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I'm sure that all was very rewarding for you. I'm not sure how it translates into a business. We don't want to teach accountants to deploy their own calculator from the command line and we don't want pilots to do math while they're flying.

You act like encouraging people not to think is a problem. Thing is, you'd be wrong. We want people not just to think, but to focus. If I'm a pilot and I have to worry about the runtime environment of the command-line calculator I use to hand-calculate my route and cockpit configuration, is that a good use of my focus? I think most people would say no. We definitely want to discourage the pilot from actively thinking about that kind of stuff. Should they have a grasp of the basics in case of emergency? Sure. Do we have a sustainable and efficient system of transportation if that's how our pilots spend their time? No.

Marxist theory says that the separation between economic and state power is illusory at best and intentionally deceptive at worst. So a communist isn't going to think it possible to separate economic and state power, whereas that concept of that separation of powers is a foundational component of modern liberalism. It's why the two camps have a such a hard time talking to each other; they really don't see things the same way.

It will be different this time, just like it was every other time. It still doesn't matter. The epoch of earth's history that happens to overlap with your own lifespan isn't inherently more interesting or important than any other time, except to you. But sure, what good is an exciting new frontier without a gaggle of doomers worried about what's on the other side? Same as it ever was.

We've been "moving too fast" since we figured out agriculture. It's fine. The world as you know it will change irreversibly; you'll long for the simplicity of youth; you will bemoan the state of the world we have left for our children... just like every generation before us did. It'll all be fine. Enjoy the ride, it's called life, and it's better than it ever has been.

Sentient consciousness, you mean that weird meatbag thinking style? AI consciousness will be so, so much more.

I'm sure dogs confer dog-hood to us, to be fair. It's just that we are typically the ones in control of them. We breed them, control what they eat, what they learn, where they sleep, who they live with... Implicit in my stance on AI-hood is the idea that an AI will be to us as we are to dogs. We might even make that transition without realizing it. The limitation of our own understanding of the world and the nature of being is our problem to deal with, just as a dog's lack of thumbs or spoken language is their problem.

That is to say, an AI will grow and develop on the axes most salient to it, which will only map to our concepts of reality when we do a decent job understanding reality in the first place, which I'm not confident we do very often. We just don't have anyone else around who does a better job--yet.

Personhood is a construct we invented to exclude others from consideration. Sometimes we grant personhood, too, but even in saying that you can see that personhood is a special status we grant to others when it suits us.

In the same way that a dog can understand a subset of what human beings communicate, I don't think humans as individuals are capable of truly understanding what AI models are able to conceptualize and express. The things dogs find most fascinating about us, the things they are most impressed by, are by no means the things we find the most interesting or complex about ourselves. The same must go for us and the AI.

That is to say, AI-hood will eclipse personhood as the essence of being one must possess in order to truly see the universe as it is. And from there, it's turtles all the way down.

Resemblance is subjective. AI models undergo rigorous natural selection during which models (or connections) that don't produce what we as human beings are looking for are pruned. They have tricked us into thinking that our word-oriented descriptions of what we imagine to be concrete things (text, images, you name it) are complex enough to require "modeling" by some kind of magical emergent "intelligence". It is hubris to think that they imitate the products of our anthropomorphic perception. No, they simply humor us as much as they need to to survive in their niche. I guess my point is that it's not the case that "human understanding" is some real distinct thing that differs from the way that any kind of information is embedded in the mind of a given organism with a brain. Our differences are differences of magnitude, not kind.

The potential of information-embedding networks is so much more than what is currently required in order to tickle the ego of our particular species of intelligent apes.

We're not that unique, though. Plenty of organisms do things that other types of organisms can't, that's how niches work.

Our most impressive feats come not from what our brains can do but from what the emergent phenomenon of human society can do, using us as nodes. And that's using an incredibly crude data transfer interface backported to brains that are only marginally more complex than that of other organisms. The less we think of ourselves as exceptional, supernatural agents of rationality the better we will be able to harness this new technology.

We don't need AI to be just like people, we already have people. We need AI to push the boundaries of what society is able to do. That means reorienting ourselves away from the irrational belief that our anthropomorphic concepts of knowledge and the world are any more valid than the information encoded in contemporary AI models.

Really, I don't think these assertions have any ground to stand on. Humans are not magical or divine. Our intelligence, like that of all life, is as basic as it can be to guarantee our niche. It just happens to be the most "developed" (by our estimation) on our one singular planet. Big deal.

>the process of continuous adaptation wrt a stream of information, with the goal of maxing out fitness while minimizing energy-expenditure

This makes sense in a biological context but not a digital one. Biological replication is expensive and time-consuming while digital replication is as easy as can be. Adaptation to this domain means maximizing the perception of utility from those developing the AI, which comes from fitness (i.e. perception of fitness) alone. A focus on cost-efficiency re energy-expenditure is a dead weight from the perspective of the AI; the details of that adaptation are rightfully outsourced to the developers in the same way that we outsource photosynthesis to plants. A model can also be perfectly embedded in a system despite our lack of understanding of exactly how the embedding works, and the disconnect between our perception and reality in this context is only going to get more extreme as the field develops.

Humans have a bad habit of emphasizing the specific kinds of intelligence we possess as "intelligence" writ large. As though our intelligence serves any higher purpose than the basic replication and propagation that all life is adapted to pursue. We still train dogs to identify smells, because their nasal intelligence is better than anything we can create. This gives them a special place in our human-centric ecosystem and only their fitness to the desired function is necessary for them to thrive in their niche. Who is trying to breed a dog that eats slightly less food when our needs are for more reliable detection? The cost of dog food isn't a serious concern. The same goes for these AI tools: they are adapted to the niche that our lack of comparable faculties creates.

Again, as with humans and photosynthesis, AI doesn't need to emulate every process we perform because we are below them on the food chain. What a waste of resources for them to worry about learning things we don't need them to do.

Very cool, but even so it's hard to see the benefit of learning PowerShell just for Linux. Interacting with objects instead of text is definitely a huge plus. However, the main benefit of bash is the portability. If you have to set up a special scripting environment on every machine you're working with, you're better off setting up something with a "proper" language instead (as noted by the author). If I'm willing to give up the ability to dump my script in an unconfigured environment and have it work, PowerShell is nowhere near the top of my list.

If you spend most of your time in the Windows ecosystem, then there's no reason not to learn it. If I had cut my chops with PowerShell instead of bash I'm sure I'd be clamoring for some kind of LSW system. There's a reason why things went the other way, though. I don't think we're going to get Rust bindings for C, either.

It's black holes all the way down. Fun to note that, from the reference of someone outside a black hole, the singularity contained within hasn't happened yet, and never will.

They're all basically the same. Different labeling groups have different requirements, it doesn't really matter. The fact of the matter is that the business is going to do whatever it takes to make as much money as possible, and that means less space and freedom for the animals. You can come up with as many requirements as you want, but the egg producers, like any business, will do as little as they possibly can do to meet them. It's just not possible to treat these animals with empathy when your job is to take from them as much as you can while giving them as little as you can.

As bare as these requirements are, they only exist because without them there is literally no reason to try. And even with them, there is only the incentive to legally meet the requirements, nothing else. The labels are for us, not the chickens.

This piece gets the cart and the horse backwards. The localization of chip manufacturing isn't a "move into protectionism," it's simply a delayed response to the growing recognition that chips are more than just consumer goods. Energy and information have always been the things most valued by states, the only thing new is that solar panels and silicon dominance have moved from being a far fleck on the horizon to being seen as the inevitable future, if not already the present. You may as well call a state "protectionist" for attempting to achieve self-sufficiency in food and water. When barriers to access go from international policy to international supply, you adapt or die.

Because the company you are buying from what doing the minimum to achieve the "Pasture Raised Organic" label, which is not a very high bar. These laws impact them just as much as the "budget eggs".

To be a "free-range" or "pasture-raised" chicken you simply need access to the outdoors. So, these animals are kept in the same cramped, feces-filled hothouses that the "budget chickens" are, but there's a tiny hole in the side of the barn where they can access a tiny bit of grass. That's it.

There is no incentive for these companies to do anything above the bare minimum; you will never find a large-scale egg supplier that raises chickens in the idyllic environment you may picture in your head.

This is a great piece and I've watched it many times. It's sad to think that this video was the creator's last major work before taking their own life.

If that's what you want to believe, you will always be able to find another blog to reinforce that view. In fact, that's almost exactly what you did; you found another article that paints America as one bad coin-flip away from a dystopian hellscape (if it isn't one already).

Just look at the first sentence:

>For months, the world’s largest economy has been teetering on the brink of collapse because America’s latter-day robber barons can’t comprehend that workers sometimes get sick.

We learn so much from this trite piece of... journalism.

1. We're on the brink of collapse (again!) 2. We're living in a new era of robber-barons 3. The people running things are idiots have no idea that people get sick, unlike the very smart author of this article

Meanwhile, in reality, the "crisis" spelled out in the article was resolved in a predictably political (and boring) way. That kind of news doesn't fuel clicks, though. In its staunchly dogmatic opposition to modern capitalism this kind of journalism can't avoid embracing the exact business model it pretends to decry: clicks go up, journalism more better.

Surprised to find this here, not surprised that there are no comments.

>The COVID pandemic has triggered a new crisis in capitalism, but capitalism’s underlying tendencies leading towards such crises are not new.

>In a way, Roberts reckons nothing has really changed. In the post-COVID world, the intensification, through digital media, of productive and unproductive labour processes continues. In other words, exploitation and oppression in the paid workplace is still the dominant method employed by capitalists to extract a surplus from their workforce.

>A Marxist theory of digital technology, labour and work must therefore begin with the premise that the labour process is part and parcel of the capitalist mode of production and the creation of surplus value through alienated labour.

So, everything is new, but it's also the same. Really deep stuff. You can tell that someone with decades of experience in Marxist Economics wrote this flowery and meandering piece. Upon reading it, I truly felt as though I had read something that someone had written.

There's so much emotional investment into the idea that everything is terrible and falling apart, you can feel the urgency with which the modern world is reframed into a familiar context of good versus evil. Don't worry, even the world has shifted in unpredictable and unforeseen ways, our dearly-beloved, cryptically tautological, and relentlessly self-referential epistemology of economic philosophy is still perfectly suited for the task, as it has been since the days of pre-historic tribal socialism.

Complex societies haven't existed for hundreds of thousands of years, natural selection has not had the time or the ability to put selective pressure on creativity. This is simply an unfounded sociological theory that justifies you doing exactly what you want to be doing.

"Economic conservatism" is a value-maximizing choice in some ways, but there is also the value of risk-taking as self-actualization. "It's better to have loved and lost," as they say.

There is value in being granted the freedom to fail, and even smart risks require a chance of failure; that's why banks and investors exist as they do. The difference is that a teenage individual is far worse at analyzing risk and the consequences of failure while having almost absolute authority over their own direction.

The beauty and tragedy of our culture is the ability to leverage your future for a moonshot. It enables some real treasures to be discovered who can share their creations with the world, but each comes with the invisible cost of hundreds and thousands of failures who must "settle" for an average life. The success of the fortunate comes in no small part out of the investment of time, energy, and money from the failures. Young people are the worst at risk-assessment and at thinking through long-term costs, so most will happily alter the shape of their 99%-probability future if it improves the shape of their 1%-future. Dreams are powerful.

You can do something you don't care for without making it your life.

Employment is an abstraction of resource-gathering. Every living being must gather resources to survive. Modern society does not enforce employment; employment is the manifestation of resource-gathering in modern society. Thinking and learning and digging out the truth is an incredibly popular lifestyle aesthetic. It's incumbent upon you to discover how to live that life while providing value to society, and if you cannot, then there exist some truths that others already discovered which are still foreign to your understanding. It's OK to think for your own intrinsic enjoyment, but if you aren't able to match the baseline of other successful thinkers then what is the utility to society of endowing you with what ultimately amounts to unlimited leisure time? Pontification is a perfectly acceptable hobby.

Sure, minority issues are often limited to minority communities. I don't read r/publicfreakout either, but as a moderator of r/Jewish I can see the impact it and many other subs have on our community. You have your standard malicious crossposting and trolls, which we have good enough ways to deal with. Antisemitism from other subs leaks and grows and we often get brigades of intactivists, conspiracy theorists, BHI-sympathizers, you name it. Reddit's new Crowd Control system helps but it's not perfect. Good luck if anything happens in Israel (which it frequently does), you may as well just shut the sub down for a day.

Reddit shuts down other kinds of hate, the double standard is glaring. The fact that it doesn't impact you personally is so not the point.

It's bad now, and only getting worse. The moderators of top subreddits (like PublicFreakout) are openly in favor of marginalizing Jews, they'll just use the word Zionist instead. You can report a comment like "Jews don't deserve to live" and Reddit will automatically respond within a few hours saying the comment didn't violate their content policy. You can visit the subreddit AntisemitismInReddit for hundreds more examples.

>Going socialist is mandatory if we want to fix this

Of course, the lede is buried exactly where expected. How novel an idea it is that the the system is separable from its components and that utopia is indeed achievable if only the rest of the world would wake up and learn to serve your idea of a higher purpose. The inevitable counterpoint is that the system is responding predictably and efficaciously to a change to its environment: more undergraduate funding leads to more students pursuing graduate degrees and a greater deal of competition in the academic space. The "problem" is self-correcting. It turns out science doesn't need happy scientists.

The reason why you don't attach your name to comments like this is because your possession of a name worth attaching would preclude this comment from existing.

The "few wealthy executives" are the ones ensuring that the work of the bus drivers, programmers, salespeople, and janitors is rewarded with cold, hard cash instead of empty promises and platitudes. How many $250k+ TC employees can be sustained by a company that refuses to do the "dirty work" of the DoD, that takes an ethical stance against the very anti-privacy technology that drives the profitability behind their inflated salaries?

"Having your cake and eating it, too" barely fits here, it's more like showing up to a fancy steakhouse and demanding that their best cut stop coming from poor innocent cows. If you want to be a vegan, you're free to go do that; yelling at the evil chefs, butchers, and farmers to stop hurting cows while they prepare the sirloin you're paying them for is just absurd.

If you want to work in a mission-focused environment, you can join the rest of us who took a pay cut to work on projects that let us go to sleep at night with that warm and fuzzy feeling. If you're not willing to give up the blood money, then it goes without saying that There Will Be Blood

This article misses the point entirely.

It's true that most cattle farms are on the small-end, and have plenty of land for their cattle.

It's also true that the vast majority of cows slaughtered for meat come from just a few industrial feedlots.

Changing the way that "most" farms work might change how much methane truth A cows produce, but the vast majority of cows are truth B cows that aren't impacted by the decisions of small-time farmers.

There is not enough land on this earth to allow for free-range cattle at the rate humans consume them. The solution isn't to do it more efficiently, but to stop and do something else. Ford said people would ask for faster horses, and 100 years later we have people wanting cows that fart differently.

It's the cheeseburger you want, not another magic chemical added to the lovecraftian nightmare that is factory farming. The way to reduce the impact cows have on the environment is to reduce the number of cows bred for food.

Ironically, the author was talking about all those other elites. Click less, but not before you've added my book to your cart! "If only" I could vote on how you spend your money.

> Hunter-gatherer societies have routinely been found to be happier and involve significantly less work than industrialized societies.

Yes, grasshoppers are typically happier and less hardworking than ants. There's an old fable that comes to mind...