godwinson__4-8

It's going to be funny when there are more fatalities on the roads where people are trying to avoid the robot trucks...

Humans are such terrible drivers. Most of them don't want to drive. They want to get a private chamber to wheel them around while they look at their phones.

I'm continually shocked that people criticize autonomous vehicles along these lines... like where do you live in the US that gives you such a high opinion of human drivers? Daily dipshit human driving behaviors and a frequent cadence of bad accidents or fatalities seems the norm across major metro areas.

If more robots can drive we can actually have a hard test to pass for driving. Right now basically anyone can drive because it is too expensive to tolerate it being any different given the extent with which transportation and the economy in America is built around cars. The only people who will manually drive are people that really want to. Which is how it should be. You shouldn't be operating a vehicle if all you really want is just to appear x miles away while being able to dick around on your phone or fall asleep or whatever is causing all the lazy driving behaviors we all see around us everyday.

Why over-index on a handful of autonomous driving related fatalities? How many humans kill other humans in cars? Do we ban all cars? Why do you think robot cars will necessarily always be worse drivers than human ones?

You may be right. For my part I don't agree. I think the scale will be so much greater than the jump from 1995 to 2020. The moat will be data, or anything derived from hardware/the physical world. That is the tie back into "the ability to clone is not sufficient". You can clone Amazon app but how will you ship a package? Especially as their dominance in that area rests on their monopoly power?

Eventually they will fall too. It will just take longer. I think really the reason I disagree is simply that AI will get good enough where necessarily no human will have an edge. The super advanced ones will be on the whole time ambiently and likely adversarially self prompting. Your great idea already exists somewhere out in latent space. They will either get their first or just copy you. You will not care about anyone's edge. When you care about something you will necessarily engage with it manually. I mean this in the definitional sense. How did we know Alice cares about task x? Because she did it manually. She doesn't really care about the weather, so she just asked the computer in enough ways to make her own version of that. In the same way you wouldn't think Alice cared about Bob if she delegated correspondence to him to someone else. You know she likes him because with all her needs met and all her knowledge of the weather, she still chooses to spend time with him. For everything else compute/intelligence as utility will have you covered.

The problem with talking is it lacks rigor. It's fun to get you from 0 to 90. Then the last 10% sucks and you don't really understand how you got there.

It's an engineering problem humans and AI will solve together. The same discussion is happening in math. It's a question of meaning. In this case it's even more obvious. Fairly soon, your weather apps and your ski games are not going to be interesting. I predict within a year.

Everyone will be able to ride their own version of whatever app. They will increasingly all be good enough, so why does anyone care about your "first"? Who cares about a first when cloning is cheap?

The last 10% is always the differentiator and talking is not going to be enough. Even if it doesn't make it better for someone else, for you to care we will see people return to something like programming.

The rest of the vibe coding people will slowly drift back to being consumers, because they don't care enough and because when everything can be good enough the only thing that matters is what you want, not anyone else. If you care about something talking about it isn't good enough. You will talk to your weather app because really you don't care that much. It's rather transparently for most people a mere question of utility (do I need an umbrella today vs meteorological phenomena are so fascinating).

The optimistic part of your story isn't what you've accomplished it's that your "accomplishment" will be duplicated to the point of such eventual economy shattering irrelevancy (post bubble, post UBI) that no one will have to care.

What this synthesis of recentering human intent for activities a human wants to pursue for no good other than the intrinsic, "thing in itself" with LLM capabilities ends up looking like I'm not sure. But I am certain it will not simply be talking. Likely it will be something multi-modal, but one where users also invent their own programming languages from the axiomatic principles that most agree with their interests/intuitions.

Reminder from a lawyer (and a cop in the audience) presenting at a law school: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

Tldr: Don't talk to the police. Another reminder - familiarize yourself with your 4th, 5th and 6th amendment rights and remember to invoke them audibly (for an example of the risk of failing to do so - see Salinas v. Texas [1]) and then shut your mouth. When possible, record every interaction. Cops will lie. Do not argue or be belligerent. Invoke your rights, record, comply with any legal orders, and never physically resist. But do not agree to talk or consent to doing so. A cop on the street is neither judge nor jury. Do not surrender your rights under the pretense of a "voluntary" or "consensual" visit.

Nothing can be more patriotic in a country that fought off a King and passed the Bill of Rights than telling an armed agent of the state without a warrant who "just wants to talk" to get off your property.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salinas_v._Texas

I feel like you are missing the rather obvious or else the note implies. Luckily the law is not so rigid as to be hamstrung by such sophistry. I didn't assault you, I merely invited your face to make an acquaintance with my fist!

The reason the note works is banks don't want to pay the cost of having their employees getting their brains blown out. Passing a note with this understanding means one knows they are making a threat.

> What does this even mean?

I take it based on your other comments that the distinction between criminal and civil proceedings is suitably apparent to you?

If so I struggle to understand then why this leap is so hard for you.

You and I can have a private dispute without the government getting involved as a prosecuting party, yes? Banks are highly regulated because the state has sought fit to take an interest in how they are run. Roughly, because if a bank defrauds its numerous depositors this incurs a societal cost. Similarly, violence is also regulated, as it is inimical to the state's requisite monopoly on violence to tolerate private expressions of this power.

I simply do not get the intuition here that it is in the public interest to put this person in prison in the same way the intuition may surface in these other cases. If you disagree that is fine, but then I'm curious to hear where your intuition on this private vs public interest line is. Of course it is somewhat vague. If the public interest was clear and obvious to everyone electoral politics would not exist.

Can you offer a positive moral argument for incarceration in this case? Surely you are aware of principles around the burden of proof? Since you seem to be on the pro criminal prosecution side here why don't you take up the burden of saying you want this man to suffer in prison for his crime? I understand your frustration that I don't have all the answers. It would be a more impressive indictment if I was willing to send people to prison under such circumstances.

I take the burden of depriving a fellow citizen of their liberty in a free society rather seriously.

Do you? If so, please explain to me how you alleviate yourself of this burden in this case. I'm open to being persuaded.

No? A bank is a regulated entity in the public interest.

Pointing a gun in someone's face is also not in the public interest.

Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin? It's not even clear to me without diving into the actual case where he went from getting an edge to engaging in the alleged crime. Or what he could have done differently to preclude criminal prosecution but could have still resulted in a civil case.

More importantly, why should he have to go to prison? Why don't you make that moral argument instead of engaging in such a misread of my position.

I simply don't buy that this is like copying a $1 bill.

And I don't think you do either. I think one could construct a suitably objective test that would relegate certain instances of this sort of fraud to the civil courts where I think they belong.

Part of the problem is conflating the private Spotify ecosystem with "the system" writ large. In any event, a civil case with appropriate punishment would serve to dissuade others from taking the same action.

What does adding a prison sentence accomplish?

What part of doesn't merit a prison sentence escapes you?

I'll take all 3. It really doesn't matter. I don't want this person going to prison in my name. A criminal case is supposed to represent the public interest. A free society is meant to set a high bar to deprive someone of their liberty. The streaming platform can sue him if they like. A civil case that results in punitive damages is also understandable.

In my view, incarceration in this instance is a disgrace. The argument is a moral one, not a legalistic one.

Perhaps the statutes around wire fraud should be reformed. IDK it's not my area, and my argument doesn't rely on a legalistic interpretation, rather it suggests if the law's answer here is to put this person in prison something is wrong with the law. That is the argument. You seem to be asking me how would I codify the solution or else you have misunderstood me.

If endorsing the right of a private company to not pay the cost of replying to degenerate rage counts as sanctimony I'm happy to be labeled as such.

The feeling of amusement is mutual. Have a good day.

None of this merits a prison sentence to me.

Should be a civil case. The readiness which with the United States incarcerates is a moral disgrace. Especially given the level of criminality the government itself exercises that goes unpunished.

You people? What do you mean, you people?

If only matters of interest were limited to the things you could "absolutely fathom" how much simpler our lives would all be.

Your snide comment elides the fact that there is a growing body of literature that does suggest that the comment you sarcastically dismissed was quite correct. Especially among the "terminally online". Do you take this population to be shrinking? Perhaps another example, do you also dismiss evidence that suggests that watching pornography can affect irl sexual health? Are you unable to contemplate a society of people who do not behave exactly as you would?

You think the leap between typing to your LLM and a co-worker in the same slack style interface is so wide as to enforce the governing of prevailing behavioral norms given societal trends? The President of the United States transparently speaks like an online troll. Did you fathom this 15 years ago?

Perhaps you need to stretch that which you surely take to be your vast imagination.

No, it kind of isn't.

You are merely noting Google Maps has an imperative to be useful.

The notion of a street name is meaningless if they all have the same name. It doesn't change the fact that it's not Google's job to name them. If the government did that and postage and signs eventually changed, one would expect Google Maps to likely cease to refer to street names at all.

I often find when traveling in unfamiliar areas giving me a street name is a profoundly unhelpful manner of instruction unless there is adequate signage, and there often isn't. A more reliable way is to say something like "make the turn at the stop sign" or "at the third light". The idea that it's Google's jobs to name things as if they don't rely on a sensible state is just nonsense. If the government turns into Alice in Wonderland at the end of the day Google Maps cannot exist. Google doesn't just assign a random name to every street or deliver the mail. It's not their job. Your strawman doesn't change that it just asks what would a company do if the government went completely off the rails. It doesn't change the fact Google doesn't bear responsibility for naming these features in the first place.

Tech has been about disintermediation.

Replacing low quality intermediaries with superior automated ones at massive scale with all the associated benefits.

This is the story of obsolescence and human history.

The coming end state of which has led to this transformation from the "big data" to AI paradigm.

Now so called "knowledge work" is itself being disintermediated. No need to worry about "bullshit" desk jobs anymore. They will be gone. It turns out a stochastic sentence guesser is superior to the average knowledge worker. This will only improve and become further operationalized, with accompanying safeguards and adversarial checks. At a certain point the value is already gained. The founders have taken their massive exits. Soon it's not so special anymore. In short, intelligence becomes a utility.

The end state of all of this is the same dichotomy our earliest ancestors had already forseen: apocalypse or utopia. In the same way that credit cards were once a cool idea, now they are trite and their continued privatization is merely a private tax on almost all transactions, and as such is rather undesirable. So turn it into a utility. Just like if we all survive the coming wars, the future will be one where compute based intelligence is a public good.

Sure, what point are you making?

I'm not alleging a conspiracy. It's almost self evident emergence given the nature of a company and a government. What is Google to gain for resisting the name change? Nothing. Status quo they benefit from a service that names things according to government convention. Their map wouldn't be very useful otherwise. If the government starts renaming things why do they care? This isn't some cult in the middle of nowhere, the federal government changed the name. If liberals don't like it tough maybe learn how to not choke away another election. Why would Google fight the government on the name change? There is no upside and it's not something they care about. More importantly it's not their job.

The same logic applies to credit cards. You think the MasterCard CEO is gonna risk his plush paycheck so a handful of degenerates can beat off? He doesn't care. It's not his job to decide that question and he doesn't want it to be. If the government wants to nationalize him however, then of course he will care. It's called a trade off and ultimately all successful people learn to navigate them. It doesn't change the fundamental truth in my point that many people blame corporations for alleged sins that in truth are caused by governments. The "Gulf of Mexico" thing and "credit card censorship" being two of many examples of this confusion in our discourse.

Your governments benefit enormously from American largesse. Europe is essentially still operating in receivership to the United States

Why have almost all European leaders come to grovel before an American President they clearly despise?

When you can defend your own continent without the sight of your governments prostrating themselves to such a man I'll take your claim more seriously. Europe has been asked for decades now to act more responsibly. Now you are being forced. Instead of blaming America let's see if you guys can cobble together a path forward with waning American guarantees without recreating the internecine strife that led to the American intervention in the first place.

Nothing I am seeing out of Europe gives confidence over the next decade. Hold your own governments accountable.

This misses the mark in the same way people getting mad at Google for updating the "Gulf of Mexico" do.

You're missing the driver. It's not like Google cares or wants to change the name. They more or less have to given the public/private relationship and who is responsible for what. It's not Google's job to name bodies of water, it's not a credit card company's job to censor. And if you actually look, they aren't making that decision because they want to. They are often acting on behalf of the government.

Payment companies are even more enmeshed with the state. They often do these things to simply comply with what the government tells them to do or to get ahead of government telling them what to do. Like with some of the anti-pornography laws being drafted or passed in certain American states.

The private/public distinction really needs to come under more scrutiny here. The credit card duopoly is very much tied in with state power. This has only accelerated post 9/11 as the Treasury's mandate increasingly shifted to "national security".

Payment processors are censors because the government is. Just like Flock the government can't do certain things so it contracts with a third party. They then have an interest in protecting/promoting that party. Flock is a snoop because the police are snoops. If Flock does it and the government merely pays for it well it's not a violation of your rights. Your rights protect you against the government, not against Flock. It's the same legal backdoor. A payment processor doesn't care what you buy, why would they? They make money so long as you keep transacting. It's the government that cares.

This same dynamic happens all over the American economy because the private/public distinction can get increasingly amorphous. Your credit card is as much government spyware as your phone. But understand - the problem is not the companies, it's the majority of your fellow citizens who either don't care or actually do endorse censorship. Unless you have a solution for that trying to blame credit card companies for the problem unfortunately misses the mark. You might as well suggest Google have the authority to name bodies of water.

Not unlike the experience many Americans have of fighting their own insurance company that they already pay a monthly premium to.

The lengths insurance companies will go just to avoid adding to a deductible are, given the circumstances, rather disgusting.

They don't seem to produce any savings. Are credit card companies much different? Why are their CEOs making millions of dollars? Is it all supposed to be because of innovation in preventing fraud?

As with health insurance companies I too have found in reality their way of dealing with these things leaves much to be desired. The way they treat it seems transparently like health insurance - add minimal value upfront, then wear you down so you never actually get the service or "value" they were supposed to provide in the first place.

That shitty service is the margin padding that multi million dollar salary. Where's the innovation?

The United States government already interferes on behalf of Visa and MasterCard to maintain their duopoly across the globe.

Look at the tension between United States and Brazil on this issue with their nationalized payments system.

The fact is the most important relationship Visa and MasterCard have is the one you left unsaid - their relationship with the United States government.

As AI compute will be within 15 years.

The other parties didn't even pursue a civil case. If OpenAI "hacked" you, wouldn't you?

Perhaps the headline grabbing claims of OpenAI "hacks" are overblown? If they are causing bedlam with such glee why is no one suing them for damages? Perhaps the criminal case you envisage is less clear than the layman news is leading you to believe.

I'm still not clear where most of the alleged cases fall in terms of criminality. Yet I also know here in the United States a government tried to criminally prosecute a reporter for "computer hacking" for finding data using client-side inspect element.

Maybe encouraging the government to prosecute these "crimes" is not the virtue you think it is. Why are the counterparties not seeking a civil remedy if they think they have been a victim of a crime? Perhaps that is a more telling sign than all the people imploring the government to "do something" and come up with criminal charges.

You mostly have it right. I appreciate the response.

Now it is my turn to make sure I understand what you are saying. On that count, I think there is a remaining point where we are not understanding each other. And really the rest of the discussion hinges on this.

You say:

> I am not defending a managerial or ownership class.

But also say:

> I have talked to over 10 people at universities, SMBs, and large enterprises that are actively allocating millions of dollars to bring AI in house.

Who are these people with such authority if not the managerial or ownership class, or at the very least, their representatives?

I think what you are saying is quite plainly a defense of such interests. We sort of need to agree on that or the rest of the discussion cannot follow.

Once we align on that, I will have more to say which I believe will close the loop I have been attempting to weave.

I have been enjoying this back and forth though. Some of your points do make sense. Perhaps you are even correct. But let's be accurate about the nature of the two options we each propose, only then can we attempt to grasp some sense of the tradeoffs.

Even more evidence in the change the name corner, which I also second.

I suspect if the question was put to the LLM itself it would have flagged this. Somewhat ironic.

Let them run rampant like a D line swarming the field. Once they have sacked the quarterback of the incumbent owner class they seek to replace, that is when we storm the field brother.

I hope my metaphor makes sense apologies I don't really watch or know much about American football. The point is LLMs are too disruptive a technology for the already unequal incumbent economy to survive. It could become even more unequal. Or we may all benefit from a well timed intervention into the economic disruption it will unleash. We should probably allow them to play on for now.

The game is not over my friend. We're not even at halftime.

Let's not get too wistful here.

A lot of work is busywork and not enjoyable. LLM automation in the optimistic case (UBI) allows everyone the luxury of such effort and journey. For most people work is not "communication" it's a necessity to make sure they can eat and have shelter.

People using LLMs to get a better return and get time back in the same way corporations do is desirable.

Also most of those stories on the back of food products are fables. Don't be fooled and take caution in the instinct to valorize work in a society that has always been trending towards automation.

It's really nice that this was also something he did with his kids. The fact that his kids are grown and stopped but when they came back for the holidays they wanted to see how the city is doing is iirc the way this got out. He was mostly doing it as a way he could connect with his kids.

It also says a lot about Minecraft which of course has been said before but it makes sense this would be the game you would play to connect with all of your kids as they grow up in a supportive way.

Minecraft is really an amazing example of emergence from simple primitives and the virtue of engineering that gets out of way and lets users do the building.

I appreciate the response but I think you need to read what I wrote again.

I don't think I'm arguing with a "phantom" at all, rather you seem to suggest I want OpenAI to own the economy when I rather precisely articulated the most desirable "rug pull" (using a phrase you yourself invoked elsewhere in this discussion) would be depriving them of that very opportunity. If anyone has misread this, I would suggest it's you. We simply seem to disagree on the timing and nature of the regulatory intervention.

Are you against UBI? We've gone back and forth with each other for a bit now and I still don't have an answer to that question.

Where do you live in a hut somewhere? How are you accessing the internet?

Civilization is all about giving up control. Are roads also a mechanism to control people?

UBI is desirable and will likely only come about by the sorts of collective action that defined the labor movement. Are weekends also a "mechanism to control people"? I think you need to consult a history book, it would give you a better grasp of who is "spreading nonsense" here.

No it won't matter because if they don't someone else will.

It's like trying to stop adoption of computers by cobbling together a union of human calculators. It's an economically nonsensical position that simply comes across as denialism. It's not even desirable.

You are advocating a protection of the managerial and owner class to keep the economy needlessly balkanized. Universities are some of the greatest offenders in perpetuating inequality. Why have universities gotten more unaffordable?

Replacing most universities with federated campuses, eliminating their managers, open classrooms, LLM TAs and other resources to respect the diversity of the student population, etc. would be better for the world, not worse. If you want to take the side of the incumbents in an economy already teeming with inequality be my guest.

The saving grace of the approaching compute as utility end state is the destruction of the class of interests you purportedly represent. With mass layoffs will come mass demand for UBI, and the destruction of universities that are in truth the ones doing the rug pulling you mentioned elsewhere. People complain about public incentives for AI? What about schools? Has the quality of schooling increased with price? And I'm supposed to be taking your side?

The ultimate rug pull is one we should all look forward to - the polity saying, thank you for your hard work Mr. Altman, Mr. Musk, Mr Whoever but this technology belongs to everyone now. It would only be right given we all know they are trained on a corpus that really should be considered a public good.

If LLMs become the "everything app" they will have to either be nationalized by the state (UBI), or the billionaires are going to kill us all with their robot soldiers. The battle is not over technology, it's about ownership. The owners you represent are less desirable because their continued existence is further behind the most desirable end state, and they themselves are only desirable if you assume only the worst possible futures will come to pass. I believe if UBI is progressively scaled enough over the years enough billionaires will be satisfied to refrain from mass homicide, as has happened before when wealth generating technologies essentially became state utilities.

Good luck in your efforts. It's always possible my model of the world is incorrect. A meaningfully informative rejoinder in that respect would be welcome.