588 karma · joined August 1, 2021
I have fun ideas that are kind of complex and I can just experiment and see now with a couple spare hours on the weekend.
Trying to explain to my non software engineering friends that they could build any small app they have an idea for and they’re like I wouldn’t know how, and I’m like, you just ask and you can literally figure it out now so quick.
Maybe software engineers are the most excited and the most cynical.
Like given a specific task it can do a thing amazingly well, but can it recall a thing. Its memory seems like a giant filing cabinet and it has to go scan like 20 million tokens worth of memory to recover things previously talked about.
Human memory is more graph like, we don’t recall things exactly, but one thing links to another, we create a pattern of a thing, we mark what is important, and overtime what was important degrades or becomes less so.
I feel like what makes it lack intelligence is it never seems to learn. Like it kind of does, but then doesn’t persist once too many other things are learned.
I’m sure they’re probably working on this, but I feel like that is what I want far more than even better models, is a better memory system to recall and forget things that the models work on.
Secular humanism not being a religion, does have a set of beliefs. It would seem unconstitutional if someone had to pay a teacher to teach my kids the Bible, or the Quran, and many things taught in government schools are counter to beliefs of religion.
I don’t see a solution to the problem that doesn’t cause crazy amounts of abuse other than the government completely gets out of education, or local communities/governments alone support it and the school matches the beliefs of the local community.
None of that seems plausible. So how do you respect the 1st amendment rights of people like the article talks about?
So presuming it forces a set of beliefs on people based on an idea that there is no god that would be counter to their religious beliefs.
But it would also violate 1st amendment rights if they took tax dollars and gave it to families who used it on a private religious education.
Or they could arbitrarily let parents pick whatever school they wanted, regardless of what it taught, but that is way too ripe for fraud.
Can anyone think of how a government could respect various religious beliefs while not advocating for one specific one (and let’s presume secular humanism is a type of religious belief), while maintaining tax funded education?
Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America.
As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
Still would be very valuable to be able to read works that shaped western civilization in their original language, since a lot of nuance is lost translating to English. Just see how many crazy readings of the Bible people have (american evangelicals particularly ) because English can’t express the original idea in Greek well enough.
My kids at least are all learning Latin, and later, Greek.
I have a large family, so we buy almost everything at Costco.
When I was kid I was so mortified when my parents suggested to buy clothes at Costco.
Now I think half my clothes come from Costco.
Watch now it’s gonna be like weirdly not including them.
Gonna go and try to have it make me a story about a goblin and a pigeon and a raccoon and see what it does.
It is meant to point out how many people say they would be willing to sacrifice even their very lives for a stranger, but in reality they only sacrifice if they already know others had to sacrifice and now they're forced to.
Like if you took the combined wealth of every person who thinks we should tax people more to help the less fortunate - do they give anything freely? They want others to sacrifice first. I'll believe people would actually press blue in a majority, when I see people who claim we should pay more taxes, voluntarily paying more themselves.
I'd love to live in a world where I was confident a vast majority of people would press blue. But I've literally seen people say they would press blue - then go on to say that in a communist revolution certainly we will have to end the lives of all the bourgeois.
I would most definitely press red, because I don't believe anywhere near half the population are actually that good, and don't think I'm a good enough person to actually think I'd risk pressing blue. (Trump won the popular vote in America, and so based on the rhetoric I hear from my left leaning acquaintances, neither would they)
Sad world really. Also why this question is so good.
All the different ways to frame it and think about it, and the balance between them all.
Saying "I would press blue" is different than actually pressing blue. Many people have insisted if I strike it rich, I'm going to give all my money away, and then... they don't.
Oh and the amount of ways you can ask it differently "If more than 50% vote for Trump/Kamala everyone lives, but if less than 50% all Trump/Kamala voters die" - and then seeing how the responses change. And the way the whole calculus changes depending on what other parameters could be added/presumed.
Once again just such a good rage-bait question.
Though I can't for the life of me figure out why people get so mad at people's answers, unless it's like in secret hitler where someone accuses of me being a fascist, and we get all mad, but we all laugh at the end because it's just a silly game, like this silly but fun question.
I probably just overreact and judge too quickly certain statements from my experiences of people who act like I’m destroying the earth because I have more than 3 kids.
I appreciate reasonable people though, and I should not assume, everyone is a crazy alarmist because they have any concern, so I apologize.
My first thought from that heading was “my company will know where I am at all times”. Though that was not the point thankfully.
The value of plowing ahead and using more energy is worth far more than making sure Florida doesn’t lose some coastline.
The presumptions I see that annoy me with the alarmists, is that they completely negate human agency and ingenuity, and they ignore the economic cost of many of the proposed plans.
Natural gas is far better than coal and should be encouraged rather than condemned. Nuclear power is best of all, is the cleanest and safest energy, and yet is hardly ever the first choice of the alarmists.
I’d rather spend double the energy unlocking breakthroughs in science with the help of AI, and address the problems when they come. I don’t go out of my way to lower my “carbon footprint”, but I also don’t just do things that are wasteful and deliberately harmful to the environment.
AI making us forget how to think for ourselves is a far bigger risk to mankind than climate change. Thanks.
So this is not a good reason to oppose AI. Now the sheer energy it requires does mean we might want to go nuclear though.
Natural gas is nice though because it does pollute the air far less than coal.
You might argue the EPA only repealed that because of political agendas, but the same argument could be made for why it was passed.
A lot of people got very rich off the fear mongering from climate alarmists.
Competition is for losers, is a way to say to go and compete in a super crowded market where it is impossible to differentiate yourself is not going to make you a winner.
But usually people are called idiots because they don’t swallow the progressive propaganda wholesale.
I’m doubtful of some of the article’s claims, that seem to project our modern ideas onto the ancient world.
But I think ancient israel saw there were many “gods”, but they viewed Yahweh as “God most high” or even “creator God”.
It’s like saying “Hinduism” is this singular religion, that is actually full of different gods and different practices, but we just lump it all together as one thing.
We just really like taxonomies.
As a citizen, who doesn’t trust the government, or the media, or giant corporations, I’m also an 8/10 concerned.
That means I’m equally concerned about AI as I am excited, I might be more concerned than someone who isn’t excited at all about AI 1/10, but who is mildly concerned with a 5/10.
For some reason people think having an education is only valuable if it is traded for money. For example I think an educated wife and a mom who never earns a single dollar from an employer is incredibly value to her family.
I hope my daughters get a robust liberal arts education and then just get married young and have kids and be homemakers.
I think it is underestimated how difficult this truly is.
And this will always remain uniquely human because only The human truly knows their intent (sometimes).
I’ve had the AIs (ala the google) after I say “make me a script that does XYZ”, say here you go, and if I asked does it work and it tests it out will say yep it does, but only I will know if it is actually doing what I intended. I often will have to clarify my intent because I didn’t communicate well the first time. As we’ve all seen even amongst humans to each other, intent is not always well expressed.
There will always be a judgement made by a human with yes that is my intent or no it is not.
But even in old days of writing the “code” itself, most bugs were you not precisely saying what you wanted the program to do.
I think it’s correct to think of LLMs as compiling English to code, like c++ getting compiled to assembly.