mapontosevenths

> Couldn't your odds of developing a cancer be sloped to effectively zero if the odds are such that you are very likely to die of something else?

Are you sure that people should try? Will they live longer, or happier lives if they do?

From 1900 to 1950 the average US life expectancy went from about 47 to roughly 68. Penicillin and sanitation did most of that.

From 1950 through present day we added another 10 years. What most folks don't realize is that:

- 70% of those gains, or 7 out of the 10 extra years, came from cardiovascular health. Mostly because we got better at surviving heart attacks, and people smoked less.

- 19% came from infant mortaility gains (2 of the remaining 3 years of gain).

- 11% came from EVERYTHING ELSE that people did to become "healthier." So 1 year.

The US spends $5.3 trillion per year on healthcare, give or take. That's about $15.5k per capita every year. It's roughly 20% of the total GDP of the United States. That's 2 out of every 10 productive dollars going towards healthcare.

In exchange for 20% of every hour you work for your entire adult life you get 1 extra year at the end of your life.

In exchange for constantly worrying, exercising, staying up to date, eating right, etc you buy yourself one year more of life, and it's not even going to be a GOOD year. It's going to be one more year of being 80+ years old with everything hurting and constant medical needs.

Is it really worth 20% of the money you make every year for you entire life to live one extra, shitty, year?

I just don't think people have done the math on this one.

> Couldn't your odds of developing a cancer be sloped to effectively zero if the odds are such that you are very likely to die of something else?

Suicide is at once the worst and most effective cure for cancer.

I don't think that anything you said is wrong, but I also think it's important to note that on a long enough timeline your odds of getting cancer are 100% regardless of the way you live.Most people just don't live that long.

The things you mention here make it happen sooner, but no amount of healthy living lowers your risk to zero and I think that's important to note when you say things like "cancer is caused by".

Cancer is caused by math. This stuff just steepens the slope.

By this logic a human is only $130-$160 worth of Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen and some trace elements. Perhaps structure sometimes makes things that are more valuable than their inputs?

That said, this is also inaccurate at a technical level.LLM's are very capable of doing math and they ARE calculating internally. Most of what they do is calculation, not storage. It's just not done in a way that it's trivial to explain here.

It's described in some detail below, though it's a bit dense.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/E7z89FKLsHk5DkmDL/language-m...

I bet that was something! I just re-watched one of the Watts videos he filmed on the Vallejo a few weeks ago.

I imagine that living in a place with that sort of history was the kind of experience one can't really convey in a few words online, but if you have written about it (or intend to) I would certainly love to read more.

You lived on a houseboat named SS Vallejo in Sausalito...

Any chance it was THE Vallejo where Alan Watts lived, and the grateful dead once played? Or maybe she was just named in homage?

Either way, it's very cool! Thanks for the great read.

From the article: "Jurors also found Facebook misled the public about investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, finding the company liable for over 2 million violations."

A jury just found that there were more than 43 million crimes (total) committed on the ad side. I think you're saying that the illegal data collection wasn't related to the advertising end, but it was. That's why they did it. Whether it was actually useful or not is irrelevant.

More importantly to me, the billionaires using it to launder their bribes to the US president probably won't ever be convicted, but that does not mean they aren't just low class crooks who can afford good lawyers.

You may be missing the actual crimes.

You're right that the tools were hype, and that they didn't work. So why, despite knowing that Cambridge Analytica tools were useless, did Trumo keep paying it?

Well, Robert and Rebekah Mercer were primary backers of the Trump campaign, and they also owned a major stake in Cambridge Analytica. Giving something like $49 million dollars to Trump and Co.

What are the odds they made a profit on the deal?

Have you considered switching to decaf? There are brands out there now that are just as tasty as the real thing.

I disagree, but this is the most interesting take here.

You're not concerned about the impact on people's freedoms or the economy? Not concerned about the chilling effect on scientific progress?

Agreed. I missed that this was OpenAI 'driving' this time, but this doesn't sound like criminal intent. Maybe negligence at worst.

You've got me there. I should have finished TFA.

I thought this was like the last one where a private third party company misused it.

If it was OpenAI at the wheel then they're 100% responsible for how it was used. Mea Culpa.

> We need to stop beating around the bush and hit these companies with severe criminal charges.

Do you sincerely think that the company producing tools people use to break the law should be held responsible?

Like, do you genuinely think Ford execs should be rounded up if someone does a DUI using their product?

Or do you just not like AI, because you fear it's replacing you?

Anthropic is profitable now. They have massive debt looming over them, but they're at least making more than they spend each quarter.

I suspect that the people saying this haven't used Luna.

It's also weird that anyone uses it outside of an enterprise. They force you to use Googles inferior harness on the plans and I doubt any mere mortal is paying that much, for so little usage, with the worst harness on the market.

I'm in a similar boat myself.

I wonder though: Was the code ever the important part, or was it just the ability to reason through complex problems in a specific way that mattered?

Code forces you to think in a specific and valuable way. You can do that in English as well, and maybe even get more done faster... but it's a skill that will take time to master.

Have you tried Qwen 3.8 Flash Next? You can run it on one spark with reasonable context sizes at about 30 tps, and it's as good as DS Flash 0731. Maybe even a tie with GLM 5.3, though like everything it depends on the use case.

Or perhaps their wallets. There are a lot of programmers here. Some of them think that AI is the death of their profession, rather than a change in it.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

I came to the comments because the web page for Enzo explains everything except what the hell it does. Then I couldn't understand the gp comment either.

For a moment I though I was having a stroke.

> Doesn't seem like a very good metric.

I don't claim to be able to define it. I just know that we have a fairly binary choice here. When people can't agree then the cost benefit should make the decision until people can align.

With machine consciousness one path leads us to p-zombie's and Holocausts. The other might cost someone $50 or a few extra keystrokes.

Sorry, but folks can just open up their wallets until we can align on an answer.

The global warming debate is similar. Is global warming man-made? Who cares. We have a binary choice: "do nothing" or "do something".

If we do nothing we risk preventable extinction. If we do something it might cost a few bucks for no good reason. The choice is clear.

You can apply it to the dog example as well. Could a reasonable person think dogs are conscious? Yes. So we should be nice to them.

The cost of being kind is low and if we get it wrong we risk torturing a conscious being.

The question has two parts.

1: Can we define consciousness in a way that includes humans, does not include emachines, and does not accidently exclude the disabled or or nerudivergent without just restating the idea that being human is equivalent to being conscious?

2: If you can't manage that definition then you must ask whether the risk of accidently giving rights to a non-conscious thing or the risk of taking away rights from a truly conscious (but different) thing will be worse.

Given the high cost of what happened to the Jews and others throughout history, and the low cost of simply not torturing machines, I think we have to air on the side of caution and just treat anything which claims to be conscious as conscious.

The biggest mistake the web ever made was leaving it up to to the website to choose how content renders.

It should be the users choice how their browser renders, it's their damn browser. Instead, browsers are built to follow standards that mostly favor the developers preferences above those of the person who actually own the device rendering it.

The modern web is user hostile by design.

Switch to a bank that has a website.

If they can't do online banking in 2026 your bank might actually just be some guy in a monopoly man Halloween costume.

Here's a non-paywalled version with some relevant videos as well: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/USAconscious.ht...

The argument is fun, but silly. Saying 'it has some aspects that consciousness also has therefore it is consciousness' is like saying 'if it's liquid it must be water.'

It either matches some, but not all of the criteria or the criteria are wrong.

Most anti-materialism arguments just boil down to "because Jesus" or "because it makes me feel icky" once you strip away the rhetoric.

Evaporative cooling. They think that because the earth is only 2/3rds water we will run out before it rains back down again.

I jest, of course. The actual argument is something about most water being frozen and how some people live in deserts so we should all live as if we were desert dwellers. As you can tell I'm not very convinced by it.

Water is literally the least scarce thing on earth.

> Such an advancement would be devastating for their conclusion.

They only ever placed them there because they saw it as unattainable. Rest assured that those posts will never stop moving.

Exactly so. I just found that it's on prime video (for a few bucks) as well if you don't want the blu-ray features.

If you've seen the old VHS version of Shada where Tom Baker narrates the missing pieces, you'll probably enjoy the animated version replacements more.

https://www.primevideo.com/region/na/detail/0RNSB5JYFHDMUJ0U...

The unfinished original is one of my favorites, and the 2017 animated version is also wonderful.

I feel like the animated version filled in gaps I hadn't even realized were there in the old one that just had the voice overs.

If you like classic who, Adams, or both, and haven't seen it buy the blu-ray!

The only way to have a better democracy is to have better people.

Education is the entire slow, painful game.