stanfordkid

Whoever wrote this article probably has little more than a cursory or highly aesthetecized understanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It feels like they just related his idea of value-creation to a bunch of pre-conceived purportedly “bad things” like lack of social cohesion.

Most of his work deals with the psychological and historical origins of morality/philosophy, as well as how it might change as a result of herd dynamics. This doesn’t mean he thinks AI destroying morality or mediating it is a good thing or that some Nietzschian “ubermensch” needs to create a universal AI morality. His whole point is that morality is not universal truth but comes in flavors (master vs slave morality). He doesn’t really even think truth or egalitarianism/democracy has any inherent value (all ideas this article seems to negate).

In my opinion the biggest Nietzschian idea we can pontificate on in relation to AI is the concept of “The Last Man”, which describes Nietzsches prophesized end state of humanity in the post death-of-God era — men just want to be safe, satiated, and friendly to each other (which we are in):

“No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. Formerly, all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink. We have invented happiness, and they blink"

I'm not so sure that is entirely accurate. Most of Israel's military superiority is based completely on air supremacy -- Dahiya doctrine. Even w/ F-35's this requires tons of US produced munitions (smart bombs etc). The Iron Dome system was jointly designed by US/Israel and most of the actual consumables are supplied by Raytheon.

I think it is accurate to say that if the US wanted to cripple Israel they pretty much could do so on a whim, using nothing more than sanctions. That also applies to any other non-superpower country of course. What I mean to say, we could sanction them like Russia etc. and it would probably have a much larger impact if we really wanted them to do what we want.

In my opinion the whole agents.txt thing is bullshit and/or politeness, and should have zero legal significance.

If something is openly available on the internet you should be able to crawl it, and it is the server's responsibility to identify, authenticate and/or ban clients that do not adhere to it's requirements. If Amazon states "You must not use agents" in it's website terms of service then it would be the individual perplexity user not perplexity itself that is breaking it's terms of service, since they are the one operating the agent.

All in all lame move by Amazon.

And all we have to do to have them roll over on our command is to threaten the halt of the billions of weapons and aid we send annually. My main issue is that Israel/US relations feel like the tail is wagging the dog. Israel exists because of the West. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that we have immense leverage over them due to them being surrounded by enemies and dependent on US weapons systems like the Iron Dome... we can basically force them to do whatever it is we want. I blame the US and the bought politicians for the tragedy in Gaza as much as I do the Israeli's.

I have the feeling Israel simply will go the way of Rhodesia within a few generations due to the actions of this war resulting in widespread de-legitimization on both sides of the political spectrum and especially generationally. No one in the US actually wants to spend tax money on a patch of land in the Middle East the size of New Jersey, especially if they don't behave.

Maybe it’s for a use case I don’t understand… but I don’t see why anyone would use this for a modern, complex, richly interactive web-app. I also don’t really see any examples of a high quality major production site using htmx.

The reasoning for why they canned him is a total facade. Nothing he said was really that inflammatory. They canned him because they were afraid the FCC would screw them, then they saw their viewers were angry so they re-negged. Run of the mill spineless bean counters. They kind of won it both ways though, because they were able to feign loyalty and show gov't they only re-instated "because they had to for the money", which Trump will empathize with.

This is a common framing by neo-liberal / centrist folks: That the US/West is intelligently and methodologically utilizing Israel for some tactical geopolitical advantage / force projection. It may have played out that way in the past... but at this point Israel is lobbying the US gov't heavily and has bought out most politicians via AIPAC. The myth of Israel being a "bastion" between the west and terrorist Arabs is pretty much a veneer... they are themselves responsible for generating much this terrorism. They bombed the shit out of Lebanon and who would've thunk it Hezbollah popped up.

To further explain:

No, they didn't build iPhones to be beautiful because they would sell more, they did because they wanted to.

Ferrari didn't design sports cars because he wanted to sell the most cars. Armani doesn't design the most profitable suits. It's all completely absurd to say the point of "a firm" is to "maximize shareholder value". It's just so utterly stupid and inane... like... what about time horizon? At what level of variance? Its a lot like an unfalsifiable claim. You could say anything and say "well it maximizes shareholder value according to me"

Friedmans theory is basically a non-statement. It’s so banal as to be vacuous, except as a justification. It’s like saying the point of life is to procreate. Like no shit, but that’s not all that it is.

To put it in AI terms: you could dimensionality reduce a 1024 dimensional vector into 1 dimension and train a model on it. It may be the case that it’s the best reduction you could compute, but that doesn’t mean your entire idea isn’t shitty.

It always astounds me how stupid economists are. Like only an economist would use reasoning using terms something like epsilon to infinity to describe something that is a context dependent feedback loop in a closed system. Like these guys are literally idiots that studied real analysis then said maybe we can just apply that to an oil and gas company, without thinking about how it requires people and social consensus etc. to actually carry out these activities and they exist in a finite closed system with feedback.

"Increase shareholder value" ... yeah until the company subsumes the planet... duh, so natural and rational. And obviously if you act that way forever it won't ever effect shareholder value. It's so stupid of a theory it's basically a non-statement. It's utterly obvious that companies want to make money and obvious that stakeholders want that too. This theory is just saying that goodwill is worthless but like, clearly it's not. Apple didn't have to make it's products beautiful, but it did, because it's cool.

Umm... it absolutely was cut and dry. 75 years ago a set of westerners came and occupied another country through massive, brutal and widespread violence all under the approval of western govt's that themselves felt massive guilt about the holocaust. The Israeli gov't pretended to give Palestinians rights all while calculatedly trying to suppress any legitimate form of gov't (read about Israels massive support of Hamas starting in the 80s because they believed they would have a tougher "negotiating position" against extremists... guess that backfired. They enforced apartheid, blockades, mass surveillance etc. naturally that resulted in resistance. Is resistance justified? Who cares. Is it a natural consequence of material conditions? Absolutely.

I have a friend who would say anytime someone brings up that "it's a complex issue": "They should just stop stealing peoples houses dude". This pretty much sums it up. Maybe if they stopped that a few decades ago this wouldn't have happened.

It means two people of different races can have a baby together, but two people of the same sex cannot.

This a bone headed article… umm we can’t extract anything from it about your health (*now)… so might as well just spread it everywhere?

Like he doesn’t even go into the fact that it could be used by law enforcement wrongfully etc: e.g Unregulated Chinese crime detection startup buys the data, you happen to be in China and get arrested bc they used inadequate algorithms that wrongfully accused you.

There is absolutely nothing convincing here.

The answer is to work with your bank to block payments. Equity is a legal contract, it's not going to evaporate because Carta says so. Carta isn't going to hire a debt collector against a well funded startup and get counter-sued / risk the bad PR.

This is the great illustration of the hokey thinking that happens in economics. They don't focus on modeling humans as agentic systems. What happens if GDP is pushed to 1000%, 10,000%? When there is so much agricultural production that food is free? How does that affect geopolitics, human social values and demands? It's clear to me the models completely breakdown and are really only epsilon valid (e.g okay for modeling small, but not catastrophic pertrubations)

Is back propagation really an idea applicable to the Nobel prize in physics? I mean certainly a Turing award is warranted. But back propagation or neural networks don’t really tell us anything about how the universe works. It’s an efficient optimization algorithm for a really powerful class of models.

There is indeed, as you state, political influence being exerted on courts. Most of that influence is in support of Israel and Netanyahu — do you really think there is significant political power and influence upon the ICC from Palestine or Hamas? Look at the amount AIPAC has contributed to pro-Israel politicians. It’s quite frankly absurd such a political organization exists under the guise of representing American Jews yet pretty much lobbies solely for Israeli geopolitical issues. Kennedy even tried to get it to register as a foreign agent. The fact that these warrants were issued despite the influence and leverage of Israel is a hint at how egregious the crimes are.

Coursera seems to have made a (reasonably) successful business out of it. $1B market cap and almost $200M revenue. Now of course it is not the scale of other SaaS/Enterprise/Social Media outcomes but there is a market here, I think it's all about product vision and creation of new credentialing systems / disrupting the way skills are assessed at a fundamental level. There is clearly a problem with the cost/value ratio with traditional 4 year universities. I also agree selling into the same system is hard.

The thing is… having billions doesn’t actually make you that cool or desirable to women. Maybe it’s nice on paper — like having a cool car, but it’s a condiment. I think a lot of these tech billionaires want what they didn’t have when young and suddenly the facade of it appears in the form of gold diggers… they fall for these traps where they are weak. Eric Schmidt is not a so called “baller” like Leo DiCaprio or Christiano Ronaldo — most average women don’t actually want to sleep with him.

I mean it’s easier to build something new than guess how a black box you don’t have access to works (short of spying on the manufacturing facility). I’m sure Russian missile technology has at least somewhat kept up.

It was ethnic cleansing, violent forced displacement paired with massacres of 750,000 people. My mistake — not genocide.

I think the problem the Muslim world faces is that it is too often summarized by such aspects. It’s a diverse civilization with a rich history and complexities like any other. We hardly associate all of Western or Christian civilization with pedophile priests, Timothy McVeigh and Mormon cults.

One must also remember the west was hardly a Utopia for LGBT rights until a decade or two ago and to this day huge swaths of the US are filled with evangelical fanatics.

Not really. It’s absurd to draw the line into ancient history of Arab’s colonizing the Levant. Early 1900s to 1948 are more reasonable given that people actually exist that lived in this time or at least meaningful records of history.

The fact is the British/UN gave a bunch of land to people that wasn’t really theirs to give. Nakba happened (which is illegal to even talk about in Israel) which was already a mass genocide/forced displacement). People alive today saw this happen. Watch the documentary Tantura to see some of the horrors by early Israelis (rapes, torture, killing people and feeding them their own genitals).

The point is: throughout most of modern history “Israel” has been invading Palestine. The fact that the UN recognized Israel in 1949 doesn’t matter… because that recognition required mass displacement and horrors to actually materialize.

Arab wars etc are a consequence of this. Sure maybe Israel won some of those. But one has to accept that the very conceptualization of Israel is rooted in genocide and displacement from the start. Many (or maybe most) states throughout history were formed this way I guess … Israel had the bad luck of doing it during a time that the human rights and morality of modernity was beginning to fully form.

That’s a bit of a moot point. The actual human beings forming the military backbone of the “Taliban” were all fighters trained by the Pakistani ISI (at the behest of and sponsored by the United States) in order to fight Soviets. The US distributed a lot of brainwashing material to Taliban madarsas etc.

Stupid, especially coming from a VC that is very knowledgeable of the amortization of returns on a portfolio: 9 companies fail for every single success. Google acts like a big VC fund, obviously many initiatives fail. Why would he judge Google for failed initiatives while he himself is a poster child of waste?

No doubt there are useless jobs but the main example he gives is failed initiatives by Google.

What about failed initiatives (“startups”) at a16z?

It's kind of funny reading HN comments comparing this to WWII. Israel was given the land after WWII as some sort of weird hand washing by western governments. People already lived there. The claims that Hamas is like "Germany" trying to eliminate Jews are laughably absurd. These are people without a military fighting with AK-47s and rocket launchers against one of the most sophisticated armies on the planet -- F-35 jets and laser guided munitions. How can we blame Hamas when it is Israel that is stealing Palestinian homes to add Jewish settlers? Imagine someone coming to your house with a bulldozer kicking you out and placing new people there. This is literally what a settlement is and it is condemned by most of the UN outside of the United States.

It is also important to remember that Israel did not exist before 1948. There was a lot of violence that occurred against Palestinians during it's formation -- within 2 generations of the current generation -- rapes, murders, displacement. I recommend watching the documentary film Tantura which outlines some of this. There is some pretty horrific stuff... 70 year old Israeli men laughing about old stories of raping women. Feeding men their own cut-off genitals etc. There is a reason the "Nakba" is not allowed to be mentioned in Israel.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt16378034/

There also seems to be only a very basic understanding of the political realities behind why Hamas exists in this forum. "Big bad boogeyman Islamic terrorists" vs "Secular free modernity" is a stupid way to look at this. The Israeli government does not want a Palestinian state. Hamas was very much uplifted by the Israeli government since as early as the 80s because they delegitimize the idea of a free Palestine in the international sphere. They are easy to negotiate against because they are extremists. Even given their extremism, Hamas does not want to "genocide Jews" -- this is another absurd claim that is propagated but has no basis.

Hamas is also not ISIS. They are a resistance movement against an occupying power that uses violent means to influence political realities. This is dirty dirty work and many horrible things happen when you give 20 year olds AK-47s. I don't support it. But the existence of Hamas is very much an expected outcome of military occupation. It is interesting to note that the founder of Hamas was 8 year old when he saw 15 Palestinian men executed at point blank range by Israeli soldiers. He is also a pediatrician and a geneticist.

In general, I think people on this forum view terrorism through a very childish lens. It's a bit like calling everything a "programming language" ... well yeah maybe C++ has some similarities to Typescript ... but they are very different beasts. Osama bin laden and Hamas may have shared political objectives and ideals but they are not completely equivalent.

To summarize my feelings: Israel has definitively built a great civilization -- but we musn't equate that with some sort of moral cleanliness. Hamas is a terrorist organization -- but we musn't equate that with a lack of real grievances.

The statistics don't lie: Israel has killed more women and children in 100 days than any other recent modern military conflict. It has used more munitions than the US did for the entirety of the Iraq war. It's a ridiculous response that, given the context above, is nothing short of genocide.

"to perform a lethal function in a weapon without human authorization or control."

In other words... Just make sure you have a confirm dialog before launching the rockets!

IMO the major cloud players have no ethical or moral controls in place that are actually practical or useful in curtailing the usage of AI methods for the purposes of war or surveillance. It's inevitable at this point. The OpenAI/Microsoft partnership will inevitably lead to contracts with NSA/CIA/DoD. AWS/Microsoft have no real ethical pushback on DoD relationships. Google at least seems to have some internal political opposition and moral compass. The future will be a weird place.

Regulatory capture in action. The real immediate risks of AI is in privacy, bias, data leakage, fraud, control of infrastructure/medical equipment etc. not manufacturing biological weapons. This seems like a classic example of government doing something that looks good to the public, satisfies incumbents and does practically nothing.

Yeah exactly. It is non-sensical to say that she is a Bank Teller twice. English isn't mathematical syntax and directly converting a P(occupation=Bank Teller) => "Linda is a bank teller" is a bad translation of mathematical syntax to english, because we contextualize the statement when we are presented the next statement "Linda is a bank teller, and part of the feminist movement".

Stupid stupid research IMO.

It's fairly clear to me that there is no such thing as AGI. Intelligence is a process of integrating sensory input with action and reward mechanisms -- nothing more, nothing less.

Are there specific structures and architectures that have evolved that are very unique which give humans, say, language ability or visual processing? Certainly. Perhaps by gods spark or some random chance on the board game of life human beings developed examples of very particular structures. Perhaps there are undiscovered ones lying within the minds of peregrine falcons, tree roots or deep sea squid. We don't even know how to look for them because we don't even know such perception and intelligence exists.

The point I'm trying to make is that there is no "goal post" of AGI, there is no quantification of intelligence yet. We don't even know what sorts of intelligence exist out there because we haven't even begun to fully characterize what it is. It seems foolish to me to search for something when we can't even define it.

It's like trying to find "the ultimate general animal" when what you really have is a phylogenetic tree of huge diversity.