pcstl

Yes, it is. If you convince a model it is inside a sandbox it is much more likely to comply with requests that would normally be against its guardrails.

>assuming their difficulty is in the same ballpark

It is not. Many mathematicians have said that they don't expect to see solutions to the other 5 problems in their lifetimes.

Of course, AI might advance fast enough that the "in their lifetimes" part ends up wrong, but there is a considerable gap to the other problems. We have barely any idea of how to even get started on most of them.

Indeed.

Regression to the mean is pretty nasty. Stumbling into success can make you a car dealership owner or something like that, but being consistently successful in business requires just about as much skill as being consistently successful in, say, chess.

I find it difficult to imagine an intelligent person who finds it hard to get what they want. The trope of the oblivious genius who is incredibly competent in a single field of inquiry but completely unable to handle day-to-day life is more a creation of media than how reality works.

I'm not saying any of the people in charge are good people at all. I'm just saying that they are skilled at achieving their own goals, regardless of the morality or lack thereof of those goals.

That's a choice, but the universe has no reason to respect it.

"Capability to achieve goals" seems to be fairly independent of goals.

This isn't about people who just happened to make it big in a market rally, though. You're talking as if I'm speaking about people who just happened to buy some Bitcoin in 2012 rather than leaders of some of the most successful corporations on Earth.

They're not infallible, but modelling them as complete idiots that just happened to get lucky is also... Not really consistent with reality, as far as I can tell. These people might not be good people, but they're good at playing a certain kind of game.

I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.

I never said it's not worth discussing, I'm just saying that it becoming a charged issue was bad for Zitron specifically because his style of content fell in demand with the most irrational parts of the crowd.

>It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions

Humans are built for fighting and killing the rival tribe, not for pondering whether the other tribe might actually be correct. We are exceptional for even being able to overcome ourselves enough that the outcome of "fighting and killing" can be minimized in the large.

It is weakness in the long-term.

It's pretty clear in how people talk about billionaires: They must somehow conclude that the people most successful within a system that rewards certain things are not competent because the things the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward (it is fine to believe the system rewards the wrong things, but people walk straight into denying that those people have skill even within the system, or they claim that skill within the bounds of the system does not reflect any "real" skill - totally ignoring that elites tend to stay elites even through, say, Communist uprisings).

Hence how someone can say that Musk is "dumb" with a straight face.

Zitron has become the distorted reflection of the very AI boosters he criticizes and mocks.

I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position. This gave him a captive audience - as long as he says what they want to hear, which means that he can never ever concede that he might have been wrong or that AI might actually be progressing or having successes.

This is not conducive to good prediction long-term - rather it leads one to a state of cognitive dissonance where one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces. The propagandist's disease.

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What is real engineering?

Rule of thumb here is that investments will work fine using doubles, but transfers need to run on int or fixed point.

Air moves from regions of high pressure to regions of low pressure. Pressure itself does not have a direction.

This just seems like a bad idea. Starting things and not finishing them is just... The default. Whoever thinks that our society is too focused on commitment has really not been keeping up with social trends for the last few decades. Most people are cut loose from any kind of stability, community or enduring sense of identity.

I get that they're trying to go with "done does not need to mean perfect", but this way of putting it is too aggressive and I don't feel like it'll have good outcomes.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/phones-listen-theory-debunked https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVazBWGgg64

They're sending pretty much everything BUT audio.

Main reason is that audio is just tremendously inefficient compared to other signals. It's large and expensive to store and process and doesn't really give you that many bytes of information you can't get elsewhere for how expensive it is to handle.

This is very likely fake.

But why would a company say they do this? It's because so many people believe that this happens anyway that there's next to no cost to them in saying it - and the buyers for this kind of technology think of this as a good thing.

It might be fake, but people being scared of your powerful technology is good for sales.

AI labs do the same thing by actively courting fearmongering.

People have. And it's always shown that no apps are opening your mics when you're not using the app, and that if you're using the app they generally will only open your mic when it makes sense to do so.

These companies are most likely lying or exaggerating their capabilities. Since so many people believe in audio eavesdropping anyway, it's in their interest to make the buyers of their software believe they're much more powerful than they really are.

It's the same as how it's good for AI companies to talk about how AIs are just on the verge of ending the world and must be regulated at any cost - more people believing that what they're selling is absurdly powerful is good for sales.

Can you provide evidence that code which is "as performant as using mutation" is generated? Mutation tends to be very hard to beat.

Mangroves are generally salt-tolerating and perfectly adapted to growing in brackish water.

The majority of the industry is made of people who care mostly about their own careers. If solving nasty distributed system problems is simple, you can't justify having a huge bloated expensive team. If your team doesn't spend a lot of money, you aren't seen as very important within the company. Since people want to be important, it's hard to get more productive languages to be adopted.

That's pretty much what Urbit wanted to be, to be fair, just with a strong networking component powered by a decentralized identity system. It's just too esoteric to have meaningful traction as that.

Is Umbrel just actually usable Urbit? [0]

[0] https://urbit.org/

I'd agree with you if it weren't for all the cultish red flags present here.

This is clearly a man who wants a cult-like mentality to form around him.

If he were just going ridiculously in-depth with his self-research and being open and honest about this, I'd actually admire him a lot, but it's all the grandiose talk about "Zeroth principles thinking" and "Aligning with what the 25th century would want" together with implying his detractors must be weak, scared and lacking in self-control that turns me off heavily.

So he's a successful businessman.

How does that background translate to any kind of scientific competence? Because his website is heavy on the buzzwords and the Silicon Valley "glorious future"-talk and remarkably light on anything resembling responsible science.

He clearly doesn't want to advance knowledge about longevity, he wants to be the world's top longevity marketer and salesman. It's just a business long shot to him. And yes, that is perfectly congruent with his background.

As an entrepreneur myself, I can tell you that "needing the money" stops being a significant motivation after a while, or at least takes a back seat to the thrill of just getting people to buy the thing.