jasonhansel

Yeah, I understand passing a law that is intentionally designed to apply to only one company. But it's odd for a law to just name the company.

I'm rather surprised that you can write a law calling out one particular company by name and applying solely to that one company, as the Montana bill does. How common is this?

Let's just say he's extremely controversial: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/policy-and-politics/2337379...

An excellent case of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.

> And if they tried, they would hobble the companies involved.

Well, yeah, that's the point of regulation: to limit corporate behavior. There are plenty of other highly-regulated industries in the US; why shouldn't AI be one of them?

If unelected CEOs have more power than the democratically elected government, we aren't in a democracy. That's the problem.

Why would cropping alter the file in-place? That would presumably leave the image corrupted if (say) your phone died during the cropping process; it would seem much better to save the cropped image separately and then overwrite the original file atomically. After all, it's the same amount of data to write either way.

The issue is that most "underground" groups do not have access to top researchers or experienced engineers; those tend to be public figures, or people who want to become public figures. Furthermore, complete secrecy requires tightly restricting communication in a way that makes collaboration even within an organization harder; note how terrorist groups have to operate in isolated "cells."

I'm sure that anyone could replicate GPT-4, but creating radical new advances would be very hard to do in secret.

Furthermore, while many such groups (particularly state actors) have plenty of funding, for other groups it will take a great deal of time and effort to raise or steal the necessary cash in secret, potentially making the costs outweigh the the benefits. If you make a profit, you'll also need to launder the resulting profits, which reasonable crypto regulations would make harder.

Ultimately, nobody can entirely stop "underground" AI. If you think AI will bring about the singularity and destroy mankind, laws cannot stop it. But if your worries are more pedestrian, merely reducing the prevalence of such systems is more than enough.

Interesting which "groups" they care about (e.g. mainstream political parties).

I posted this in part because it explains why I think attempts to regulate AI (including the recently-proposed moratorium) have a decent chance of working. They won't prevent dangerous misuse of AI technology altogether, but they can substantially reduce the risks, much like with bioweapons.

The problem isn't that websites should have more text; it's that they should have more content, using things other than whitespace to establish a visual hierarchy.

I believe locking customers in to proprietary services is called "going full IBM."

Honestly, I wish websites here were more information-dense. Many sites seem to have gone all-in on adding as much whitespace as possible, making them much harder to use on (say) smaller laptops.

I agree with the general point that there is, at present, far too much uncertainty to understand the long-term effects of LLMs. It will be somewhere on the scale between "semi-useful toy," "ends white-collar work as we know it," and "accidentally destroys mankind." Beyond that, there isn't much we can say.

Sure, but some of us can only get Comcast.

I don't have an easy solution, nor does anyone else. That's the problem.

So...nobody should ever be concerned about the effects of new technologies? Ever?

"Curtail but not stop" sounds like a good, realistic goal.

For an excellent example of how this can work, check out "Barriers to Bioweapons": https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2017/06/30/book-review-barri...

If there's one thing Microsoft is known for, it's "spearheading proper regulatory and policy systems"!

Or--wait for it--they care more about money and/or fame than about AI safety.

I'm skeptical. It seems like this could just be the result of increasing epistemic humility, rather than a shift away from rationality per se.

I get the sense that they are trying very carefully not to sound like climate change denialists, so that they won't get conflated with people much further from the scientific consensus. If they just said "the IPCC models are BS," they would likely be dismissed out of hand, at least in the scientific community.

Reminder that one of EA's core supporters is a fan of scientific racism: https://twitter.com/ArsonAtDennys/status/1362153191102677001

For some more context: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Scott_Alexander#Race_and_IQ

"Unfortunately, high interest rates have reduced our access to capital, and high-risk investments are among the worst affected."

To be clear, The Witches is full of obviously intentional antisemitic tropes: https://www.heyalma.com/is-roald-dahls-the-witches-antisemit...

Over time, I think it's increasingly clear that our country made a horrible mistake in the 1980 election. Whatever happens, Carter's legacy will only continue to improve.

"Would you like to allow your toaster to make toast?"

"Please grant your refrigerator permission to store milk."

When people complain about prejudice against fat people, this is what they mean.

I fail to understand why someone's size would make their advice less credible, particularly on topics other than weight loss. If anything, being at higher risk would dispose them to take the virus more seriously.

After all, "trying to eat healthy" is rarely successful. The vast majority of dieters do not succeed in achieving long-term weight loss.