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icandoit

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I like python, computer vision, machine learning, and embedded linux. Javascript and C aren't so bad. Java when I must.

Sometimes hard problems require original solutions.

Let me know if I can help you build something.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/out_of_memory; my proof: https://keybase.io/out_of_memory/sigs/hKCdGlnMJiWvfRVU5-EsMZECGi0IfBaGJq8OpznChHw ]

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AI 2040: Plan A 13 days ago

By legislative design? If a nuclear bomb could be made with hardware store finds the world would already be over. Big collaborative works raise the stakes and the observability for surveillance. Apply for a job at a defense supplier or even and energy company.

If AI production is limited to big labs and big data centers then it is de facto contained and monitored. If you know where all the ASML machines are then you know the reproduction rates of chips. If no one can buy or build the machines required to concentrate uranium or plutonium to critical levels then the threat is contained and monitored.

You can dig up all the Uraninite you want. It was never much of a secret that uranium had dark applications. The machines and processes where thankfully big and expensive enough that only the most focused bad actors could aquire them and then hold the world hostage to the degree they do. If al-qaeda or isis could have used $40 bombs from home depot instead of expensive planes they would have (and they do).

You have to legislate and control the big, expensive, and slow things. Dynamite and phentanyl are so dangerous because they move much more easily. Freedom does not have to be a suicide pact. If the inconvenience of requiring prescriptions or access to dynamite reduces harm then it is net positive?

AI 2040: Plan A 13 days ago

LLM adoption is 30% in the charts I saw googling for "ai adoption". An example of capibility: I have had Claude one shot an RL agent that learns connect four in 30 minutes. That's PhD level stuff.

LLMS are 4 years old and the companies that sell them 10x every year. What evidence can you cite? Could you convince a disinterested 3rd party you have anything other than cope? What facts about the world make you think this is anything other than the new (and probably temporary) normal?

AI 2040: Plan A 13 days ago

Nothing follows from this empty platitude though, right? It can't inform you choices or decisions? It's just a disempowering thought?

They are buying up all the RAM today. Do you think "this is fine because in 5 years post-crash I can buy some cheap RAM"? If everyone with money is betting differently, do you have some information they don't, or is the whole economy just slipping away from you?

You experience luxuries today, that no king 1000 years ago could afford. Instant access to communication, food, medicine for the right price of course.

The consumer economy was great while it lasted but it's over now. We have machines that do useful mechanical work (engines) and useful intellectual work (llm-computers). Capital will move productive work from people to machines(if we let them), and the only jobs left will be delivery driver and warehouse, and then those will be gone too.

Human population was exponential and now its flat, but that's a function of what exacly? It could go back down to 1 billion or less. When jobs demanded a person supply was ready to match it. When jobs dont demand a person? Go to a degrowth rally take the temperature (and average age and child-per-person ratio) to get a taste of the future shape of supply and demand in a pessimistic world of sentences that don't have subjects just vague plattitudes. Are they net shutting down grade schools or building them in your neck of the woods?

AI 2040: Plan A 13 days ago

If the production, and distribution of the tech is confined to one or two companies, then those two companies and the resulting power that comes to them, makes them the de facto world government. (Democratic choice may be a farce but it is a useful friction on net.)

If they own all the RAM, models, and the means to do any work, then you are at their mercy. They will buy all the RAM, leaving you none, then all the transport, then all the electricity. You will be as boxed out of the current economy as the Amish and it will get its plug pulled.

Gradual Disempowerment is the default plan right now. War and tyrrany are not remotely the worst case scenario. I'll take Butlerian Jihad over being turned into cattle any day.

Imagine solving for equilibrium with two classes of beings. One requires agricultural land and 20 years to become individually productive and barely maintains a healthy population in a entertainment saturated landscape. The second eats only electricity and is ready to work on day 1. Round 1 goes to the strongest gorilla for sure, round 100?

If LLMs had come to earth in spaceships would you have welcomed them into your work and your home?

I think interpreting the rejection of broad, impersonal, policy based remediation to climate response is a way or expressing a preference for a more personal response, sharing their homes with climate refugees. Does anyone have something catchier than these?

"Climate denialism: A personal guarantee to host the displaced."

"Denying the crisis? Congratulations, you've just RSVP'd to house the refugees."

We want the LLM to learn the multiplication algorithm not an incomplete set of tables. The algorithm might be smaller and will be more complete.

Honestly, our technology has outpaced our epistemology. So we don't really know what a fact is or isn't. Are facts what we call our supervised learning experiences? You think the sun rises, no the earth spins. Your belief that the sun rises helps you predict sunset and sunrise. Your belief would be quaint to someone born and raised on a space station. Apollos chariot moves the sun across the sky doesn't it?

There is the logical system that turns prolog into SQL. Something like this might be useful for nuero symbolic computing. Graph languages like cypher seem a lot more limited.

But then you let yourself get held hostage. Say NO now, while you can.

Suppose that circumcision becomes more contentious and the pro lobby and the con lobby both start sending you legalase and angry letters from politicians.

If you can say "we welcome your contributions to the internet corpus, and that's it" then you are maximally free. If you welcome their contributions to the SYSTEM_PROMPT then your future movements get increasingly restricted, well past the point of performance degradation.

Then you are fighting for your rights to run to run your product at all, rather than as mouth piece for some non-paying customer.

Let's ask the robots what they think about how we should regulate robots.

This will be useful feedback to determine whether humans actually should or should not. Maybe they can even tile the internet with a manufactured consensus that we just gradually accept as not just as correct, but actually the only opinion possible.

Anyone else smell the gradual disempowerment?

The bacteria that aren't antibacterial resistant eventually get replaced by those that are.

Maybe you are alcohol, gambling, and pornography resistant but maybe you have friends and family that aren't. Are you picking up their slack?

What circumstances make "going Amish" look, not just reasonable, but necessary for survival?

AI would never be able to hijack the political process. AI Super-PACs dominating elections would be a clear milestone in the progression of the "gradual disempowerment" theory of loss of human control.

How could a person dedicated to their denial of the possibility of gradual disempowerment spin this as "good actually?" Am I reduced to "technological improvement is always good"? Or there some logically smaller step I can take?

I wondered if this was using interaction combinators like the vine programming language does.

I haven't read much that explains how they do it.

I have been very slowly trying to build a translation layer between starlark and vine as a proof of concept of massively parallel computing. If someone better qualified finds a better solution the market it sure to have demand for you. A translation layer is bound to be cheaper than teaching devs to write in jax or triton or whatever comes next.

Think of it as sharing questions and your approach to finding an answer. That way learning anything at all is a success, even if all you learned was that you underestimated the work involved. Don't wait for it to "be presentable" share your interests and learnings. 80% is actually 100%.

I present my outline to an AI chat and ask for other ways to structure it. Ask for some fun headings and the paragraphs will flow.

Share any failed search terms or unsearchable ideas. That way people can respond with "you have to search for frobnocator".

Understand that the faster you can go from and idea to a post the happier you will be. A quick one pot pasta dinner with interesting touches. Not a multi pan demanding process that requires that 6 things go exactly right.

Think about writers that you like and what it is you like about them. I like Joe Armstrong of erlang fame. He wrote it a casual friendly style that got you curious about the system and any number of deeply technical issues

Imagine your computer has a knob for "release heat" and that setting it to zero on warm days did not reduce the amount of computation done.

Maybe heat is desirable in some contexts, but in most it is an undesirable waste product that takes too much space to eliminate. (Heat pipes, fans, and AC are what percent of data center costs?)

If you know how it works, you can make it better,faster,cheaper.

Without the 300k starting salaries. I imagine that is a stronger incentive.

It's the users of the LLMs that want to launder repsonsibility behind "computer said no".

No, productivity and wages climbed in lock step until the 70s. After that productivity kept climbing and wages went flat.

Would that mean that my poltical screeds (or spam) can't be deleted from your social media website for dogs?

That you would have continue to host and serve whatever content I publish? Even if your userbase only interacts with my content to hide it?