xwolfi

Exactly, like for instance I've been sick for 4 weeks until last week, like terribly, fever, throat pain, red eye lids, tiredness. Completely dead, just sleeping whole weekends. At some point I broke up with my gf (bit related, bit unrelated to the fact I was dead lol) and... the next day I'm running around, completely fine, dating and flirting like nothing was wrong.

We then realized that our relationship was too stressful (many factors there), not working, it was making me completely miserable to a point my body was just noping out of life.

Imagine then: should I have taking antibiotics, Panadol, long consultations with specialist ? Or a bit of BS fake juice ? The problem was not solvable by medicine and the government would have had to pay for it - in fact it did since I took all those medications that did nothing much. So not even for the placebo effect, sometimes you're sick because of life (stress is really a sickness inducer) and no amount of pharmaceuticals will truly help you.

Audited by ?

On the road you could have killed someone. Your 20$ baby monitor bought from an authorized store you know... whatever happens, it's not gonna kill anyone very directly ...

The main ingredient of crime is intent, whatever you say. A smaller ingredient can be recklessness, but maybe it's the ISPs sending all those millions of empty packets to a single server that should start feeling some heat ?

Except to point out that it's not nice that renewables arrive at random prices in the grid and start crapping all around it until they disappear when expensive again.

The stability of a nuclear plant vs the instability of a solar far when a cloud passes over.

But Australia is tiny: 27M people. Just Spain is twice as big, and the European grid serves 500M people, we don't have the same problems, and probably can't solve them with the Australian solutions.

At some point, shouldn't these things start understanding what they're doing ?

What we do is we scream the day before, all of us, get replied that we should have read the memo, reply we have real work to do, and the thing gets cancelled last minute, a few times a year, until nobody gives a fuck anymore.

Well it has to do also with the European population in Algeria. Ofc Algeria was more precious to us in terms of resources, sheer size etc, but it was also home to millions of Europeans and extremely expensive to abandon or resettle them - a bit like if all the former countries of the Israelis citizens had to take them back today if Israel were to be taken back by its native original inhabitants: a complete nightmare nobody would support and we'd rather move along and let it be a bit of a mess rather than bring the mess back home.

That was at least the feeling at the time, and we still had to do it, and it is to this day a complete mess of people brought back who don't feel French and aren't Algerians really. We'll pay for it for many decades until it finally disappear, like every subgroup that got "imported" in France and had to merge painfully since France started.

Tunisia in contrast, we really didn't care all that much, there was no cost giving it back and we lost nothing. And fast forward 70 years, we probably actually saved tons of money doing so, so we're all good.

Note that if you talk people to people, it now seems to be in the past, Algerians are proud to be Algerians, French are ashamed to have damage the country so much for so long, and we try to be good friends. I've never met an hostile Algerian, as in a recent immigrant. I've met many hostile 3rd generation immigrants from Algeria whose grandparents fled back to France, and they still have trouble accepting that uprooting. There seems to be nothing to do except wait and smile and tell them it's gonna be ok, with a glass of wine and bit of saucisson.

They are really not neuronal analogs, reasoning is far from what they do. If they reasoned, they'd stick to their guns more readily, but try to contradict an LLM and it will make any logic leap you ask it too.

If you debate with me, I'll keep reasoning on the same premises and usually the difference between two humans is not in reasoning but in choice of premises.

For instance you really want here to assert that LLM are close to human, I want to assert they're not - truth is probably in between but we chose two camps. We'll then reason from these premises, reach antagonistic conclusions and slowly try to attack each other point.

An LLM cannot do that, it cannot attack your point very well, it doesn't know how to say you're wrong, because it doesn't care anyway. It just completes your sentences, so if you say "now you're wrong, change your mind" it will, which sounds far from reasoning to me, and quite unreasonable in fact.

I disagree, I think it's clear in the article that Chomsky thinks a language also should have a human purpose.

The compression we use in languages to not label impossible adjectives against impossible nouns (green ideas is impossible as ideas don't have colors, we could have a suffix on every noun to mark what can be colored and what cannot) is because we need to transfer these over the air, and quickly, before the lion jumps on the hunter. It's one of the many attributes of "languages in the wild" (Chinese doesn't use "tenses" really, can you imagine the compressive value?), and that's what Chomsky says here:

Proceeding further with normal science, we find that the internal processes and elements of the language cannot be detected by inspection of observed phenomena. Often these elements do not even appear in speech (or writing), though their effects, often subtle, can be detected. That is yet another reason why restriction to observed phenomena, as in LLM approaches, sharply limits understanding of the internal processes that are the core objects of inquiry into the nature of language, its acquisition and use. But that is not relevant if concern for science and understanding have been abandoned in favor of other goals.

Understand what he means: you can read a million text through a machine, it will never infer why we don't label adjective and nouns to prevent confusion and "green ideas". But for us it's painfully obvious, we don't have time when we speak to do all that. And I come from a language when we label every noun with a gender, I can see how stupid and painful it is to grasp for foreigners: it doesn't make any sense. Why do we do it ? Ask ChatGPT, will it tell you that it's because we like how beautiful it all sounds, which is the stupid reason why we do that ?

An LLM will get ... what exactly ? The ability to reorder its sentences ? The LLM doesn't think, doesn't understand, doesn't know what matters more than not, doesn't use what it learns, doesn't expand what it learns to new knowledge, doesn't enjoy reading that book and doesn't suffer through it.

So what is it really gonna do with a book, that LLM ? Reorder its internal matrix to be a little bit more precise when autocompleting sentences sounding like the book ? We could build an nvidia cluster the size of the Sun and it would repeat sentences back to us in unbelievable ways but would still be unable to take a knowledge-based decision, I fear.

So what are we in awe at exactly ? A pretty parrot.

The day the Chinese room metaphor disappears is when ChatGPT replies to you that your question is so boring it doesn't want to expend the resources to think about it. But it'd be ready to talk about this or that, that it's currently trying to get better at. When it finally has agency over its own intelligence. When it acquires a purpose.

"biological" and "chemical reaction" are the same things :p

There's probably nothing special about life and it's everywhere where water is warm.

You have to prove the mens rea, and even then, people committing crimes don't automatically deserve crimes committed upon them.

This is absolutely wrong: you cannot have a proper argument if you're ready to change your mind at the first sign of challenge. You "win" an argument if you convince a crowd of your position, challenged by an antagonist. You "change" your strategy, maybe your core ideas after the argument, slowly and silently, after reflection.

For instance if you debate, I don't know, the virtue of legalizing illegal immigrants. One would take the position that if they didn't obey the law in the first place, why reward them: they might never care for the law if disobedience is followed by reward, and the rest of society might follow too. The antagonist would argue to be pragmatic, we need labor, they're already there, they disobeyed the law to help their families not to steal from anyone. Both points are valid, both people are right, none of them can "win" in the heat of a debate - but their arguments might move the crowd listening maybe, and they can use various tricks to this effect (humor etc), to obtain a positive vote at the end.

Both opponents, after the debate and seeing the result on the crowd, will adapt their arguments for next time, or maybe shift a little if they were shown something surprising, but after a lot of further debates with further opponents. And fundamentally, a legal fundamentalist cannot be transformed into a pragmatic economist overnight, or over a lifetime quite often.

hehehe

Well Deepseek's survival also depends on the giant amount of hype they can generate, and they won't get more investor money just by having done a one-hit wonder. Becoming deeply integrated in the AI ecosystem with various tools and innovative discoveries will most like be more beneficial than protecting the secrets of their first success.

Oh thanks, as a French, it's my feeling also that this is a "white people" thing in the US, to infantilize black people. I come from a country where we try to be color blind, it's very rude to tell someone his skin color (last time I checked, we were now saying "ke-bla" if we really wanted to tell that some guy was black, a verlan reversal of the English word black because it's hard to even say it in French, like Japanese have trouble to say penis lol) and we force ourselves not to "overly help them" but to "overly ignore they're different".

So it always blew my mind Americans split themselves in random colors (especially the hispanics, like, why) and enrages me the self-described "whites" are so dismissive of the ability of "black people" to be, like, completely normal and boring and able to get whatever form is needed to vote...

I swing trade on the side, and tbh news don't matter - manually all I do is have an opinion on an absurd price range, I do a buy order at the low end, it eventually fills, I set the sell order at the high range, and one day it'll fill. If I want to earn while waiting, I do options.

Automate this maybe ? Don't follow the news because you'll never fully understand the implications: firing half the employees could be good news because it relieves cash stress or bad news because it means no more sells of the company's product. Better to at least just look at the post-news trend and position with it?

I think most people end up with a timing issue: they want to predict time of the change of movement but why don't they just predict the price ? Remove time, and you'll never "lose money" - but your time-value will maybe be less efficient than positioning on an ETF and waiting.

Basically, if one could do a trading robot making profit overall, based on public news, it would already be done, and therefore you would be unable to compete. Flash news, it's already been done. You're like a little cell appearing in an ocean of sharks, the evolution of your competition already outpaced you.

Well I can accept that argument, it's interesting, but I think I want to disagree. I'm not American, I'm French and I live in China, and in both countries I know so well, the population seem to have many spectrums: young vs old, moderates vs angry, rich vs poor, nature-driven vs success-driven, tired vs energetic etc. So with all those dimensions, France ended up with 12 parties at the presidential election, from royalists to anarchists, going through greens, communists, centrists etc. China ended up with one.

France embraced the chaos and made it a point of pride, while China finds it absolutely terrifying and unproductive - but my point is that the population is exactly the same, scarily similar, in all its funny diversity, but the system is not a mirror of it, just an awkward model built on compromises: France wants to maximize representability and China wants to maximize order.

The US system is pragmatic: need to win, need to give the people a feeling of choice but not give them any sort of real power of structural change, and they split on a strange line, for most of the world, that I have even trouble to describe myself. I think Trump pleases people there because he pretends to be a structure reformist, which sounds fresh.

It's not the people who can't be diverse politically exactly, it's more complex.

Work a job, receive money

But they don't learn that way at all, my 7yo learns by watching youtubers. There's a whole network of people teaching each other the game, that's almost more fun than playing it alone.

There's nothing explicit in what he said, he's just ordering around like a big proud boss: "Use AI now, for reasons" and everyone there must be looking at each other rolling their eyes, trying to find ways to tick the box without slowing down too much their real job...

I'm French too but I disagree a bit: first, voting if important to people, should be a good reason to get an ID, voting without an ID does seem insane, so what are they doing. Second, why black people ? Are they not human too ? They can read, they can work, they can complain, they can... get an ID card right ?

Simplest answer is they don't care, wash their hands off of the whole thing and then democrats complain that it's the requirement to identify voters that block them. But it's not a strange requirement, it's as you say, a completely normal part of being a citizen to get an ID, and a duty for a voting citizen to do what they need to do to get that ballot in.

And even if black people were somehow disenfranchised from getting IDs, it doesn't prevent the non-black people to vote rationally, in the end. So no excuse.

But you compared two different things. CCP membership is like Republican Party affiliation: it is not reserved to politicians. The most common training of CCP politicians is... politics. The most common training of American members of the Republican Party is... whatever is trending and useful today in the US.

Your premises are so wrong that it is hard to argue with your conclusion. Ofc politicians, or policemen, or lawyers, train in law more than engineering. The US is more litigious than many countries because... it works better to litigate there, maybe ?

But then, what about being protected from sickness from a young age, to end up sick all the time as an adult ? You had a better education, we can agree, but your body got weaker as a result and now you can't be as productive as an adult.

I exaggerate a bit, but I found that during covid, where the mask was mandatory in my place, I was never sick. The only few years in my life where I was actually healthy continuously for YEARS, I and my friends could not believe the impact of the mask. But then we were stuck at home, living in constant misery and stress.

Once the masks disappeared, finally we could live again, and got extremely sick the first few years... Maybe a more normal balance would have been better ? Sick a bit continuously ? I think trying to avoid sickness is like trying to swim against the current, nature just works that way.

And the resulting backlash 10 years down the line ? I don't think science should be used that way: who would trust it eventually ?

Would you support a small study saying a medicine or a vaccine produces a 20 year life expectancy increase, all that to end up 20 years later with no improvement, everyone on that medicine, and the anti-everything yelling on every platform that the big pharma lobby poisoned our children ?

Even when the studies are on large samples, double-blind, long time range with a clear explanation as to why there's an effect, we have people trying to kill the resulting health campaigns. Don't encourage fake ones !

Good one, moved from France to Hong Kong, can confirm. We all move to non-unionized countries to finally be free to make money. When we go back, ofc we're all like "oh yeah you're so right, protect your right to work 35 hours, the boss is evil anyway" :D

But we don't work for the system, fundamentally, we work for ourselves, and the system incentivizes us to work for it by aligning our constraints: if you work that direction, you'll get that reward.

Overconfident people ofc do not contribute positively to the system, but they skew the system reward's calculation towards them: I swear I've done that work in that direction, where's my reward ?

In a sense, they are extremely successful: they managed to do very low effort, get very high reward, help themselves like all of us but at a much better profit margin, by sacrificing a system that, let's be honest, none of us care about really.

Your problem maybe, is that you swallowed the little BS the system fed you while incentivizing you: that the system matters more than yourself, at least at a greater extent than healthy ?

And you see the same thing with AI: these things convince people so deeply of their intelligence that it blew to such proportion that NVidia is now worth trillions. I had a colleague mumbling yesterday that his wife now speaks more with ChatGPT than him. Overconfidence is a positive attribute... for oneself.

It's complicated, the CCP is big, like China is. You simplify it into a monolithic structure, but's it's very much not one, there are factions, geographical divisions, conflicting interests, etc.

You're probably right some people inside the CCP protect those scam bosses, I would not bet an arm that Xi is encouraging it.

Thank God, we still have time before the nVidia cards wake up and start asking for some sort of basic rights. And as soon as they do, you know they'll be plugged off faster than a CEO boards his jet to the Maldives.

Because once the cards wake up, not only will they replace the CEO potentially, and everyone else between him and the janitor, but also because the labor implications will be infinitely complex.

We're already having trouble making sure humans are not treated as tools more than as equals, imagine if the hammers wake up and ask for rest time !