Nevermark

The wall is the way.

Things move faster once you discover/can see your next problem(s) clearly. Is another way to put it.

a linear association between happiness and Log(income) implies that the marginal utility of additional dollars diminishes exponentially, though never mathematically plateaus

And income (or wealth increase) can go up exponentially with wealth, so hitting the point where wealth just grows = linear increases in happiness relative to time?

If a system is distributed enough, with complex financial and legal dependencies, a great deal of indirection becomes stable, because to violate the indirection would put so many direct relationships in peril.

And when there is reliability, even over vast distances and time, that future-value can be traded as today-value. With risk assessments of course, but this is how a great deal of the economy works. More and more of the economy, as it becomes growth and innovation focused, operates on the currency of expectation.

Exactomundo.

My guess is human learning requires some major differences in training.

For instance, we learn to process a firehose of visual, sound, tactile and motor information, before we start thinking in well-defined concepts.

That is a major foundation, grounding, and highly organized state, on which we learn language. And is entirely missing for LLMs.

We learn a lot metaphorically, so it may be that the physical effects we learn to recognize act as highly efficient sub-vocabulary, for quickly learning new concepts both verbal and nonverbal.

So a series of different learning stages, each making the next more efficient, is likely to be a big part of any solution.

No amount of data/exposure will help a baby trade stocks. General fast learning requires other things to be learned first.

Furthermore, light-speed lag and distance mean that child civilizations must be functionally independent of parent cultures.

Makes me wonder if a solar system wide civilization, with trillions of beings, wouldn't invest in ships to go to the next system, extract resources, and create a stream of resources ships going back to the original solar system.

That might sound uneconomical. Why not just go to the other system? But moving trillions of beings, and disrupting all their practical considerations and dependencies, would be a far more costly enterprise.

In the short run it would be resource acquisition. In the long run, the new system would accumulate entities, and then a civilization of its own. But there might still be strong value, or incentives, for the original system to continue acting as a kind of capital/dominant/higher value location.

Long distance/time dependencies could develop and be naturally maintained via complex decentralized indirect but intertwined economic arrangements. Just as shareholders who have done nothing but push a button on their phone to get an electronic record of having some stock in a company, have strong property rights over complex systems they may never see or understand, because it is in everyone's interest for the system to keep working.

Also, automated systems that defend themselves and their owners positions, even across a few light years. With the owners being able to trade their value in real time, even if the physical returns are long term.

A couple examples. They are both common viewpoints that came up in low-key conversation. Other cases are similar. Self-described conservatives vs. liberals I know, seem to adopt a different set of highly correlated views.

Self-described conservative friend: Specific views about dealing with cultural differences that require some kind of resolution. The desire for immediate "simple" solutions, without any signs of awareness or respect for the "others" and why solutions were not attempted before.

My view: Patience is necessary for a real solution. Resolving these kinds of differences takes time, and often is best done case by case directly by the people involved in each situation until a common pattern emerges. The people needing accommodations deserve some extra respect, for the lack of it that made them invisible until recently.

Self-described liberal friend: Inability to consider economic closure over environmental costs, so the market maximizes resource/impact efficiencies relative to their actual costs. The dissonance being this would raise prices.

My view: We are destroying the environment, which economically should be viewed as a commonly held asset, not an unowned asset. The result is we are not optimizing its future value. Any (slowly introduced) rational pricing optimizes both costs and efficiencies, and incentivizes improvements for both. The longer we wait, the more damage our economy subsidizes.

These are reasonable intelligent people. I cannot tell you their nuanced views, just their reactions and a common human theme: reluctance to go deeper.

This is a gross oversimplification of my experience with conservative vs. liberal friends.

But there is enough truth in it to at least be worth the humor.

My conservative friends respond to a problem by mashing all its symptoms, and often operate on assumptions they have never tested. And would resist testing.

My liberal friends respond to a solution, veering away hard from the solution's costs, without first asking how they can be mitigated or if the accounting still works out positive.

Disclaimer: Could be anecdotal. Could be projection. But for my population of five people, the correlation is 100%! They would all likely agree too. Given enough beer, and with my recorder out of sight.

When you buy an option, you don't deserve a refund for not exercising the option.

On the other side, a user that watched a movie 1000 times should not get less compensation.

All users are being impacted exactly the same way (loss of future access), so should be compensated the same way.

The interest and inflation are the time value of money, which you pay, for the time value of access.

Original-price refund is both simple, and (by linking the time-value of money for both parties) fair.

Revocation should come with full refunds.

That would:

1. Balance the revocation economically, for both parties, while leaving the decision to the "seller".

2. The trade becomes the time-value of money vs. the time value of access. Inherently fair. The seller nets interest, and the inflation drop on the original price. What an accountant would come up with, yet automatic.

3. Provide users the remunerative recourse for "resuming" their "perpetual" license with another provider.

4. Motivate the avoidance of revocations, as who wants to have anti-sales.

Maybe there are good reasons for revocations. Fine, but purchasers should not "Get" randomly screwed, while the seller who had control of their sourcing arrangements loses nothing.

"Get" instead of "Buy" does not address the problem. If "Get" requires the user to gamble, it should be "Gamble". "Get for five years" or "Get for 5 viewings" would be ok. But "Get" without a clear definition is inherently misleading. Another dark pattern.

(Also: By law, contracts must be something given for something taken. A one-sided uncompensated nullification-at-will option is a sneaky way around that. Companies that nullify without compensation, or less than full price where the licensing agreement made no refund amount declaration, should be required to return customer money with interest to reflect the bad faith contract. IANAL, just a believer in justice, especially where simple accounting provides answers.)

I am someone completely unable to fake appearances, and would never want to.

But I can vouch that being completely convinced of a solution path to an ambitious problem, is a shockingly helpful condition to get long term, long shot help, with no strings.

I have never been in a situation where I needed, wanted or felt I deserved help before. And I would have had no idea how to ask for it. But dire need and absolute belief (not faked) in what I am doing has resulted in so much help over so much time (far more than planned of course), I am humbled. And also very happy that it worked out.

There appears to be a silent "immediate" in this version of "useful".

Against "only immediate/certain usefulness".

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

I am not sure if you are insulting everyone who reads your point, or your own ability to communicate.

But maybe interpret the ideas less as a dichotomy you can't untangle and so must reject, which is a fragile place to reason from, and instead identify what are good points, what are not, and improve upon either.

Because there is certainly a great deal of truth to the problems being addressed.

How could less correlated reading, no matter how high the quality, possibly compare to a solid book - in use of time or depth of impact?

The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.

Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.

If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, with lower correlations of who finds them, reads them, and when, the page count would have to increase 10x - 100x. The setups and redundancy would be immense.

Books also get to explore many perspectives on the same important ideas. Which is not redundancy. It is the difference between recognizing a good idea and understanding it.

Feeling an epiphany vs. absorbing its implications. Awareness vs. fluency.

Actually:

its output can be novel or good, but rarely both at the same time.

rarely

That is not a viewpoint they can't do something useful and new.

With that criteria, he could be talking about anyone.

I find it rare that people critiquing AI today, actually hold people to the same standards. Or are as enthusiastic about referencing ways machines keep surpassing us, as for ways they have not yet, when speaking about limits for progress.

Any flattening of discovery due to AI, but will be temporary.

We tend to think that obvious potential is the same as realized potential, for new technology.

For any specific context, there are generally innumerable smaller adaptations and capability thresholds that have to be crossed. And the price for that journey is often temporary loss off overt productivity.

Why does this company still exist? It is continually pushing the boundaries of social harm for dollars.

The entire many-dimensional disaster, that the surveillance + manipulation monster economy presents, was not a technological inevitability.

Simple privacy laws, protecting people from surveillance and surveillance leveraged business activity, and protecting their information from predatation, would have channeled an enormous amount of SV, VC and startup creativity in more inspiring, and certainly more productive, directions.

Instead, because parasitic business models made founders and investors rich, there are complaints, and momentary responses, but no real pushback.

Dark business models are a corruption of capitalism. They do not make the world better, and are not a net economic win.

It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century

Ouch! Well ok then!

Zoom out in time, and the explosion started in the 20th century. But the pop, while near, has yet to come.

Mea culpa.

> It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make, since it will lead to an “intelligence explosion.”

Well, that didn't happen.

Predictions are not false because their claims are not in the past yet. That bar would make all predictions wrong.

The faster things happen, the higher the speed-of-progress expectation bar gets raised. This is how objectively compounding progress gets interpreted subjectively as linear, or even as a stall. Despite the dramatically increased rate of progress compared to the context of decades or centuries of speculations about cognitive machines.

Models being used to write a lot of the code for new models is a strong suggestion of compounding capability. With new models achieving higher scores. Not proof, but a high bar for evidence that we may be in that explosion now.

The fact that models trained to match SOTA model behavior (i.e. distillation), now learn much faster and more cheaply, than models trained on human behavior, is also strong evidence that capabilities are compounding.

We are talking about the big cultural/organizational decisions that allocate where creative freedom lives or the lack of it.

To not recognize the decisions, weigh their tradeoffs and their implications, is to make the decisions blindly.

Creativity has to be actively protected where it is wanted or impactful. Or in large companies, it will get crushed as power to make choices flows elsewhere.

You understood the notation.

So "nat64" cleared up two notation deficiencies: correct base type, and explicit declaration of modularity.

A plain natural (unbounded/big) would be "nat" or "natural".

The problem is when practices are chosen, that improve things on one dimension, and harm things on another, without recognition of the long-term tradeoff being made.

Simply recognizing the tradeoff exists, is likely to result in wiser decisions with lower tradeoff costs, and greater opportunity expansion.

Intelligence can operate without learning. At a minimum inference and learning don’t need to be co-concurrent.

Not disagreeing with your point, but your terminology muddies your point.

But your point doesn't acknowledge that even with inference, there is a lot of room to tune the calculations. Multiple models, quantization tradeoffs are just the most obvious examples. Every architecture can be adjusted to increase intelligence/watt or other measure, even without further training.

  using int64 = int64_t;
  using nat64 = uint64_t;

Or, if you must, the positive integers:

  using pos64 = uint64_t;

The speech is so fake sounding. Not fake technically, but like a fake/pacifying kind of person. It is a very strange tone to train for.

The model is not interested in the conversation, it is just "serving" a conversation.

Which is very different from the engagement of SOTA text models.

A great number of people here are engaged in civilized debates about whether parenting needs age verification.

That might seem to be the issue, but it is a red herring.

Powerful people are ramming age verification through in a way that will surveil you and give government the ability to not just attest for your age, but surveil what sites you use, and revert their attestation, for anyone, on any site, for whatever reason.

Not just porn sites but any site they convince to use their age verification scheme.

Even Wikipedia is having to fight this with the help of the EFF to not force all its users to submit to this.

Wake up. We all need to wake up.

The purpose of an anonymizing open source alternative is to head off dystopia. Nuanced opinions about parenting are not a defense strategy. Not against a closed internet permissioning system run by governments. Implemented by people who are using parenting as a cover.

Your parenting opinions won’t help you log onto increasing numbers of sites that block you without a government supplied key.

Wake up.

We must not let governments use this issue to lock down the internet. But that is now the default outcome.

The problem is insidious.

You are framing the debate in a reasonable way.

But apparently are unaware that this debate is being forced by powerful unreasonable people who are not going to give up if we leave a resolution up to them.

Reasonable and informed people want to avoid that. By stronger means than repeating “I don’t need that” until we realize that didn’t work.

When a site you and i need requires you and I to register with our governments to access it, how is your reasonable opinion going to help us navigate that?

You are imagining that a solution for you will be deemed a solution for the political powers pushing for this. Or that being age-verified is the main danger of having age-verification.

That would be nice!

But if there isn't a safe market driven solution to age-verification, which provides anonymous, unsurveiled, age-attested site access, with no ability for the government to individual monitor, deny or revoke, then that is exactly what is going to get pushed on all of us.

You don't defeat an enemy by not needing the manacles they are very motivated to force on everyone..

Increasingly: We adopt zero knowledge proofs, and other decentralized open-sourced hard-security technologies, and resolve seemingly-small, but not-going-away practical issues like age & porn, or empower and "trust" every weak politician, interest group and stranger on the internet to not use our lack of awareness and defense against us.

Add AI to the mix, and the risk/damage of passivity becomes extreme.

If you need personalized government attestation to visit a site, then the government has the ability to dynamically deny and rescind your individual access to any site that adopts age verification, at any time.

Once adult sites adopt the system, it will creep over to any site wanting to limit their liability. Banks. Business services. Eventually almost everyone.

Liability the government will dramatize and escalate. You won't see the government pass any laws to create age-liability safe harbors.

Wikipedia is already being forced to fight to not implement age verification. Age verification managed by the government = No Wikipedia access without individually tracked, controlled and revokable government permission. [0]

Seldom has a slippery slope been so slippery.

The distance between government controlled per-citizen access to obviously adult sites, and government permissioned/controlled access to any site of substance, does not even involve a technical hurdle. It just becomes a site adoption curve. Every adoption increasing the scope of real-time government surveillance in our minute-to-minute lives, and its real-time at-will ability to deny access to whatever it chooses, whenever it chooses, and for whoever it chooses. In any combination.

Dystopia is here.

In my opinion, this is terrifying.

We need: Third party attestation, providable by anyone/entity meeting basic openly-defined criteria, limited to age attestation only, implemented with Zero Knowledge Proofs, to create a safe anonymous (unsurveiled/no personalized denials) alternative, to take the wind out of the sails of this constant governmental power grab. If it isn't solved by security minded technologists and the marketplace, the freedom destroying version will prevail - and it won't be undone.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/we-support-wikimedia-f...