fallingfrog

True although a lot of those neurons and synapses are in the cerebellum, responsible for motor coordination and or in the visual cortex and so forth. Only a portion are in the language and reasoning areas. LLM's are comparable to human scale now, i think, and if trends continue will swiftly pass us by in the future.

If I had a magic button I would not only pause AI development but set it back 10 years. Sadly I have no influence on events and those who do, don't care about the future of humankind or actively wish us dead.

Yeah I mean LLM's don't generally offer useful answers to questions. They just kinda make the same guesses that any reasonably educated and articulate but not very smart person would make. They will answer, "maybe its this, maybe its that", but they can't go and do actual investigation and digging and find the real answer to a question. They just wing it. I can already pop possibilities off the top of my head.

I don't know, maybe if you were generally not very informed the AI might seem knowledgeable by comparison?

Spain has a lot of friends in the EU and given the way Trump has bullied and insulted all of them lately this is probably going to backfire and lead to them becoming closer together to resist trump more. I feel like this is basic psychology. Nothing makes groups gel together like a common threat.

I have noticed that lately certain topics on HN seem to be eliciting low quality comments like "genetics/evolution don't yet seem to fully explain how humans exist". That is a really ignorant and silly thing to say. Are we being flooded with AI generated comment slop or do topics involving genetics attract a less knowledgeable crowd?

Ah. ...first time?

Sorry but we've been committing war crimes as a matter of policy for decades at least.

Yes, all this is my understanding also. I would add to that that think it's good to keep as a goal that we want to have the political ability to make prudent changes to avoid disasters even if those disasters are not totally world ending but merely catastrophic levels of suffering for a hundred years or so.

"Politicians hide themselves away

They only started the war

Why should they go out to fight?

They leave that role to the poor"

Nothing ever changes.

Idempotency is just the next generation realizing that goto and global variables are still antipatterns.

And then some lazy birdbrain will come up with some new way to either jump to a random place in the code without guardrails on program state, or referencing data that other code or threads could have touched, and they'll call it a time saving feature.

And then we will all learn the hard way that those annoying restrictions were in place for a reason.

This is the great circle of life and death and rebirth

Sam Altman is willing to roll the dice on human extinction in order to make a buck. Even though hes already outrageously rich.

I feel that I cannot properly voice my feelings about him without being banned from hacker news.

And assuming that median salary drops the same percentage as gdp per capita, it would drop to 41k, which puts a lot of people beneath the threshold to pay their mortgage.

Of course taking a huge pay cut is not something most people are willing to do, so you'd probably actually see mass unemployment and salaries being inflated away.

In response the fed will do the only thing it knows, which is to rev up the money printer even more. But thats going to make all these problems worse, leading to a vicious cycle.

And in the midst of economic chaos, people's danger switches get activated and they will turn to an authoritarian strongman who will make them feel safe.

And generally speaking, once such a person is in power, they can only think of one way to solve their problems, which is to plunder their neighbors by going to war. Thats basically the imperial cycle.

It sucks to be able to see all this coming and yet be powerless to stop it..

The debt can be inflated away (which is the only plausible way this is going to go) but it might cause the dollar to be dropped as the world reserve currency. I don't know for sure what happens in that case..

I suspect that imports would become enormously more expensive, which would reveal the catastrophic erosion in worker rights and pay due to neoliberalism. People would be suddenly aware of how much less they are making and how much more the wealthy are taking than was the case 40 years ago. This in turn might result in political instability. But who knows.

They'll rule in favor of whoever has the most money.

Sorry, but that music is really boring. I certainly would not have bought it in 1983. But, you're right that the average person on the street probably can't tell the difference.

Music out there in the real world runs in clusters and communities that form around real world places where people go to be together and make and share things. Its so much more colorful and interesting than you can imagine. But, it is admittedly just a small slice of the weirdest and most creative and crazy people who participate in those communities. For everyone else music is just a recording that appears out of thin air in their car stereo without context and the glossiest product is the one they pick.

What do you think of this?

https://youtu.be/5KszaGOsFR8?si=YVorLTuTMr7jjAvY

Or this? https://youtu.be/pdEmM79MRmU?si=CMGkWs6CyZxXyVaH

Or this?

https://youtu.be/Bdzt39vX1Sw?si=06NNB4m0xuB7Lcbl

I mean, that's the only way I code. I don't use llm's to do my work for me. I'm perfectly capable of solving any sort of problem on my own, and then I'll understand it well enough to explain it to someone later.

Ok but don't cattle often browse on land that is too marginal for farming? And don't they eat grass? I don't know if this argument holds up.

Well this has been essentially the plan since the 70's. The 60's scared the bejeezus out of the ruling class and they began taking steps to bring the people to heel from the 70's onward. In the words of Ronald Reagan's education advisor, Roger Freeman: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].”

I interact with people who seem about as smart as me fairly often- my college professors for example. And, I certainly have been in many situations where my domain knowledge was vastly less than some other person with real expertise. But I have a hard time thinking of a time when I thought someone else was significantly smarter than me. Probably, that's an example of exactly what the article is talking about- maybe I've met those people but failed to recognize them. They certainly must be out there (unless i am the smartest person in the world, in which case we're all in serious trouble).

Well, I mean, tone deaf people cannot accurately judge musical talent.

Having proof on video of trump sexually assaulting a minor would still be significant, I think. Such footage probably exists and would make great leverage.

And who was the person or group who made correct predictions in advance of the announcement? Why not just say who it was?

It's funny that in movies like the matrix they imagine that humanity would fight back against the machines. In reality the first thing ai will do, which it has already done, is capture our governments through the application of money, and then the humans would first have to defeat their own institutions before they can even begin to fight the machines. Neoliberalism is profoundly unable to deal with threats if the threats produce short term profits. That goes for housing shortages, global warming, health care costs, falling birth rates, across the board if it produces short term profits that can be used to bribe politicians its impossible to address. AI is no different.

Yeah at my last job at a larger organization they would occasionally get us all in the big auditorium and start showering us with this sort of language. I would excuse myself to use the restroom then go back to my desk and get some work done. Peace and quiet! Never got called out on it, they don't need me sitting there rolling my eyes and grimacing through the whole thing anyway.

Personally I very much doubt that any civilization would build Dyson spheres in their naive spherical shell form, because the gravitational field inside a hollow shell is zero and therefore nothing would stick to the inner surface and would instead drift towards the host star. (Proved by sir Issac newton)

But more than that- the concept of the sphere is making a ton of hidden assumptions about the desirability of always wanting more and more space and energy which are probably a side effect of the kind of authoritarian power structures that rule most humans currently. But that may not be common.

Cool work though- good to know what to look for

Well the reason people buy bitcoin at 100k is because they think it will someday be worth a million. If it's never going to be worth a million, then it's not worth 100k either.

Have we looked at nutrition? Economic crises lead to sharp spikes in poor nutrition especially when social safety nets have been stripped back. A generation whose growth is stunted by malnutrition is a plausible outcome of "tough love" welfare reform. A lot of people either lost their jobs or had to quit to take care of their children during the crisis. And there was a much degraded safety net to catch them.

My male ancestors died of cancer in their 70's and 80's but my great grandmothers lived to 93, 103, 99, and died in childbirth. I actually remember meeting my great great grandmother when I was 8 or 9 and she was 102.

Yeah so I realize that at some point manufacturers of hard drives started to cheat and claim 10gb hard drives that were actually a bit less, using a 1000kb megabyte as their rationale, but that's just the marketing team engaging in false advertising. There's no reason to dignify such deception by inventing new words. They just lied. A mb is 1024 kbytes and a gb is 1024 mb. Sorry thats just how the math works out. A 16 kb address space can access 64kb or 65536 unique memory locations.

Would you put a professional manager straight out of business school with no military experience in charge of a platoon of marines and send them into a war zone? How do you imagine that would pan out? if not, why would you put such a person in charge of an engineering team? Do you imagine it would go any better?

Like sure eventually the person will learn the job but only after a significant cost in bad decisions.

Yes this is absolutely true. Difficult to impossible, I would say.. my prediction of "2 to 3 years" could very well be totally wrong.

The dominant narrative around bitcoin right now is "hodl because in the long term it always goes up." Thats the core premise that the bitcoin price is based on. If that premise were to crack, bitcoin could drop to near zero for all we know.

As far as I can tell, bitcoin, having no intrinsic value, is priced entirely by vibes. Right now the vibes are generally negative. The latest bubble of interest has faded. I would wait, the world could become interested again but it may be 2 or 3 years. The bottom will probably be around 70k.