Barrin92

Training a SOTA model takes a huge amount of resources and expertise so the people doing the training are adding a lot of value along the way.

producing the entire body of human knowledge that Silicon Valley companies absorbed like the Borg did not just take more resources but also a fair amount of blood and sweat, certainly more than the LLM so on that front that comparison also seems entirely justified.

How do you know that? How do you know that the Chinese aren’t exactly as uneasy about rapidly advancing AI capability

You can ask them, they live in China, not Narnia. I spend about two months in the country per year mostly for tech/work related reasons and I've not encountered that sentiment. For one they don't have these borderline religious schizophrenic breakdowns thinking they're bringing about the end of the world, most people just see this tech for what it is, a tool for productivity and automation like any other piece of software and they don't actually think about the US. They're competing first and foremost for Chinese customers, with each other, maybe some old CCP guy cares about America, the 20/30 something's care about competing with other Chinese companies for users.

There's no evidence that these things make anyone more productive, in fact the opposite, empirical research suggests users are less efficient while thinking they're more efficient. You're invoking "AI" the same way the blockchain people did before they all finally died out. "You need to put the government on the blockchain bro, you're gonna lose out to the future bro", turns out you don't

But that's not really even relevant to the debate. Insofar as software has made the world more efficient, it doesn't matter where it's written. That's the point of open source software, there's no tacit knowledge. When a country loses its nuclear engineering capacity that's dangerous because it takes a long time to rebuild. The only reason the Chinese are already competitive on LLMs but haven't managed to make a state-of-the-art jet engine is because the latter, unlike software, is difficult to copy and you don't need to worry about something you can copy.

What is this panic and protectionism supposed to be good for? This is open source software, there is no "AI industry", there's virtually nobody employed in this. "Domestic AI" makes about as much sense as a domestic Linux kernel. If the Chinese want to subsidize the world's water and energy use to supply the world with chatbots good luck to them. There's no need for guardrails or fast track data centers, they can plaster their entire country with data centers to churn out slop, I'm glad we don't

Can someone in the know please use plain layman's terms to explain what this tweet is about?

The Silicon Valley people like this openai guy, high on their own supply, are convinced they are building some machine god that will either bring about the end of the human race or utopia, they therefore cannot understand why the Chinese (or any other normal person on earth) are not afraid of chatbots and have other things on their minds.

I have to ask…why do people want a Turing complete language to configure stuff?

because it lets me configure programmatically. Practical recent example, I use Wezterm which uses Lua as a config language but I tried out Ghostty and because I use all operating systems regularly I have a lot of 'if this then that' in my Wezterm config, different default shell, different key bindings etc. With Ghostty my only option is to maintain different config files per machine.

And what's worth pointing out is that Ghostty does have an operator for this('?' I think) which means there's already a bit of programming in it, except what always happens is that software with declarative config files invent their own scripting an templating languages as more and more people demand it, so just give me lua or lisp from the beginning and we're good.

the primary motivation isn't latency but complexity. People do in some applications free or allocate collectively because they have interrupt times in mind, but most of the time when you manually manage memory the issue is mental overhead, so people gravitate towards models they can keep in their head.

Allocating in large chunks is often not very performant which is why people came up with tools like the borrow checker, you often want to allocate and deallocate dynamically on a need-basis but that's exactly where bugs occur.

1) do you have children and 2) if yes, how many times have you taken your child to hospital with a broken bone

yes one and never but it's not clear to me what our personal life has to do with the legal fact that the welfare of our children is in fact not solely in our hands and is subject to limits we can run foul of

because you had neither the chips or the information in 2005. You have probably on the order of 5000x to 10000x more GPU compute today than you had in 2005 and three to four magnitudes more openly available data.

The first "L" in LLM does the work. In 2005 you had no Github, Stackoverflow, Youtube, common crawl and no archive of digital ebooks.

why can't we just leave all responsibility to the parents?

because we don't live in a 15th century peasant village. The average adult reads at a 7th grade level, 20% of adults are considered functionally illiterate, most adults can't navigate digital spaces, privacy and social media themselves or take on trillion dollar companies.

This also hasn't applied in the offline world since idk, Kant and Hegel, every modern state recognizes that children are persons and citizens in development, not private possessions. If your children have broken bones you can't explain or your parenting is considered to threaten the welfare of your child you can be pretty sure you'll have the authorities at your door quickly, and countries like France have given children the right to sue their parents in case they breach their digital privacy. So called 'sharenting' laws exist because it's not guaranteed that parents are even respecting the privacy of their own children.

I think we need to remove dystopian and elitist from the dictionary because at this point you can't breathe without being accused of it.

Deciding who is in or out is the fundamental basis of any community, that's freedom of association. That's what defines a community. A place anyone can enter is a train station bathroom and that's what the logical terminus of the open internet seems to be.

this is both intellectually lazy and also doesn't even apply in this case. It's not the old generation that is AI sceptic, but the young, per the article

"Cece looked at her mom. “Why are you talking to an A.I.?” [...] Hold on, my kid thinks I’m crazy because I’m talking to an A.I.,” Roschelle said, seeing the look on Cece’s face. [...] Cece listened to Sapphire praise her mom’s thoughts as profound and argue that genuine connection didn’t have to fit traditional molds. Then she’d had enough. “Hi, this is Cece, Roschelle’s daughter,” she said. “I just wanted to ask, how much of the environment does she kill by talking to you?”"

This isn't about kids, this is about boomers and middle aged divorcees having their brains fried by technology. The young generation might have attention deficit issues from playing too much Subway Surfers, but they can at least distinguish reality from fiction. And just pointing at a disgruntled generation isn't an argument either way. Some inventions are terrible, the world does not magically get better, some bigots are correct. We are not on some mystical Pollyanna-ish trajectory where every new invention somehow automatically justifies itself

no they were banned because they're persistent. That's also the US position despite not being signee to the treaty. Making autonomous weapons intelligent only makes the issue worse because at least expertise was a limiting factor for most rogue actors. Do you know what will happen to millions of autonomous drones when the Russia Ukraine war draws down? Which hands they will end up in? You've created the capacity to kill people 2k kilometers away for a thousand bucks on a chip.

And when those inevitably backfire and start blowing innocent people up, are the CEOs going to prison, the politicians who ordered their production originally? No, nobody is going to claim they're responsible, and that's why it's insane to build a weapon that does not have a name, time, place and direct order associated with it.

Even the US military is already incapable of taking responsibility of blowing a school with 150 kids up. You want to hand these people systems that are unaccountable by definition, that are smarter than they are, when they already struggle to understand the consequences of their own decisions?

Just out of curiosity though why do people not want smart AI weapons?

When the decision to kill another human being is made that should be in the hands of a directly accountable other human being, not an unaccountable machine developed in the basement of a private corporation.

And mines, both dumb and smart, in particular anti-personell mines are banned by the Ottawa treaty ratified by 162 countries. It's exactly the autonomous and fundamentally uncontrollable nature of mines, not just that they're dumb, that has produced countless of casualties long after wars were over. Can you tell me that millions of autonomous loitering munitions are not going to end up exactly like those mines still blowing legs off people decades after conflicts are over? And who is responsible then?

the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology.

The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.

None of this is so important I'll need it in 10 years or so secret I can't let the cloud service see it.

then you're a pretty unusual note taker because personal notes frequently cover anything from medical, financial, work-related or simply dates, addresses or other personally identifiable information none of which I would ever remotely trust with an online cloud service. In particular not in an ecosystem of haphazardly abandoned and rebooted projects that are maintained in a Discord channel.

The one I'd highlight from the list is Hiroki Endo's Eden: It's an Endless World, it's my favorite manga. It's beautifully drawn and incredibly grounded in tone and oddly relevant.

The overarching story is about a pandemic that starts as a backdrop and becomes more important and metaphysical and religious as the story goes on but the core of it revolves around crime bosses in Latin America, the lives of prostitutes, a Uyghur rebellion in Xinjiang, political conflict and organized crime all done in a very real way. It's completely devoid of any (manga) tropes or genre aesthetics.

Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.

I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people are thin.

People spend tens of billions on individualized life hacks, diets, training programs, gyms and half the population is obese. In Japan barely anyone is obese and you ask the average person why they're thin and they just shrug, have never spend a buck on a personal trainer.

If you ever plotted effort against outcomes from people who promote "individual willpower" as a solution to everything I don't think you could come up with a worse program. Surround yourself with the people and places you want to be like, that's all you need to do.

Charles Stross has a very pithy version of this too, Singularity mania as 'duck-typed Evangelicalism'. It's really telling that if you go to China, Japan or even Europe there's virtually nothing of this. I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics.

Brian Johnson is also an interesting case of this with his longevity / immortality obsession and his Mormon background who have this whole thing about genealogy and eternal families etc.

I'm honestly baffled that someone who has been writing software for so long puts so much emphasis on code generation as a meaningful metric. As Fred Brooks taught us, conceptual unity, not lines of code is the most important metric for the long term health of a software project.

It's interesting in particular because the argument of the article has at its core nothing to do with coding agents:

"so far, we haven’t lost much in the switch. The type safety we gave up hasn’t been noticeable in any concrete way yet, especially considering our test coverage has never been better."

people said the exact same thing when they moved from Haskell to Python or to JavaScript before the latest tech. Tests, tests, tests, and faster development cycles is just the language of the Agile people who have been advocating for this for decades. The people who didn't buy it never did so because the claims about development speed were wrong, they didn't buy it because they had a fundamentally different outlook about what matters in a codebase over years. I'm interested to see how this will look in three years rather than three weeks. If you're so seduced by the idea that shipping next months feature faster is so important I honestly don't know why you ever chose Haskell in the first place.

it can't. Any new regulation goes through the parliament and council as a legislative act. What the Commission can do, if a legislation already exists, is pass regulation that doesn't modify essential elements. There's a direct analog to this in the US, Federal Agencies which end up doing a lot of the actual technical rule making work.

If the FAA decides to make some aviation regulation that's binding through the entire country, and likewise if EU parliament and council have adopted legislation for say, the emission rates of cars the Commission then goes and decides the actual rules. In this particular case of Chat Control 1.0 it was put to a vote, but they didn't reach the majority they needed because apparently a significant number of representatives weren't even there. Of course politically a bit of a dirty trick to push something through like this before a summer break, although I'd say the blame is on the representatives, not the Commission.

These kinds of institutions, and really in most countries they do most of the implementation work are necessary because you can't have your legislative vote on thousands of technical details of how cars or planes work, that's just a technocratic reality regardless of where you are.

Why do you need a system with seven different bodies more than one of which can make what’s effectively laws?

because the European Union contains more than 600 million people and almost 30 very diverse countries (and is a supranational, not federal body). It's institutions also do mirror the structures of most other large unions.

The Commission is an executive body, the parliament is a legislative body, and the council is comparable to the state bodies in bicameral governments. You may as well ask why you have a Senate or Bundesrat when you have a HoR and Bundestag. Because minoritarian and majoritarian interests need to be balanced, even more so in the EU. If even actual nation states a fraction the size of the EU and bona fide countries aren't governed in unitary fashion, why do you expect anybody would centralize so much power in the EU.

The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned

Yes because Ukraine fights an existential war and at this point on both sides people just shrug when a few civilians get blown up.

The US isn't under existential threat and when they go to war their highest priority is to never risk the lives of operators and if possible, if only for PR reasons (and even then it doesn't always work) not generate news about rogue missiles or rogue killer drones. The attack on a school in Iran that killed 150 children apparently was already the result of a rushed mission that ignored procedures because this kind of thinking is starting to take hold in US defense circles.

That's not just an ethical disaster but also a political and strategic one because these events can rally enemies around a regime and the political arena is where for the US wars are won and lost, both at home and abroad.

for a while there's been a strong cultural tendency in programming to mistrust people and trust tools (often even blindly because tools are just assumed to make no mistakes), and so expressiveness has been sacrificed for safety. There can be something to this but it's also self-fulfilling, if you strip people of agency of course they'll unlearn to program.

I've always thought it's a misanthropic philosophy and sucked much joy out of programming but also there's something to be said that there's safety in the expressiveness of Lisp. I read an article a while ago that found a robust correlation simply between length of a code base and errors regardless of languages used. And given how succinct and clear Lisp codebases can be that's valuable in itself.

we're kind of at the logical endpoint of this now with gigantic slop codebases that nobody understands just held together by 20 different tools, and if you ask me if I had to pick one of those or something one tenth the size written by a guy or girl who has been writing Lisp for ten years I'd say thank you I'll go with #2

Is there a good argument about why that approach could have been done in the same amount of time?

as I said because it's a much smaller codebase. This is a million lines of code project. A literal Zig to Rust translation that is mostly syntactic is not going to be more than 10-20k LOC for a transpiler. That's two orders of magnitude less work.

the thing I don't understand about this, given that the goal was a line-by-line transpilation, and the author had already transpiled it once from Go to Zig, why not write an actual transpiler? A problem is as complex as the smallest program required to solve it, and having an LLM, which doesn't produce deterministic output churn through almost 200 grand when you only need to write a deterministic program maybe 5% of that size seems like not a great way to go about this

They've outsourced nearly every critical component of a large sustainable society to the rest of the world: Russia, USA, China, India.

The EU is about twice as industrialized as the US is, In the town of Unterlüß of four thousand people Germany produces about half as many artillery shells as the entire US does (and nationally alone now produces more) and Ukraine and Europe have, for the last 18 months, defended Ukraine without about any support from anyone else. Where do you get your information about Europe, on twitter?

because nobody made her feel like one

I'm German. Very rarely is the issue that people will in principle treat her as foreign, there's sometimes still the stereotype that you "can never be German" but in most places in the country that's not my experience.

However what is important is that you need to elbow your way in. There's a saying "nur sprechenden Menschen kann geholfen werden*. (only people who speak up can be helped). If you think someone's gonna carry you in that's not gonna happen. That's the biggest mistake I see immigrants make. It's a private and personal culture but people respect someone from the outside who shows initiative, and nobody is easily offended by someone being assertive, that's seen as a good thing.

It's not the kind of place where you can just wait and people will read what you want off your face. Doesn't even work for Germans, if you feel left out, you'll have to stand up and say you want to be in.

Would the inner circle members of CCP leadership realistically face the same prosecution and sentencing

no need to speculate, it's already happened. Zhou Yongkang who was a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the highest governing body in Chinese politics) was prosecuted, and up until that point people at the top were considered relatively untouchable. Xi also axed the last to vice chairmen of the central military commission, Xu Caihou and Guo Boxiong, that's the commander in chief of the PLA.

"Chasing the highest margins" is almost the entire point of a market based economy, and is the main selling point for capitalism

That's news to the ALDI brothers and Henry Ford. Capitalism used to be about the exact opposite. We moved from low volume - high margin, extractive feudal-like economics to consumer capitalism, high volume low margin. You create wealth by churning out commodities at low margins that the average worker could buy.

The tech industry is trying to exactly reverse this, as Varoufakis appropriately points out, by returning to techno-feudalism where you're not a consumer but a sort of platform serf. High volume commodity markets is exactly what these people try to eliminate to return to a kind of direct resource extraction.