mlsu

I replaced all the bulbs in my house with incandescents.

They use more electricity, but I don't really care. If we're going to build ten thousand gigawatt datacenters for every corporation on earth to stuff AI up my ass I will do as I please with the lighting in my own home and I rest easy about it, because of the very pleasant, warm, full spectrum glow that incandescents give off when dimmed.

Technology is, of course, downstream of society.

We have treated government with a startling glibness, a deep unseriousness. At the end of the day, the government can kill you and your entire family, and the only thing that can stop them from doing that are the laws of civil society. It is incredibly serious.

Unfortunately, we have been unserious going on several decades. They have realized that the front door is unlocked and the gleaming glowing beating heart of civic power is sitting right there completely unprotected. There were warnings after 9/11, with the patriot act and the GWOT. People who raised these concerns were dismissed as cranks but in fact they were the only serious people in the room. The unseriousness has increasingly accelerated in the last 10 years.

Now we are seeing the consequences. There's a timely acronym for this I think. FAFO?

Is this “swelling AI tax revenue” and “wealth redistribution” in the room with us right now?

I see wealth redistribution alright. Not in the direction you’re thinking!

Now I’m curious. What if it occurs when you’re like under the enemy and you can’t surface? Do you have to just chill at depth until you can get the reactor running again?

Check out stormsurf001 on YouTube. He’s been tracking the development of the El Niño for months now.

I (SoCal) kinda hate El Niño. Seems like it always means way more weather (blown out days) and most reefs around here are maxed out beyond overhead. It’s nice to get lots of groundswell but I’ll take 2-3 and high pressure over 6-7 and rainy any day.

He's 100x, bro. 36 hours is basically like a whole 2 week sprint for you.

Fair.

What I am trying to get at is when people talk about "intelligence," beyond academic debates such as this one that mentions qualia, they are talking primarily about value. How intelligent the thing is is how valuable it is (often directly, in an economic sense). My argument is that value is a relational thing that must involves human feeling, intelligence actually has very little to do with it.

When a child slowly reveals to me something he's judged insightful about pokemon, it's valuable to me, even though I'm not learning new facts. When Claude does the same thing, it's not even "not valuable," it's wholly outside of value, even if I do not already know that fact or thing. If ever Claude reveals to me an insight, that insight certainly came from the training data, not from Claude. The soul came from a human being external to Claude -- the training data -- and passed transparently through Claude. Claude is a translator: it feels nothing, adds nothing. It colors the noise. I know this because the facts are the same but the aesthetic structure - how many bullet points, whether it says "delve" or "load-bearing" does change over time, according to the whims of whoever is in charge of post-training.

But the "real intelligence," is the same thing as "real value." It is the soul of the humans in the training data, the books, newspaper articles, etc.

A clever hacker news commenter might argue, well, what if we gave Claude a humanoid body and senses and let it interact with the world, then would it be intelligent? To that I would say, why waste your time and effort? You can get it for free: just talk to a friend, a neighbor, or a family member.

You are diabolical.

Sure. I should have been more precise about what is 'real intelligence' here.

What I mean is that blindsight's scramblers are aliens that cannot share human values. Their structure is completely different to ours, their qualia (or whether they even have it) is impossible for us to understand. In short, they do not have a soul. When Claude does this "slowly revealing a dramatic insight" thing that it does, it does that not because it has judged itself through some introspection as having an insight to share. It does not even know what an insight is or is not. It is not sharing anything, because it is not capable of sharing, because it does not have a soul.

The aesthetic structure of its replies is a pattern, a constraint on the token distribution, like the color of noise.

It's my bad to use the word 'intelligence' because it's so overloaded. Will Claude will act as a therapist or produce value or produce a work of art? No. It cannot, because it does not have a soul. I leave it freely open to interpretation whether having a soul is required for "real intelligence." But what I've noticed is that "intelligence" in these discussions is mostly used to denote some capability to produce [economic/social] value. In my mind value is a relational thing, a thing of human feeling.

Everything that claude writes fits into the same aesthetic structure. The aesthetic is that of an expert slowly revealing an insight to the user. The actual content doesn't matter.

- "Introduction that rephrases your prompt."

- "3 paragraphs, with one section of bullet points"

- "The Twist"

- "The Bottom Line"

It's really obvious once you see it. Every single prompt, from a quantum physics question to a mundane observation about California burritos, is phrased in exactly the same way. This is obviously an artifact of post-training but it's also kind of how you can tell that this thing is a lot closer to a blindsight scrambler than real intelligence.

I find it interesting that innumerable people just like the ones quoted in this article were able to lead rich lives and find happiness, despite the absence of these material things.

Take the first quote. If only we had music on demand, "the limit of human felicity" could be attained. Yet -- we now have music on demand and clearly it did not cause everyone permanent happiness.

What I take from this is that material things actually matter very little to the attainment of meaning. Meaning comes from elsewhere.

I have running water, it's true, but I'm still bothered by the AI slop art in this article. Funny thing, that.

It seems very easy. Always on spy camera installed for the express purpose of dragnet surveillance? Illegal. Film child’s baseball game? Legal.

I find this attitude I find kind of tiring. Gosh it’s just sooo hard to figure out the difference between Flock Safety and Big Bill’s Little League Sports Photography. It’s actually very straightforward to determine the difference between these two things. So easy, an idiot could do it. Or a judge.

There is a concept in safety called the hierarchy of hazard controls. There is a ranking of hazard mitigations from most to least effective.

1) remove the hazard

2) replace the hazard with something less hazardous

3) isolate the hazard (guards, cages etc)

4) administrative controls (procedures, training, warning, etc)

5) PPE

Implementing some kind of judicial review for these panopticons is something like 4) in the hierarchy. It would be a good thing to have, but we can go far further. Why do we need this shit? Oh what so someone’s car doesn’t get stolen a few times per year? I think my values are in line with the founding fathers and most Americans when I say I would gladly give up a little bit of safety to not have a spy camera trained on me 24/7.

I would like more removal and less procedural controls. The cops cannot abuse a system that does not exist.

Why punish S.E. Massengill? It’s the parents, after all, who willingly allowed their children to drink sulfanilamide. Hell, if the children simply closed their mouths when the spoon is in front of them, they’d be perfectly fine!

The class you’re thinking about is not made up of workers.

Yes I love this comment! GPs are awesome.

Prompting is conditioning, that is what it is. The visual of a GP (like the thing you get if you google image search “Gaussian process”) is a great metaphor for what prompting an LLM is doing.

The output of the LLM is the logits which is sampled - plucking out tokens from a distribution. The input of the LLM is data which constrains the logits. That is what it is.

That’s also how you know that AI will never “solve” intelligence (the way the boosters say it will) without some general mechanism for this conditioning process. The ultimate mechanism would be embodiment; the crappy mechanism we have now is something like openCLAW.

It’s true across the board. How to get good results with coding using AI? Be a good coder. How to get good financial advice? Be financially literate. How to get good medical advice? Be a doctor…

Makes ya wonder: where is the intelligence coming from?

The liberal arts education was originally conceived to educate the leaders of society. That is where the free-minded pedagogical angle comes from, it's explicitly privileged. The idea was that if the leaders of society learned what it means to have values, integrity, what it is to be virtuous, etc, then they would diffuse those values into society and create a just world. Society would transcend in the image of the great works. Books from 500 years ago can teach us what being ethical means because human values are transcendental and totally outside of technological or vocational fads.

Unfortunately, at some point in the last 30-40 years, we've totally abandoned this idea. The most powerful people in society are not just indifferent to the liberal arts but are actively hostile towards it. They see it as a frivolous waste of resources. Why waste time studying a great work of literature when you could be "building" instead?

Of course, it's predictable where this leads. We did all this building, but forgot what justice means, what it means to have values, what it means to do right. So now our society is ugly, corrupt, and rotten. Hey, at least we (the leaders) are rich!

I love driving around when there's no traffic. It's only natural that I should have the right to restrict the number of cars on the road.

Oh, you want to buy a car? Too bad -- it's my right to preserve my driving experience, therefore, no car for you.

It really does seem like they should have been able to do an incremental rewrite with FFI. Could have easily done it with AI too.

Absolutely true. But China’s industrial dominance is also the government immiserating its people, just in a different way. Domestic consumption in China is famously low, work culture is famously bad (996,etc). And this is because of what their government, not the people of China, have chosen to do.

This is why capital accumulation, of the extreme kind we see today in the USA, is wrong. Not because greed is a sin (although, it is, and most of these guys are going to burn in hell), but because it turns the country into functionally the USSR bureaucracy. We are basically doing central planning in huge swathes of the economy and surprise surprises, it’s not working.

I went on a backcountry camping trip last year and was stargazing as one does. Kept seeing satellites. Was cool at first (used to be a rarity) but it got more and more annoying.

And for what? So that we can have more internet? Oh that’s just what we need. To spend even more time online. I’m sure Elon is quite excited for all of us, no matter where we are, we can be plugged into X just like him!

For the general consumer, they were basically right though. Most people don't use laptops except for work. The primary computing device is the phone, and phones have basically become become mini-ipads in form factor since that ad aired.

Ah, but you forgot private equity, that's about $2473 of profit per ride that needs to be accounted for. This high cost is what we must pay to keep our economy dynamic and efficient.

An infant begins to mirror the emotions of his caregiver at 3-4 months. He can distinguish his own body in a physical mirror at 18 months.

I like this reply. I think you and I use AI the same way and probably have a lot in common. But I read things more cynically than you do. Things to ponder:

Read the GPT Live announcement. Why do they want to make it more life-like, if not to encourage the pathological engagement? Why does the model say "thank you for that insightful question"?

It is not "just a tool", that is not the goal. It is designed to be a replacement for people. Even in the most charitable "LLMs are just a tool" reading. The value proposition is to have fewer people (dramatically fewer: the "one person unicorn" with fleets of AI agents!) and for those people to spend more time talking to bots. Replace your junior employees with bots. Replace your customer service people with bots. Replace a bored teenager behind the Wendy's counter with a servile golem whose smooth plastic face can easily be wiped down when spit on.

Their metric is engagement, it is how engaged are you and how long do you spend using the application. They will do absolutely anything to get that number up. Remember, after the GPT-4O debacle, when Altman talked about implementing sex bots? That's a shark, smelling blood. Something like 30% of under 18's have used AI chatbots for "companionship," a big subset of those for ERP.

> Would be just weird.

I was a weird kid who spent 10-12 hours a day on the computer, back when computers were primarily low-res screens and boring text. Now everyone is spending 10-12 hours a day on the computer. These things change in a single generation and I'm sure you know as well as I do that boy does it happen fast.

You sound like me: an older, healthy, well-adjusted person who can understand what's going on when the model says "that's a really insightful question!" Most people are not. They will not understand when it's an AI video clone of Chris Helmsworth.

> there were HN comments I took to heart pretty bad

I bet it made you feel alive.

What would you call it?

Anti human, corrosive, powerful, uncanny... but not evil?

I am fully encountering this, believe me. My conclusion is that it's evil.

Human beings require interaction with other human beings to identify the self. It is impossible to live without others. Read up on solitary confinement sometime - enough time without human companionship will drive any human being (except the schizoaffective) completely insane.

The extent to which it's true is the extent of the evilness of the technology. Go search the phrase "ai boyfriend" on reddit sometime; imagine what it will be like when society is fully baked with this shit. You're talking to AIs all day at work. You're talking to AI's when you use social media. You're talking to AIs for therapy. You're talking to AIs on dating apps.

If your answer is "well I'll simply touch grass" I agree. But most people won't which is why this is tech is immiserating and, I would argue, evil.