fatherzine

re the website name (aipanic) and the attitude that the real problem is the people reaction to ai and not ai itself.

radio erevan q&a

q: what should we do in case of an atomic attack?

a: you dress in a white sheet and head tippy-toe to the cemetery.

q: but why tippy-toe?

a: let's not create panic, comrade.

robots that zero-shot learn how to plant/harvest crops just by watching a video of you doing it.

"the next AI winter may have just begun" -- good!

time to stop playing with existential fire. humans suffice. every flaw you see in humans will be magnified X times by an intelligence X times stronger than humans. whether it is autonomous or human lead.

things are moving faster than the ability of any human to keep up.

"they lied about how they are using customer data" -- possibly. it is in the inherent logic of the ai to gobble up as much data as physically possible

There is a delightful little town on an island off SoCal coast, Avalon, where the main mode of motorized transportation is indeed the golf cart. The shaping constraint is geography, the town is on an island by a bay surrounded by steep hills, medium/long distance travel is out of the question. Would be difficult to transition nearby LA megalopolis to such a mode of transportation without enforcing political barriers to travel, which in practice would require a ruthless tyranny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avalon,_California#Transportat...

"The main method of transportation within the city is by small gasoline or electric powered motorcars referred to locally as "autoettes". These include numerous golf carts and similarly sized vehicles. Vehicles under 55 inches (140 cm) wide, 120 inches (300 cm) long, and less than 1,800 pounds (820 kg) may qualify as an autoette. Any resident may acquire an autoette permit with the restriction of one permit per household. It is very difficult for a private citizen to get a permit to have a full-size vehicle in Avalon."

Great synergy with https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect

How much would they pay an average SRE to deal with random fires operating a poorly designed, poorly instrumented and poorly understood system?

It's a tongue-in-cheek title. The author proposes something akin to cognitive behavioral therapy, to voluntarily seek out 'offending' situations to learn to behave in disagreement mode instead of offended mode.

For the better. The future society will develop technology at a slower pace, and their technology will be naturally constrained by sustainability concerns from the get-go. We've turned 'medieval' into a pejorative during the Enlightenment period (17th, 18th centuries) predominantly for political reasons. Think red vs blue false dichotomy in contemporary politics. From a spiritual, technological and cultural perspective the Medieval age wasn't quite the dark pit of despair its political enemies made it to be. Visit a village e.g. in the French country side, there is something deep inside us that recognizes it as more organically fulfilling than either Industrial towns, or Contemporary sprawls.

Possibly. I'm alluding to the spiritual disposition that expects 4.97 stars or bust. In relationship terms this often maps to expecting the perfect dinner company. When the actual company disappointingly fails to meet that standard, they are summarily dismissed, and the whole experience turns into superficial theater of appearances.

These days I purposefully avoid as much travel research as possible, and intently choose to immerse in the place and moment instead. I'm happy to miss that 4.97 stars dinner place, and instead enjoy interacting with a less-than-Instagram-perfect dinner & perhaps some flesh-and-bones human company.

Not sure why to expect TV-over-Internet be any different than TV-over-cable: 1 minute of ads for every 3 minutes of content. Sure, for some years the industry held back the ads in a capital fueled chase for market share. Yet at some point capital requires returns, and so the ads spigot will eventually be turned wide open.

Every prompt you put in somebody else's LLM goes into the training set of the next iteration of said LLM, with the explicit purpose of replacing you as a cognitively, and therefore economically, relevant entity. The only dignified move is not to play, though it's a very difficult choice. It probably not a winning move, though at this point there are no obvious winning moves -- you and I and all our loved ones will be obsoleted and replaced by tech within the next few years. Concretely, to not play means to stop feeding the machine data, i.e. disconnecting from the digital world. Given how digitalized society is becoming, possibly also from the modern society altogether. Godspeed.

Why do people say '2 is a solitary outlier'? Sure, by a quirk of English there is a special word 'even' denoting 'number divisible by 2'. By that logic, every prime k is a 'solitary outlier', being the only prime divisible by k. E.g. '5 is a solitary outlier, the only fiven prime'.

Alternatively, 'traditions are experiments that worked', and 'fear of God' simply translates to 'fear of messing up', with an accent of 'by pridefully refusing to listen to the wisdom of tradition'. Darwinian insights apply to a wide range of human behaviors, from cooking to cheese making to moral systems. Debate is always welcome, but changing social norms willy-nilly on a whim comes with a high risk of chaos, pain and disfunction.

"omniscience and omnipotence" The wording unfortunately implies an agentic creature of this world.

Alternatively, God created the world as an arena, with creatures as agents. God manifests in the world through His creatures, in our quest to maximize truth, goodness, beauty. One step further, the purpose of the Son is to provide a humanly comprehensible blueprint on how to act as to maximize truth, goodness, beauty. Finally, the Holy Spirit is that which guides us in following the path the Son laid out for us.

For a scientifically trained mind, this can also be pictured as the quest to identify and asymptotically aim at maximizing the objective function that encodes truth, goodness, beauty. The stakes - a life well lived.

FWIW, 'omniscient man in the clouds' is a strawman built by its enemies.

"you have no ability to hold others accountable" -- true for all levels of the human stack

Societies have failed to develop industrial scale investing for centuries. E.g. the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, due to high levels of endemic corruption. A societal trust/faith breakdown may indeed bring an end to investing as we know it. The countdown for the crumbling of the spiritual foundations of Western Civilization continues apace.

Yes.

While I am not an expert, the most common cited cause for the Japanese stagnation is the late '80s Japanese asset bubble, possibly worsened by the '85 Plaza Accords where US significantly devalued its currency USD, via currency market manipulation.

From a wider perspective, individuals and countries alike are subject to economic forces that sometimes are beyond their control. The American cultural habit of attributing, without rest, ill fate to moral failing, lacks in nuance. Possibly a byproduct of the historically unique wealth of opportunity bestowed onto the post-war generation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decades

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_asset_price_bubble

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord

Fair enough, BLS seems reasonable, though devil in (lots of) details. I was extrapolating the 'ketchup is a vegetable' debacle, https://www.foodpolitics.com/2011/11/ketchup-is-a-vegetable-..., where American ketchup is a mix of tomato paste and high fructose corn syrup, see e.g. https://www.nutritionvalue.org/Tomato_ketchup_by_HEINZ_54041...

Pure personal anecdote, a couple years back I did explicitly choose to observe 'zero work Sundays', either office or domestic. Rejecting the oft self-induced guilt for daring to catch my breath 1/7 made a measurable dent in improving QoL. While YMMV, give it a try. Usually stuff can wait a day.

I wish I would have more spiritual and material insights onto how the 24/7 grind mindset became widespread in USA, possibly via Calvinism and the Protestant work ethic. The foundations do prescribe regular perusal of relief valves.

8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work:

10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:

11 For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2020&ver...

Through disenchanted materialistic lenses we can only see man plumage manifested in the physical world. Yet it is not the only way.

Please, at a minimum, change the oil according to manufacturer specs. Or eventually blow up your engine.

Social darwinism is inescapable.

With taxes funding the work, there will be some (aggregate) metric to decide who gets the grants, and some committee to decide said metric and apply it. Which inevitably leads to corruption, both in directly gaming the metric and in greasing the committee wheels to choose the metric that favors certain kind of projects, certain kind of credentials, and/or certain socio-ethno-economic identity markers of the authors.

While the capitalist system is nakedly brutal, at least offers a skilled, determined and lucky person the opportunity to spend a part of their career earning (temporary) financial independence, and then spend it to finance their own projects.

Splendid, thank you!

Gamification is a powerful motivator. There is a leaderboard, climbing it is a reward in itself.