176 karma · joined February 4, 2026
The same applies here, is it really "more open" to allow corporations to profit by removing the openness of your work?
That is so far outside the realm of possibility it's closer to fantasy than sci-fi.
Usually not the guys at the bottom of the chain of command, even if they're human. And much less so if they're not.
I think the correct response to incidents like this, is stop messing with it before somebody gets hurt. But of course, just like shoddy nuclear power plants, it won't stop until there's a disaster of appreciable magnitude.
> Reading math however does not guarantee ideas or intuition.
is true, but the converse, having the mind for good mathematical ideas or intuition, almost surely means that you'll have very little trouble picking up mathematical notation (not just notation, but the reasoning and ability to write a proof, be it in natural language or some formal proof assistant language).
Like yeah, before the written language there were great storytellers who couldn't write. But now that humanity does have standardized languages, it's way more rare to come across such a person.
> But shovels are our gods (don't believe? E.g. shovels cannot die from natural causes). They don't need puny humans. They need AI.
At least me, I haven't seen any paper bills walking around screwing rockets together. Perhaps Musk has a bunch of coins putting together data centers for him? Perhaps he's writing a check and leaving it to code up new features for twitter for him. Hmm, I've never seen a check use a keyboard. But I guess it's possible. I'd be delusional to not believe it.
Surely it's not poor people in Africa mining metals to put in those teslas? No, no. It's his money that's going down into those mines. Just a stack of bills wielding a pickaxe.
Oh, did you mean he's just renting out his "assets" to people? In other words, restricting access unless people pay him. Well, there are terms for that [0] [1]
Oh, wait, maybe you mean he's like a drop-shipper but for people's labor? Buying cheaply and reselling at a markup, without adding any real value? Well, that is surely a commendable goal. Market efficiency!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury
( For the record I didn't "flag" your response above, I think it's just annoying when people do that as it disrupts the discussion, now people can no longer refer back and see what was said. But oh well, I've been on the other side of people "flagging" stuff just because they disagree with it too. )
Is it really that common for musicians to not be able to read music? I'm not a musician so I wouldn't know, but it seems far-fetched. Like the story that Einstein failed math. I likewise doubt that there are many people who would be good mathematicians but unable to learn the language.
Sure notation is arbitrary and not the actual "truth" of math, but we need some way to talk about it, so why not just learn the accepted standards?
There might be at least one awesome author out there who never learned to write or type, but they're probably extremely rare, because becoming great at something usually entails a lot of practice, and that's hard to get when you're not making the effort to learn the basics.
In any case, LLMs are probably a bad way to "pivot math towards intuition and accessibility" because they, as language models, are great at generating a bunch of jargon that is hard for somebody with no training to tell apart. See the recent story [0]. Here the author (perhaps) succeeded with his proof, but was it because of superior intuition? Or just throwing compute at the wall to see what sticks?
My point however is that companies have no agency of their own. Their age doesn't really matter for that. There are guns that are older than all living people too. If somebody used a flintlock pistol to go around robbing people that wouldn't make the pistol a "godlike eternal entity". Or for that matter if somebody used a 200 year old shovel to create a really nice garden (in the case you believe companies are a net positive).
You might as well say "That crypto scammer is just following his goals of making money. Don't complain that he's taking people's money for nothing, that's just his goal. He's just 'good at marketing'. He's just an 'entrepreneur'."
Let's at least call a spade a spade and admit that there's no such thing as "making money from assets".
EDIT: real mature response, LMAO. I'm the "delusional" one while you're believing that Musk's money is walking around building rockets.
Let's flip your comment to demonstrate how much substance it contains:
> You're demonstrating a completely unhinged lack of understanding of the Labor Theory of Value, and it looks like you are buying into the ridiculous Market Economy delusion there. I apologize if my response didn't correspond to your delusions.
I can only assume motivated reasoning on your part. Surely you must own a lot of capital, if you're defending it so hard.
This is the biggest lie in today's society. "Make money from assets". There is no such thing. Money cannot work. People can work. He's figured out how to extract a lot of money from his employees, without them realizing the trick that's being played on them.
> ANY physical system can be evaluated to ANY DEGREE of accuracy by a computer
It's completely SENSELESS to claim that they are distinct, because in order to EVALUATE or SIMULATE the physical system you will need a FUNCTION which COMPUTES the STATE of the system at a given point in time. The only POSSIBLE distinction between SIMULATING and PREDICTING would be the time taken for the computation, but that is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT as long as it is finite.
Again, your own source says:
> We CERTAINLY don’t have ANYTHING CLOSE to a complete UNDERSTANDING of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world
How does that square with your claim above?
Also the word "verbiage" ticks me off as a LLM-ism on the level of "delve" or "smoking gun". Are its users aware that in addition to its usage as somewhat of a synonym of "idiolect", it more commonly means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content", i.e. slop?
Now consider throwing a ball in the air. Can you even write down the rules that each of the ball's subatomic particles obeys? How can you be certain there exists a computer program that in finite time can predict where any of the particles, for any ball, ends up?
> the chemistry of the brain is very well modeled
There are models, but the fact of those models is that they do not apply to "any degree of accuracy", as you claim.
Consider the ball thrown in the air again. Is the ball affected by what happened 100 years ago, inside of a black hole 100 light years away? Why would it not be affected by that? Or if you grant that it is affected by that, do we then need a model to predict those effects before we can "evaluate" them?
EDIT regarding the below linked blog post: Did you read the rest of my comment? Did you even read the blog post you linked to?
> We certainly don’t have anything close to a complete understanding of how the basic laws actually play out in the real world — we don’t understand high-temperature superconductivity, or for that matter human consciousness
Can you try to consider my central point before replying: Are the rules governing physical reality simpler or more complex than the Collatz conjecture? Does there exist a (theoretical) computer that can "evaluate the Collatz conjecture to any degree of accuracy"?
EDIT 2: I'm not the one moving goalposts. On what grounds are you classifying the question whether a given number ends at 1 or not for the Collaz conjecture as an "inifite" computation? It's a simple boolean question, yes or no. All you have to do is build a computer that can answer yes or no for each integer. Isn't that simpler than answering the position of each atom in the ball after the throw? Each is just a function, what makes one more infinite than the other?
Also, regarding determinism, just read this article by the same guy you linked: https://preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2011/12/05/on-determin...
> For everyday-life purposes, we can’t get around the fact that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to predict the future robustly.
That's an interesting hypothesis, but I don't know why you'd assume it to be true at face value. It's a bit unclear how you would even define "evaluated", given that we don't yet have a mathematical model of all of physics as we know it. [0] And then consider unknown unknowns.
> Do you agree that humans are physical systems?
Do you consider humans _with infinite memory_ as physical systems? Do you consider computers _with infinite memory_ as physical systems?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_Mo...
I just think you and the other guy have different definitions of "smart". There's no denying that LLMs are useful, but I don't know if I'd classify them as "smart". There were probably people in the 80s saying computers were "smart" because they could compute 78971 * 12341 faster than a human.
In what sense is a LLM "undeniably smart" but a CPU from the 80s isn't? Or would you define such a CPU as "smart"?
This is a bit of a strange assumption to make. I do agree that a human, if it had infinite memory, would be an universal machine, i.e. capable of computing any given Turing machine [0]. But would that be the limits of its capabilities? It's far from certain.
You'll get into the philosophy of free will (funnily enough, a sort of inverted Turing test), i.e. for a given human with infinite memory, is there a Turing machine that exactly replicates the behavior of that human? Is our behavior governed entirely by rules? Would that imply that a human themselves is a kind of Chinese room [1]?
> any non-constructive math "steps" or thoughts must also be at most computable.
What does it mean for a "thought" to be computable? Compare to Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Clearly the act of stating the thought, or writing down the theorem, is computable. But proving it to be true or false may very well be impossible.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
In what sense? BB(n) is a prime example of an object that can be mathematically defined, yet is not computable. Or see BBB(n) for an "even more" uncomputable function. [0]
> An LLM in a loop where it can write on a tape can be Turing complete
What does this mean? A given LLM, like a given C program, can't really be Turing complete or not in a meaningful sense. The C programming language, or the concept of LLMs in general can be said to be Turning complete or not. Do you mean to state that LLMs in general are not Turing complete, but being "in a loop" somehow makes a difference?
> it can compute anything computable and is "bigger" than math at that point
Again, in what sense is it "bigger" than math? Lots of things are Turing complete, I wouldn't classify lambda calculus as "bigger" than math.
In any case, Microsoft has stolen 25 billion from its employees in 2025, and OpenAI has got 13 billion in revenue from "stolen" content in the same period, so that'd make them about equally bad villains, except OpenAI has mostly stolen from other companies.
> Total prosperity of world has increased inflation adjusted over 100 years. Why?
Clearly, because people have worked to bring value to the world. But, most people actually doing the work see very little of the profits.
I often see this argument, "you have access to food, housing, healthcare etc., so that means that the system is working great". But you're missing the fact that me, my parents, and their parents, and their peers, have all worked to create all of that stuff. While simultaneously working to create the private jets and luxury yachts for the 1%.
In a more fair system we'd have twice as much prosperity, or work half as hard.
Arbitrary is also quite different from random. Bad passwords are arbitrary, good passwords are random.
If you ask a human to give an arbitrary number between 1 and 10, the answer will be 7 way more often than a random number between 1 and 10.
> It's not a zero-sum game.
Well, it is. Thermodynamics. Earth is pretty much a closed system, except for the sun.
So for example if you invest $100 in a farm and get a return of 10%, where does that come from? The nutrients in the soil, the effort expended by the workers, and the power of the sun to turn seeds into food. All value comes either from finite resources in the ground (nuclear, oil, ...), from solar power, or from human effort (work, innovations, etc.)
> or from human effort (work, innovations, etc.)
The only thing "suspicious" here is your lack of reading comprehension.
So for example if you invest $100 in a farm and get a return of 10%, where does that come from? The nutrients in the soil, the effort expended by the workers, and the power of the sun to turn seeds into food. All value comes either from finite resources in the ground (nuclear, oil, ...), from solar power, or from human effort (work, innovations, etc.)
So can you trace back Nvidia's incredible 10000% return on investment to any of these sources? Which ones?
Counterexamples: crypto keys, stock price history, weather observations, radio telescope recordings