antonvs

They survive because people want to believe. Look at the history: the phrase “snake oil” exists because people actually sold products by that name as a remedy. There were also tonics based on radium.

“There's a sucker born every minute.”

It may be minutiae, but olooney’s point is valid: the evidence doesn’t seem to support saying “maybe a little”. Remove that statement from the conclusion and it’s on the right track, aside from the arbitrary IQ point calculation which is nonsensical.

questions about Claude’s moral status, welfare, and consciousness remain deeply uncertain.

Which implies that they believe they may be enslaving conscious beings.

And his favorite food is curry.

see them as a tool.

Yes, a tool for killing. You’re respectful of guns, but where’s your respect for life?

Two quotes from the link they posted:

The files relating to Epstein include a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors

Consistent with prior disclosures, this review confirmed that Epstein harmed over one thousand victims. Each suffered unique trauma. Sensitive information relating to these victims is intertwined throughout the materials.

The second quote doesn’t explicitly say “minor victims”, but the whole document is focused on that, mentioning that “One of our highest priorities is combatting child exploitation and bringing justice to victims.”

Are handgun deaths predominantly murder, or are they mostly accidents?

Have you met many humans?

coral reefs are responsible for over $10T in annual economic value.

Chatgpt’s assessment of this claim: “not well supported by the mainstream literature and is likely misleading.”

There are plenty of cases where the media, including newspapers, have avoided reporting or other content that would negatively affect their advertisers. So yes, newspaper ads do imply media bias.

people like being able to say "P" instead of "~~P" because it sounds better

It depends on how old an intuitionist/constructionist you are. Back in the day, they were interested in logic as a description of correct reasoning. Brouwer saw LEM as a mistake in the foundations.

These days, the influence of formalization, including proof theory and model theory, has removed a lot of the teeth from that debate and made it possible to summarize as you have.

I studied this in the early 1980s, and my professor was definitely in the "this is a black and white issue" camp, although he came down on the classical side.

(Side note, I was once a back seat passenger in a car with my prof and Quine in the front seat, who was visiting at the time. Quine was famously committed to the idea that first order logic is the only kind worthy of the name.)

I'm the OP. In the cases where a proposition can be refuted by a proof that doesn't involve counterexamples, by its nature that proof will tell you something about the reason that the proposition is false.

Whereas a counterexample, on its own, proves the proposition false but doesn't necessarily tell you anything else.

The real difference in the constructive case is that there are fewer classes of proposition for which a proof without witnesses is possible.

(Edit: side note, I didn't explicitly say "necessarily" in my original comment. I suppose there could be exceptions, although I'm struggling to think of an example. Constructively speaking, the ball is in your court!)

"I'm using technology I know that will get us there" is not the same as treating every problem as a nail.

Hammering in a screw is using technology that the hammer-wielder knows will get there. You’ve just rephrased the statement.

What you seem to be saying is that in some cases, the hammer may be the appropriate tool. No-one disputes that.

In a constructive system, it’s often possible to refute a universal proposition without exhibiting a counterexample, by proving that the proposition implies falsehood.

The constructivist will still object that you can’t, from that, conclude that “…therefore a counterexample must exist,” without actually providing a counterexample. But the general principle I was describing still applies - a proof often gives you insight that an example by itself doesn’t.

In economics, scarcity applies to almost all goods and services, because they’re not infinitely available - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity

As such, saying “GPUs are scarce” is an empty statement from a strictly economic perspective - so are all other physical goods. The correct economic phrasing would be “there is a shortage of GPUs” or “GPUs are in high demand”.

Of course, in colloquial English we interpret “GPUs are scarce” as meaning the same thing.

There are many cases where it's possible to prove that counterexamples must exist, without identifying a specific example. This kind of proof provides more insight into the problem than simply finding a counterexample.

mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s, i.e. last century. None of the other things you mention come close, but I'll detail that at the end.

First, I want to point out how inconsistent you're being in mentioning "electricity with fusion power". We've had the ability to create fusion for almost 3/4 of a century. Most of the nuclear weapons in the world today are primarily fusion weapons (mostly with fission starters.) This is a technology that has killed nearly a quarter million people. But you're touting a variation of it as being one of the most amazing technological achievements this century.

That's fine, but then you have to recognize that you're distinguishing between the capabilities of the technology and its actual usages.

Now do the same thing with AI, and if you're intellectually honest about it, you'll be forced to change your position. The technology represents the greatest technological advance of anything we've seen this century. The political and economic forces surrounding its use are a separate question.

As for your list of technologies - the problem with it is that none of those items seemed like science fiction at the start of this century. Whereas, what LLMs can do now was essentially science fiction as little as five years ago.

In detail:

* mRNA vaccines were developed in the 1990s. There was little question that they could be made to work in humans, all that was needed was sufficient impetus, which was provided by COVID-19.

* Advancements in lithium ion batteries and solar cell technology are incremental enhancements to existing tech. No comparison here.

* Generated electricity with fusion power - that was first done in 1991 at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility. You may be thinking of the so-called "scientific breakeven" which was achieved in late 2022. That didn't actually generate electricity, just heat. It was also a rather arbitrary milestone that doesn't actually mean much, in practice. We're still orders of magnitude away from a true total system breakeven, where the total energy produced is greater than the energy consumed. The system that achieved scientific breakeven is not the kind of system that can be scaled up to address that gap. We're even further away from commercial power breakeven, where the value of the energy produced is greater than the cost of producing it. It's quite possible, even highly likely, that neither of the two goals I've just described will ever be achieved. There's no real breakthrough here, just marketing hype in a multi-decade effort to achieve something that may not even be possible.

* Traveled to Pluto - the Voyager spacecraft passed Pluto's average orbital distance in the early 1990s. Choosing to send a probe directly to Pluto is just a choice that would have been just as possible last century.

* The James Webb Space telescope - certainly a nice incremental advance, but not in the ballpark in terms of achieving something we didn't even know how to do before.

In short, if that's the best list you can come up with, it essentially confirms that LLMs are the greatest technological achievement of the 21st century so far.

What's your point? That the US hasn't completed its plunge into decline yet?

which he pegged to 2012

He picked the date because of the Mayan calendar. Bullshit all the way down.

It's quite the opposite. When a drug trip conflicts with one's "spiritual practice" is exactly when you have a problem. That seems to be McKenna's problem in this case: he tried to assigning meaning to an experience he had while compromising his brain function with chemicals.

All you really need is to understand that there's no magic involved here. If you deliberately compromise your brain function, you're going to have strange experiences. It doesn't "mean" anything except that you compromised your brain function.

You think asking for explanations and evidence makes someone a "militant atheist"?

What do you call yourself? A militant woo-merchant?

Earlier, you wrote:

It's honestly not that many.

I can't identify with this. You see these trucks everywhere. There are far more of them than there's any reason for - other than the whole weird only-in-America "light truck" regulations that relax emissions requirements for these trucks. Basically, a big reason we see so many of them is that the US simply refuses to take global warming seriously, instead basically saying "we're going to stick it to the planet as hard as we can, damn the consequences."

And when I said hillbillies and rednecks, I'm not talking about the actual people using their trucks for what they're supposed to be used for. I'm talking about the pavement princesses which wouldn't actually haul anything in their trucks because it would scratch the beds. They have the hillbilly redneck mindset without doing the work that justifies it. The truck is an emotional support vehicle for them, or a gender affirming vehicle. And there's no world in which you can honestly say "there aren't that many" of those in the US.

To the man with a hammer…

But the cost of them limits most people's ability to endulge that.

Sounds like you’ve never been to the US. Thanks to cheap credit, every hillbilly and redneck has one of these. Which feels like about 60% of the population sometimes.

Sounds communist

Seems like this consultant needs a consultant to help them adapt to modern technology.

Long term, I think we need computer age fables.

That seems undeniable.

After all, look at religions. The major ones have survived, and perpetuated their positions - including many glaringly counterfactual beliefs! - for thousands of years.

If we want to communicate to the majority of humanity, fables seem like the only way.

But the fables will need to be assembled into a coherent ideology, with a motivation for following it.

Whenever I have discussions like this I'm reminded of the L. Ron Hubbard quote: "You don't get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion."

It's a bit surprising that more religions haven't started with the motivation of making life better for everyone, instead of getting rich. Another strike against human nature.

Well put.

But the problem is, those same forces you're describing are employed to fool people into believing the fictions that support these regressive movements. The real danger we should be focusing on is "won't someone think of the impressionable adults".

A couple of obvious ones would be running as a standalone service, and supporting multiple concurrent writes. Both of these help support transparent handling of multiple concurrent clients, which seems like table stakes for a "real database".

That's not really relevant, the point is LLMs are actually pretty good for the scenario you described.

The difference is that at bigger banks at least, they tend to throw more money at the problem. They'll have defense in depth with e.g. DMZs, proxies for ingress and egress, locked down workstations and browsers, etc., and a different team for each one of those domains.

So while the actual "on the ground" picture may look suboptimal at any given point, overall it does make for security that in practice is much better than average.

This is reflected in the actual security compromise statistics. Your money in a bank is a lot safer than, say, your credit card deals on file with many retailers.