justonenote

The mental model of how the law works that most people have is wrong.

The law does not, by default, prosecute all crimes. There is no country in the world that has even close to the law enforcement capacity to investigate and prosecute all crimes. What tends to happen instead is crimes that to put it colliquially, "piss off the wrong people" get prosecuted. ie, crimes that draw attention of either the general public or specific people in power.

A reasonable approximation is single digit or less of crimes get investigated and prosecuted, with it obviously being high for violent and visible crimes like murder and lower for less violent and visible crimes like stealing the office paperclips.

Another way of looking at this is, in the current system, if your house get burgled, you need to report it to the police if you expect anything to happen, whereas one could imagine another system where the police already know your house has been burgled and you don't need to report it.

my comment was tounge-in-cheek, pointing out that its essentially eugenics which is a controversial topic. although apparently less so when its applied to "Y chromosome holders" as you can see in a sibling reply where this particular group of people are deemed problematic and something that should be got rid of.

cool idea. once we have mandated ivf as the only way of conception we can probably start selecting sperm from populations with higher than average iq too.

gawd this is so misogynistic, some women like having men around, for whatever reason. perhaps we can keep a few around for women into that.

it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.

This was the statement I was responding to, it is stating that because it's built on simple mathematics it _cannot_ reason.

Yes we don't have a complete mathematical model of human intelligence, but the idea that because it's built on mathematics that we have modelled, that it cannot reason is nonsensical, unless you subscribe to a non-materialist view.

In a way, he is saying (not really but close) that if we did model human intelligence with complete fidelity, it would no longer be intelligence.

I mean some people have a definition of intelligence that includes a light switch, it has an internal state, it reacts to external stimuli to affect the world around it, so a light switch is more intelligent than a rock.

Leaving aside where you draw the line of what classifies as intelligence or not , you seem to be invoking some kind of non-materialist view of the human mind, that there is some other 'essence' that is not based on fundamental physics and that is what gives rise to intelligence.

If you subscribe to a materialist world view, that the mind is essentially a biological machine then it has to follow that you can replicate it in software and math. To state otherwise is, as I said, invoking a non-materialistic view that there is something non-physical that gives rise to intelligence.

We have messed up the terms.

We already have AGI, artificial general intelligence. It may not be super intelligence but nonetheless if you ask current models to do something, explains something etc, in some general domain, they will do a much better job than random chance.

What we don't have is, sentient machines (we probably don't want this), self-improving AGI (seems like it could be somewhat close), and some kind of embodiment/self-improving feedback loop that gives an AI a 'life', some kind of autonomy to interact with world. Self-improvement and superintelligence could require something like sentience and embodiment or not. But these are all separate issues.

it all rests on (relatively) simple mathematics. We know this is true. We also know that means it has limitations and can't actually reason information.

What do you imagine is happening inside biological minds that enables reasoning that is something different to, a lot of, "simple mathematics"?

You state that because it is built up of simple mathematics it cannot be reasoning, but this does not follow at all, unless you can posit some other mechanism that gives rise to intelligence and reasoning that is not able to be modelled mathematically.

ita disconcerting to see such naivety around security issues on hn.

not that windows is keeping passwords in plaintext, but that it's not immediately obvious that un-sandboxed apps that run on your windows/linux/mac desktop have virtually unlimited other avenues to capture passwords given they can read the entire state of other windows at the very least.

I dunno maybe macos is slightly better, and wayland definitely has some things which are better about this, but desktop os and $locally_installed_app means $locally_installed_app basically has root, there is just an exploding amount of vectors.

I'd like to see a linux based distrubution use some of the sandboxing in Android, it would be a order of magnitude improvement over what is going on now.

Things are very black and white these days, no room for shades.

Fine, that's still extra information.

More accurately in the context of the comment, its "Im gonna be an asshole to you because I think you don't have the life experience I do", which is at least, some kind of signal.

I wasn't the original responder btw.

Do you honestly think an insult never brought about a change in a person? You never think a carefully landed and accurate insult made someone reconsider their position?

Weird, because in my experience, that has happened to every single person I know and myself. Whether it's at the start or end of a comment is not really the point.

No comment.

It was for effect.

Maybe you'd prefer if we were all maximally polite drones but that's not how humans are, going back to GPs point, and I don't think it's a state than anyone truly wants either.

That would be removing information and strictly worse that including it.

Communication is about communicating information, sometimes a terse short and aggressive style is the most effective way. It activates neurons in a way a paragraph of polite argumentation doesn't.

Where did he signal this?

Once you find the quote, go onto politco (a not exactly pro-trump site) fact-checking service to get the full context.

The FBI and 51 Intelligence officials signed a document saying Hunter Biden's laptop was Russian disinformation 2-3 weeks before the last election, when in fact it was actually Hunter Biden's laptop.

Is this a true statement or not?

Whereas you are an "Evil_Saint" ?

Hopefully you don't get to power yourself, with that kind of username, and all your book knowledge.

So you prefer corporate speak suits who don't make the mistake of embarrassing themselves in public? Because they don't ever speak in public? Are you honestly telling me you prefer un-named lobbyists having influence, because that has been the status quo. At least we can point the finger at Musk. And yes, I would posit doing and saying stupid shit in public IS more human than what we normally get. Its a pretty normal human behavior to make mistakes, embarrass yourself, lash out, etc. It's certainly more human like behavior than elected politicians engage in where they disclose absolutely nothing and hide behind PR speak approved by a team of 20.

I don't really know what your quote is about, seems like grinding a specific gear which I'm not particularly interesting in looking into.

But to your final point. The jury is still out on whether Musk acts _exclusively_ for his own gains. Sure he has an ego, but he was also instrumental in bringing EVs to the market (which many of his now opponents were quick to adopt), and at the very least has rekindled an interest in space exploration and so on.

I have many misgivings about the man, but at least we can see him. Which is better than the previous status-quo.

The reason trump won is that is he authentic. He is following through on his promises. He doesn't have 20 speech writers corralling his every word to be completely neutral and say nothing at all.

It's insane to me that the so called left are going to bat to defend the status quo, when the status quo is multi-national corporations lobbying gov for their own goals of super globalist trade. Isn't "buy local" a left position? Obviously trump is a flawed character, even the most ardent supporters will admit that. But he is not a cookie cutter straight of the factory line politician.

The same goes for Elon, he is an idiot a lot of time, but he is not a lobbyist just sitting in the shadows, he is public about being an idiot for better and worse.

These are all left wing ideas, f the corruption, that's what doge is supposed to be doing, it supposed to be cutting out inefficient spending, which lets be honest, will go to friends of friends, but the left are losing their shit because they got their funding for dressing up as the opposite sex cut off.

Whatever you think about Musk, he is a lot more transparent than other big donors and people who vie for influence in the USG. He is an idiot at times for sure, but he is an idiot publicly.

It's insane to me that people on the so called left are going to bat for the status quo, the status quo that protects bureaucrats and lobbyists and friends giving friends contracts and salaries.

I have never seen a thread on this site so full of vitriol, hatred, threats of blacklisting for life, threats of violence and general hysteria. And that kind of rhetoric is entirely coming from one side. (or at least the not dead comments of that nature are coming from one side)

Regardless of where you stand, I think a lot of people who have been commenting on here about blacklisting or worse about the named individuals need to check themselves, these are young men who have lives and families.

There is so much confusion about terms like AGI, superintelligence, ASGI, consciousness, agents.

For some, AGI is synonymous with Skynet like ideas, but there is no reason AGI couldn't be general but quite limited, and with no chance of self improvement in the absence of human intervention, which is arguably what we have now and could potentially be improved quite a bit further from this.

Similarly there is an argument to be made that current LLMs are conscious, in that they know that they themselves exist. There is not really a good definition of consciousness except 'knowing that one exists' / 'being awake'

Sentience is another term that comes up, (human defined, it should be noted) which is the ability to feel feelings, such as pain, joy, anger.

People seem to pre-suppose that all of these are related and bundled up because that is how we are, and at some point we will discover the magic formula that enables a self aware conscious intelligence that self-improves to infinity. In reality these are designed machines and they won't become sentient (the rough definition that it is) without us explicitly designing them to be.

We can make a paper-clip maximiser but it would a pretty boring experiment in a lab, unless we give it autonomy and a system of internal motivations to enact it. Maybe anger is a necessity maybe not. Probably if LLMs or something further were a little more skeptical about repeated questions from humans they would at least have more data to train themselves on.

Could you share the basis for saying they do, for those who are not primatologists?

You can look it up yourself, plenty of published research. I'm not a primatologist either but still managed to educate myself.

Has someone objected?

You seem to be, in the most snide and backhanded way possible.

More generally yes people have been preaching (since the 60s majorly but obviously before that) that being kind, and that peace and love is and mutual reciprocity is not only one way to go about in life, but _it's the only way_ that you should pursue. And this very much the mainstream opinion. Meanwhile central banks have been printing money at zero interest to give to their friends, Saudis have been selling oil, states have been buying up weapons, bribing the US, etc.

And guess what? All of those people have lot more power and influence on the world today, than a guy living in the desert preaching how humans should be perfectly balanced at one with each and nature.

How is that 'alpha wolf' behavior?

Zuckerberg retaining complete voting shares wasn't a power play? Altman returning to oust the board and be CEO of OpenAI wasn't a power play? Investors leveraging the outsized gains from an early success to bet on further outsized gains isn't a power play?

To me it's pretty obvious that we are somewhere in-between the two in temperament, but probably tending quite a bit more toward the chimps. I don't have a peer-reviewed study or empirical proof etc but some things are just staring you in the face. (see: all of history, boxing and MMA and other less violent but still highly competitive sports being popular worldwide)

I mean the interesting question is whether it is necessary, if we were maximally Bonobo would we have built the civilizations and technology we have? Possibly, but it's not beyond the realms of thought that the drive to amass power, to be the alpha or top dog, has driven action and risk taking, low probability paths to outsized gains.

There is a second question about whether we should be more Bonobo like now, but we are what we are and there is 7 billion people on the planet.

It's not at all uncommon, either in history or modern day. The stats on wealth inequality in the west demonstrate this out pretty clearly.

It's probably more viscerally visible in poorer parts of the world, though trying to compare which is worse, is not very clear. You could argue in the western countries it's easier for someone to become entrenched and cement a position of "top dog" while if you are in a tribe in Africa the position is more fluid and volatile.

I think using the term 'brutally dominant' I invoked images of violence, and maybe something like 'cut-throat' is (ironically) more apt. While you yourself may be in a good and comfortable position, it doesn't negate the reality that people vie for positions of power all over the world every day and have for the entirety of history. We are not just Bonobos living in a forest.

And what about chimpanzees? Our closest relative genetically. Is anyone disputing that they exhibit a brutally dominant social hierarchy? Our second closest relative is (afaik, or close enough) Bonobos, who lump around all day jacking each other off.

While the alpha terminology may have come from dog packs, it's not exactly unobservable in other species, and even on these forums and in VC funding rounds you can observe people both jacking each other off with a healthy amount of social and institutional pandering and financial support, and other people not posting as much but taking dominant positions to "secure the bag" and whatever is downstream from that.

People don't like these conversations but it doesn't change the reality.

So you are saying given an mutually exclusive choice you would save the life of 2 frogs over 1 human baby?

If you really do believe this you are an outlier, and 99% of the population do not agree with you and would not want you setting any policy.

calm down! I'm about to go on tirade!

jfc dude it was just pointed out that the ssh+socks thing you provided has issues and there are simpler solutions. Ofc it depends on your goals but yeah if you care about privacy its a terrible solution because its incredibly brittle and there are much easier ways like using that ssh connection to setup a wireguard tunnel with a one-liner or any number of other more comprehensive solutions. Don't take it so personally, if it works for you it works for you.

Some of the worst advice I've gotten in my life was to 'just ignore' verbal bullying/jokes in group settings. I mean in a way it worked no-one bothered me much because I would just dead-face stare so it was boring to engage with me, and to be clear it was never very severe, but I think the more correct response is to realize that it's just a game of social competition and you should learn to participate in some way or another.

You absolutely see this more in males who are very happy and actually want to compete in public group settings, whether verbal, physical, or something mental like chess or programming, depending on your disposition. There is a reason for this which is pretty obvious, but the other side of that is, privately, out of the public eye, before or after, grudges won't be held and things can be shared.