joe_the_user

I'd say that AIs occasionally "going crazy" and calling for death to human is evidence that these things might "mis-align" on occasion. And I say that knowing that most of these events are just these thing parroting bad sci-fi plots (or posts by people worried about alignment). That's true but everything they do is "just parroting" right?

I think you're making a false dictomy. The these models can be actually dangerous - in reality and the people in charge of their development can believe this is true (on various levels) but still not take it super seriously and instead mostly use the fact as marketing rather than being super cautious once they see the danger in action. This is behavior that's characteristic of extreme arrogance, which we know is rife in these circles.

Well, predictions that I'll go to work and things will be as usual aren't as uncertain as Bitcoin pricing or as certain as planetary motion.

However, the aim of math in these situations is often to give explanations for intuitive impressions like "predicting the future is hard". The concept of NP-completeness gives one (very partial) explanation why certain computing problems are "hard", for example. So that theory doesn't "boil down to saying programming is hard". Unfortunately, I don't think the text really gives strong explanation in this case.

I remember in 2017, it was said that "regular" machine learning techniques were better for time series than neural networks. It seems like this blog post is indirectly references that belief and gives. It seems like the idea is simpler ML can be tuned to a given time series whereas neural network require lots of training.

Also, one method works better than another is more meaningful than "predicting the future is hard".

I think we're saying roughly the same thing. It's natural starting with a statistical model to say it generates data (as the article sometimes does) but in reality, you often/generated have data generated by a possibly deterministic and completely different process but satisfying (if you're lucky) the statistical conditions. Even in testing random/stochastic models, you would usually use pseudo-random generators - which are deterministic.

The question "what probability distribution generated this" is very hard to answer if you're only getting short window before the distribution changes. A lot of distributions could generate relatively "short" set dispersed data points and deciding which distribution is "really" creating the points might not even be meaningful. A distribution is a mathematical device, not something with a physical existence.

Unfortunately, the votes for a regime of permanent bailouts were already in when Ben Barnacke made his famous speech proposing helicopters over cities if deflation reached a crisis level (though the Internet says Milton Friedman thought of this first). Some later observed "the helicopters only seem to go to Wall Street", which isn't surprising.

I don't think you can say the Turing test has been passed in a computer versus determined humans setting. IE humans making a strategy effort to sort humans versus computers as well as humans motivated to distinguish themselves as humans, IE, people quiz the person or machine about "common sense, reasoning, etc." and people make an effort to exhibit that reasoning. I'd concede that creating such a competition would be challenging.

I find references to LLMs fooling humans in "casual conversations" [1] but that's not how I think the original Turing test was conceived - or at least that's not all versions that existed.

At the same time, before even LLMs appeared, the exact meaning of the test was under intense debate. The "Loebner Prize" [2] being awarded to fairly simple chatbots made serious computer scientists very embarrassed.

[1] https://neurosciencenews.com/ai-passes-turing-test-30733/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loebner_Prize

People enjoy saying "AI can replace middle management" as a comeuppance but it's not what people think. In many ways, AI is primarily serving as middle management, yes. But what happens is that instead of one manager engaging in petty surveillance, harassment and browbeating to increase work intensity, you have ten clones of the manager doing the same thing. That's not the "woo hoo, automated middle management!" you were looking for.

Indeed,

Thinking about, if I had a lab, I'd be trying to get training data from a combination of the open web, piracy and all of my revivals. I wonder how labs are doing that.

Now to be "that asshole" why unhoused instead of homeless?

@dang, flagging. HN standards are basic civility, starting a comment with "I'll be an asshole" is clearly creating a pretext for violating HN standards.

I mean, "unhoused" is considered a more polite term among the people I work with, it just basic politeness, there is no other distinction I know about. I don't feel a need to respond to the rest of your argument when you start things that way, though I'll say they put a lie to your initial congratulations and are only tangentially related to the topic at hand ("You mentioned the unhoused there, well let me tell you about the unhoused...")

I would say "get (professional) help!" is advice that always sounds good and can be good for X percent of people and not so good for the rest.

I am part of project that offers food and resources to unhoused people outside the usual state and regulated private agencies and without conditions. So by that fact I see many people who the mental health system fails to help for one reason or another. I can't tell you what percentage of people that is but I can tell you it's more than zero percent. I have no advice about what works but I can't see what's wrong with creating a structure that could help you.

This thread is filled with strong arguments that ambulence operators do make money with medicare.

But even more, it's completely false that the reason an ongoing, working business charges a huge price to some people is that some other people are taking money from them. A business charge people huge prices when it can. Businesses make as much money as they can.

It is true that what health care providers charge individuals tends to be their "opening offer" to insurance companies so they do make this exact argument "we gotta make all our profits on you 'cause everyone else is denying us" but that doesn't make such arguments any more reasonable.

Health care in general has been solved by state sponsored medicine in most industrialized nations. And when it isn't solved by directly state sponsored medicine, it's solved by formally and informally regulated monopolies. In fact, US health care in the 1960s was made reasonable by the Blue Shield regulated monopoly.

The thing about unfettered private health is that it finds "profit centers" and pumps them ruthlessly. But the problem when scheme/scam gets reigned in (say out-of-plan doctors), another appears (out-of-plan ambulances) and there's no end to the situation. Only actual state sponsored health care can end this.

Sure, in a given public discussion, lots of people saying that show up. But substantial portion of those are shills, not necessarily people to say but who benefit from the scam. And some people who are paid, public relations people acting on the downlow, etc.

One thing people out here periodically is how causation is hard to find. Someone who is dying may be not inclined to do anything 'cause they feel lousy all the time.

Even AI companies talk about the situation as a bubble. But the idea is this is akin to the railroad bubble or the Internet bubble. Basically, you the "frothy" development of a new technology in which you will certainly many losers but also a few massive winners. Moreover, "how do you monetize it" is not as much of a question as in dot com era.

Not that things are guaranteed. But the argument that a smart speculative investor should be in AI somewhere seems convincing. It's certainly "overheated" the economy but a correction based on overheating doesn't discredit things, it just shakes thing up allows the highest quality plays to double down however many months later.

One that occurs to me is that Roko's Basilisk makes about as much sense as the "peasant rail gun" of old Dungeons And Dragons [1]. Basically, the idea of "reality as simulation" allows you pick between different laws of how reality behaves. The "simulation" acts like reality with exceptions provided by a future AI which the "thinkers" imagine will simultaneously be "inscrutable to humans" and behave like the most petty human imaginable. I mean, if the AI's motivations are truly out of our understanding, perhaps it would self-hating and torture everyone who cause it to come into existence instead (that been the plot of a few movies and books too I think).

This doesn't take from the point that putting not fully controlled things in charge of chunks of reality isn't a good idea. But I think it shows that the people who worried earlier weren't very clear thinkers on the subject and so their failure isn't particularly surprising.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/17xy69k/what_exactly_i...

I suspect that another thing that's expensive, besides analog controls, is creating and testing a new, better interface for driving ICE cars using digital controls. So the only thing old our old-tech car companies do is add ad-hoc extensions of the usual car controls. And it is economical to package all these in a touch screen along with all the standard controls they can get away with.

The study is two months old (March 13, 2026).

Edit: Also, it's about writing not coding and it's point isn't that time isn't saved but even with time saved at the task, you don't get a broad decrease in total worked time for many/most workers.

Most true small businesses can't exist in markets with a lot of competition. Highly competitive markets have a lot of fluctuation and businesses with little capital fold when there's a downturn.

In fact, most markets naturally go from high competition to monopoly or oligopoly. You can see this in chips, cars, airplanes, steel, ecommerce(Amazon) and beyond. Indeed, many oligopoly situations only fail to be monopolies through either antitrust activity or through nation-states supporting their competitors (chips).

Agriculture in particular tends to be geographically dispersed so it's harder to have absolute monopolies. But some "harking back" claim of "if we only had small business, all the predatory stuff wouldn't happen" really fails to understand the dynamics of markets. Scale in agricultural production is what allows the low prices you get in stores - But $10 cage-free organic eggs are available at my local coop for those who love small businesses (though I prefer the $2 cage free eggs at nearby Grocery Outlet).

The robot has a two pronged gripper. I wonder what teleoperating that to do complex tasks would be like.

I think the first to use such home robots will have is people who can do the tasks but simply don't want to be bothered.

The aged, infirm and disabled are going to need real people for company and to deal with any crises the infirm might have. And since the real people will be there and paid for anyway, the state is unlikely to pay for robots as a quality of life improvement (they'd pay for them if they removed the caregiver but that complete removal will science fiction for a while).

As an example, I work taking care of a partly paralyzed man. He's tried an exoskeleton, believes it would help him a lot but can't afford the many thousands of dollars it would cost. The state pays for 18-hours/day care which is tens of thousands of dollars a month but they have to pay that.

That's a bit like asking "what did most books do?"

The whole point of forums was that it's difficult to make a generalization about them and moreover, what "most" forums did/do doesn't matter. What a particular forum might do in a particular context is what mattered.

The difference between forum and a subreddit or discord isn't ultimately the features, it's localism. A forum can make it's own rules whereas Reddit ultimately makes the rules for a subreddit.

Yahoo bought Viaweb from Paul Graham and rewrote the Lisp application in C++ and Perl. Reports are the results were strictly inferior but it achieved the goal of not having to rely on Lisp programmers.

Part of Yahoo's business is/was hiring programmers reasonably cheaply and controlling them reasonably easily - to allow Yahoo itself to sell parts or all of itself.

So things aren't quite a simple as "this doesn't serve the product", sometimes the engineers (and their replaceability) are part of the product.

Citations? Wikipedia is full of them

I think there are problems with modern longevity science. The OP's "A fundamental challenge that longevity gurus face is that what’s true is often boring, and what’s interesting often isn’t true" is plausible.

But it also seems like there's a tendency for debunkers to be too categorical. It should be kept in mind that anyone aged around 110 would have gone through a variety of age and other record systems. Moreover, it's quite possible exercise and special diet as such really really aren't that useful.

I think the wikipedia page on Jeanne Calment actually does a good job of debunking "revisionist" doubting of the record.

After consulting several experts, The Washington Post wrote that "statistically improbable is not the same thing as statistically impossible", that Novoselov and Zak's claims have been dismissed by the overwhelming majority of experts, and that those claims are "lacking, if not outright deficient". (the entire section is worth reading) [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Calment#Controversy_reg...

I think it correct to refer to the models as LLMs. The references I can find for the techniques used seem to boil down to transformers + optimizations to make transformer-index larger/faster + chains-of-thought-optimization/the ability to add real time and other data to the context window.

See: https://kenhuangus.substack.com/p/frontier-ai-models-technic...