dsign

There's often an issue of perspective. Imagine you visit an 11th century monk in the occupation of copying manuscripts by candle light. This is a guy that spends long cold winters hunched over parchment, using sticks with god knows what passes for ink to copy and illuminate beautiful texts. You tell him that you will buy manuscripts from him, as long as they are typeset in Times New Roman regular, 12pt, and please use this laptop for that. Also you are setting shop with all sort of modern niceties next to the convent, including heating fans and desk electric lamps. Of course the monk will be heart-broken and incredibly grumpy at the loss of time to practice the craft he loves, which is writing and illuminating by hand. But those heating fans are something alright.

We already have desk lamps and heating fans, and many other things which make daily life convenient. But if you hand me a piece of paper (or better, a notebook), I'll fill it just enumerating the amount of diseases I want gone from the world. At least in theory, we know the laws of physics and how things are put together, and we know many of the impossibles of today are simply due to extreme scarcity and cost of qualified intellectual labor.

Maybe what we need is a shift from extreme pride on a specific set of technical skills, to priding ourselves in understanding enough of the world to solve some of its problems.

Interesting that you bring daydreaming to the conversation. I've got an issue with it, and it's that I get interesting ideas then. But nothing comes out unless I sit in front of a computer to do anything with them. And computers have all the distractions.

I have had, and continue having, way above average use for my handwriting. It works for all sorts of math, quick diagrams on anything from geometric reasoning to electronics, composing tricky fragments of text, taking notes on something I'm doing that requires a myriad of easy-to-forget details, and so on.

But my 1st grade teacher and my 1st to 12st year classes variously agreed on how atrocious my handwriting was. Famously, my 1st grade teacher told my parents, "there's no hope". She was right. And, four decades later, it irks me to no end that every time I grab a pen and start writing, the ghosts come to look over my shoulder and judge. "Look at it, he's at it again. That 'f' looks like anything but... That's not a proper uppercase 'I'... you could summon a demon with it, but it would be a pitiful one. That 'g' is vicious. Is that a '1', a '3' or a '7'? Didn't we fail you enough times in basic arithmetic for that? Also, that line of text is sagging as much as your sitting, boy..."

It doesn't make me happy to say it, but the American LLM companies were first. Capital in the rest of the world is way more conservative, and I can't imagine the mega-investments OpenAI and Anthropic managed to secure happening anywhere else without existing proof that "thing is profitable".

This. Forgetting is the biggest crime. Anything in the other direction is atoning.

Well if AI destroys bad music videos by making them cost $25, I say it's a win. What will be left will be seriously scripted productions.

Another day, another model and another pelican :-)

I can't help but wonder where is the trend going? What will we have in five years? Maybe it will all have puttered out, and we will have moved to the next thing? Or maybe the prompt then will be "make a pelican ride a bicycle", and out will come the genetic code for a giant pelican with extremities suitable for a handle bar and pedals, and an inborn affinity to ride bicycles?

PCBs are very neat, but that shipping time is a boomer when you are prototyping and you really don’t know what you are doing.

Honestly, I don't take offense at the joke. There's a reason freedom of expression has some degree of protection in many countries, and it is so that people can slander each other's religion or lack of it with impunity. I mean, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be constitutionally protected if it were about football clubs' rivalries. So I slander God at every opportunity I get, while actually being an atheist, because I find the given solutions to the problem of evil abominable and have mild objections to the morality of whoever swallows said solutions. Though I would never bar people of faith from using an operating system I contribute to; why in hell would I deprive them of a platform to read my slander?

A few years ago I bought a SUP and there was a motto on it "life is easy: just add water". I've done enough with that SUP to learn that the motto is actually true. I can imagine some people take it to the "life is great: just add an ocean" extreme.

Deeply disappointed to read it doesn't work for iconoclasts.

Up to five years ago[^1], we lived an age of pure speculation about intelligence and minds. That age brought about multiple theories of the mind, and to me, their finest legacy are arguments of the form "$X is not $concept because $theory", where any given day $X can be "LLM" or "LLM+harness+tool", "agent" and $concept can be "intelligent", "aware", "rational", "long-termed", , etc. Those arguments, in the context of $theory, are not wrong, and they are in fact quite useful. But there's only so much utility in a sieve.

We are going to need positive theories of the mind, and we will have to build them using terms and bits that avoid confrontation with the old guard. So, maybe instead of "mind" we will say "artilect"[^2][^3], and then move on to engineer desirable properties. For some of those properties ("alignment", "paucity", Kantian analysis and synthesis) we are already there or aiming for, but as we design to take on more and more challenging deeds, we may need to go back, steal and rebrand other old ideas. For example, "long term goals" and "self-preservation" are strongly linked in humans. Can we reify that relationship in the new artilects we make?

Other things we will need to make from whole cloth. For example, minds with an intuitive understanding of, and capability to manipulate: quantum mechanics, biological organisms, the workings of an ecosystem, the stock market, a stock company, or itself and other minds.

[^1]: YMMV, depending on where you draw the line between fine intelligence and stochastic parrots.

[^2]: Not the dictionary meaning, but the term as used by Alastair Reynolds in "Blue Remembered Earth (2012)"

[^3]: We may not use the term "LLM", because of the stochastic parrot crowd, because LLMs become one of many ingredients, or simply (but unlikely) because we find a completely different tool for the kit and discard LLMs entirely.

So, we are giving up privacy in all our electronic communications because a bunch of companies can’t stop running algorithms to drive up engagement? From the article above, it seems Snapchat messaging would work just fine if kids had to touch phones to exchange contacts. Versus putting everybody in 24x7 AI surveillance, the lesser bad here is to forbid those algorithms, even if that bankrupts the platforms.

> I keep telling people about such things and I am looked at as nerdy, geeky or boring.

Hm, yeah, we have our work cut out for ourselves. Politicians can't do nerdy nor geeky, but it's their job to talk in a way that moves people. That's why we keep electing absolute idiots that can't even speak that well, all things considered, but who can "charm", for a given definition of charm of course. To be heard we need to remain nerdy and geeky at our core, but talk in a way that moves people.

In this concrete instance, what I do when somebody brings Chat Control to the conversation and other listeners start to roll eyes, is to derail the conversation with colorful yarns about how we did surveillance in the old days of the Soviet Union, and what we did with anybody who was rattled for giving a foul mouth to the Party. "Yes, we didn't have Siberia, but the heat and the savage ants in those sugar cane plantations were damn fine, and honestly you don't need any particular geography for a good old beating... Catching them dissidents was the hard thing, but it all would be so much easier these days... Hey, have you noticed how you talk about one thing and Facebook start popping ads about it almost at once? Does it listen to all our diatribes? I'm pretty sure that's the stuff Chat Control wants..."

What are the updates for, I wonder?

Video games, like all forms of art, are about stirring emotions. I don't own, nor have never owned an Xbox. But when I think of the device the first thing that comes to mind is "Microsoft" and "Windows". So I consider all the little beancounters and MBAs at Microsoft who are always optimizing for profit and that have made Windows nightmarish, and I imagine them with access to an "emotions machine" they can manipulate to make number go up, and can't help but think that the device is a pocket dimension of hell but more or less useless otherwise.

All said, in order for Microsoft to fix XBox, they will also need to fix the Windows desktop experience. Otherwise people will think "ouch, I don't want to buy a cousin of that creature. Better go for a Nintendo or Steam Deck or something..."

I can't say anything about the "centuries" part, but the rest sort of checks. In those old soviet countries there was no such thing as "customer service", the politburo didn't get around inventing it and every economic cog was created from above. If a modern American had seen how things were done there, they would have wrongly assumed that a powerful pulp-and-paper lobby was in control. Also, when the thing in question was made in the West (which was often the case for high tech stuff), and somehow smuggled under the iron curtain and Western sanctions, customer support was unaffordable or simply out of reach.

I wouldn't mind reading that and having a good chuckle while processing an MR, as long as the comment had been crafted by a person. But now I think writing in grunts is gonna become the thing. "pete? you good boy? we won't hire you/ paper you gave HR girl with older gigs? remember it pete my boy? too many words/ words were too long/ dots you used dots/ you scratched long dash with knife, but baby saw scratch/we don't ai pete/ask if they have job in next cave/good luck."

> but after 5-10 generations of a combination of artificial and natural conception you could end up with meaningful loss of fitness

Yes, if we end up in some corner-case dystopia where evolution and natural selection continue to be in charge of fitness. But evolution and natural selection bring much suffering to the unlucky. In other words, if you go to a hospital, you'll quickly learn there's far more human suffering caused by God and Nature than by the "cruelty of man". Though common sense is never assured victory, I look forward to a world where our children live healthier and longer lives due to us properly messing with God and Nature.

Slightly tangential on Swedish society, there are similarities between USA and Sweden. There's a large segment of society that is white and very blond, and there's a largish segment which is not. Along that same line there are all kinds of divisions: economic, education, religious, sets of values, and of access to things and possibilities. What pisses me off is that the cast of "CEOs of successful companies" live in an sphere of privilege where they really are not bothered at all by the brown people. They in fact have plenty of places to go, a vast archipelago, out of reach for anybody who can't afford a boat. Though they get all the benefits, including cheap qualified labor from people who had to leave their homelands displaced by poverty, conflict and war. I'll switch VPN provider too.

One of these days we will elect somebody who is corrupt and morally corrupt, incompetent and poorly educated and who'll promise to screw us over many times and in many positions, and we will let him just do so so that there are concentration camps for the brown people.

> There's something incredibly peaceful about being in the hands of an expert you trust. You don't have to worry anymore and can let them guide you through the process.

> AI can absolutely shatter that feeling in an uncomfortable way...

As a mental experiment, think how things would look like if the AIs were right more often than doctors. Then living longer and being healthier would imply living with a lot of "technical medical worries" that you don't longer get to outsource to a black-boxy human wearing whites. I know some people who are already ridding that train.

My experience with questions to LLM is that they mimic reddit a lot: ask them an apparently simple thing that is not possible, and they will bend backwards to tell you it's possible and give you tons of convoluted possible solutions. Ask them a thing that is possible but complicated, and they will be overly dismissive. The good thing however is that between those two banks there's a wide river of utility...more often than not they'll at least mention things I haven't considered before.

Nonsense. Everybody knows Cthulhu.

> the model itself has become a commodity

Indeed. So the winner is going to be whoever can also commoditize the rest, i.e. hardware and energy costs. In the long run, whoever has the factories to make chips, windmills and solar panels is going to be ahead. I think this is well understood by the American elites, and it can very well explain their exacerbated hawkishness.

> Verification data stays between you, Persona, and Anthropic, except where we're legally required to respond to valid legal processes.

That, in conventional meaning, means an ongoing judicial investigation. But "valid legal process" very plausibly means as well "this legal order we secretly received from a branch of the government that means we shall build a dossier of every foreigner using our service and share it with the agencies". And honestly, after other recent news from Anthropic and its "lively" relationship with the concentration-camp-building-current-administration, I dread handing over id documents to them. If I see the prompt, I'll close my account and use one of the many alternatives.

It has been said in this thread that we shouldn't scan healthy people because false positives. That's a good point. But I also think we are still looking at the small picture: catch diseases.

The slightly bigger picture is to prevent them, and there early warnings can help a lot.

At a yet slightly higher level, some people think that we are about to enter the age of superintelligence. That's a separate debate but it's not something I would disregard entirely. In an age of superintelligence, our goals and tools for healthcare can be different. I'm very much doubt that the medical establishment and we as a society will embrace a world where each person has some model of their metabolism running on some hardware and being updated and monitored 24/7, but this is already a reality in many industries where it is called "digital twins", so maybe this is something you'll go for if you are a trillionaire.

Zooming out and flying higher, the goal is of course to be young forever and let your body stay away in state space from most diseases. Is that something superintelligence can do?

Not to detract of any of the other reasons given so far for people disliking 'AI' in the brand messaging, there's the additional "snob factor" that the average consumer will reject (perhaps because it's culturally trained to do so).

To put it simply, the last few decades have been about glorifying the average Simpson. KISS and Marvel movies. Trump-level speech. And now along comes something that is going to take the pain of deep complicated thinking away (what a relief!), but the damn villain not only walks the talk[^1], it also unfortunately talks the talk with complicated words, correct capitalization and (gasp!) em--dashes. What's not to hate about it?

[^1]: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/192777/walk-the-...

And so war begins :p ! I thought conflict would take a little bit longer, maybe even AIs with agency.

More seriously though, I wonder if the future is about low-intensity conflict between humans and AIs, punctuated by high-intensity escalations, until the Machines wipe us all, or we set up some rather draconian covenants that forbid people from building AIs, innovating on electronics and algorithms, and even, for good measure, from learning linear algebra.

The root of the problem is that AI-as-a-service is corked, because companies providing it have a hell of an incentive to use all that data to out-compete their competitors, and they can do so in secret. To say nothing of salivating law-enforcement who really, really wants to tap into it. I'm hoping there will be at some point open-source and affordable hardware that can run competent models.

Yes, but using five type checkers on Python is the equivalent of buying a Nissan Leaf and trying to turn it into a Lamborghini by adding an internal combustion engine which is only supposed to produce a nice roar but no thrust.

The way I see it, AI is going to change the world radically. It could be for the worse, the better, or a mix of both, but in my mind there's no doubt.

We are only five or six years into the leap LLMs represent. For reference, radio waves were discovered in 1886, Marconi used them for communications in 1895, and while telephone and radio coexisted for many decades, it wasn't until the 1995 that mobile phones and wireless technologies started picking up. It took so long not because of the physics of radio waves required time to mature and improve, but because everything else needed to profit from it did require time.

To me, LLMs are not so much AI as it is a building block. Radiowaves maybe, or the equivalent of transistors. We are already seeing that it's possible to chain LLMs into agents. Currently, price is a strict limiting factor for coding and agents.It's probably fine-ish if all you want is Claude Code or Codex, but there are many other possible compositions of LLMs that most people don't dare to experiment with. For example, LLMs to drive NPC dialog and world mechanics in games is not a thing due to cost. Were prices of inference hardware go down and inference algorithms keep improving, I'm convinced (and afraid) we would see things very difficult to imagine today.