the opposite. We cannot rest with incomplete LLMs, nor we can with this dumb, intrinsically dangerous humanity.

Hey, you're talking to a guy who's got a list of tech to ban: nukes, social media, all forms of video news, etc. What does Taylor Swift say, "I've got a blank space, baby, and I'll write your name (Claude)".

> What does "safely" mean? Getting stuck with this infra-humanity?! That is the radically unsafe thing.

You literally just ban it and turn it off. People are always like "you can't ban it bawwwwwww!" but we ban tech all the time. Try buying a bunch of fertilizer, try buying equipment to research gain of function, try buying anti-aircraft guns, try building fuselages to enrich uranium. LLM research requires extraordinary amounts of hardware, electricity, data, funding, and all the things upstream of that (cooling, shipping, space, financing, etc.) The effort you'd have to go through to do this clandestinely, illegally, while also finding researchers willing to take the risk is all prohibitive. There's a list of all nuclear scientists in the entire world. They have to go to school somewhere. Same for AI researchers. If, say, half a dozen of them suddenly disappear, and a random town in Wyoming suddenly starts making millions of requests per second across the whole internet, guzzling electricity, producing a lot of heat, or ordering a shitload of insulation and ducting, we'll know!

Of course not. Even the developers of AI admit there's a huge risk though, no? Even they are calling for a slowdown. Do you think you know more than they do?

I honestly have no idea what this word salad means.

> 50% of the world's population lives in nuke-capable countries.

Are you saying you prefer Pakistan getting nukes over India's population doubling since 1975? That seems silly. Also this is only because of China and India, so this has been true and fine for over half a century.

> The reason Africa doesn't have nukes is their poverty, ditto for the rest of the no-nukes world

Pakistan is poor, Norway is rich. How can you possibly make this argument?

I don't know, but it's also what Kevin Rudd thinks [0]. He was Australia's prime minister (twice, lol), Australia's foreign minister, a foreign service officer working in China, and the author of a dissertation on Xi Jinping.

[0]: https://archive.ph/VzJKU

People are working really hard to not see the "until there's a federal commission and safe processes" part.

Finally, we agree. Even Dario Amodei thinks we should halt work on intelligence until we can do it safely.

"Were we on the brink of a nuclear holocaust multiple times? Maybe yes, maybe no. But hey Google Maps!"

Countries use nuclear power too. The reason they don't launch nukes at the drop of a hat is MAD. I don't see how this isn't analogous to what we could do with AI.

I don't think working on LLMs is the same as working on superintelligence (personally I don't think superintelligence is on the table, but whatever)

The point is an arms race is bad for everyone. "I don't know what WW3 will be fought with, but I do know WW4 will be fought with sticks and stones" type of stuff.

No I think it's fine for 9 countries to have existing models and to coordinate development with each other, which is the general outline of all NPTs.

The bill doesn't ban it. It pauses it until a regulatory body and processes are established. That seems pretty reasonable.

After over 80 years since the US used nuclear weapons against Japan, less than 5% of the world's countries have nuclear weapons, and no one's used one on another country since. If you don't think that's an incredible achievement you're unserious.

Is it even possible to steal this code? How much of it is uncopyrightable LLM output?

Two things I would say. One: nuclear non-proliferation has been pretty successful; we can use a similar model for AI.

Two, China's major motivation for developing competitive AI isn't to reap the benefits from an an important new technology. It's to undermine the economic development of the West and make them even more dependent upon the CCP. It's an extension of the policy that's made us dependent on Chinese labor and manufacturing: win on the economics by any means necessary, wait for the other producers to die, enshittify (extract geopolitical concessions, in this case).