m4nu3l

I'm assuming no coercion. In my scenario, tier 1 doesn't need any of that except natural resources because they can self-produce everything they need from those in a cheaper way than humans can. If someone in tier 1, for instance, wants land from someone in tier 2, they'd have to offer something that the tier 2 person values more than the land they own.

After the trade, the tier 2 person would still be richer than they were before the trade. So tier 2 would become richer in absolute terms by trading with tier 1 in this manner. And it's very likely that what tier 2 wants from tier 1 is whatever they need to build their own AIs. So my argument still stands. They wouldn't be poorer than they are now.

> I also don't buy that groups don't make better decisions than individuals.

I didn't say that. My example of the market includes companies that are groups of people.

> We know that diversity of thought and opinion is one way to make better decisions in groups compared to individuals; why would there be harm in believing that consensus building, debates, adversarial processes, due process, and systems of appeal lead to worse outcomes in decision making?

I can see this about myself. I don't need to use hypotheticals. Time ago, I voted for a referendum that made nuclear power impossible to build in my country. I voted just like the majority. Years later, I became passionate about economics, and only then did I realise my mistake.

It's not that I was stupid, and there were many, many debates, but I didn't put the effort into researching on my own.

The feedback in a democracy is very weak, especially because cause and effect are very hard to discern in a complex system.

Also, consensus is not enough. In various countries, there is often consensus about some Deity existing. Yet large groups of people worldwide believe in incompatible Deities. So there must be entire countries where the consensus about their Deity is wrong. If the consensus is wrong, it's even harder to get to the reality of things if there is no incentive to do that.

I think, if people get this, democracy might still be good enough to self-limit itself.

The marginal value of natural resources decreases with quantity, and natural resources would only have a much smaller value compared to the final products produced by the AI systems. At some point, there would be an equilibrium where tier 1 wouldn't want to increase it's consumption of natural resources w.r.t. tier 2 or if they did they'd have to trade with tier 2 at a price higher than they value the resources. I have no idea what this equilibrium would look like, but natural resources are already of little value compared to consumer goods and services. The US in 2023 consumed $761.4B. of oil, but the GPD for the same year was. $27.72T

There would be another valid argument to be made about externalities. But it's not what my original argument was about.

>governments generate wealth all the time. Public education, public healthcare, public research, public housing. > These are all programs that generate an enormous amount of wealth and allow citizens to flourish.

I thought you meant that governments generate wealth because the things you listed have value. If so, that doesn't prove they generate wealth by my argument, unless you can prove those things are more valuable than alternative ways to use the resources the government used to produce them and that the government is more efficient in producing those.

You can argue that those are good because you think redistribution is good. But you can have redistribution without the government directly providing goods and services.

>Why would this be worse than the current situation of private actors accountable to no one controlling this technology? It's not like I can convince Zuckerberg to change his ways.

As long as Zuckerberg has no army forcing me, I'm fine with that. The issue would be whether he could breach contracts or get away with fraud. But if AI is sufficiently distributed, this is less likely to happen.

>At least with a democratic government I have means to try and build a coalition then enact change. The alternative requires having money and that seems like an inherently undemocratic system.

I don't think of democracy as a goal to be achieved. I'm OK with democracy in so far it leads to what I value.

The big problem with democracy is that most of the time it doesn't lead to rational choices, even when voters are rational. In markets, for instance, you have an incentive to be rational, and if you aren't, the market will tend to transfer resources from you to someone more rational.

No such mechanism exists in a democracy; I have no incentive to do research and think hard about my vote. It's going to be worth the same as the vote of someone who believes the Earth is flat anyway.

In economics, you aren't necessarily creating wealth just because your final output has value. The value of the final good or service has to be higher than the inputs for you to be creating wealth. I could take a functioning boat and scrap it, sell the scrap metal that has value. However, I destroyed wealth because the boat was worth more. Even if you are creating wealth, but the inputs have better uses and can create more wealth for the same cost, you're still paying in opportunity cost. So things are more complicated than that.

Having your life dependent on a government that controls all AIs would be much worse. The government could end up controlling something more intelligent than the entire rest of the population. I have no doubt it will use it in a bad way. I hope that AIs will end up distributed enough. Having a government controlling it is the opposite of that.

>We are not there, yet, but if AI could replace a sizable amount of workers, the economic system will be put to a very hard test. Moreover, companies could be less willing to pay for services that their internal AIs can handle or build from scratch. Nor is it possible to imagine a system where a few mega companies are the only providers of intelligence: either AI will be eventually a commodity, or the governments would do something, in such an odd economic setup (a setup where a single industry completely dominates all the others).

I think the scenario where companies that own AI systems don't get benefits from employing people, so people are poor and can't afford anything, is paradoxical, and as such, it can't happen.

Let's assume the worst case: Some small percentage of people own AIs, and the others have no ownership at all of AI systems.

Now, given that human work has no value to those owning AIs, those humans not owning AIs won't have anything to trade in exchange for AI services. Trade between these two groups would eventually stop.

You'll have some sort of two-tier economy where the people owning AIs will self-produce (or trade between them) goods and services. However, nothing prevents the group of people without AIs from producing and trading goods and services between them without the use of AIs. The second group wouldn't be poorer than it is today; just the ones with AI systems will be much richer.

This worst-case scenario is also unlikely to happen or last long (the second group will eventually develop its own AIs or already have access to some AIs, like open models).

If models got exponentially better with time, then that could be a problem, because at some point, someone would control the smartest model (by a large factor) and could use it with malicious intent or maybe lose control of it.

But it seems to me that what I thought time ago would happen has actually started happening. In the long term, models won't improve exponentially with time, but sublinearly (due to physical constraints). In which case, the relative difference between them would reduce over time.

Developing a model of the real world, or even just learning only a subset of self-consistent information, could be detrimental to the task of predicting the next token in the average text, given that most of the written information on many subjects could be contradictory and somehow wrong. I don't know how they are doing RL on top of that, how they are using synthetic data or filtering them. But it's clear that even with GPT-5 they haven't solved the problem, as the presentation demonstrated with the very first prompt (I'm talking about the wrong explanation for lift produced by a wing).

Of course, I'm just pointing out that the main explanation it gave was the equal transit time and added the angle of attack only "slightly increases lift", which quite clashes with the visualisation IMO.

It still got it wrong in the very first answer, as I mentioned in my top-level comment.

Very funny. The very first answer it gave to illustrate its "Expert knowledge" is quite common, and it's wrong. What's even funnier is that you can find why on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_(force)#False_explanation... What's terminally funny is that in the visualisation app, it used a symmetric wing, which of course wouldn't generate lift according to its own explanation (as the travelled distance and hence air flow speed would be the same). I work as a game physics programmer, so I noticed that immediately and almost laughed. I watched only that part so far while I was still at the office, though.

I work in game physics in the AAA industry, and I have studied and experimented with ML on my own. I'm sceptical that that's going to happen.

Imagine you want to build a model that renders a scene with the same style and quality of rasterisation. The fastest way to project a point on the screen is to apply a matrix multiplication. If the model needs to keep the same level of spatial consistency as the resterizer, it has to reproject points in space somehow.

But a model is made of a huge number of matrix multiplications interspersed by non-linear activations. Because of these non-linearities, it can't map a single matrix multiplication to its underlying multiplications. It has to recover the linearity by approximating the transformation with many more operations.

Now, I know that transformers can exploit superposition when processing a lot of data. I also know neural networks could come up with all sorts of heuristics and approximations based on distance or other criteria. However, I've read multiple papers showing that large models have a large number of useless parameters (the last one showed that their model could be reduced to just 4% of the original parameters, but the process they used requires re-training the model from scratch many times in a deterministic way, so it's not practical for large models).

This doesn't mean we might not end up using them anyway for real-time rendering. We could accept the trade-off and give up some coherence for more flexibility. Or, given enough computational power, a larger model could be coherent enough for the human eye, while its much larger cost will be justified by its flexibility. In a way like analogous systems are much faster than digital ones, but we use digital ones anyway because they can be reprogrammed.

With frame prediction and upscaling, we have this trade-off already.

I once wrote a non-conservative generational GC for C++ just as an exercise, with the constraint that I could only use standard C++ (it was in C++17).

It worked based on a template type I called "gc_ptr<T>". So you could create one of these with the function template "make_gc(...)". This was the only way you could allocate a new garbage-collected object.

"make_gc" would check if a type descriptor for the type was already initialized and if not it would allocate a new one. It would then set a thread_local with the descriptor and the address of the current object being created.

Then it would call the object constructor. If the type being instantiated had gc_ptr members, these would be initialized by their constructor. The gc_ptr constructor would, in turn, check the descriptor of the parent object and add a record to it representing the member. The record would store the member offset calculated from its address and the one of the parent object.

Garbage-collected objects would also use reference counting for gc_ptr(s) on the stack or inside objects that were not garbage-collected. It's easy to know if a gc_ptr is being constructed inside a garbage-collected object or not: If it is, then the code is also executing inside make_gc, so I just need a thread_local flag.

For the mark and sweep, I would use an atomic flag to mark the GC as running. If the flag was set, then all gc_ptr would stop the thread (by waiting on a mutex) as soon as some code would try to swap/reassign them. This means that code that didn't touch them would be kept running during garbage collection.

I would start marking objects from those allocated in the custom arena I used that had a reference count different from zero.

I wanted to add containers that could allocate contiguous GC'ed objects by wrapping the standard containers but never finished that. GC'ed containers of gc_ptr(s) just worked fine.

I just re-ran the benchmarks I wrote to compare it against the Boehm-Demser-Weiser GC. It is quite faster in doing the mark-and-sweep (up to an order of magnitude faster with thousands of objects and a bit less than 100 MBs of GC'ed memory in total).

However, because of the atomic check, it was slower in swapping pointers by roughly an order of magnitude.

I never used it in any project.

I've seen people complaining about early access games before just because they never got released (hence my question). From the comments I get this case is a bit different though.

The game is in early access. Steam clearly explains that when you buy an early access game you take the risk of it never being finished. I don't know much about the events or the promises behind this game but I woundn't say it's a scam just because it went bad. Social media are full of people calling it a scam. Am I missing something or is it just the usual social media nonsense?

I recently read "The Machinery of Freedom". It makes a strong case for an anarco-capitalist society.

I'm not sure about either of these arguments. The most robust arguments, as far as I can tell, are those relative to common goods (where you can't exclude access to goods/services) and externalities. The book tries to answer most of these questions. While I'm not entirely sold (at lest not yet) I recommend the book. It's not a rant about the Government, instead it goes quite in depth by proposing what anarco-institutions might look like and what kind of society those institutions are likely to produce by looking at historical cases (like Medieval Iceland) and parts of the current system.

> you can't make these machine things without literally feeding this copyrighted information into them, therefore they do contain a copy.

They don't necessarily do. Think about that. You can take some copyrighted material and transform the information contained in it (for instance a fictional book). You can then write a summary. The summary contains information that was present in the original but it has been transformed and hence it's not a copy. The ML model contains information that has been generalized by some degree. So it's just a grey area IMO.

OK, I have no idea about C#, I use GDScript and C++. All my tests are in GDScript.

Not sure when you last tried it out, but GUT (Godot Unit Test) is what I use and it integrates very well with the IDE.

> But isn't it possible to have a local flow of time?

You can use a clock to measure time, but I think it's better to say that matter and energy move through time, just like they move through space instead of saying that time flows, because flow implies time which makes the definition circular.

So I would just say that if you consider any frame of reference you can define time with respect to it. But still there is no real "present" in time just like there is no "here" in space. You can just take any point in space and say it's your origin.

Because you simply can't define "preset" in absolute terms. Two events that happen at the same time in my frame of reference might happen one after the other in your frame of reference.

If the past nor the future exist and you first see one of the things happening, then the other, but I see them happening at the same time I'm seeing things that shouldn't exist in a single moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity

"Obviously, the past does not exist; it is a collection of mere memories, impressions in the mind. But the future also does not exist; it is a collection of ideas about what should or might happen"

It's been proved beyond reasonable doubt that time is as real as space and what is an illusion is the flow of time. There is no "present" moment. Every moment and place exists in time-space with different versions of you thinking they are in the present. So it's exactly the opposite.

You could say that taken one of those points in time and named it "present" you can say that the past and future do not existent within that moment. But because of the relativity of simultaneity you now also have to pick an arbitrary frame of reference to define "preset".

Makes sense, thanks for the explanation!

What can cause the mutex to lose track of the number of waiters?

The code isn't the easiest to read but in glibc it seems that the syscall is only performed if waiters are detected in userspace during an unlock operation

https://github.com/lattera/glibc/blob/master/nptl/pthread_mu...

That's my understanding too. In Linux mutexes are implemented by futexes (Fast User-Space mutexes). If there is no contention they are guaranteed to not perform a syscall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futex

Of course I'm an ideological anti-communist. I prefer not starving to death like in the great famine - which happened in the 50s-60s in a society that applied the principles you are proposing.

All you objectively need is some calories every day and some shelter, some medical attention. That's it.

Everything else is subjective. Either you define "needs" to be objective and thus you can satisfy them with just those things or you can talk about them as "wants". It's just semantics.

We pretty much have all objective needs satisfied. That shouldn't stop anybody to persue their "wants".

This can be true for some resources that people consume in limited amounts, like food. It's not true about houses, cars etc as you can always want a larger one, a faster one etc.