geye1234

Look up the English Enclosure acts. They brought about a large-scale robbery of peasants by landowners in the 17th and 18th centuries, and created a proletarian class that needed factory work to survive. Things got a little better in the 19th and especially 20th centuries.

I think this is one reason people like asking LLMs things. They have many downsides, but they're never rude or belittling.

Once you see it, you can't unsee it:

https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

And if you have more time:

https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/kupdf.net_bernays-et...

Curious to hear if anyone has tried running the 2-bit or 3-bit quantization of this. With a bit of investment I may just be able to swing it locally. I already have 96GB VRAM, so with 192GB RAM, which seems to be the most one can find these days with a 4-slot motherboard, I may be in with a shot. Yes, it'd be slow, but I could give it overnight jobs. But I don't know if running at such a low quantization would make it hallucinate with only a small context.

Qwen and Gemma are great, but they need babysitting every 30 mins, which is quite a cognitive load.

How far would you take this? Let's grant that the difference between murder and a just killing is what someone (maybe the guy in power) says it is, nothing more. Would you say the same about robbery? Is it only robbery to point a gun at someone and take his money if someone says it is? If yes, at what point does the distinction between one thing and another thing become real, and not just based on what some guy says?

Yes. A full-recourse loan and a non-recourse loan are different: in the way a cat and a dog are different, not in the way a small dog and a big dog are different. It's most unfortunate (and probably deliberate) that they both go by the word 'loan'. Aquinas explains this very clearly in his discussion of usury in the Summa.

Anyone failing to distinguish between the two has no business talking about the ethics of usury, or the history of late-medieval Catholic teaching on the same.

Making a profit on a full-recourse loan, regardless of whether the lender or borrower are Christian or not, is a sin, and a pretty serious one at that. Usury is to fraud what robbery is to larceny. Many people try to claim that the Church has 'changed its teaching' on this, but they can never point to a source that shows this.

For those of us who have read Paul Graham's submarine essay, should the last paragraph be a giveaway? The "AI theoretician's" quote seems to have nothing to do with the rest of the article.

It's astonishing to me that advertising and marketing is accepted as normal. The majority of B2C marketing is designed to manipulate people's emotions so that they act against their interests, in order to make you money. It's really disgusting.

Someone posted these photos a while back which seem to capture the spirit: https://issung.com/posts/lanphotosarchive/

During the Middle Ages, Western civilization described humans as composed of two distinct entities: body and soul.

This is absolutely, completely, demonstrably false. Soul-body dualism was largely a 17th-century innovation, although Plato somewhat anticipated it. Most medieval Catholic thought rejected it (and continues to do so), being quite clear that the soul/mind and the body are one entity. How can people in good conscience write about things they're so ignorant of?

Gell-Mann suggests I don't read the rest of the article. A brief scan reveals a rehash of the common assertions with no serious attempt to reply to counterarguments.

I was seriously considering investing in an RTX 6000 rig, and I think this is just enough to tip me over the edge. I know it's not as good as CC, but at least I know it'll be there tomorrow.

I am interested in hearing how to get hard drives to last longer. Should you keep them locked away in the closet? Spin them up occasionally but not too much? Keep them always-on? I understand the less reading and writing, the better.

How does external compare to internal, if at all? Is 3.5" going to last longer than something smaller?

Yes, I'm grateful I run Linux. You can get quite a bit done with 4GB RAM and a 6th generation (or even earlier) CPU. All 64-bit. I don't think such ancient hardware will be affected by AI demand to the same degree (though I think we'll still see some prices rise if people stop buying new stuff).

The worry is that at some point the older hardware will stop working.

Peter Hitchens had a hell of a time trying to fix Wikipedia's appalling biases:

https://hitchensblogarchive.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/goodbye...

Search the site for other examples of the fun he had with it.

I'd choose Wikipedia over AI, of course, so I'm ultimately grateful it's there. But better than both would be a well-edited traditional encyclopedia, written by experts in a single voice, and possibly peer-reviewed.

Potentially-ignoramus comment here, apologies in advance, but amazon.com itself appears to be fine right now. Perhaps slower to load pages, by about half a second. Are they not eating (much of) their own dog food?

Worth remembering that the Venerable Bede was writing The Ecclesiastical History of the English People two centuries before Athelstan, so clearly there was some notion of unity as early as that.

This will have a big effect on those in passive index funds I think?

Tech made up about a third of the S&P last time I checked, but the AI hype is also affecting non-tech sectors.

I recommend "The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science" by E.A. Burtt if you're interested in that period. It discusses both the science, and the different philosophies of physics that were informing and perhaps influencing them. The book is a hundred years old but very readable.

Fine, so there are some that fall below the O-1 bar. Nonetheless, those are a drop in the ocean compared to the regular $150k jobs being lost to H1Bs.

There's the O-1 for that.

Immigration benefits capital and hurts labor, but big business has hypnotized the left into supporting it.

That's not what's happening though.

Sure, but the 2025 equivalent of that GM job -- if you can find it -- is not going to pay enough to support a family and pay a mortgage on one income.

Even if it's implemented, how do you rise tariffs on intangible works?

If you are an American company (or a subsidiary thereof), and you have an employee resident in another country who does IT work, then you pay a tax to the US Treasury on that employee's salary. This tax can be varied depending on the country of the employee's residence.

Alternatively, if you pay OutsourceCo or whomever to provide you with IT services, then, depending on OutsourceCo's incorporated location, either you pay a tax on the services you buy from OutsourceCo, or OutsourceCo pays the tax on salaries just described.

All this can be avoided by hiring American workers, of whom there are many currently looking for work (mainly because of offshoring and immigration).

The only effect this is going to have is accelerating the offshoring of jobs through more hiring in India, Europe and Canada, which is a net loss for the US.

Offshoring can, and ought to be, heavily tariffed.

In the 1970s, a single-income family on a factory worker's wage could buy a 3-bedroom house with a 3x mortgage.

It's always baffled me how the same candidates that claim to be pro labor and pro environment are also pro globalization. The way it plays out is that the jobs are just offshore to jurisdictions that lack the same labor and environmental protections.

Propaganda is very effective, and Americans are the most skillful propagandists in the world. Immigration is as pro-capital and anti-labor as you can get, yet somehow the left has been convinced to support it.

The UK has a much more intelligent (though far from perfect) approach to land use.

It has public rights of way (if on foot, horse or bicycle) crossing the whole country. You can walk from one end of Britain to the other without trespassing, and without using roads (much). Many of these paths are very, very old, in a few cases Roman or pre-Roman, although more are medieval. Until recently, they were based on common law rights, although they're now in statute. The situation is a happy hangover of the medieval approach to property rights, which is based on custom and usage and negotiation instead of strict statute. The American eighteenth-century enlightenment approach is an attempt to make everything tidy: it's based on the rationalist idea that a thing is its definition and nothing more. So private property is private, that means nobody else can use it: case closed.

The medievals also held in theory (not always in practice, hahaha) that one had a moral duty to use wealth for the public benefit, and that not doing so was theft. So buying up land and kicking everybody off was not only frowned upon, but could also get you into legal trouble, and possibly into trouble with the Church.

EDIT:

A few points since I didn't mean this to be a controversial comment but it seems to have started an argument:

- I should have mentioned the vast public lands in the western US, since they provide a counterpoint.

- The liability issue in the US obviously affects access to land, but could be ameliorated in principle (I would think).

- My comment is not a general defense of British land usage approach. There are huge problems, including but not limited to the tiny number of big landowners. I should have prefaced my first paragraph with "in some respects". Similarly, it is not a general defense of the medieval approach, and certainly not of serfdom.

- The UK's problem with vast landowners got worse in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteen centuries, with the Dissolution, the enclosure acts and clearances. Land becomes far more concentrated at this time, and the social distance between landlord and tenant much greater. Older lords' houses tend to be built very near roads where anyone can talk to them (whether to beg or to threaten), whereas the eighteenth century ones, as well as being much bigger, are far from the road in huge parks, guarded by layers of servants. The historian E.P. Thompson talks about the "triumph of law over custom" -- in other words, "what you and your ancestors have agreed with us and our ancestors up until this time doesn't matter, we've managed to get this law written down that gets you off the land, now get lost".

Yep, makes sense, and looks like they still have it:

https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co40509...

I don't remember the big Kensington museums being like that when I was a kid. There was a kids' section or two, but the rest was clearly for adults (and has stuck in my memory just as much, if not more than, the kids' sections).

Seeing the real Apollo 10 (I don't remember which module) sticks very clearly in my memory.

I also rode on a "heritage" train recently, and what struck me the most was that the interior decor of the passenger cars looked as though it had been designed for and by grown-ups.