pksebben

Oh no, they might stop doing the thing that benefits me and that they were never required to do in the first place.

I would be fascinated to hear what value you think JP Morgan created rather than moved around. His company continues to do so long after his death.

one doesn't go to a gallery to watch the painting get made. Creative coding can still be enjoyed by appreciating the output.

The immediate rebuttal to that might be that "AI could just do it" but that's not entirely true - the sort of art that you (typically) see in a gallery isn't "an accurate representation of the world as viewed" just as a lot of "code as art" isn't "a problem solved with code". The camera captures (mostly accurate) images, and AI is usually writing "code that does a thing".

The expressiveness (can) come from a place that's deeply human, and can yield a product that is tangibly diifferent from what an efficient coding process would normally produce.

A few of us played a game when I was in batch at the Recurse Center - we called it Monstrosity. The game was to build a string in the absolutely least efficient way possible - using the largest stack, the most network hops, the most obfuscatory and difficult methods to create a character (bit-shifting algorithms to make ASCII, anyone?). It was beautiful, and it was the kind of thing that AI would never think to do (at least, not without significant cajoling and even then you'd be missing the point).

"We believe these representations are not serious, they're just really good friends."

That does kind of make it sound like think tanks are normally either straightforward or fundamentally honest about their agendas, which they pretty much never are. Even the ones that register and have DBAs fund reports that end up in scientific journals and publish articles through chains of obfuscatory intermediaries.

Really only possible in broken-futureland, to have a company whose sole purpose is to get paid to have an opinion.

Ah! Sincere apologies for being defensive. Yeah, I share your eye when it comes to orthodoxy in most if not all areas - wary. The problem with any orthodoxy is that it's dumb - not as in 'stupid' but as in 'doesn't think or adapt to changing circumstances'.

Being the most correct 20 years ago is fairly meaningless today - not making a judgement on whether D-Stall is, was, or wasn't. But it's important I think to deal with reality. Thanks for your clarification!

Sorry, but you must be way smarter than me or something because that made no sense. Not that I don't understand what that notation is supposed to mean, but that I'm not seeing the connective tissue here. It's also a little weird to come at me based on the 'erosion of my foundation of beliefs', considering how orthogonal that is to the topic of legal precedent and contracts.

For what it's worth, what I do believe is that our system of law was a good idea at one point but is totally ineffectual in the current context - that's my point about an era of grifters. Didn't get that one from stallman, measured that on the eyeball mark I.

Have you served? Because I have. Still have friends in the service and they are pretty cheesed that they've been roped into this mess. Go ask a lifer what they really think about Smegsbreath some time - I think it will be enlightening.

This line of reason is one I find appealing but somewhat untimely. If I'm grokking the deeper message it's that "limiting licensed use in these creative ways opens the door to potentially evil chicanery" -- i.e. you start limiting licenses to non-police activities and then some corporation goes "great! now that we can do that our licenses now limit usage to only endeavors that boil your firstborn and undermine our competition".

Problem is in era de la grift we've sort of realized that they never needed permission - there's no precedent to set anymore.

Oh, that's lovely. So, if you don't know what the cause is, you can't really say you've mitigated it, can you? C'mere, I wanna honk your big red nose.

Recontextualized: *A person who chooses a career centered around the use of force is more likely to use force in their personal life*.

Ahdunno, where's the lie?

out of curiosity - what scheme do you suggest? I've always been of the mind that 'one thing to remember and secure, but secure it well' was the best option - 2factor and a 15+character passphrase meaning that nearly everything else gets it's own discretized blast radius.

Always open to better security, though.

I'm with you on the uninformed / confident vector in general, but you do seem fairly level-headed so I still want your take on the question: what do we do about it? How do we approach the problem of "most of our problems stem from an intractable information asymmetry, and this could be existential"?

Real question; what are we supposed to do about that information delay when it directly enables corruption and usury? This is an ongoing issue with historical precedent; the repeal of glass-steagall, MKULTRA and COINTELPRO, Iran-contra, watergate, the list is indefinably long.

All of these all surfed in on that very temporal ambiguity, and the fact that we have zero recourse in a plurality of cases - a situation that has eroded over time, not gotten better, and could feasibly be credited with a large part of the palpable social decay that real people are suffering from every day right now.

So what do we do about it? "Indulging in plausible conspiracy theories" could also be read here as "trying to get out ahead of this imminent yet undclear threat"

"Assessing effects of rent control on wealth is hard, so we threw most of that out and just used housing prices. Also, we're fairly sure that our results are good because there was nothing special happening in St. Paul in 2021 that we could figure. See this scatterplot that looks like inflation, note that the statistics we put just below it also don't look interesting but we've tied them to how rent controls are at the same time socialist and also evil and capitalist. We are objective parties to this because we say we are, please ignore the TLD we're serving this on."

You can almost hear yakitty sax playing in the background. I bet if you met the researchers you could honk their nose.

Right - it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. For one, "not a citizen" is a pretty hard bar to assess online. For another, "citizen" isn't very meaningful here. Many national security incidents have featured a citizen at the core - and it's a really fuzzy indicator of "potentially hostile" and especially "for what reason".

I guess I'm possibly giving them too much credit, but if the people who sent the letter have their head screwed on straight, "protecting national security by disallowing specifically non-citizens from using it" can really only be read as a smokescreen, or at very best a small part of the actual picture.

Bit of a doozie though, that one.

I recall getting really excited over hinton's FF foray, right before he bailed on AI as a societal direction (which, if anyone ever had the right, I suppose he does). If one squints, one can see a backprop-free base being much easier to train on geographically distributed and heterogenous hardware.

Genuinely curious - who do you think the targeted people are and how would this keep them out?

> Perhaps the US administration is gambling that US citizens on their own provide enough of a training data and revenue flywheel for them to keep their AI development edge.

There is no way to enforce access of one and not the other, not with the state of tech in the US (and most countries without a great firewall). Bypassing such controls is as easy as a pilfered credit card (or some other american-looking payment method) and a vpn - both trivial to come by.

Perhaps a little tinfoil hat, but I don't think there's a legitimate concern here to address. An empowered populace is antithetical to the current political paradigm, which is what I suspect the actual grievance to be.

And before either 'aisle' piles on - I'm pretty sure the concern is bipartisan.

Dumb astroturf grok bot is dumb. Don't feed the trolls.

It's not a training problem, it's an incentive problem. You put these guys in a structure that requires them to justify their jobs at minimal cost of effort and then ooh ack surprise when they don't take the proper care to ensure that they're not stepping on innocent people in the pursuit of a healthy career.

Couple that with overburdening them with petty nonsense all the time and training them in military equipment and tactics and like it doesn't matter what tools you give them, those tools will be abused at convenience.

The issue is structural, not technical, but power tools = more damage per capita.

I think I see where we're coming at this from different angles.

If you're going by the numbers and the 'strength of the state' - then yeah, we're doing great. However, neither I nor anyone I know happens to be a part of the class that's holding the baton with all that stuff.

My concern is specifically about how well the citizens are doing, in aggregate, taking into account whether they have democratic control over the reins of governance, whether they are afforded the opportunity to be meaningful contributors to the greater good, education, freedom, enfranchisement.

GDP / capita is meaningless if most of the 'capita' never sees a dime. TBH the structures and institutions that make up a country are just a bunch of bureaucratic role playing from where I stand - they're meaningless without the 'we' of 'we the people'.

all fair points - but what strengths? We've proven ourselves incapable of the most basic social goods for decades now. All the metrics that you might point to as "hey the US is doing fine" (GDP, deficit, sector growth) are concerned specifically with how the state is doing and desperately unconcerned with it's citizens, which I think is a principal issue here.

Isn't flock's whole thing that they extract information from the pictures they have?

Like, say I have an interview in your office and you step out for coffee. I take a picture of the applicant list on your desk. That doesn't make the list of applicants "my data".

Both are good sources of energy. If you're going to make the argument that "nuclear is unsafe so we shouldn't do it" though, it's relevant to keep in mind that since we've had nuclear power, dam failures have outpaced nuclear by many times in terms of deaths / TwH (1).

Edit to add: Before anyone jumps on for this it's important to note that without the Banquiao disaster the rates are about the same. Still means "nuclear is unsafe" is kind of a red herring.

1 - https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

I'm not going to go to bat for Mao(1), but I think you're underplaying the body count that capitalist countries have had - this is kind of easy to do because a lot of the damage that we do is obfuscated behind proxies. Besides the obvious and direct war crimes like Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, and now I guess Iran again, there's the second order stuff like Israel's Bad Neighbor Syndrome (which we have enabled financially for basically the duration), Pinochet who we put in charge, heck - pick any country south of the border and we've done some damage there at least once. Then there's the spiderweb of damage that flows out to the global south continuously through NAFTA and similar foreign policy. I suppose the principal difference is that we externalize a lot of our violence (and somehow are shocked when it comes back to bite us that we trained Osama Bin Laden).

Nobody's asking for Maoist China, I think mostly we're clamoring for something closer to Norway. I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to settle for UK-style socialized services but even those folks get lambasted for being "too far left" too so whaddyagonnado.

1 - I think he and 'bolshevism' are a bit of a strawman here anyway, as I've not heard a ton of pro-Mao people but a TON of people who identify as leftists - they are not the same thing

>> trust in the ideas and people who control it,

This right here is the crux of the issue. I don't even trust my own computer without fairly deep introspective tools, and what we're given for 'leadership' is 'this totally outdated and opaque system of voting for corporate shill A or corporate shill B is totally trustworthy! You obviously cannot think that you could get by without some asshat running your whole society so be thankful'.

Direct democracy, liquid democracy - whatever you pick that removes the middle man will be a marked improvement from day 1. We do not need these people deciding what's best for us. I'm not sure we ever did.

guidance and alignment are usually handled by RLHF, which actually rewires the weights such that it becomes near-impossible for the model to have certain kinds of 'thoughts'. This is baked in such that it's not something you can just extract or turn off.

"Yeah so it says on your chart here..."