slibhb

This narrative has been around for a long time in one form or the other. In its pure form, it's arguing that the form of human society is downstream from military technology.

The earliest mention I'm aware of is "the old oligarch," who claimed that Athenian democracy was justified by the fact that Athens was a naval power. Since every able male could man an oar, wider sufferage made sense. He contrasts this to Sparta's less democratic structure and its military, which was supposedly based on its few elite hoplites (helms/greaves/shield/spears were expensive).

You could compare this idea (military tech shapes society) to the Marxist claim that societies are shaped by economic forces. Both claims have some truth to them, but reality is more complicated. In particular, human societies today are less violent and founded on mutual consent/social contract moreso than on violence. Therefore, I would expect new military technologies to have limited disruptive effects within states and more between states. We'll see!

He's absolutely not saying iron caused the collapse, only that it prevented the recovery.

> The causes of the Bronze Age collapse are still debated by historians: a series of severe droughts; the sudden appearance of mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided along the Mediterranean coast; the disruption of the tin trade routes; internal revolts; or possibly all of these at once. But there is another unifying factor that could have prevented the resurgence of empires: iron.

The claim is that bronze enabled complex, highly centralized states because it was rare (due to a dearth of tin). So only the connected/rich could afford it, and they used it to build empires/kingdoms/etc.

Iron wasn't superior to bronze (in the fact the article claims it was worse), but it was good enough and widespread. All you needed was a furnace with bellows, charcoal, and an iron source (which were everywhere). Since everyone had access to iron, no one person/group had an edge over the others and this prevented highly centralized polities from being established.

Hmm, I kind of like it. It comes across as hand-crafted and I spent longer there than I planned.

All I mean is that you shouldn't swear, call people "cucks," flip people off, etc. It's not an effective means of communication, and will get you removed from whatever room you're in.

Based on reading between the lines and watching the video, here's my sense of what happened:

1. Some protestors showed up at a council meeting to complain about flock

2. The council moved to disallow discussion of flock cameras

3. The protestors started disrupting the meeting, chanting, etc, and were forced to leave/were arrested

4. One protestor went to the podium and started talking about flock cameras, was politely interrupted, then had her mic cut. She flipped off the council and was arrested

If you oppose flock/this kind of surveillance, fine. But this kind of behavior is not tolerated at council meetings, and it's not a surprise that some of the protestors were arrested.

> “Well, I said: ‘Jeff Schrag is a cuck.’ I said: ‘Fuck you Jeff.’ I said: ‘Worthless’ and then, also, the final thing I said was: ‘Jeff Schrag has a tiny, stinky, cock,’” Powell explained. “I just let myself get handcuffed and let them do whatever power trip they wanted to do. Got my ticket and left.”

I mean, really?

If there's value in writing, then it's in the writing. It doesn't matter who wrote it, even if it was monkeys on typewriters.

"AI-generated" looks bad to a large minority of people. It is not clear if the majority notices, much less cares.

That aside, if you spend 5 minutes prompting AI, you can create an image that no one will clock as AI.

> the frontier labs are priced according to the narrative that they have produced or will in the very near future produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers

That's a reason to be bearish about AI companies, not LLMs. But is it even true? OpenAI and Anthropic have each reported ~50 billion in revenue with ~900 billion valuations. That's a high ratio but I'm not sure if follows that the only way it pans out is if we get "fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers".

It wouldn't shock me to see those revenue numbers scaling up to where they need to be over the next decade ( to, say, ~400 billion) without ever achieving drop-in worker replacements.

You see the same thing in literature, where modernism has crowded out of other styles. As one example, you see way less description today than in older books.

I'm not a hater on modernism -- I like stripped down literature and architecture (though I wish concrete buildings were cleaned more regularly). But there does seem to be some truth in this idea that "the elite critics" have dominated these fields, resulting in the production of art (and buildings) that are broadly unpopular. I think the overriding goal of these critics is avoiding kitsch, which they see in classical forms.

"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.

I understand people just get off posting stuff like this. But creating LLMs from the entire corpus of human text was a huge achievement. Distilling those models is much less of an achievement. It means China is further behind than we thought.

That's why we have an independent judiciary. What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits? Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?

The modern legally bound nation state has done much better at guaranteeing rights and protecting freedoms than any other configurations despite the fact that it's constained largely by "pinky promises" (i.e. laws, courts, etc).

If red light cameras are incorrectly calibrated, that seems like something that could be challenged in court and changed.

> If your approach is that we can fix abuses by having the abuser write down rules that say they're not allowed to abuse us, why limit it to public surveillance? Stick cameras in everybody's houses while we're at it. Think of all the horrible crimes that go on behind closed doors. Solve the privacy issues with legislation.

People have a constitutional right to privacy in their own homes.

This post is a good example of why I find the anti-surveillance people so tiresome

> Just wait til we have an administration in the White House (I’m guessing not this one?) which directly threatens your freedoms in such a way that they can easily use cameras to prosecute those who they disagree with.

"You must not be gay/trans/black/hispanic/female or you'd agree with me" is not a good argument.

We're living in a brave new world where cameras and storage are cheap, networks are fast, etc. People have cameras at their front doors, stores have cameras, appartment buildings have cameras, etc. We need to deal with these facts productively, i.e. with legislation and serious thinking, rather than inane comments like "women seeking abortions have been tracked therefore we need to ban cameras".

Great -- so fix those problems with legislation.

That sounds like an argument for anarchism. I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.

What seems to me to have worked is understanding that a government is necessary, that it has the potential to misbehave, and therefore we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it. I would like to see opponents of mass surveillance do this, which seems more productive than what I normally observe.

I'm generally in favor of mass surveillance, as long as it's in public. I think it can prevent a lot of crime and I don't believe we have a right to "privacy in public". Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.

However, I'd be interested to see if opponents of mass surveillance could draft good legislation to curb potential abuses. For example, the laws around who owns/controls data from cameras could be changed/redefined, as could the process of accessing that data.

From what I understand, none of the people involved here are originators of the idea that led to this solution. Not Buckmaster nor Alpöge nor OpenAI. All of the above were using LLMs to push other mathematicians' ideas forward (Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa; named in the linked document).

I don't know how the math community handles this but normally I would think if X mathematician comes up with an idea and Y mathematician uses it to solve some problem, Y would get credit. But does that change if Y heavily relied on LLMs? I suppose we're going to find out.

Worth noting that Tao's post says the authors had "significant AI input" but are reworking them into "acceptable form". Either way, it seems AI was involved.

> But the right to accurate information from public officials, I thought that was indeed an absolute and basic right in a democracy

That's a misunderstanding on your part. You can't have a "right to accurate information" because officials might simply be wrong. "Being wrong" can't be against the law. Additionally, people simply disagree about lots of things and often there's no procedure to resolve this.

However, you can't lie under oath, or in front of Congress. But lying is not the same as providing inaccurate information. In most other contexts, lying is legal.

This is what happens when people get "the entire history of humanity" from Howard Zinn-like sources. Healthy, stable societies are not based on the threat of violence, but rather consensual submission to a rule of law. As a rule, humans cooperate, play fairly, and want others to admire and respect them.

1. The government will force them to submit

2. They care about status, fame, reputation

3. Attitudes towards taxation/redistribution will change in a world where AI is doing almost all the labor

That's not the main issue at all. I'm baffled where you got that idea.

Also, I live in Northern Virginia where we have tons of data centers, and energy prices have not spiked.

Today, the decentralized nature of human labor means we have to incentivize people in broad ways. But if there's like 5 AI companies doing all the labor with their robots, we can just tax them and redistribute.

The owners/workers at AI companies won't resist the redistribution. It will be seen as inevitable as AI performs a greater and greater share of labor. Also, the AI company owners/workers will accrue massive status and fame; which will become the new currency (like you noted in your first post).

The US has never experienced a widespread famine.

In some sense I agree with you that starvation in the modern world is a political problem. Evidence for that is the common observation that famines don't occur in functioning liberal democracies.

But food production relies on more than technology. Human labor is necessary to produce food, and so incentives have to exist for people to do that work (prices, free markets, capitalism, inequality, etc). So if we decide "everyone deserves free food" then we are undermining the production of food. Why would people work in the fields when they could just collect their free food? Scarcity won't be truly gone until food is abundant whether or not there are any people working the fields.

Scarcity of status, fame, power, etc may be inevitable -- but that's fine. After all, people need stuff to do.

But if we solve food, hunger, housing, education, healthcare, and entertainment then that's enough for me. And no, it's not "the current political system" that prevents us from solving those problems now. Rather it's that engine of production is human labor, which forces us to rely on incentives.

> Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”

This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the pre-AI era as technology has accumulated). Eventually, AI will do all necessary labor and goods/services will be incredibly cheap. Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.

Also, it's possible that this technology just doesn't pan out. There could be a bottleneck or a nuclear war or whatever. Maybe it just stops scaling, or it stays in the realm of text-generation and can't replace manual labor. But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.

Feels more like leftists are pro-scarcity into order to "empower workers"