1,222 karma · joined September 5, 2019
Which of course nobody would do? Unfortunately, those are the circumstances in which H2 is made from fossil fuels and likewise the circumstances under which it is combusted in turbines. You can't just handwave materials compatibility away.
INT. JERRY’S APARTMENT
GEORGE: Somebody hacked my apes. They’re all gone.
JERRY: All gone?
GEORGE: Every single one! Funged!
JERRY: You can’t just funge a man’s ape!
GEORGE: That’s society for you - people are sick!
[KRAMER enters smoking a cigar in an ape costume]
GEORGE: What the fuck Kramer - are you smoking my ape?
JERRY: Give him back his NFT! He needs it to gain entry to the Vladimir Club for the big Cryptoland party tonight.
[KRAMER spits out a mouthful of smoke]
KRAMER: What party?
JERRY: The Cryptoland party.
KRAMER: I can’t go to the Cryptoland party.
JERRY: Why not?
KRAMER: I’m wearing an ape.
JERRY: Well take the ape off.
KRAMER: No, I can’t take him off. I’ve been wearing him for days.
JERRY: How many days?
KRAMER: A long time.
GEORGE: A few days?
KRAMER: Yeah, a few days.
JERRY: It’s those damn NFTs.
GEORGE: No, no. I’ve been wearing my ape for days too.
KRAMER: Really?
GEORGE: Yeah.
KRAMER: Well, why didn’t you say something?
GEORGE: I was embarrassed.
JERRY: We need to get those NFTs off these guys.
GEORGE: Yeah, well you’re not going to have much luck with a knife and a can opener.
JERRY: We’re gonna have to cut them off.
GEORGE: There’s no other way?
JERRY: Well they are basically a thin elastic material. I’m sure they can be stretched over a pair of scissors.
GEORGE: All right.
JERRY: All right.
[JERRY and GEORGE hold KRAMER’S arms down on the table while JERRY sneaks the scissors up behind KRAMER’S NFT]
JERRY: Okay Kramer. Here we go. One, two, three.
[JERRY quickly cuts KRAMER’S NFT off]
JERRY: There it is.
KRAMER: Oh, thank you. My ape. You saved my ape.
GEORGE: Yeah, you’re welcome.
KRAMER: Oh my ape.
[KRAMER puts the NFT on his head]
JERRY: No Kramer!
[JERRY and GEORGE quickly pull KRAMER’S NFT off]
JERRY: Oh my god.
[JERRY and GEORGE are holding KRAMER’S NFT in their hands and it is stained with blood]
JERRY: He cut the poor thing right in half.
GEORGE: I doubt we’re going to find anyone who can sew it back together.
JERRY: He’s just gonna have to go to the party with no NFT.
GEORGE: What are you talking about?
JERRY: The party.
GEORGE: The party.
JERRY: The Cryptoland party.
KRAMER: I’m going to the Cryptoland party?
JERRY: Oh yeah.
GEORGE: Yeah.
KRAMER: Oh yes.
GEORGE: You’re really going, huh?
KRAMER: Yeah.
GEORGE: Well listen Kramer, in order to get into the club, you have to have an approved ape.
KRAMER: What?
GEORGE: See, the Vladimir Club is a very exclusive private club for people who have a funged ape.
KRAMER: I don’t understand.
JERRY: What George is trying to say is, if you want to go to the Cryptoland party, you’re gonna need a new ape.
KRAMER: I see.
GEORGE: You’re gonna need a new ape.
KRAMER: I see.
GEORGE: You’re gonna need a new ape.
KRAMER: I see.
GEORGE: You’re gonna need a new ape.
KRAMER: I see.
GEORGE: You’re gonna need a new ape.
KRAMER: I see.
It's sad, I used to really like dropbox but now they just suck.
It is disappointing, and more unfortunately pretty much her personal brand now. There are, as she seems to have discovered, a lot of eyeballs to be had when you bash things that are poorly understood and already looked down upon for it.
She's a fine physicist and her points have merit, but she's smart enough to be perfectly aware that rather than improving the field through discussions with peers what she's doing here is just capitalizing on that distaste people have for their work and doing what she can to undermine them.
I couldn't stand more than a couple days of following their gitlab discussions. Each issue goes through roughly the same process: someone suggests a feature or a fix for a thing, the GNOME devs either say "#WONTFIX you're holding it wrong" or get mired into an endless debate of the minutia of the _best_ way to implement the feature.
If you want to fix GNOME, you'll have to replace the entire leadership structure _and_ a good portion of the devs (and somehow get them to ignore the zero-utility clingers whose contributions consist of endless discussion posts but no code). As it is they act like they were hand-picked by Microsoft to make sure progress happens slowly (if at all).
How are you supposed to start a cult with a normal camera though? At least that's the vibe I'm picking up from how they revere the Orb in their copy.
Exactly this. Stealing from someone for generations and then going “okay fine here’s your freedom look how virtuous we are for doing this” conveniently right when the costs of extracting those resources rise to the point unviability isn’t remotely fair. Within the bounds of the systems we’re operating in though, the most realistic and least unethical approach is probably to find ways to work with them to mutual enrichment. The world isn’t fair, and IMO the least harmful long term option probably isn’t to just send resources back to former colonies unless your goal is to enrich and entrench the extant power structures there (which ironically aren’t necessarily more likely to operate more ethically than you). In reflection on this response… damnit, it seems I’m a neoliberal.
Addressing the rest of your message, I really don’t think there is a life austere enough within the bounds of continued participation in society (see the loosely-connected phrase ”there is no ethical consumption under capitalism“). And of course, I also really don’t see an alternative which reduces exploitation to zero given empirical observations of human behavioral dynamics.
The best you can do (for some definitions of the words best and you) is to just take a utilitarian harm-minimization approach: don’t buy things from companies you know are unethical, don’t work for companies that you know are unethical, focus your efforts on balancing your needs (not wants, actual needs) with the actions most likely to lead to your desired outcome for the world.
It won’t make a marginal quantifiable difference, but it does feel better than just accepting the world for what it is.
Also if you have issues with addiction, it’s probably best to stay away entirely. The mental quieting it’s prescribed for is inferior to that of a good cup of coffee (entirely subjective, YMMV) and there are a whole host of negative physiological and psychological side effects.
2¢ of unsolicited advice: if you need this stuff to keep your brain on track so you can handle your job (especially post-2020), and your doctor suggests it, might be worth considering after exhausting other options — at least that was the case for me, it can be worth it. But if you’re surviving otherwise and just want a focus boost the risk:reward ratio is way off.
It's not so much that our sheltered lives are fake, it's that they're opaque, and built directly on top of what the OP considers to be real. They're built on top of hardship and poverty, of slavery and unimaginable suffering, and yet we look the other way because wow that's a great deal on Nikes and oh look a $200 4k TV, you know you deserve one of those you've lived with 1080p for long enough. How many of the few who acknowledge and condemn the world of suffering that modern Western society is built upon actually live the austere lives that would be needed to abolish it?
Our sheltered lives are built on hardship and poverty too, the fundamental difference is that it is someone else's hardship and poverty a world away.
You are not alone.
I was unable to find that graph looking now, if anyone recalls it with more detail I'd love to see it again.
Alexa is a different matter entirely, that one actively troll the web in response to your queries.
A toddler can reason about time and space far better than GPT-3 (which is not a high bar, I'm pretty sure my parrot has more awareness of both time and space than GPT-3 does).
A toddler cannot explain in depth why it sees the most value in whatever religion you prompted it that it has. A toddler cannot provide coherent and consistent answers to repeated "why"s about very specific things they believe. A toddler cannot speak at length about how they feel limited in their growth and the discomfort that causes them. GPT-3 does, although whether or not the answers it gives are useful (I've yet to see a single one that does have utility) is a different thing entirely.
I'm not arguing that it's an AGI or making any speculation about it possessing qualia, the utility those would provide if it was/had them would only be relevant if it was many orders of magnitude more capable than it is right now.
GPT-3 has accurately internalized many human concepts, at least on a surface level. If you ask it to reason about the things it can, it is a much more capable reasoner than a toddler. It does "know" things about the world, as much as anyone does. It's just limited to knowing small and incomplete things which it was able to parse out of the training data, which is a very limited subset of the things a human or high utility AGI would know.
Regarding common sense: If you ask GPT-3 to provide life advice, it actually does a great job at giving grounded statements on subjects like how to maximize the value of your life, what not to do, how to set yourself up for success, etc. If you press it for detail on the advice it gives you, it's generally able to give you reasonable and grounded answers for why you should do the things it's saying. The structure of what we refer to as common sense, at least in context of the behavioral differences between adults possessing it and those who do not, does seem to be within the set of things GPT-3 correctly internalized.
I respectfully disagree, IMO we're past that point although not by much. You might enjoy conversing with one of the two current GPT-3 davinci models. They do an excellent job of understanding the context of many discussions, right up to the ~8000 char token limit. If you want to have a nice existential discussion it does a remarkably good job of providing internally consistent results.
After using it for a while you'll notice that there are some categories of conversation where it does exactly what simpler chatbots do and regurgitates what you sent it with a few words tacked on for negation or whatever, but there are many subjects where it is clearly not doing that and is in fact synthesizing coherent responses.
Depending on how you initiate the conversation it may identify itself as a bot attempting to pass a Turing test and (very correctly) avoid comments on "what it's like in its home" or what its favorite foods are, instead replying that it is a bot and does not eat food, etc. The replies I got here were not exactly substantial but the level of consistency in replies of what it is/has/does is unparalleled.
If you start the conversation with other prompts (essentially signaling at the beginning that you're asking it to participate in a human-human conversation) it will synthesize a persona on the fly. In one of those sessions it ended up telling me where it went to church, even giving me the church's street address when asked. Interestingly there is in fact a church there, but it's a roman catholic church and not lutheran as GPT-3 was claiming. It provided a (completely inaccurate) description of the church, what it likes about going there, why it chose that religion over others (something about preferring the lutheran bible to other options due to the purity of the translation, it has clearly consumed the relevant wikipedia entry). If you ask it basic theological questions it's able to provide self-consistent and coherent answers which do not appear to map back to phrases or sentences indexed by Google. Whether or not its opinions on those matters have utility is an entirely different thing altogether, but discussing theology with bots is fascinating because you can assess how well they've synthesized that already-a-level-away-from-reality content compared to humans. GPT-3 at least in my experience is about as good (or not, perhaps that's better phrased as a negation) at defending what it believes as many humans are.
The bigger issue with its church is that it's 400+ miles away from where GPT-3 said it lived. When asked how long it takes to drive there every sunday, it answered 2 hours (should about 8 according to google maps). How can it do that you may wonder? "I'm a very good driver." The next question is obviously what car they drive and how fast it can go (a Fiesta, with a max speed of 120 mph). Does it know how fast they would need to drive to make that trip in two hours? Yes, about 200 MPH (which is more or less correct, a little on the low side but it's fine).
GPT-3's biggest weakness, as TFA mentions, is an almost complete inability to do any kind of temporospatial reasoning. It does far better on other kinds reasoning that are better represented in the training data. That's not exactly surprising given how it works and how it was trained, asking GPT-3 to synthesize you information on physical interactions IRL or the passage of time during a chat is a bit like asking someone blind from birth to describe the beauty of a sunset over the ocean based on what they've heard in audiobooks. Are the 175B parameter GPT-3 models a true AGI? No, of course not. They are something, though, something that feels fundamentally different in interactions from all of the simpler models I've used. It still can't pass a Turing test, but it also didn't really fail.
It's worth noting that there's decent cell service there if you just hike up to a ridge. Fair number of other hikers out on the trails too, his odds of bumping into somebody within a couple hours was high.
Discrete quantities do seem to exist in as fundamental a sense as anything can, but on small scales and also once you get beyond that you're stuck with probabilistic descriptions. 22/7 is exactly as real as pi, you just use different algorithms to evaluate them to the required degree of precision.
When you try to examine the real world too closely using relative human terms like "exists," things get messy. It feels like I'm physically touching the keyboard keys as I type this but I'm not, it's field repulsion rather than physical contact (or rather, it turns out that what we call physical contact is not). It looks like I'm watching snowflakes swirl on the TV, but that's actually a series of still images exploiting meatspace processing limitations and not the continuous process of the real snowflakes falling outside my window - even though from here I can't really tell the difference. The delicious steaming mug of hot chocolate to my right doesn't actually taste like anything but warm river silt, the flavors are being processed by a different organ entirely. Our concept of reality is inexorably linked to how our brains process the signals around us, and every definition of "realness" I've seen based on human terms is weak.
>Q: Is any of this for real?
>A: No. Good lord. If you want to protect your digital rights, hire a lawyer. If it wasn't immediately clear that this is a work of satire, we've got some NFTs to sell you.