I really don't see that as a fair comparison. OP wasn't equating individual citizens, they were equating the nations as a whole. And China, as a state, definitely isn't akin to a slave being forced to do this dirty work.
307 karma · joined December 6, 2022
> No the chinese people, most of whom do not have a ICE car, do not produce those carbon numbers
That sounds to me like you're saying that China is not as bad as the US, because the pollution in China comes in some part from laundered pollution from the US. If that's not the case, could you explain what you meant?
I usually have quite a bit of flexibility when traveling. Exploring multiple options with current tools (at least the ones I'm familiar with) can be slow and annoying.
So what I think would be better is a constraint based system. Rather than simple departure and return dates, you'd input more abstract info like
- Trip must take place between October and November
- Trip must last between 10 and 15 days
- Trip must contain 2 full Tuesdays at the destination
And so on and so forth. Then come up with all possible flights that meet these criteria, and let me sort by price, or by least time spent on transfers, or any number of parameters.
From the small digging I've done, seems like the real hard part of this is getting the actual flight data. I wouldn't even want to necessarily book the flight through this service, just giving me the info about the flights would be enough. But airlines seem to be really stingy with that data. Which kinda makes sense, but damn, is it annoying.
Maybe scraping could be ok. I'd refrain from doing that in the past, but with the AI craze, I guess I'd barely affect the background noise levels of bot activity hitting their servers. Certainly if I built this for me only, and didn't release it, or just released the source for people to run it themselves.
In the almost 10 years I've been running this setup, I think I hit a conflict one single time. I don't quite remember the details, but I think I accidentally edited something in the mobile app, and before saving, edited something else in the desktop app or vice-versa. So it was pretty much my fault.
Other than that, literally never had an issue. Password managers are by their nature mostly reads, and very occasional writes, so it's very hard to put yourself in a situation where conflicts happen, even if you don't pay attention to it. I've made an identical setup for my (fairly savvy but non-technical) fiancee, and she's never hit an issue either. I had to insist a bit for her to get on board, but years later she actually loves using KeePass. She's thanked me multiple times for how convenient it is not having to remember passwords anymore!
But some things are not like that. Two statements being right against each other, or having an empty line between them, encodes information.
In a big function call with many arguments, where do you add line breaks between arguments? That can convey information as well. As the posted link says, those are some of the most difficult scenarios for a formatter to try to deal with, and my point is that I think it's not worth the effort.
If you want to make some comparison of general intelligence, you have to start thinking of some weighted average of all possible domains.
One possible shortcut here is the meta domain of tool use. ChatGPT could theoretically make more use of a calculator (say, via always calling a calculator API when it wants to do math, instead of trying to do it by itself) than a calculator can make use of ChatGPT, so that makes ChatGPT by definition smarter than a calculator, cause it can achieve the same goals the calculator can just by using it, and more.
That's really most of humans' intelligence edge for now: seems like more and more, for any given skill, there's a machine or a program that can do it better than any human ever could. Where humans excel is our ability to employ those super human tools in the aid of achieving regular human goals. So when some AI system gets super-human-ly good at using tools which are better than itself in particular domains for its own goals, I think that's when things are going to get really weird.
Most of the videos take a form of:
1. Presenting a possible problem that AIs might have (say, lying during training, or trying to stop you from changing their code) 2. Explaining why it's logical to expect those problems to arise naturally, without a malicious actor explicitly trying to get the AI to act badly 3. Going through the proposed safety measures we've come up so far that could mitigate that problem 4. Showing the problems with each of those measures, and why they are wholly or at least partially ineffective
I find he's very good a presenting this in an approachable and intuitive way. He seldom makes direct those bombastic "everyone will die" claims, and instead focuses on just showing how hard it is to make an AI actually aligned with what you want it to do, and how hard it can be to fix that once it is sufficiently intelligent and out in the world.
No, that's the problem. You don't have to deliberately train that in.
Pretty much any goal that you train the AI to achieve, once it gets smart enough, it will recognize that lying, hiding information, manipulating and being deceptive are all very useful instruments for achieving that goal.
So you don't need to tell it that: if it's intelligent, it's going to reach that conclusion by itself. No one tells children that they should lie either, and they all seem to discover that strategy sooner or later.
So you are right that you have to deliberately train it away from using those strategies, by being truthful, empathetic, honest, etc. The issue is that those are ill defined goals. Philosophers have being arguing about what's true and what's good since philosophy first was a thing. Since we can barely find those answers to ourselves, it's a hard chance that we'll be able to perfectly impart them onto AIs. And when you have some supremely intelligent agent acting on the world, even a small misalignment may end up in catastrophe.
Keeps actors with more potential for damaging society in check, while not laying a huge burden on small companies which have less resources to spend away from their core business.
With dart, I felt that very often, when time I saved a file after editing (which activated the formatter), the code would jump around a lot, even for very small edits sometimes. I actually found myself saving less often, as I found the sudden reorganizing kind of jarring and disorienting.
Most of this, I felt like came from this wish of making the formatter keep lines inside a given width. While that's a goal I appreciate, I've come to think is one of those things that's better done manually. The same goes for the use of whitespace in general, other than trivial stuff like consistent indentation. There's actual, important meaning that can be conveyed in how you arrange things which I think is more important than having it always be exactly mathematically consistent.
It's one of the reasons I still prefer ESLint over Prettier in JS land, also, even for stylistic rules. The fact that Prettier always rewrites the entire file from scratch with the parsed AST often ends up mangling some deliberate way that I'd arrange the code.
Not only is that not an implicit claim in the post, they explicitly say the that it's not free, it's actually just around the same amount of time they used to spend with AWS:
> Total toil is ~14 engineer-hours/month, including prep. The AWS era had us spending similar time but on different work: chasing cost anomalies, expanding Security Hub exceptions, and mapping breaking changes in managed services. The toil moved; it did not multiply.
As for the following:
> If you’re a stable business with engineers sitting idle that could be the right choice. For most startups who just need to get a product out there and get customers, pulling limited headcount away from the core product to save pennies (relatively speaking) on a potential AWS bill can be a trap.
You're just agreeing with them:
> Cloud-first was the right call for our first five years. Bare metal became the right call once our compute footprint, data gravity, and independence requirements stabilised.
The person I'm engaged with, and their family, had/has it even worse, and it's not hard to see the ways it affected and still affects them.
My point being, I'm no stranger to a family history of financial hardship. I'm sorry for whatever you and your family have had to endure. But, politely, screw off with the implication that the only way I feel the way that I do/say the things that I say are fruit of some privileged upbringing that couldn't possibly understand money problems.
It just makes the propositional logic of the sentence clearer:
X might not imply Y, but !X implies !Y
The utilitarian POV will always look for the best (less noisy/most accurate/most reproducible) medium possible. But when it comes to art, many other aspects factor in, and a little bit of noise can very well add something to a piece. Not always, but often enough.
Microsoft does not have a monopoly on distributing software on Windows.
Hell, Apple itself does not have a monopoly on distributing software on MacOS.
Really, you could say the same about, AFAICT, every single major operating system that has ever existed, other than iOS.
We've had chatbots for a long time before LLMs, and while they're of course much more limited as you have to explicitly program every thing it should be able to do, by that very virtue, hallucinating is problem they do not have.
For this kind of customer service chat scenario, I find them much better than just a free style LLM trained in some internal docs.
(Though really, probably the ultimate solution is a hybrid one, where you have an explicitly programmed conversation tree the user can go down, but with an LLM decoding what the user is saying into one of the constrained options. So that if one of the options is "shipping issues", "my order is late" should take me there. While other forms of NLP can do that, LLMS would certainly shine for that application)
It's not perfect by any means, but it's definitely much better than nothing. So the US should absolutely be able to at the very least match that, but really most likely it should be able to do much better. That it doesn't is very much a choice.
In my view that's the ideal setup. Turnouts is always very high, even though the fine for not voting is laughably small (3.51 reais, literally less than a dollar). Good example of the power of defaults.