nearbuy

You totally reversed who is making a strong assertion.

Anthropic has said they don't know if LLMs could be conscious.

Ted Chiang has said they are definitely are not conscious.

Most of the time, no group of players will run a server at that cost. So regular players still can't play.

It's not unheard of though. WoW and City of Heroes had/have large, expensive fan servers. But realistically, this legislation would save maybe 0-2% of games in the thousands-per-month cost range. According to the parent commenter, we might lose many more than that from the legislation causing studios to decide not to make them to begin with.

Games with cheap servers are a different story.

The article very bluntly states multiple times that LLMs aren't conscious. Ted Chiang is definitely making that argument.

There is no reason to have UBI if there is zero scarcity. There is no reason to have money at all without scarcity.

UBI is a system for dividing up scarce resources.

> Now these two people how do they make money? they pay each other so there is no extra value created thus the amount of money as value symbol remains constant.

The money just circulating around is actually more or less how a normal economy works. If you have a two person world where one person makes food and the other makes tools, the money just bounces back and forth between the two people as they trade tools and food. It facilitates trade by acting as an IOU in case the first person doesn't need to trade tools at the exact moment the other needs to trade food.

AI and robotics will one day be able to produce food and tools without human labor. So there could be plenty of wealth created. The question is how do we distribute that wealth when humans aren't needed to make it? We need a new distribution system that isn't based on pay for labor. A lot of people suggest UBI.

I'm not sure why we have had such different experiences, but I feel like people have been saying those things repeatedly.

Star Wars almost feels a bit like it's public domain already. They've been pretty liberal with licensing their IP so we ended up with a huge number of Star Wars books, comics, games, LEGO sets, merchandise, etc. At the limit, there isn't much practical difference between a public domain work and an IP that will grant anyone a license for a very reasonable fee.

If Star Wars were public domain due to shorter copyright, the newer works and characters would still be protected. Another film studio could make a new movie based off the original trilogy, taking things in a different direction than the new movies. I'm not sure this is likely though, just like no one is rushing to make 3rd party Mickey Mouse cartoons since it entered the public domain. It probably changes things a lot less than copyright proponents worry about.

Even with books, which are much cheaper to produce than movies, the original author would probably capture most of the money from their works under shorter copyright (e.g. 25 year copyright). If you like a series from a particular author, you want new books from that author. You're not going to read A Game of Thrones and then continue with a sequel written by someone else. And as long as the author keeps writing, they're expanding the canonical world in their series with freshly copyrighted IP, and fans will primarily want new works that build on that.

And if an author writes a sequel so bad that fans abandon the series and someone else writes a better sequel that fans flock to... well, the world is better off. Even the original author may be better off if it improves the popularity of the series.

I wouldn't put that in the same category as campaign donations. That money won't help the candidate get elected. The money goes to the inaugural committee to pay for the event.

I'd put that in the broader category of doing something the president/politician likes in hopes of gaining favor.

With this administration there are even better ways to gain influence and money by doing things the president likes than donating to inauguration ceremonies. Become a known staunch Trump advocate, and you could become the Secretary of Defense, FBI Deputy Director, or head of DOGE. No experience necessary.

> But what is low, anyway?

I think we're in the same ballpark here.

> Abolition of copyright will drive that monetizable share essentially to 0%

I'm in favour of copyright, though I think 70 years after the death of the author is so long it's silly. Even your grandchildren will have died of old age before your copyright ends.

I know this is tangential to your main point, but in the US, you can only give a max of $3,500 to a candidate per election cycle, for each the primaries and general election.

To give more financial support, you have to do independent, uncoordinated campaigning for the candidate. So you can spend a million dollars on ads saying to vote for a candidate, but you can't give that money to the candidate's campaign and the candidate can't coordinate with you. This is what Super PACs do.

I only write this because a lot of people are unclear on the rules. I'm not making an argument about billionaires.

No one knows. You're asking about uncaught crimes with no victim who can report it.

What data makes you think it's low?

> Can a Waymo prevent a carjacking when someone places traffic cones in front of it?

Yes, actually, that's an advantage of a Waymo over a regular car. I believe they have a perfect record against carjackings despite several theft attempts. The Waymo computer isn't easily intimidated at gunpoint.

What do regular drivers do during a carjacking? They get carjacked. There are about 30,000 incidents per year in the US.

You're underestimating how easy and common piracy is. You can get books, movies, or music with just a search, for free, with no consequences. It's generally socially accepted. This report tracked 216 billion visits to piracy websites in 2024: https://www.muso.com/blog/what-216-billion-visits-to-piracy-...

Music piracy is down just because services like Spotify let you listen to any song (for free with ads or with a subscription) and it's more convenient than pirating.

> I wonder how many of the books I love would still have been written in a world where somebody could scoop them all up and post them on the internet for free (and run ads).

Legal or not, this is exactly what happened. The piracy sites run ads and/or ask for donations.

I don't know which of your favorite books would have still been written without copyright. But I can say with confidence that the massive increase in the number of books per year over the past two decades would have happened regardless of copyright. It's been driven by lowering the barrier to entry for self-publishing, and only a very small fraction of them earn a living.

A surprisingly large fraction of my favorite books from the past two decades were published for free online by the author (e.g. Andy Weir's book).

People have been pirating books online for 20 years and in that time the number of books published per year has increased 15-fold. A number of my favorites have been released in that time.

It's about 240 wpm on text.

That's assuming they only use it to replace their software engineers and make no money selling AI usage or using it for anything else.

Are you suggesting that the lack of development and poverty is caused by good government?

As the article states, that Malawi hasn't developed much industry or exports is more of a description of poverty than an explanation. Malawi can grow coffee, but mostly doesn't. They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining. Why haven't they developed more?

I assume they meant they can't come up with a reasonable justification.

They do it because training different personalities is more effective than just changing the system prompt. Ever try asking ChatGPT to adopt a specific personality in a prompt? Its standard style bleeds through.

As the article says, the personalities weren't supposed to affect other personalities. OpenAI was as surprised by the goblins as you are. Training can be tricky.

Just to clarify, it's not the prompt voodoo that caused the affinity for goblins. It's the reward. They rewarded it for mentioning goblins when set to Nerdy, and it's still the same model as the other personalities, so the effects can carry over.

It's not entirely clear from the article but it sounds like Thus is either this chip or a series of chips that run low power neural nets with millions of parameters and they intend to use them for other applications in IoT devices.

It's a pretty central example of what we traditionally called AI before the term started being mostly used for LLMs.

According to the article, it's used for noise cancelling and calling that can better isolate voice from background noise. It's not an AI assistant or an LLM. These are totally different and the public's feelings on LLMs do not apply to their feelings on active noise cancelling.

I don't have one but odds are you know someone with one. Or, given the audience of hn, someone with a heat gun.

You don't need a heat gun. A regular hair dryer is fine.

I didn't choose 1975. That's the year the parent comment claimed median earnings have dropped from in comparison, so that's the year I have to use to refute the claim.

Still, real wages in 1975 were relatively high compared to previous decades. See table A-7 here: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-2...

Estimated median earnings for full-time male workers peaked in 1973 in the chart, until surpassing it in the 2010s. It's hard to find directly comparable data for earlier decades, but estimates put wages significantly lower. If you anchored to the 1920s, 30s, 40s or 50s instead, you'd just show even more growth in median wage. If you're saying we shouldn't compare to the 70s or 80s either, then what's left? Just years after 1990?

This isn't true for median purchasing power. You're looking at the federal minimum wage, not the median. Only about 1% of hourly workers earn $7.25 or less.

Median earnings were $48,070 in 1975, measured in 2024 dollars, and $51,370 in 2024.

Yeah, the Twitter acquisition wasn't obviously irredeemably stupid. I think it was a bad decision, but paying a 38% premium above market price for an acquisition of a public company is within the normal range. You can argue the markets were irrational and Twitter was overvalued, but you shouldn't argue it's obvious because it clearly isn't obvious to a huge number of investors. You could argue Twitter is a poor fit for Musk's goals, but that wasn't obvious either. Twitter didn't have to change radically to be worth its price. It just had to grow profits a bit and maybe help some of Musk's other projects (like Grok).

In my experience, people of every social strata sometimes do audaciously stupid things, and it's not because they get special treatment. It's often the people who have gotten in trouble the most that do audaciously stupid things the most frequently, despite experiencing past punishment.

Your observation matches what we would see if those people you speak of were just stupid for no reason and committed crimes that aren't caught as often. If a crime is only caught 10% of the time, they probably won't get caught the first few times. You can interpret that as them learning they can get away with it, but the person who just does stupid stuff for no reason will do the same thing, it isn't evidence one way or the other.

And they'd still be stupid the first time they committed the crime, before they've learned they can get away with it. And if they get convicted eventually, it was still stupid in the end. And if they don't get caught, we usually don't know about it, which makes it hard to argue that it's actually worth it for them to do these seemingly stupid crimes; we know of their failures but not their successes.

I think you get less return on investment for the same absolute edge in percentage points. A 1% event priced at 4% gets you a 3/96 = ~3.1% return. A 53% event priced at 50% gets you a 6% return. You nearly double your returns by investing in the latter market even though they're both off by 3 percentage points.

If the market isn't resolving soon, the small return might not be worth it.