• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

help-circle
  • The technological progress LLMs represent has come to completion. They’re a technological dead end. They have no practical application because of hallucinations, and hallucinations are baked into the very core of how they work. Any further progress will come from experts learning from the successes and failures of LLMs, abandoning them, and building entirely new AI systems.

    AI as a general field is not a dread end, and it will continue to improve. But we’re nowhere near the AGI that tech CEOs are promising LLMs are so close to.



  • Oppenheimer was already really long, and I feel like it portrayed the complexity of the moral struggle Oppenheimer faced pretty well, as well as showing him as the very fallible human being he was. You can’t make a movie that talks about every aspect of such an historical event as the development and use of the first atomic bombs. There’s just too much. It would have to be a documentary, and even then it would be days long. Just because it wasn’t the story James Cameron considers the most compelling/important about the development of the atomic bomb doesn’t mean it’s not a compelling/important story.


  • There was a crazy amount of variety in at least American recipes and cuisine until the turn of the 20th century when modern grocery store practices replaced older ways of managing a food store and food distribution. Innovations in canning, refrigeration, and other food preservation technologies allowed for the creation of larger, centralized factories that could mass produce products that could be shipped further away. Food prices and meal preparation times dropped, but so did variety and unique food cultures across most home kitchens.


  • This is the ultimate Texan dog-that-caught-the-car moment. I remember talking about this in school in Texas 25 years ago when Republicans were complaining about immigration. Several students brought up that the farms are all tended by “seasonal workers,” which meant immigrant labor, so what was the Republican answer to that? They didn’t have one, of course, not a realistic one. It was the same talking points then as now of “American workers” filling the gap, and even then those jobs didn’t pay a living wage, so no American would take them. I bet they pay worse now.

    They had 25 years to figure this out, but of course they had no intention of figuring it out.





  • The size of the cut is what they use for the appeal to the public to build their social narrative, but legally/economically speaking it’s not really the problem. The problem is that Apple effectively forbids developers from having any other mechanism to transact with customers except through their marketplace where they take the 30% cut, hence the lawsuit being about monopolistic practices, not the amount they’re charging.

    Valve handles things completely differently. Sure, listing on the Steam store requires giving Valve a 30% cut of the purchase price, but Steam doesn’t demand a 30% cut of any and all transactions that happen within or related to the game like Apple does. You also don’t have to buy a game from the Steam store to load it and launch it from the Steam client. And Proton works with a lot more games and applications than just those on the Steam store.

    The fact that the two companies charge a similar price for a single relatively similar business case oversimplifies a lot of how the two companies operate.



  • Campaign promises from fascist populists are always made in a superposition of joke and serious. They only resolve to one or the other when they get in office, and most of the time as a supposed “joke” to humiliate the opposition or an exaggeration to “make a point” because on the campaign trail they say whatever they think will get them votes, not what they plan to do or even think is possible.

    The most frustrating of the unkept promises are those that are logistically and practically possible, but never happen because the now-leader is a fascist and doesn’t do anything without personal gain, and they can’t figure out how to exploit the implementation for themselves. Not what’s happening in this case (there was never an actual path for peace with Russia, regardless of timeline), but has happened with other Trump promises.


  • Intent matters, and methods matter. But I think what the friend is missing is that the methods aren’t bad; op is using methods developed from scientific analysis of abused animals with the intent to ethically care for them. Coming back to intent, she clearly wants to help this guy who her training is identifying as having some kind of background of abuse. The methods might be a little crude in the sense that they were developed for animals and not for people (who are animals, but animals with several distinct qualities from other animals, like the ability to communicate complex ideas), and there are different, more well-adapted methods for people, but they’re only crude in comparison to those modern human-focused methods. They’re still quite effective, and I would still consider them ethical for use on humans when paired with an altruistic intent, which she seems to be conveying. As long as she still views the guy as fully a person, a peer, then I see nothing wrong here.


  • I cannot imagine already being married and going through that tectonic of a shift of worldview. I had pretty much figured out I couldn’t be Christian by the time I got to college and met the woman who would become my wife. She was still very strongly Christian, and I was okay with that and didn’t push anything. I’m just a naturally curious person and read a lot of nonfiction and like to talk about what I read, and she is a naturally curious person, too, so she would enjoy the conversations. And after talking about the history of philosophy and philosophical ideas and how that intersected with religion, she had a worldview-shattering realization that the concept of the soul wasn’t handed down by God to early Christians, it was borrowed from non-Christian philosophy that was around at the time in roughly the same geographic area. It was another in a long line of philosophical diffusion of ideas that happens everywhere all the time in human history. Nothing intrinsically earth-shattering in itself to students of history, but that was her equivalent of Rhett’s evolution moment.

    It was devastating to her, and it took years for her to figure out who she even was after that. I think it worked out as well as it did partly because I came from the other side and had already thought through a lot of the questions (What is morality without God? What brings value to our lives without God? Etc.) and could help anchor her and prevent nihilistic spirals while she figured herself out. I can’t imagine being married to someone still very much entrenched in the worldview I realized I had to abandon. I honestly think I would be terrified of how they would react: I came into my realization on my own, and so it came as an internal struggle, but now presenting this major change in myself and the way I want to lead my life to my partner, I represent in a way an external threat to their worldview and their way of life. In the face of that kind of threat, people can act drastically differently from the kind of person you have come to know them as through normal interactions. And however they react, it’s going to set the course for the rest of both of your lives.

    I’m going to have to watch the full interview.





  • People are making fun of the waffling and the apparent indecision and are missing the point. Trump isn’t flailing and trying to figure out how to actually make things work. He’s doing exactly what he intended: he’s holding the US economy for ransom and building a power base among the billionaires.

    He used the poor and ignorant to get control of the public institutions, and now he’s using that power to get control over the private institutions (for-profit companies). He’s building a carbon copy of Russia with himself in the role of Putin. He’s almost there, and it’s taken him 2 months to do it.