alm1

same argument can be made about excessive athlete salaries and really any sports related business ventures. Athletes go after specific stats to hit contract goals, get their bonuses and live good lives. Gambling industry is just one of the hundred detractors to the sport itself.

this is quite a different statement from "nothing ever happens".

maybe that humans are controlling the creation process and can terminate it when the AI versions are going increasingly "rogue"?

logical or well reasoned argument doesn't equal a casual or factual relationship. The well reasoned arguments on many issues change over time, just take the same issue and go back in time 100 or 50 years to find much less consensus and much weaker logical links. Elon shows pretty consistently that truth for him is mostly just what Elon deems truthful or useful.

do you plan on having a more permissive license?

how much do you know about the signature collection process? I can easily see how a large number of these could've been out of fear of retaliation and some out of greed. Many autocrats claim high support numbers on every election, doesn't mean they are beloved.

In author's defense he doesn't claim to be exceptional and even concludes his essay with labeling this A.I. moment as “the revenge of the so-so programmer.” I actually enjoyed author's nuanced take, different from the common narrative of AI takeover. To the contrary I think LLM-driven coding is not a tool of power users, but rather a tool of disempowered users. They will bring many more people into the engineering profession and change the profession for many in it towards more complex tasks. Quickbooks hasn't destroyed the need for accountants, yet it allowed millions to become the "so-so accountants", when that's all their business needed.

I think the deterministic requirement was what made the semantic web nearly impossible at scale. Aligning on the schema for all the entities can be challenging within a small group, yet alone the world. Doing it continuously is impossible today. Wikidata has tons of abandoned and branches which are no longer relevant or even wrong.

It seems like LLMs and vector representations for words are more practical ways to explore semantic data. Then the specific, reccuring queries may be optimized through graph representations.

in fairness, the society did self regulate as evidenced by Meta's declining engagement numbers. Many people got depressed from reading Nietzsche, should we regulate those too? Was the internet a net good or will admit that it's a glass half-full argument.

There is an extreme conflict of interest in the OpenAI's proposal. I don't see regular people protesting and asking politicians to act, I don't see small business owners writing petitions. I see a small number of highly invested, very rich individuals weaponizing media attention and lobbying to create extremely favorable combinations for their business.

regulate books and internet while you are at it, they both spread chaotic thoughts.

Is Twitter dangerous? Is a steam powered engine dangerous? Is a printing press dangerous? In retrospect they aren't. In history they were hated, vilified, regulated and banned.

I think the discussion has a thick veil of anxiety and sci-fi movies. It's very strong on hypotheticals and very light on actual evidence of harm committed by AI and actors. "We need to act before there is evidence" is hard to argue with, thankfully human imagination is not regulated yet.

the inspiration for founding replica was the founder's intense pain and trauma from suddenly losing a friend to an accident. Then reflecting on the psychotherapy culture in a country with a rich history of government assigning what constitutes proper behavior patterns. It's easy to label somebody's psychological state as inadequate, but what's harder is providing them tools to recover. What's nearly impossible today is providing such tools at scale. Would your general sentiment on replica and it's users apply to using idiotic VR simulators for PTSD survivors? I can make an argument that a reasonable adult should not be tricked into believing they are actually on a roof ledge when they are clearly on a couch. However, that kind of therapy has shown some promising results and is certainly more accessible than traditional care. Granted replica may not be the working tool, but I'd be curious if you have other options its users can go to when traditional human relationships are challenging for them.

Mechanized factories failed to kill humanity two hundreds ago and the Luddite movement against them seems comical today. What makes you think extinction is most likely?

this is not whataboutism, it's actually guilty-by-associationism displayed on both sides. Should we blame children whose elderly parents support the war for taking care of their parents, instead of disowning them? Should we blame employees of Google for allowing employees of Lockheed Martin use Google maps during the Syria invasion? Should we blame employees of Yandex for paying taxes and working for a company which did not cease operations in Russia?

Where do you draw the line of association?

It probably won't change your mind, but here is a pretty transparent poll on a mix of Russians at a train station in Moscow (to capture some from outside the metropolises). The multi hour poll is a continuous video to show lack of selection bias (parts with no speech are fast forwarded) https://youtu.be/eNwe24PlPTQ

About half the Russians don't support the war. I hope the conflict ends soon.

earlier in the thread someone provided a definition along the lines of: "a pimp is a manager who is allowed to use violence, drug addiction and other forms of non-consensual coercion."

I hope you can explain your point more. Coincidentally you won't find many nannies from the wealthy western countries. Which doesn't tell me very little about this kind of work. But maybe it does to you.

that's why a lot of responders are calling the approach naive. This function is potentially the last layer in thousands of functions. Thinking that one can predictably change the behavior of a large nonlinear model via one variable is like thinking you can change the US political system by passing one good law in Reno, Nevada.

This approach only works if auditability is mandated to also be a property of the model, which typically reduces model complexity and accuracy too. We do this with credit scoring models semi-successfully.

I feel like authors are thinking about the "algorithm" almost as if it's just a bunch of if-else statements in a tree.

Read only audit is an overly naive way to think about understanding complex algorithms. In an audit they would find an enable of large DNN transformer models with thousands of layers and thousands of features often with their own transformation trees. There are entire CS departments dedicated to researching tools to understand complex nonlinear models. You definitely can't do with a read only code audit. You can _barely_ do it with full access to the model, full access to the input data and being able to retrain and rerun the model on that data.

One can say that Solomon Asch experiments on social conformity are great illustrations of the benefits of free speech. Diverse opinions discourage group think and encourage critical thinking and discourse. That works even if the opinion is bogus, since in that case it may encourage the individual to avoid adopting an overwhelming majority point of view. As you mentioned it is indeed a slower process, but a much more fault tolerant one. The simple analogy is the slower, complicated democratic process vs fast, simple autocratic process.

would you say the same thing if Russian citizens were instead from North Korea? The "democratic" Russian Federation is 31 years old (20 of which were under Putin). There has been 0 full generations who saw a functioning or even a fictional democratic process in action.

how's this rhetoric different that Russia's "there some bad actors in Ukraine, so let's wreck the whole country"? Some people didn't vote for Putin, some even went to protest and been to jail and all got sanctions. Saying it's "deserved" seems rather insensitive. It escapes me how the regular Russian people are often considered the only group that can quickly change the situation today. Yet all they get in western media is hate and shame.

if you speak Russian you can go on vk.com and check some of the exchanges on public groups. There are also few "interviewing regular Russians on the streets" videos circulating around.

To clarify the belief that was cultivated through propaganda is that there are reckless Nazi groups in Ukraine who stop at nothing to hurt russians. They were striking at ethnically russian regions of Ukraine for last 8 years. When Russia invaded to fight these groups they positioned their forces in the hospitals and schools. As they strike back they are hitting their own schools and hospitals mostly from being sloppy, because that's what they are and the equipment is old. And in some cases maliciously, because they need gruesome content for the west. Russian forces are doing precision strikes and hurt no civilians.

I think you underestimate how massive and elaborate Russian propaganda is. These stories are fed in pieces over weeks, sometimes years. For example it took multiple years to establish and cement the idea of Nazi groups in Ukraine. Now if you start at this belief it's not that far fetched to believe these groups have no regard for human life whether it is their foreign or their own.

interest != admiration. If you watch and talk about Mindhunter it doesn't mean you admire serial killers.

Are you implying that lives lost from the drone strikes are somehow less worthy than those of journalists and activists? Or is it the degree of closeness to the murders? (not trying to troll, genuinely interest since you did not disagree with drone strikes killing humans)

I'm surprised at all the negative comments equating closure of the _game stuido_ to Stadia not doing well. Google is not known for good content production. Only example I can think of are Youtube Originals which hardly stand out.

I read the announcement as Google doubling down on title acquisition which probably worked out well. Cyberpunk was the largest game release last year (last 5 years?) and seemingly very popular on Stadia. Other titles they have (RDR2, Doom, Odyssey) are also among the best games of the last few years.

Personally, I never played any of the non-AAA titles on Stadia and would imagine most users are in a similar boat. Just doesn't make much sense to use a streaming service for low-key games I can play on my laptop directly. This is a big difference from early Netflix model, where they went for quantity.

My guess is that the internal studio failed to pitch any competitive titles and was disbanded. Makes sense to focus on the plumbing, while leaving titles to external studios who know how to do it well.

I'm "lucky" to have experienced chronic back pain for close to 10 years. Started a couple of years after graduation and got to a point where I couldn't sit for more than 20min or sleep for longer than 3 hours. It affected everything from my relationships, to my job (which I had to quit), to my mental state. I say "lucky" because I have mostly gotten over it recently, both physically and emotionally. So I can reflect on my time before pain, my time in constant pain and my time now.

Your response to chronic disease depends on your personality. Being stoic by nature, with strong background in sports I refused to accept I was disabled. I would not decline friends invites to play sports, even though I had to take a bunch of advil to last an hour of soccer. I wouldn't slow down on air travel, even though I spent half the flight in the bathroom where I could take a pose with less back pain. I had no empathy for myself and was refusing my condition. I regret that period and think it actually made me and my condition worse.

At about year 7, I started to accept my new, limited by back pain, self. I told my friends that I have the condition. It allowed me to vent periodically. Or make odd requests like asking to sit on side seat at a brunch table, so I can take frequent walks. I reorganized our house to be more forgiving for a back pain sufferer (basically moved everything I ever needed from the floor to waist level, so I didn't have to bend). Started taking days off work just to rest. Told my coworkers that I needed to adjust schedule because of the "back pain thing". I allowed myself to talk about it, vent about it and complain about I had a particularly bad day.

In the following years I was in more pain than before, but I actually felt better. I felt like I was accomplishing things I wanted and that my situation was just different, not hopeless. It no longer felt like I was disabled, but rather that I had a "thing". Everyone has their own: someone is taller, someone's brother beat them up, someone has a limp from a car accident, others grew up in poverty. It doesn't make them better or worse, it makes them who they are. My thing was that I had back pain. And it required me to make behavior changes to live a fulfilling life.

My advice is to evaluate your feelings to your condition and to yourself with the condition. Have you accepted it? Do you accept the new normal for yourself? Are your ok that some behaviors and experiences are out of reach? If the answer is "no" to any of these, finding peace with your new self should be the focus. It's not going to happen overnight, but it also won't happen without reminders and deliberate work.

When you have accepted the new normal, your happiness tank would start to refill with new experiences. The road ahead would not be easy by any means, but you would have the strength to walk it.

it's very individual and you may not find a "recovery template". Personally, I find that best remedies are 1) attaching yourself to a bigger goal, where even "at least I tried" and "at least I've advanced X area by a few steps" are fulfilling narratives. 2) finding something no matter how small, where you excel. Hobbies are great. Maybe your startup is a mess, but your bird dog yoga pose is pure perfection. (1) helps deal with the shocks of failures and (2) helps refill your confidence tank to try at the problem one more time.