gr_norm

I wouldn't normally reply again, but please try and take my arguments in the good faith and appeal to the heart and humanity that they were given. I think you're quite capable of reading what I've written and responding to it coherently; consequently, I also think you must be aware that you haven't done this in the heat of the disagreement. It's only if we're charitable, not cynical, about this stuff that the world may improve. Thanks. :)

Anyone with kids could tell you that this is an ethically vacant position to hold. Particularly given the social network effects of not being on these platforms and the addiction engineering that goes into keeping you on them, especially at an age when you're prone to feeling insecure about your place in the world. The effects are pronounced in children, but still hold for adults.

Anyway, I think I've said all I possibly can to educate you. I hope you can take something from it.

This is tired and reductivist reasoning deployed only by those rationalizing wrongs, and immediately recognizable by nearly everybody as such. My kids could tell you what's wrong with this thinking. I believe that working a job where I would knowingly contribute to mass mental illness (including but not limited to inducing teenage depression and body image issues leading to suicide), the destruction of liberal democracy and free society, mass surveillance unlike anything constructed before in the history of mankind, and even genocide falls on the wrong side of the line. If you have convinced yourself otherwise, this is a weight you must carry. Acting so callously against your fellow humans always exacts a price, knowingly or not; it requires destroying part of your capacity to care for other people.

Nope, sorry, I have absolutely had the option to do something similar and emphatically declined. I generally don't care to tell anyone this, either, outside the rare instances when it organically comes up as it did here. I want to see myself as a good person with a positive effect (as much as feasible) on the world, and taking such jobs is deeply incompatible with that.

I am completely willing to forgive Meta (and Palantir etc) employees who quit their job and donate their blood money (all wages above some low multiplier of median US SWE salary, adjusted for cost of living) to a reputable charity of their choice. Preferably one focused on repairing the incredible harm inflicted on other humans to which they have been a proactive and willing accomplice. Anything less than that does not constitute genuine remorse; we do not let millionaire criminals keep their illicit earnings because they apologized on the stand.

That nearly none will do this (I suspect most would be irritated at even the suggestion) tells you all you need to know about them.

edit: The disagreement is unsurprising, but I'd like to hear the reasoning against this. If you truly believed you'd wronged humanity at a job you voluntarily took for its high pay over all the others you could have easily gotten, keeping the exorbitant excesses of money should be unpalatable to you. That's how having a conscience works. Anything else is just a vacuous attempt to regain social standing.

You need tools sufficient to do the job in an economical way, optimizing for both cost and quality. That is what 'best' means. We don't give every engineer all the resources under the sun, only what is appropriate.

I suspect many will realize millions more dollars are being spent than needed to achieve the highest marginal productivity gains, and reallocate accordingly. Who wants more of their money going to developer tooling, rather than bonuses?

> Since it is the unverified SMP config of the kernel

I don't disagree with your point (formal verification does not rid you of all bugs), but this is not the subject of the linked issue. This was a bug in an unverified path.

Yeah, they showed their true colors there. This, compounded with the fact that they're the only frontier lab with no open models, tells you all you need to know. Tired of the insanely patronizing (+ conveniently and overwhelmingly self-serving) attitude out of them. My goal is to own my computing and be able to choose what to do with it.

Intentionally and silently sabotaging work done with Claude whenever Anthropic decides it is appropriate is unacceptable behavior, and comically tone deaf given the state of open models. Why on earth would I ever pay for a malicious product?

> People usually become billionaires via having “super-powers,” i.e., very unusual abilities, at least within some context.

There are certainly sometimes unusual abilities in a positive sense, but the common case likely falls closer to having an unusual degree of sociopathy. It is unclear to me how else one could view the state of perfectly solvable human suffering in the world and continue to prioritize accumulating wealth over all else, moreover and overwhelmingly at the cost of being party to the suffering itself. Indeed, I suspect having such callous disregard for your fellow person is prerequisite to encountering these unfathomable sums.

When people with an intact capacity for empathy come into huge amounts of money I think it's far more common to give a large proportion of it away (say, Jane Street workers have a culture of doing this). And thus you only stay 'comfortably' wealthy, rather than accumulating so much that it distorts society around your singular existence.

Mind linking the experiment? Sounds interesting.

You're of course correct, but it's a complex issue. See my other comment for details.

I did. I believe this sort of stuff to be, at least morally, a violation of the 4A. It's no secret that the anti-Israel protests have gotten an inordinate amount of attention from the law relative to any harm caused, and overstepping bounds like this even to catch actual criminals (as happened here) isn't worth the price paid in liberty.

My comment was targeted at the government/ICE's notorious targeting of anti-Israel protesters broadly. It's absolutely clear that we're giving up rights left and right for this total farce, the same way we did for 9/11. It is imperative to the survival of liberal democracy that this ceases.

No? I would defend the first example too, which is why I specified the idea rather than the letter (the 1A). Is it so rare to see someone who genuinely cares about this stuff, not just for those who agree with me? That I think they're an asshole is irrelevant.

Yeah. It's not cool to be principled anymore, I guess...

I've noticed many right-leaning tech types give quite a lot of lip service to free speech when it's about someone getting banned from a mailing list for being an asshole, and not so much when it's the government quashing protest against genocide. I'll personally always defend the idea of free speech, no matter the side.

Yes, this has little to nothing to do with borrow checking or memory/concurrency safety in the sense of Rust. Uncharitably, the author appears not to have a solid technical grasp of what they're writing about, and I'm not sure what this says about the rest of the language.

I'm not a China defender, but sidelining the concerns and needs of its citizens isn't why China is able to do things like high speed rail or build high density infrastructure in general. Lots there view having their property taken by the government and relocated as a good thing, because it almost always happens way above market rates. There are exceptions, of course, but my impression is that it is not the norm. Feel free to correct me. This isn't a defense of China in general, but it is totally possible to have good public transit in the United States.

And mind you that China isn't unique in bootstrapping its industrial revolution by mass theft of IP. If I were you, I'd look into the stunts us Americans pulled during our industrialization. The sad fact of the matter is that the government of this country no longer works for its own people, and that's why so many things are far below par. For many things, we _could_, but simply _don't_.

I like Gnome. I prefer my desktop to be designed around one unifying philosophy instead of a hodgepodge of customizations which don't work well together. The Gnome team has done pretty well at avoiding the classic Linux issues with the latter, though it doesn't win them any favors from people who would've been using KDE or some tiling WM anyway.

He wants to reach as large an audience as possible, and being perfectly principled isn't the way to go. Self-hosted platforms are great if you want to preach to the choir.

> I'm not interested in what "PL (programming language) people" have to say about it. They dislike all generic/parametric polymorphism implementations except their pet language that no one uses.

That's strange. I seem to recall the PL community invented the generics system for Java [0,1]. Actually, I'm pretty sure Philip Wadler had to show them how to work out contravariance correctly. And topically to this thread, Rob Pike asked for his help again designing the generics system for Go [2,3]. A number of mistakes under consideration were curtailed as a result, detailed in that LWN article.

There are countless other examples, so can you elaborate on what you're talking about? Because essentially all meaningful progress on programming languages (yes, including the ones you use) was achieved, or at least fundamentally enabled, by "PL people".

[0] https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/gj/

[1] https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/gj/Documents/gj-oopsla...

[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.11710

[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/824716/

An overview of what? It's entertaining to me when I come away understanding something more than I did before. I expected a high level explanation of the papers, or the faintest intuition behind the phenomenon your comment talked about.

If you watched the video, it doesn't actually say anything besides restating variants of "thinking tokens aren't important" in a few different ways, summarizing a distantly related blog post, and entertaining some wild hypotheses about the future of LLMs. It's unclear if the producer has any deeper understanding of the subject; it honestly sounded like some low grade LLM generated fluff. I'm simply not used to that level of lack-of-substance. It wasn't a personal attack against you, as indicated.

Wow, my first ever video on AI! I'm rather disappointed. That was devoid of meaningful content save for the two minutes where they went over the Anthropic blog post on how LLMs (don't) do addition. Importantly, they didn't remotely approach what those other papers are about, or why thinking tokens aren't important for chain-of-thought. Is all AI content this kind of slop? Sorry, no offense to the above comment, it was just a total waste of 10 minutes that I'm not used to.

So, to anyone more knowledgeable than the proprietor of that channel: can you outline why it's possible to replace thinking tokens with garbage without a decline in output quality?

edit: Section J of the first paper seems to offer some succint explanations.

That's fair, I respect that view. :)

Indeed, my view is heavily American-centric. And the trends of the past-- which you're right about-- may not apply to the future given increasing wealth inequality, the cost-of-living crisis, and the climate crisis (for which undoubtedly the poorest of us will be forced to shoulder most of the burden).

I'm explicitly not saying this work shouldn't be done, it should! But it does not exist in a vacuum, and it would be silly to pretend that it is not colored by vastly unequal access to modern healthcare. The reason I get excited about technology is because of the potential it holds for making us all happier and freer to do the things we like for longer. We are lost if we do not at least speak about the thunderclouds on the horizon for this philosophy of technology.

Certainly, you may choose to conduct yourself like this. I won't stop you! And other people who might've otherwise seen your point will be turned away from it. I prefer to have constructive conversations with people I view as equals, not stupid or infantile.

Observe that the replies to my post do engage with the argument I made.

Do point out where that was said, and I will be happy to correct it! It's important to have nuanced opinions and discussions about things.

"Effective Altruism", something I find myself aligned with but not to the extremes taken by others.

The EA community is generally incapable of self-awareness. The academic-but-totally-misinformed tone is comparable to reading LLM output. I've stopped trying to correct them, it's too much work on my part and not enough on theirs.

An absolutely terrible and tone-deaf way to phrase that thought, but the fact of the matter is that most of the world (you and I included, in all likelihood) will not get access to this sort of thing in our lifetimes. Not because modern medicine won't have been there yet, but because our lives (and those of our children) are simply seen as being worth significantly less than a rich person's desire to become richer.

How many people can even afford to get multiple opinions for a weird lump on their back? Or go to the dentist for a strange toothache? How many people can afford to get consistent exercise and eat healthy? How many lives would be saved or at least massively bettered? We already have the means to extend the life expectancy of the average person, and it's not being used. Obviously this is a wonderful medical advance, but it's depressing to wonder who it's for.