martin-t

Very happy not just with the polity but that they call the tech LLM instead of using nebulous marketing buzzwords.

> Claude did its best to comply with what Joe asked it to do

I don't like this anthropomorphization. The model generated output as an extrapolation of the input - garbage in, garbage out.

> a term that seemed new and important to him, to the point that he repeated it, like, 10 times during this meeting

I see this often with people who want to imitate competence, or in their eyes emulate what they consider competence.

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Let me be blunt, this is not a failure to learn, this is a failure to scam. The "student" has a scammer mindset and his method failed to produce results - which are grades, not learning.

> simulation of scientific research

Yeah, just like what the student did was a simulation of studying. People like this simply want the fruits of labor without the labor.

Steve Jobs motivated Larry Kenyon, the engineer working on bootup, by saying he is effectively saving lives.

I wonder if we reverse that. When engineers write shitty, slow, buggy code or when they're forced to do that by the company, they are effectively killing people.

After all, if I spend an hour dealing with a preventable bug, that's an hour of my live I am never getting back. Multiple that by the userbase and you get entire lifetimes.

[0]: https://www.folklore.org/Saving_Lives.html

My colleague organizes workshops for gifted teenagers interested in tech/science in Europe. He often asks them if they want to go study abroad. A few years back, most of them would say they want to go to the US. Now none of them do. This is not hyperbole - he said literally 0 wanted to go to the US.

Maybe that country still has some prestige somewhere else and people still want to apply but definitely not here. We've been watching the country sabotage itself and take a nosedive for a while now. The latest president is just the cherry on top.

I hope the rest of the world learns from this but I doubt it actually will.

The vile thing is that people work for a company and make it a lot more money than they end up receiving and then the owners of the company go and use the remaining money against the people's interest.

It depends a lot on the country. Pretty sure most/all have more than 2 viable parties. Still sucks because usually you can only vote for one party so it still leads to strategic voting. And ou might be able to prefer certain candidates from the party, in which case it might or might not be broken in other ways.

Oh and Switzerland has 7 presidents (effectively). No kings, no dictators.

I hoped that would be possible but wasn't sure, thanks.

I hate that social factors like popularity are a thing in technical decisions.

I have not used mercurial (though heard good things about it) but I saw a similar thing play out in Rust gamedev. There are 2 competing game engines, one better technically, the other much more popular. Now, if everyone made a purely technical decision, they'd pick the first one and eventually it would become the more popular one. Unfortunately, whenever I asked people why they chose the second one, they said because it was more popular. Tragedy of the commons.

If it's any consolation, maybe jj will take over. I haven't tried it yet (I use the staging area a lot in my workflow), but AFAIK they made the choice to be git-compatible which means it's not a choice between one or the other but lets people and teams migrate gradually.

As an European, the biggest issue with US politics I see is that you only have 2 parties. It makes no sense. As a voter, you can only express a binary choice and whatever you choose for the issue you care about most effectively decides what you vote for regarding all other issues.

I'd like to see more separation. If we are to keep indirect democracy, at least have separate representation for criminal law, economic decisions (taxes, healthcare, ...), social decisions (abortions, marriage, ...), etc. But even where to draw the lines is difficult. I think that too should be in some ways decided by voters.

Of course, in a country which can't get rid of FPTP/plurality, despite being objectively the worst voting system[0-3], that's never gonna happen. If you need to explain math to people to convince them, you've already lost, because people are not smart enough and definitely not educated enough.

[0]: https://rangevoting.org/

[1]: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/aaron-hamlin-voting-...

[2]: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

[3]: https://ncase.me/ballot/

I agree and we need to talk about specific things if we have any chance of turning ideas into change. The issue is these are complex topics not suited for a discussion platform where most activity on a post ceases within a day (and if it continues longer in rare cases, nobody sees it). But there are no really good platforms for this so everything is simplified into short statements which lose nuance.

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It's impossible for every person to have a well-researched opinion on everything. Opponents of direct democracy use this to shoot it down. But it applies to indirect democracy too.

The real issue we need to solve is how to make sure people (whether all citizens or representatives) only vote on what they actually understand.

I think votes weighted based on the score of a knowledge test would be a good start if the test is well-designed. But we need to figure out how to decide what the questions are (what is relevant, what is enough in-depth, what is too specific, etc.) and what the correct answers are (some topics are still a matter of debate even among experts). And that's hard.

It's hard in a cooperative environment (e.g. engineers deciding which factors are relevant to their proposed solution) and it's even harder in an adversarial environment like politics.

See, with a plane, you get to choose which one you board.

And the pilot is not a random guy from the street with no education or at best a completely unrelated degree. And he's probably not 90 years old. And he's the engineer, mechanic, ATC, pilot, stewerd, advertiser, accountant and TSA in one person.

Direct democracy shouldn't be the only change, obviously. As you correctly point out the issue is when uninformed, uneducated and not sufficiently intelligent people make decisions for everyone.

The issue with direct democracy is that you're describing a highly dimensional vector (your opinion) by picking one of a small set of predefined points (the political parties). Some countries only have 2. That's obviously stupid.

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For example we should weight votes by how informed they are. How to determine that? That's a difficult question. But shooting down the idea does move us closer to a solution.

Making voting indirect only has the effect that all nuance is lost. You still get dumb people voting for populists, fascists, narcissists, rapists, etc.

And that's why we need more direct democracy. People (correctly) feel like they have very little power over laws which affect them day to day.

If someone represents me, then logically I should have the right to vote directly instead of him, or remove him at any point.

Surely the deal is beneficial for both sides.

For OpenAI because they get a lot of money and and for the government because they can keep tabs on how people use LLMs to make sure they're not doing anything naughty.

Then perhaps their signalling isn't meant for you but for people who have to pay those pesky expensive intelligent people like translators, programmers, designers and writers. Those people would benefit greatly if they could rent intelligence much cheaper from companies like OpenAI.

Discussions about this topic need to separate "AI" and aAI.

- "AI" is a tool which workers use - usually to produce outputs of the same or lower quality faster. It needs a human to be constantly monitoring, steering and verifying it.

- aAI is actual AI - what sci-fi authors imagined and what ML companies promise. You ask aAI a question and it either gives you a complete, unbiased and correct answer or says why it cannot do that (insufficient information, not enough computing power, etc.). It doesn't ignore instructions or get stuck in a loop. It doesn't delete your database or exfiltrate secrets.

Obviously, this is a spectrum, not a hard division.

Crucially, "AI" is a tool for workers. aAI is a tool for owners - it replaces workers. Owners give aAI control over a company or some other form of capital and it monitors, steers and verifies humans, who will still be economically valuable for manual work, at least until robots catch up.

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All the people hyping AI either still see it as a tool ("AI", not aAI), not believing it will mature into aAI and replace them; or they are the owner class who will benefit from not having to pay wages while maintaining their passive income.

If most of your income comes from work (as opposed to passive income from ownership), you have 0 reason to be excited by AI. Your life will not be better if you lose your economic value.

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EDIT: If you disagree, you should be able to express why and we can have a rational discussion about it.

If you cannot express why, consider not participating in the discussion at all, not even by reducing the visibility of my opinion by downvoting it.

Observations:

1) Only law can fix this. Anybody (looking at you ancaps) telling you "if you don't like it, start a competitor" doesn't understand how the economy and network effects work.

2) The general population is a combination of not caring and not even being smart enough to be able to understand. If everyone votes on everything (like most "democracies" where you vote for parties), bigger issues like healthcare, abortions, LGBT will dominate and everything else is noise.

3) People who don't know what public-private crypto or zero-knowledge proofs are shouldn't be allowed to vote on issues where these are relevant factors.

4) We need to fix voting so people can vote on only the stuff they care about and only the stuff they are actually informed about. This works in small teams of highly competent people - at work or in FOSS - and only when they have the same goals. Politics is by nature adversarial and I don't know how to fix this.

This just shows you can be right, you can have convincing arguments for why you're right but unless people listen, you will not change anything.

I wonder how Winner feels about all of this.

> when they feel like

No, when they can get away with it. When the pros for them outweigh the cons. And every person affects that calculation in some small way - by their tolerance to injustice, by their outspokenness, by their ability to detect it, by the probability of an employee becoming a whistleblower and even by people's willingness to punish bad actors extra-legally.

> They still have the ability to do it at will.

Yes and your neighbor has the ability to wait on your doorstep until you open and then slit your throat.

He generally doesn't because of internal safeguards (humans have evolved emotions like remorse, though not all of them feel it - see psychopathy/ASPD for details) and external safeguards (the state generally opposes people infringing its monopoly on violence but in the absence of a state, he would still risk being hunted down and tortured/killed as punishment by your relatives and friends).

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I get what you're saying and I oppose dragnet surveillance but seeing things in pure black and white does not help.

That's defeatist, although certainly what they'd like. The world is not the US.

Even if NSA captured and logged all internet traffic, they'd still only get a fraction of the information within without breaking all the encryption.

And even if they could break the crypto, the ability would only have any power if/when they acted on it. Which in turns reveals the capability to both normal people and other nation states.

The limitations aren't laws, it's the practical consequences.

Of course, having laws with actual teeth helps.

Exactly. This is what people don't seem to get. LLMs ("AI") are not a tool for us. They are a tool for the owner class and a replacement for us.

Up until ~2 weeks ago, I believed that at least opting out of data collection would protect me. I no longer do.

Everyone knows that fines paid by companies (instead of the people making the decisions) are considered simply a cost of doing business. A probabilistic tax, if you will.

What finally dawned on me is that given they need more and more data to train bigger and bigger models, at some point the value of using my data for training will exceed the cost of getting caught using it without/against my consent.

There's no escape unless we change the law.

I assure you they cannot pierce that veil if one has a modicum of competence.

One uni in my country has been getting bomb threats during the exam period every year for multiple years (a random article says 20 times at least). The whole place gets evacuated each time, nothing is found and nobody is caught.

But people who think they're anonymous because they used a different nick? Yeah, those are idiots, their ISP and the platform knows who they are and anybody can deanonymize them through stylometry.

I don't think surveillance is the solution though. I'd much rather see a network of trust or (second best) anonymous proof of identity.

Any place selling alcohol or cigarettes is able to check if you're 18. They could just as easily check your nationality by looking at your ID and give you a crypto key which can be used to prove that to online platforms without revealing who you are.

But there's no money for big corps in that and most people are not even smart enough to think of it.

Why are they so hungry for data? If it's so intelligent, why does it need to learn by imitation so much?

It feels almost like "AI" can't be built without trillions of hours of human work, yet the ownership of the models and the resulting revenue goes only to those in positions of power to exploit that labor instead of the people doing actual work.

Look, I hate injustice more than most people and I have no issue saying that there are people who spend their entire lives getting richer and more connected at everyone else's expense and that they should be punished in full for what they gained unjustly.

But you're not gonna convince anyone by being snarky while at the same time making 0 verifiable claims.

Extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence, please...

It's not just the US though, EU too.

I don't like far fetched conspiracy theories but I really want to know where all this is coming from. Did politicians suddenly all get the same idea or are there groups lobbying for this who benefit in terms of money/power?

Consent must be explicit, informed and can be revoked at any time.

Tech people could learn a lot from the BDSM community.

Tech companies regularly violate all 3 principles.

1) Opt-out instead of opt-in is an abusive practice, only you're not getting fucked by a strap-on without realizing it, you're getting profiled and manipulated for monetary and political gain.

2) You have no way to find out how your information is used. Ironic in an age where so many decisions affecting you are made by automated systems where the output can be traced back to individual inputs deterministically.

3) Even if you do your research (=spend your limited time alive by playing zero-sum games with no benefit for you) and opt-out, you can't take back what's already circulating out there.

And the solution is not that crazy - change laws so people own all data about them and all results of using said data, except specific well-defined cases.

Then if a company uses your data without your consent, it doesn't pay a probabilistic tax called fines, it is forced to give you a part of its income and a part of its own ownership.

"You can't make people care."

Not until they've personally been hurt by something.

Unfortunately I can't recall who said this, it was the beginning of a tech talk and it made something instantly click for me.

We have almost no way to influence both politicians and corporations because an individual informed vote gets lost in the avalanche of votes by people who don't care. The biggest lie a few hundred years ago was that "all men are created equal" told to the general population by people who owned slaves. The biggest lie in our generation is that we have democracy.

1) It's impossible to vote for what you really want because the choice is restricted to predefined options - political parties are only a few points in a highly dimensional space representing what people actually want.

2) Everyone votes on everything and every vote has the same weight. It's impossible to target your vote to one issue you researched deeply - it'll be lost in the noise of people who are voting about something completely unrelated but their vote picks a party which in turn affects your issue.

3) Corporations, especially in tech, have just as much influence as the government and they're little dictatorships. Not even their workers can influence their decisions directly.

Ironically the one good thing we got from AI is being able to sift through everyone's entire internet history (even de-anonymizing the stuff they didn't want under their regular nicks) and being able to tell exactly who supported this.

> Microsoft spent literal decades rehabilitating their reputation

I hated with a passion when people claimed "MS loves open source now". I feel vindicated.

If a corporation can do a 180° turn in one direction, it can do a 180° turn in the other direction just as fast. They did not understand that, either because they didn't want to or because they weren't smart enough to understand how incentives shape behavior.

The incentives or a corporation are roughly making money for "shareholders"[0], making money for the C suite, making money for managers.

[0]: = People who do none of the actual work but have enough money to use it to get more money which therefore goes to them instead of the people doing actual work. (Intentionally saying "get" instead of "make" because they don't "make" anything.)