how is this different than translating user prompts to a different language (eg English => Dutch), retaining the translation and using it for training, while telling the user that he's technically covered under ZRP? article locked for me
438 karma · joined May 5, 2022
Power is silencing other people. Follows from the problem of coordinated action. Foundation of asymmetric law enforcement, a cornerstone of tyranny. Even in a society ostensibly governed by the "rule of law".
What's new is how concentrated the reins of power have become. Paradoxically, could lead to a period of major instability. The year of four emperors.
the conundrum: what is the right objective? puerile attempts, eg "maximize flourishing" or perhaps "minimize suffering" are trivially countered by paperclip machines fulfilling the letter while laying utter waste
'mystery of the person'
given the context, some keywords for orientation: free will, rejection of temptation, the cross
cf. SV conventional wisdom: he who ships first wins the market
in fairness, there is real value in iteration speed. i'm not holding my breath on human comprehensible corporate code bases moving forward. a slew of critical foundational projects, mostly run by the big names, may still care about what used to be called "good engineering practices".
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/10/24/what-we-k...
There are ~10M cows nationally. The average energy consumption is ~1000 kWh/cow annually. Summing up, the entire dairy industry consumes ~10TWh. That is less than 10% of the national data center energy burn. [edit: was off by a factor of 10]
Second, the labor / goods&services price ratio itself is irrelevant, as measured in the short term. What is relevant is the long term outlook of this ratio. See eg the Dutch Disease.
Third, even the long term labor / goods&services price ratio is irrelevant. Not everything in this world is, or should be, reducible to simplistic financial value.
One way to approach the underlying intuition is in terms of homeostasis, at nation state level.
A: T.uuid3712[X] = reserve X
...
B: T.uuid6214[X] = reserve X // eventually loses to A because of uuid ordering
...
A<-T.uuid6214[X]: discard T.uuid6214[X]
...
B<-T.uuid3712[X]: discard T.uuid6214[X], B.notify(cancel T.uuid6214[X])
-----
A wins, B discards
On the core observation "there are too many implementation choices", that is not quite right. True, the author mentions 4, and there are further variations. In practice, a library can:
1. Implement all suitable graph representations.
2. Implement algorithms tailored to the representation(s) that offer the highest performance.
3. Provide transformations from one representation to another. This is O(#representations), trivial to implement and trivial to use. Quite fair workload for both maintainers and users.
4. Bonus, provide import / export transformations from / to common standard library datatypes and idioms.
Memory and transformations are cheap, 99% of use-cases would likely find the overhead of transforming data, both in RAM and CPU, negligible.
Edit: "the harsh truth of working at Google is that in the end you are moving protobufs from one place to another." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20132880
- request from Ljubljana using Slovenian => white people with high probability
- request from Nairobi using Swahili => black people with high probability
- request from Shenzhen using Mandarin => asian people with high probability
If a specific user is unhappy with the prevailing demographics of the city where they live, give them a few settings to customize their personal output to their heart's content.
A. It is claimed that all perspectives are 'inherently biased'. There is no objective truth. The bias the actor injects is just as valid as another.
B. It is claimed that some perspectives carry an inherent 'harmful bias'. It is the mission of the actor to protect the world from this harm. There is no open definition of what the harm is and how to measure it.
I don't see how we can build a stable democratic society based on these ideas. It is placing too much power in too few hands. He who wields the levers of power, gets to define what biases to underpin the very basis of the social perception of reality, including but not limited to rewriting history to fit his agenda. There are no checks and balances.
Arguably there were never checks and balances, other than market competition. The trouble is that information technology and globalization have produced a hyper-scale society, in which, by Pareto's law, the power is concentrated in the hands of very few, at the helm of a handful global scale behemoths.
material:
- water: too little => thirst, too much => drown
- heat: too little => freeze, too much => burn
- food: too little => starvation, too much => obesity
spiritual:
- courage: too little => cowardice, too much => foolhardiness
- diligence: too little => slothfulness, too much => workaholism
- respect: too little => disregard, too much => idolatry
etc.
life is a balance
side note: the datacenter build out race is an early instance of the paperclip optimizer phenomena, with datacenters instead of paperclips.
* micro-dopamine hits from likes are the primary motivator
* attention spans are wildly overtaxed
* goal: maximize likes and minimize effort
* maximize likes: focus on people on your team, ignore everyone else
* minimize effort: use terse sloganized shibboleths, similar to sports and marketing. "let's go cowboys"
* fin
in its early years google was also refreshingly simple and to the point. the billion then trillion dollars market capitalization placed pressure on them to deliver financial results, the ads spam grew like a cancer. openai is destined for the same trajectory, if only faster. it will be poetic to watch all the 'ethical' censorship machinery repurposed to subtly weigh conversations in favor of this or other brand. pragmatically, the trillion dollar question is what will be the openai take on adwords.
thing is, i'm not sure about the lab access requirement. i'd expect any number of diy techniques to be functional substitutes. brb, asking chatgpt for more details.
edit: and one obvious error, it's graduates with molecular biology degrees, presumably the undergrad population is ~5x larger, for a total of 20k. and presumably the world is larger, so we can throw in another ~5x factor for a total of 100k. still, /orders of magnitude/ smaller than world population with access to the Internet.
there are a /lot/ of broken people in the world. i'd sleep more comfortable they don't get access to step by step instructions in their local language on how to design and spread the next .*pox plague at the cost less than eg a motorcycle.
when 1 in 3 children are raised in a single parent household, compared to the traditional norm of 1 in 20, everybody could use a reminder to act responsible when it comes to the life they create.