kalkin

Right. Nobody makes a Pascal's wager-style argument in _favor_ of investing in AGI. People have sometimes made one against building AGI, on existential risk grounds. The OP author is about as confused on this as the water usage point... But the appetite for arguments against AI (which has legitimate motivations!) is so high that people are willing to drop any critical thinking.

Where do those numbers come from?

I don't think this robots.txt is valid:

  User-agent: Googlebot PetalBot Bingbot YandexBot Kagibot
  Disallow: /bomb/\*
  Disallow: /bomb
  Disallow: /babble/\*

  Sitemap: https://maurycyz.com/sitemap.xml

I think this is telling the bot named "Googlebot PetalBot Bingbot YandexBot Kagibot" - which doesn't exist - to not visit those URLs. All other bots are allowed to visit those URLs. User-Agent is supposed to be one per line, and there's no User-Agent * specified here.

So a much simpler solution than setting up a Markov generator might be for the site owner to just specify a valid robots.txt. It's not evident to me that bots which do crawl this site are in fact breaking any rules. I also suspect that Googlebot, being served the markov slop, will view this as spam. Meanwhile this incentives AI companies to build heuristics to detect this kind of thing rather than building rules-respecting crawlers.

The weirdest thing about the zero-sum rhetoric to me is: when one person is demanding to benefit at the expense of someone else, if I'm neither of them, why am I supposed to care?

Suppose I'm not an American--like plenty of HN commenters--or alternatively that (as in reality) I am an American but I have good reasons to think that the personal benefit I derive from the presence of immigrants is greater than the cost to me as an individual, even were I to concede more generic economic arguments about wage competition. Then... why am I supposed to prioritize the interests of American tech workers over foreign immigrants?

I don't in general endorse an "I got mine, screw you" approach, nor one that says "hey GDP is going up so screw the losers", but if someone else is taking exactly that attitude just with a nationalistic inflection, it's hard to extend them a lot of empathy.

> Immigration helps the countries top-line metrics, but it rarely helps the citizens inside the country.

What study does one "have to do" to support _this_ claim?

I'm not quickly finding whether Kyle Fish, who's Anthropic's model welfare researcher, has a PhD, but he did very recently co-author a paper with David Chalmers and several other academics: https://eleosai.org/papers/20241104_Taking_AI_Welfare_Seriou...

The second article is marginally more on point - 24% fewer crashes for vehicles with lane keeping assist (so my guess at the meaning of the 23% stat may have been wrong). But the 95pct confidence interval is 2-42% and the study acknowledges that its efforts at controlling for confounding factors in the type of cars that have this feature are imperfect. It also took place in the US, so there's certainly no mandate for haptic feedback and I suspect very few cars had it. This is marginally more helpful evidence but not very good, I think--it seems very plausible that audible lane keeping features are helpful and moving your steering wheel (which sounds terrifying) is unhelpful.

As an anecdote, I crashed a car as a teenager thanks in part to panicking (unnecessarily) when a rough highway started moving the car's wheels (which I noticed of course via the steering wheel) without my intending it. Fortunately there were no injuries.

What the first article actually says:

"Lane departure warning and prevention systems could address as many as 23% of fatal crashes involving passenger vehicles."

That appears to be something like a stat about how many fatal crashes involve unintentionally leaving a lane. It provides approximately zero evidence in favor of specifically mandating haptic feedback from the steering wheel.

> I find it difficult to imagine this

Luckily, this is something that can be studied and has been. Sticking a stereotypically Black name on a resume on average substantially decreases the likelihood that the applicant will get past a resume screen, compared to the same resume with a generic or stereotypically White name:

https://www.npr.org/2024/04/11/1243713272/resume-bias-study-...

Evidence?

The Homeland Security Secretary today described LA as a "city of criminals". It's hard to see how it could be anything but willful ignorance or self-delusion at this point to think that the Trump administration's intention is to protect LA residents.

Have any federal buildings been attacked?

I'm confused-do you support peaceful protest, or do you think that protests always descend into anarchy and require assault rifles to be brought out to kill some people?

What if police attack a peaceful protest--say trampling a lone person with horses (https://www.newsweek.com/la-protestor-stomped-police-horseba...) or shooting a reporter standing by herself (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reporter-los-angeles-protests-r...)? Is there an assault-rifle shaped solution to this kind of anarchy?

If you automatically lump anyone who makes an argument that AI is capable - not even good for the world on net, just useful in some tasks - into "the AI crowd", you will tautologically never hear that argument from anywhere else. But if you've been paying attention to software development discussion online for a few years, you've plausibly heard of tptacek and kentonv, eg, from prior work. If you haven't heard of them in particular, no judgement, but you gotta have someone you can classify as credible independently of their AI take if you want to be able to learn anything at all from other people on the subject.

As far as I can see this only makes sense if they actually believe that AI will accelerate production code that people will want to pay to keep running. Maybe they're wrong about that, but it's got to be sincere, or the strategy would be incoherent.

Some days it seems like the most vulgar Marxist would be more rigorous about doing a who-benefits analysis before using that to dismiss an argument than the median HN commenter. Fly.io benefits from AI hype because... more slop code gets written and then run on their servers? tptacek would burn his HN cred for that? Really?

https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/secret-scanning/sec... is one option

There's nothing in my comment to "exactly" in support of your point. If the US backs away from Europe it may be more likely to encourage Ukrainian surrender. Russia may be more likely to attack Poland. Germany may be more likely to develop its own nuclear deterrent. Or none of these things may happen. Extrapolating from tariffs to world peace demands a bit more than loose speculation at the continental level.

But... they can? If Ukraine can fight Russia to a standstill, a fully mobilized Europe clearly at least has a shot. Unless it escalates to nuclear weapons and everyone loses... But you need at least an argument if you want to say that is less likely without any initial US involvement, it's not obvious.

I don't think the left has been automatically in favor of tariffs--or at least I'd appreciate evidence for that claim. The complaints about free trade deals that I've seen have tended to be about provisions that treated various labor and environmental regulations as restraints on trade. It's fair to say that left-liberal people are paying more attention to the downsides of tariffs than they were, but I don't think it's a simple reversal of positions.

No, a "view that humanity ought to be replaced" is Sutton's, not an EA view. I'm not quite sure how you read that otherwise, except that you seem very angry. I sure hope our alternatives are better than human extinction or total control by elites...

> all of their lofty accomplishments get nullified by anyone

I don't think it's a question of whether their achievements are nullified, but as you mention, how to weight the opinions of various people. Personally, I think both a Turing award for technical achievement and a view that humanity ought to be replaced are relevant in evaluating someone's opinions on AI policy, and we shouldn't forget the latter because of the former.

(Also, this isn't about Sutton's personal life - that's a pretty bad strawman.)

Sure, and his other views - in the scope of his professional expertise but also quite relevant to, uh, other humans - seem relevant in an HN thread about the Turing award. This place isn't exactly restricted to technical discussion of the details of RL algorithms, and it's pretty fair for humans to have views on whether we ought to be replaced.

It's not just one Youtube video, it's a repeatedly expressed view:

https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/1575619655778983936

Valuing technological advance for its own sake "beyond good and bad" is an admirably clear statement of how a lot of researchers operate, but that's the best I can say for it.

Ah, I read that as him saying the quality isn't as good-equivalent to a model with 50% less compute. But you might be right.

Where does he imply that it's 2x larger than Sonnet?

Seriously. I did not realize Gizmodo was at that point with opportunistic clickbait, but apparently it is.

edit to expand: from the headline I thought this was going to be Bonta coming out against the argument that AI training is fair use, which really would at least arguably apply to "almost everything" the companies make. But no, he's just saying not to do things that AFAICT they already all ban in TOS.

Incentivizing people to build homes that are likely enough to burn down as to be economically uninsurable is an absolutely wild abuse of the term "solidarity". Solidarity is the idea that an injury to one is an injury to all, not the idea that choices should have no consequences and the environment shouldn't constrain humans; the only way you can possibly sustain a world in which people actually treat an injury to one as an injury to all, is together with some effort to avoid people from gratuitously exposing themselves to injury.

Half to GiveDirectly and half to a variety of local organizations near where I live (tbh, not all ones I would have selected, but it was a shared decision with my spouse).

I don't think it was particularly brave, even. I mentioned it just to try to normalize it. I'm not exactly living like an ascetic and I don't understand why people feel they need so much more.

> a lingering question of whether any of it truly matters, especially knowing I could stop tomorrow without significantly impacting my wellbeing.

A suggestion for your consideration, or that of anyone in a similar position: give enough of the money away that this stops being true, and find fulfilling paid work (not necessarily in that order). I strongly suspect, from my own experience, that there's an amount of savings that you can keep that is adequate to remove any worry about winding up on the streets (or being stuck with work that actually turns out to suck, etc), without making further earning feel pointless to your own comfort. I think there's an ethical case for doing this even if it made you less happy, but even better if it's win-win.