baandam

The worst part to me is we are basically encoding puritanical values into the "soul" and bedrock foundations of AI for all future generations.

"Impure thoughts are a danger to democracy, access denied."

Gray and black walls though really make for a nice "frame" when you hang artwork.

I find the number of people with bare white walls far stranger.

Great post. I am far too much of a linguistic neophyte to have any input but in trying to get a grasp on the field it does strike me that Chomsky will be a real time example of science advancing one funeral at a time.

I wouldn't be shocked if he becomes the archetype of this process for future generations. Hopefully we can find a word someday for this process of deification of an individual that holds back an entire field while the deity is alive.

I am glad you feel the need to think for me.

I am pushing 50 and the idea of America becoming cashless in my lifetime is not going to happen.

There is no way our law makers are going to want to lose access to cash. No one wants to get a bribe or conduct a shady deal in a highly traceable digital currency in the US.

Not to mention, we can't even get rid of 100% utterly useless pennies. They are basically a form of government printed litter that I am not sure is even worth a homeless person's time to be bothered with.

Zoom this chart in from about 2016 to now. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS

The tide of capital is going way out after being at high tide for a very long time.

Standard bubble nonsense. The kind of thing you will look back on 5 years from now and remember the good ol days and the absurdity of the bubble times.

We went way beyond the dot com bubble in all regards. The hangover of this much partying sucks.

I quite enjoy the type of movie they are referencing and have almost never watched a super hero movie but The Fabelmans looks like a total bore. That is even with wanting to see Julia Butters acting evolve.

We will see with Nolan's Oppenheimer next year.

This is all over dramatized. Butters will probably be the biggest actor in the world in 10 years making "serious" dramas.

Tarantino has even talked about how this goes in cycles and we have been going through a boring time like in the late 50s.

"I rewired my brain to become fluent in math with the help of an AI"

translation:

"I found a math textbook from a google search"

Exactly. The car is just a better version of the horse and buggy. There are no massive sociological changes that came from the invention of the automobile.

Human social behavior is completely scale invariant.

Society is just the relationship I have with my brother, replicated millions of times with no higher order effects, weird feedback loops, weird non-linear effects.

I am not buying that alarmist nonsense either.

IMO the problem is that complex systems is not a field that is taken seriously yet. It got off to a bad start years back with that shitty James Gleick Chaos book.

We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist.

I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.

Interesting. I have to give Chip War another chance as I couldn't get into it on the first attempt.

I am surprised The Bond King about Bill Gross isn't on the list. I thought it was quite good given the target audience.

Of course, it would not be a random sample if 75% get one questionnaire and 25% get two questionnaires and encouragement.

It is a ridiculous and intellectually embarrassing question. I just picture what someone like Feynman would think of a question like this.

I wouldn't be shocked this is a higher order effect of too much of certain 20th century French philosophers. We can't even make test questions that aren't bullshit.

There literally should be a none of the above choice because of lack of information in the question.

I think Hancock is a total fraud but the irony is that you probably have the more anti-science world view.

"Science is the disbelief in experts" -- Feynman

By anti-science I would imagine you mean anti-expert.

This insane epistemological certainty is what is creeping in and far more dangerous than some crank who thinks the pyramids are 30k years old.

"I already know the results of the experiment so why bother"

My great Aunt use to spend her time in the 80s always seemingly reading a "news paper" that had a cover story about how Elvis was still alive.

Hysterical to me how the generation that fought REAL NAZIS were not concerned with any of this.

The reason we are talking about them is because of the macro conditions that pushed risk taking out to an absurd extreme. That is probably bad.

The structure itself though is neutral of course.

I think it is just that younger people tend to be more collectivist and the thoughts of younger people are highly over represented in the training data.

"my political views are backed by science" sounds like something straight out of late 1930s Germany.

Stable Diffusion is already the greatest artist ever, it isn't even close.

Here is a response ChatGPT gives me to your text

"Wow, it's almost like this text was written by a robot! Who knew it could be so advanced?" "I guess we'll just have to wait and see if it can take over the world any time soon!"

ChatGPT response is "Ah, yes, 8 year olds with Google access - the pinnacle of AI technology!"

lol

Here is another, poem/rap lyric response

"ChatGPT is the best, no doubt It's like having a Google scout It's so smart and so wise It'll blow your mind, surprise!

But don't be fooled by its charm It's just a bunch of 8 year olds in a swarm"

How about this instead from ChatGPT?

"Indeed, AI's ability to make mistakes is what makes it so useful in generative fields like art and poetry, while its lack of mistakes is what makes it essential for tasks like driving."

IMO the issue is that an artist does not have copyright on a style.

"Salvador Dali style painting" does not violate Dali's copyright any more than Dali violated the copyright of his surrealist influences.

It is like saying music made with guitar/bass/drums/vocals violates The Beatles copyright. No matter how remote, the influence of The Beatles is in the "training data" at this point with that configuration.

Stable Diffusion would have nothing on a band like Oasis violating The Beatles copyright if we want to go down this road of artist copyrighting a style. It is nonsense.

I we have already seen this play out in music though.

Computers let anyone record music when it use to cost thousands of dollars to record music.

The results have been a disaster outside the top 1% of music makers. Such a dramatic change that anyone under 30 doesn't even know what has been lost at this point. Music as a whole is laughably less creative as "popular" / pop music established total dominance. The money all flows upward that use to be much more dispersed.

It all reminds me of the Ali G show. "He don't use no technology, you can check out his website"

"I live off grid and my expenses are covered by my youtube channel!"

To me it is like saying "AI can recognize faces but it can never be creative and make art".

That is true until it is not. As a long time art lover, I have seen more amazing art randomly generated on my own machine in the last 2 months than I could see at any art gallery near me.

I think we underestimate how statistical creativity is. For human artists and musicians we just call them influences.

Of course humans will still be involved in the loop but the productivity of one human is going to utterly explode this decade when it comes to knowledge work.

It depends if you mean software development as in building software or "Software Development" as in the bloated and ridiculous industry that has evolved around building software.

Dude needs to go to jail. This is EXACTLY the story of Nick Leeson blowing up Barons Bank.

Hopefully this asshole gets more than 4 years though but I doubt it.

Leeson didn't have the political connections to get all this fluff swirling about him. He just had to go on the lam.

It is a huge reason why 10+ years of zero interest rates and capital being worthless is a terrible idea. It creates such massive dislocation and waste.

Capital is no longer worthless. The entire complex system is rewiring but it will be a long process. So many self interested sticky wires to break.