hliyan

In a world of continuous population growth, there is some excuse (but not justification) for running governments at deficit, which is essentially a bet that future generations will produce enough to meet their needs and fulfill debt obligations from past generations. When population growth halts, so should deficit spending. Smith himself, in The Wealth of Nations: "What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom."

Another important story hiding in there:

> Six weeks before my daughter was born, my employer of 13 years laid off my entire division. Ramses had just put up the down payment on a bigger home for our growing family. My unemployment meant he was facing the mortgage payments and managing a remodel on his own, while we prepared to welcome another child.

Does anyone remember a Windows game called Yoda Stories? I had such fond memories of it that I tried to find the game or an emulator version multiple times. No luck. It was an elegant game from a more civilized time where resolution, shading, texture and frame rate did not define how good a game was.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJT4sdifLXM

Yes. The user of a machine is responsible for due diligence before the decision to use the machine. Unless the operational limitations and fault rate of the machine is withheld from the public.

I feel for you. We didn't know how good we had it. Wooed by multiple companies right out of university, good salary, comfortable, fulfilling work (some nights though), fast path to car and home ownership and long term financial security. Few rules/restrictions more perks compared to other professions. We were spoiled. Perhaps this is why the current crop of tech leaders are behaving like spoiled brats.

I was about to post this thought on the latest "We're moving from tech/architecture X to Y" post on the HN front page today, but now I feel it belongs here.

I was recently chatting with a friend about how we used to do so much more with so few developers: 20 years ago, we developed mission critical, real time software (trading systems) in C++ with team of a couple of dozen developers. The core trading kernel team was four people. An in-house distributed process orchestration tool (both front end and back end written in C++) were two guys. I myself once managed to produce an entire post-trade risk management system for futures contracts in a couple of months, working alone. Today, I see teams of 60-80 working on web and mobile applications where the vast majority of operations are CRUD, with some transaction/queue complexity at the extremities.

I think the difference is tech churn. Back then, what few dependencies we had in terms of either runtime libraries or development time tools, were stable: the standard library, compiler, unix commands and bash scripts, and some internal libraries. Much of our time and focus went into figuring out the right algorithms and data structures, with coding coming in second. Very little time was spent on selecting, configuring, updating, rearchitecting or replacing tech stacks and tools.

Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.

(1) As I understand, the first modern copyright law was in 1700's Britain, which broke a printer monopoly and shifted control of works from publisher to author. It also meant that an author and their family would not starve while their work was still generating revenue for the publisher (who would have outright purchased and owned the work).

(2) This probably led to an proliferation of authors and new works, motivated by the prospect of royalties. In some cases, it enabled talented authors who would otherwise languish in obscurity. In other cases, it produced works of little value beyond revenue generation, by catering to whatever immediate demands for consumption that existed in the market.

(3) Obviously, intellectual pursuits, invention, creative writing, art all existed before the 1700. But as per (2), it probably greatly accelerated them, while also diluting quality.

(4) Mass production and distribution led to economies of scale, which meant a larger portion of the population now had access to such works.

If these four propositions are true, then it follows that abolishing (or severely curtailing) copyright will not outright eliminate any creative human output, but will probably mean that as a whole, humanity will take longer to produce the same output. Since the cost of production and distribution of digital media is now a negligible fraction of the cost of the creation process, this is unlikely to negatively impact availability.

Given that the world could probably afford to slow down a bit, perhaps some sort of curtailment of exclusive ownership of intellectual output might be a good thing.

According to Thomas Wolf:

> Leven and Tristan worked over several months on one of the Millenium Prize Problems with various AIs to reach final interesting results. OpenAI apparently heard about it in the last days and prompted their latest models to work on the direction Leven and Tristan found fruitful. They then tried to push for controlling communication of the result and dropping Leven from authorship with some very bad taste social pressure.

(1) https://x.com/Thom_Wolf/status/2097215782484607029

(2) https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/11723341370570119...

I argued this in 2015:

> "...why I believe you will not escape ads by paying for your content: people who can afford to pay for content are people with money, or people with buying power, in other words, the exact same people advertisers look to target. The more buying power you demonstrate, the more advertisers will target you. So the more you pay to keep ads away, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in..."

I've now completely stopped engaging with anyone on that platform that I can't reasonably traced back to a real person. If any non-real-name account says anything that remotely feels bad-faith in replies, I block them. Having been on the Internet since the mid 90's when it was the frontier, and everyone helped/trusted everyone else, the policy feels very wrong. But unfortunately Twitter has given no tools or alternatives to deal with the situation.

I think the model has an unusual preference for the Korean Peninsula before Christ. A number of commenters, including myself, draw from this area and period.

Strangely, I too, died in the Korean Peninsula at 8 months old, but circa 6000 BCE.

Agreed. Author should not be using this term. A world model, as I understand, is what an LLM is missing that a human brain has: in addition to a linguistically described world, we also posses a sensory model of the world, a physics model so to speak, against which the random token/thought chains generated by our brains can be validated.

How did they go from these founding principles to the current state? Astonishing.

> An appreciation that the world remains a dangerous place in which our power must be exercised with prudence, and where the primary threats to our security come from states that deny freedom to their own people

This is nonsense. The human mind cannot visualize more than 3 dimensions. It can perfectly comprehend any number of dimensions as long as they are represented in a vector space. In fact, that's what linear algebra does.

Might not be in the particular case, but what are your thoughts on the following (just to name a few recent examples): Cambridge Analytica, Net Neutrality, DMCA?

A good thing about the "you're the author regardless of the tool you used to produce the code" policy is that if a developer repeatedly submits poor quality AI generated code, one does not blame the model or the agent, one bans/terminates the developer.

Somewhat of an aside: it's ironic the that some of the clearest, most concise technical documentation I now find on the Internet has come out that way because it was written for a machine: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bigskysoftware/htmx/v4.0.0...

Human readers don't receive this level of care or attention.

That is precisely what laws do by definition and have done in practice, from the Code of Hammurabi to this day.

Democracy was also extremely hard to imagine and considered impractical (even in the face of ancient Greek evidence) a few hundred years ago. And then it became the norm.

Agreed. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that ad-hoc legal action and regulations are just stop gap measures in a losing battle, and that any remedy needs to be more foundational. For example: mandate that every job description in any private corporation include a list of ethics responsibilities, and that employees may challenge management directives that in their view breach those responsibilities, and if management response is unsatisfactory, that employees may raise the concern to relevant authority. This will limit management/shareholder/board ability to pressure/incentivize an otherwise individually rational workforce to collectively behave like a psychopath.

Is anyone working on running neural networks on CPU architectures that are not limited by synchronous clock signals? Organic neural networks are inherently asynchronous and signals propagate through different parts of the network at their own pace.

I do love the fact that I can use this interface without touching the mouse or touchpad. Between the /, Enter and Esc keys, I can pretty much get to anywhere within the application. Even within settings, you can just start typing "Line..." and it will take you to Line Width setting. Wish more applications did this. Easier to develop, easier on the resources, and easier to automate. Alas, it doesn't help maximize engagement metrics, so most consumer applications never do.

I understand that this is the common (and perhaps the prevailing) interpretation, but my question has always been: once you subtract action potential and expected ends, what remains of the concept of "good"? We cannot simply end the inquiry by saying "good will" because it still doesn't clarify what it is that one wills. Disclaimer: not a Kantian scholar.

A good point, but (a) this merely sounds like a modification of the golden rule: do unto all others, without exception, as you would have done unto you, and (b) the rule isn't an end in itself because the end lies behind the "should" (e.g. why should someone not lie to me).

Hence my qualification at the start. My problem with deontological ethics is that the justification of it abruptly hits an impenetrable wall, i.e. the rule or the duty, unless you appeal to some benefit or prevention of harm to rational beings. Even in the Metaphysics of Morals, the whole concept of duty would be arbitrary if not in reference to rational beings. But happy to be corrected.

Not unlike "delay, deny, defend".

Surprised this article didn't explain the categorical imperative before appealing to it. Here's my interpretation of it, although some would say that (4) is a utilitarian interpretation(even though it's globally utilitarian) and therefore it is not truly categorical.

(1) We all know that doing what's best for oneself does not count as doing something "good" or "right". Even the worst psychopath or monster will do what is best for themselves. "What benefits me" is not a principle on which to decide how to act morally.

(2) The most basic moral principle might be "do no harm", i.e. you are free to do whatever you want as long as you do not cause others harm. This is something that most normal human beings instinctively recognize as a valid way to decide between good and bad actions. This is the absolute minimum moral compass you must possess in order to participate in civilized society.

(3) One level up is the golden rule, or "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or treating others the same way you would want to be treated. This is generally recognized by many religions as the gold standard for what it means to be a good human being.

(4) Kant goes one level further. He says, basically: "before you do something, ask yourself: if everyone else in the world did what you're about to do as a matter of course, will it make the world better or worse? If it makes the world worse, then don't do it". This is a very basic formulation of Kant's Categorical Imperative.

Yes, but awful relative to... our brain's presets, which are an artifact of the world it evolved in. So in my view, there's nothing fundamental about it. Kant would say that the true nature of reality (noumena) are unknowable because our only connection to the real world is our sensory inputs, organized into perceptions within our brain (phenomena).