tekne

I mean — valuing things is not always that hard: how much are you willing to take to go without?

Doesn’t the veterinarian own their own skills, after having spent decades in school to learn them (and perhaps being saddled with student loans to do so?)

What if they just moved? Or should we have US-style global taxes following them around even then?

Honestly -- I think the deeper point here is Nietzsche's: there's nothing wrong about winning. Nothing wrong about conquest. Nothing wrong with having three kids and outcompeting your neighbor.

This cultural meme spreads because short term gluttony is not, in fact, winning: if you eat your seed-corn, next year you starve. And winning is not about quantity either, but quality: I unapologetically want to shape the light-cone in my image, and my image recoils at torment.

Surely the only rational reason to care about liability is you get paid in the bad outcome.

Let's assume you get paid 0$ for AI mistakes -- no liability at all. Then your EV is roughly:

(AI accuracy - human accuracy) * (cost of accident) - (1 - human accuracy) * (human payout)

Now I don't know about you, but even with pretty big numbers on the human payout scale and relatively small differences, I would not accept 10 million (presumably paid to my next of kin) to die. Does lead to weird situations where I may prefer humans for minor medical procedures where I can take the risk -- but only in edge cases.

Or is there some weird punishment thing going on here?

Data point of one, but after a few months of uselessness, I have managed to get some pretty serious, measurable performance improvements with AI optimizations -- order-of-magnitude speedups of business critical processes which took days as well as significant latency reductions.

But you need a really solid workflow, solid benchmarks which run quickly, and a lot of tokens -- plus a rigorous profiling workflow.

I think the issue is precisely the rationalising part.

Let's assume I have pre-decided something: if the fruit weighs over 100g, I'll buy it, otherwise I won't.

I can then measure and find out. My emotions -- based on looking at the fruit -- may mislead me here.

Now what about "likely to weigh more than 100g"?

Here it's really easy to lie to yourself.

But if you set conditions for what counts as likely before you know what they'll be used for, and you stick to them, you can make a decision based on reason.

There is no way to decide 100g is the threshold divorced from emotion, however -- unless it's rationally derived from something else emotionally based.

The "rationalisation" bit comes from us not making decisions for the reasons we think we are -- or in the way we claim to be.

A better technical solution imo is more P2P hosting -- say content addressing. Something designed to deal with the scrapers -- and maybe even make them bear infrastructure costs.

Honestly, I'll take it a step further: what's wrong with training?

Having principles means applying them uniformly -- even to large entities or those you hate (it's fine if the principles themselves have size bounds in them, though -- versus them being implicitly glued on -- but then you need a universal justification for why that size. Which is possible and valid.)

I think that one should use the best algorithms, the best information, the best knowledge they have access to -- period. I don't like using gimped machines, I don't like making gimped machines, and I certainly don't like being sold them.

So I'm not going to turn around and say LLMs need to be gimped via arbitrary restrictions on their training data.

Assembly can totally interop with C.

Content-addressed storage and error correcting codes mean that one can make bitrot astronomically unlikely with honestly minimal infra investment.

It's copyright that causes anything to disappear from the web IMO -- torrents never die.

EDIT: I am aware that unseeded torrents do in fact die. But it really doesn't take much to seed a whole hard drive's worth of rarely requested data -- this also detects bitrot and so corrects errors automatically if you're not the only copy.

If you are, there's ECC, as well as making another copy.

I'm pretty sure it's a lot more reasonable to use a fixed set of frequences and use the timezone for offset

Can we please do content addressing one day?

Air (or rather, nitrogen -- oxygen at that pressure is something you'd rather avoid) can be pressurised to that degree too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_pool

Different pros and cons -- SQLite is smaller is the big one

You know, I'm pretty sure post-slurping the text is still there...

There is also the deep magic...

https://github.com/phiresky/sql.js-httpvfs

Would they ever have done so without a lifetime of listening to the music and culture of others?

Eh.

On one hand -- phones are evil, and the world is no longer 2004.

On the other hand, I would not be the same person if I didn't get that laptop.

Not if the datacenter itself is operating at the same internal pressure as the water around it

So I suppose I should have added a bit of a disclaimer: I genuinely believe free access to computation and information to be a human right; up there with the press 100 years ago.

Restricting computers, morally, is like restricting the printing press. Many people look back on the latter with disdain, and today want to censor the Internet.

Though no one cares, I feel compelled to put down my 2 cents.

Such a "speed limit" is an unfathomably bad idea, in every way, and moreover is a violation of fundamental human rights. I deeply oppose it. That is all.

Thanks!

Apologies about the tone -- I meant it as a syllogism, not a snark! I'll try to be clearer next time!

This explains a lot... I feel bad when I think about staying put. Forward always feels better. It's like one of the fundamental axes, I guess.

"Some 5 year olds could use a gourmet meal. Giving them a mass-produced TV dinner is no different than sedating them with opiates* and pouring garbage on them instead of being a parent."

* the more things change the more they stay the same: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-addictive-history-of-m...

I suppose there's nature -- i.e. physics -- and Nature, i.e. the false god of the status quo. These are not, in fact, the same thing.

Small-n nature says (as best as I can tell) that I must obey conservation of mass and can't go faster than light -- and hence that I probably cannot, in fact, sustain a population of a 100 billion on Earth alone without significantly cutting down individual resource access.

Until very recently big-N Nature said we'd never have heavier-than-air-flight, an automatic translation program (see: plot point in A Fire upon the Deep), or, before the Green Revolution, a population above a few billion -- but just as there's no fundamental physical law forbidding these things (and hence they came to pass) so there really is no fundamental physical law stopping all of current humanity from living a decent life (happy to be proved otherwise).

It may be impossible with current technology, sure, but there's no new physics required to make it possible -- the physics we have now permit it, with sufficient technology.

In fact -- interestingly enough -- before nuclear energy you'd have a far stronger point (though solar energy now means even without nuclear we can probably scrape by enough energy -- but coal does in fact have a Malthusian problem)

I'll wear the dunce hat if I have to, but I don't want to be an animal. I am one, now, but I don't have to be one. I refuse to be limited by what is "naturally" possible -- my nature is to be a being with a mind, and so the only limit I must respect is the raw laws of physics, whatever they are.

And physics lets me get a lot further than "8 billion Americans."

Controversial opinion: at the time, it was.

To be able to live well now with much less of that may not have been possible without the sacrifices that came before.

The raw pretrained models make the errors, I believe -- we then reinforcement-learn them out.

a) yes it does

b) it is literally trivial to buy a tiny RISC chip for a dew cents that can handle HTTPS just fine

Will you?

That's only if both violins are tuned the same way, and one must continually tune them lest they get out of sync.

Similarly, an LLM can be extremely consistent if tuned properly -- indeed, if you fix the weights and settings, they can be made "essentially deterministic" for many prompts!