xwolfi

Who cares, the goal is to make money...

A simulation to what purpose ? What's the difference between a simulation and reality ? What is more "real" about the original hardware than about us ?

It doesn't make obvious sense to waste such vast amount of energy for absolutely no purpose that we can observe: surely you could add a grain of doubt in your absolute statements no ?

The universe is probably nothing very interesting, and reality depressingly obvious once we figure it out. It's like all these astrological sky maps they were doing to predict the mood of the gods above, before we realized we were a rock turning around an hydrogen ball, itself turning around the galactic center, completely non-special, like every other block of rock out there.

Being in a simulation is just a way for you to replace god with a machine equivalent. You want a purpose, a father figure, an observer and a designer. Sadly, I think you and I are as precious as an ant, completely not part of any simulation, having no purpose and barely any effect on the universe. We're here because we could and we'll disappear because we must, with barely a blip, while everything in the universe is turning around senselessly.

"all it takes", already impossible with any LLM right now.

All my Indian colleagues say "I agree with the same", this "the same" turn of phrase was so strange to me I had to ask (I'm French, so I have my own silly quirks, like I forget non-vocal plural(s<-- see, often I don't write that s)). They told me it was like that in Hindi so they just reproduce the pattern and it's grammatically acceptable.

For French people like me, false friends are immediately noticeable: for instance, "actually" to mean "now" instead of "in fact".

I know this word, it's French and it means coastline, coastal, something at the edge of the land and sea ! We use it in French a lot to describe positively a long coastline. I'm surprised it's used in an English context, but all French words can be used in English I guess if you're a bit "confiant" about it !

You forget one side of the equation: yes money is "printed" with abandon, but the other side gets an IOU, a debt, to repay with dividend.

The government BORROWS printed money, the FED emits debt against that money, and the hole keeps getting bigger. You certainly solved a short term problem, but you also created a long term one.

Meanwhile, people make less children, immigration is reduced, debt buyers, the ones receiving the interest, are starting to think twice, someone will be left with the bag and it's gonna be the 401k bondholders relying on these debt interest to finance their non productive retirement.

BTC is being bought maybe due to it's non correlation with those debts, but it's also printed virtually with absolutely no tangible value (the network can just collectively decide to change its rules with no legal repercussion), and gold definitely has tangible value (at least, it makes your wife smile and stop haggling when she gets some to put around her neck, so infinite value right there vs btc) and is bought in India and China to prepare for catastrophe, but it has many issues (heavy, hard to transport cross border, dangerous and expensive to store, concentrated in vaults against paper gold with all the issues that this creates etc)

Who is AMD ? A collection of shareholders, all 30% richer ? A collection of employees, all with stock vesting 30% richer ? A bank account in a corporate bank, that indeed changed not at all ?

Sentiments about what ?

What is "actual future" ? Obviously we can only have feelings for it, not knowledge, right ?

I don't know, when "westerners", aka the Spanish, colonized the Americas, they would arrive in a village where almost everyone was already dead of the flu before they even started a fight. It seems more violent a colonization than us spending tax money in Africa in soft influence white elephants to gain the favors of dictators.

But it's true it almost, almost, sounds like the protectorate system the French and British used there. And I'm not under any illusion we treat the locals much better in our exported factories.

But you know, the reports of our continuous and desperate colonial expansion across the world are vastly exaggerated and it seems to be mostly a complete failure so far (they seem to kill our factory owners over un paid wages a bit more than they learn our languages with abandon, for one). As someone pointed out, we didn't even get back our stolen gold from the "Republic of China", nor convinced them to join us back in a sort of S.A.R., Hong Kong-style, alliance. I don't blame them, for sure (Hong Kong isn't particularly happy about it, themselves), but we seem to be far from a colonial empire - or, let's give you that, we already have it in our local sphere around the Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou triangle and we seem to stick to it with difficulty... for now ?

I think a large missing piece to being a successful super-colonizer like Europe was in the past, is we don't have that big a gap with Africa or other candidates for invasion: China is advanced but not super advanced. The Europeans surprised the Americans with horse riders, it was that bad. Us, meh, not sure our army is worth anything or that terrifying compared to the Russian mercenaries these countries hire for their defense. All we can do is make them build cheaper iphones or some such I guess and pray they listen to us when we need them ?

It is fragile because it does not matter - a better lie will obfuscate it quickly.

Let's imagine a simple truth: vaccines are efficient, work well, are tested seriously, produced immense good for humanity for at least a hundred years. Well just find 3 random kids who got autism randomly after taking one and you have entire slices of the population rushing to the lie like flies to a turd, that vaccines are more harm than good. You can brandish the truth a million times, the lie is better.

Truth is fragile, people are seduced by lies, because lies are crafted, they're targeted, they're intelligently designed. They give you what you want, that God decides our fate in this particular case, and that medicine is evil for trying to change it (or whatever is the deeper reason antivax are so desperate for these lies, I really don't get it, I'm more attracted to pro-medicine arguments, even if they are lies themselves maybe). The truth is dumb, simple, inelegant, uninteresting and, quite powerless: we often don't even want to hear about it.

You need countless proofs to even observe the truth. You need nothing to observe a lie, you can fabricate all the proofs you want.

Give me a counter example ? I'm so annoyed at people telling me the Americans didn't go to the moon because a flag was waving suspiciously, I don't believe a truth ever took over a lie now.

Yup, these things are all a bit obvious, ofc the truth "is what it is", not very sure why that sentence is so special and probably why it had to be wrongly assigned to an old hero rather than to the random guy who actually produced it :D

Well it's not the same game. Here in China we're in this phase of accomplishing big stuff to help each other and flex a bit and wow at our own development. When the British colonized America, it was exactly the same - an insane accomplishment to capture and re-develop that land into something half-working so far away. When China starts capturing and colonizing other continents, you can start being really jealous !

Now, the US is focused on other stuff like maybe having some return on their investment, or looking at its people as first-class problems rather than ants meant for a greater national goal. It's not that bad, it depends on what you focus on, I think people in the US have nice stuff to look forward to, like I don't know, a holiday in Disneyland with their kids, when Chinese people often don't see our kids for years while we're building bridges far away.

Plus you know, we don't get to vote for great politicians like in the US and are stuck instead with bureaucrats that care more about infrastructure than pleasing the people. Be proud of that, I'd love for us to have your president (yes, I'm teasing you :p)

The best the world got, pwahahah,I live in China and I wouldnt choose the US as an alternative, it's not the worst but it's not Singapore or the Netherland or Australia or Canada or Switzerland or even the Czech Republic come on, there are many better places

Im in a large company, sometimes we have long incident meetings running for hours and new idiots join in the middle "what happened?". Now at least we can get summaries of the past hours during the meeting to catch up without bothering everyone !

I've been once threatened by an ex-gf with a knife, telling me she was gonna kill me. You know what I felt ? A mild worry, "come on, drop that, it's not worth it". She threw it across the kitchen and cried in my arms (difficult breakup, she has an history of family violence and alcohol abuse and comes from Myanmar, a tough place. We're both fine).

She would have had, to actually endanger me:

- to have enough strength to penetrate anything

- the courage to see a lot of blood and cries to actually go through with a full murder

- resist me fighting her back if it went to that, close range

- not react to any rational argument I would beg her to listen to while she attacked me

It was a bit traumatizing, but we laugh at it now... she failed at the first rational argument I presented "don't do it, don't ruin your life for a guy".

Imagine if we were in a gun country, and she pressed the trigger accidentally... it's not the same, you must understand that, knife murders are really really hard, gun murders really really easy.

Sometimes "victims" have been looking for some consequences for quite a while. Poke a bear long enough to be hurt, don't be surprised people blame you, "the victim".

We completely understand the inner workings and can see the emerging result, but it's hard for us to accept that it took no decision and just chose a nice word to complete a sentence, time after time, and sounds intelligent. Then it says Strawberry has two r, and you're like ok, it's just a huge statistical matrix with zero value.

... you can run a good LLM on a macbook laptop.

On one hand I cant wait for this fad to end, on the other hand, I cant imagine how bad the next one will be. I almost miss my middle managers running around with stupid blockchain ideas.

You only worked on very small codebase then. When you work on giant ones, you Ctrl+F a lot, build a limited model of the problem space, and pray the unit tests will catch anything you might have missed...

JS is cool because the browser interprets it to show nice effects on website. AI agents are pointless

But how, it's not like it's thinking, it's just spitting the next likely token

Because we really could use all that time, money and uranium to train them on complex problems we need to solve, rather than entertainment.

But you're right, shareholders of OpenAI want profit, not progress, and they'll give us our intellectual Big Mac.

At least he wrote this himself

because it is a stupid auto complete, it doesn't understand negation fully, it statistically judge the weight of your words to find the next one, and the next one and the next one.

That's not how YOU work, so it makes no sense, you're like "but when I said NOT, a huge red flag popped in my brain with a red cross on it, why the LLM still does it". Because, it has no concept of anything.

Any sort of argument ?

A rocket trip to the moon is fairly cheap compared to a rocket trip to Mars.

But those warm body that speak English, they offer a service by being warm, and able to sort of be attuned to the distress you feel. A frigging robot solving your unsolvable problem ? You can try, but witness the backlash.

Rum is a social lubricant and it is healthy to be relaxed in social settings... quite frankly as long as they dont say health benefit increase proportionally with consumption, I see no problem saying alcohol is healthy. Or, like, why is it allowed, why was it created, why do we drink it all the time with no visible issue (beyond abuse).

> Thank you to GPT 4o and o4 for discussions, research, and drafting.

Yeah okay, this is completely pointless... so now we have to verify everything this guy published ?