rain_iwakura

have you had actually negative interactions like that? they sting for years, even after hundreds of mild-to-positive ones. the brain focuses on risk-minimization and not reward-maximization.

lol

you posted an opinion piece by "Director of National Maritime Intelligence Integration Office (NMIO) and Commander, Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI)" (i.e. State Department mouthpiece) and the other source is from 2022, with airport still operating, (no evidence that it belongs to china), directly refuting your own point.

America certainly isn't innocent either when it comes to IP theft, but China takes that on yet another level

there you go with your bias. https://reason.com/2024/06/02/the-mirage-of-chinas-i-p-theft...

America itself was built on IP theft by the way. https://apnews.com/general-news-b40414d22f2248428ce11ff36b88...

Nope. They are just as vile loan sharks as the IMF, some say they go even further [2].

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246822762...

Chinese have actually been investing into infrastructure and helping build Africa out. What are you smoking? Do you need a reminder who ran Transatlantic Slave Trade and what IMF represents? There are no good guys in the lending world. Are you assigning a moral value to loans and repayments now? If someone gives you money they expect interest. Doesn't matter if they're Chinese or American.

P.S. judging from your other comments, you're European, not American, and so at this point of Trump presidency (and listening to Carney's speech), you should realize that "The West" isn't about moral hegemony. This isn't America good, China bad. It's a calculus of power. Trump just laid that bare by showing that might makes right, which is why he's renegotiating our already dominant position, and showing how this hegemony and loan structure was built. The liberal veneer was there as a pretty varnish. The fact that you're still out here pretending like we're the good guys is strange to me, unless you're one of those NAFO guys that are kind of going extinct because US is screwing itself over by hurting its allies.

It's good economic policy based on what? Did you run a counterfactual already? Comparing the US to other countries is meaningless, it's not the same set of init conditions and variables.

Do you realize that those taxes go to fund public services and help people stay afloat, which I don't need a study to show you, creates far more customers for all these tax evaders in the first place? Go back 50 years to see what this country used to be and how much shit it got done and compare it to today. There are measures of productivity engineered in math, and then there is common sense: majority of existing infrastructure was built decades ago and now it costs billions in overrun projects to build a single station in NYC.

The current system works just fine in terms of punishingly taxing everyone on this website and the poor, that's why it feels like I'm contributing half of my salary to the federal government. What it doesn't do is take its share from extremely wealthy, who in turn DO NOT SERVE the economy because they're effectively stateless agents, who can put their money into Seychelles or whatever. Nobody would bat an eye if those billionaires would contribute the billions to the economy. Instead you get people crying about how "the government is inefficient, it gets nothing done, I'd rather the titan spend it as they see fit." But if this ship called United States floods they will be the first to abandon it, just like a famous critter.

I'm sorry but posts like this are the exact definition of bootlicking.

this was basically what I was asking. would this scheme actually make more money for the musicians? thanks for a reply.

I think they should basically turn it into Twitch, where I can "sub" to an artist and maybe get their tracks earlier than others or some other additional content that costs artist $0 to produce for the most part (podcast, making of, e.g. a la Patreon). In addition, if you add "donate" button you'd see a lot of artists being showered with cash. It's a shame that these hacks (streamers) become multimillionaires while real talents make pennies off actual art.

how would this work if i listen to 1000 bands? the split would be miniscule.

that failure is much more a leadership issue than a talent issue. Google was founded by PhD students and it shows. (I am one.) It's like a giant lab where things get prototyped and innovations are pushed, but where product ends up sidelined by bloated admin (how many levels are there and why does it feel like an MMORPG i.e World of Warcraft) and lack of clear capitalist vision (I'm actually anti-capitalist but even I can admit to this LOL). Honestly, it sounds exactly like a university. I used to think Google was slated to be the king of AI back when I starting out because they had ALL the talent (even OpenAI is its offshoot if you consider early employees and Ilya himself). I feel like it was so lateral that it was a loose federation of small tribes of smart people that live under the same banner, but not a tight organization where each team had its purpose within a giant mechanism. But as the saying goes too many cooks spoil the broth.

Apple is WAY different internally. For all its dreariness and corpo atmosphere (not allowed to talk to each other, teams siloed and laser focused on shipping a specific product) they have much clearer vision of what will sell and what not, usual company missteps (AR glasses) notwithstanding.

I think you misread what I said. I said "could help us" which just implies it's a distant possibility. I am aware that it's an extremely low probability event, but not an impossible one, for example in 200 years they might find a universal beta coronavirus vaccine based on a general stem and not on a variant specific spike.

More information in this case is better outcomes regardless. We can't just accept the current state of affairs and do nothing if there are still avenues of improvement that don't involve pretending like COVID is a mild disease or forcing quarantines whenever some worse variants shows up.

Whether it will jump back from deer or dogs (two animals aside from minks who i remember testing positive for sars-cov-2) back to humans is a huge if (hasn't happened so far as far as I remember, or if it did, it couldn't have been more than ballpark ~5 cases), but I don't disagree that it might happen once more, since I'm not a lab leak guy.

i think applying software engineering logic to diseases is fallacious. anyway, the reason you can say that is because there is basically no one left who doesn't have some sort of immunity against the virus. no immunologically naive people means better outcomes.

my point was not to make it disappear, but to develop better targets for antivirals, which effectively make it end by just shortening the disease course to 1-2 days. Right now, the rebounds that happen are mostly due to virus reservoirs within the body that aren't completely eradicated by 5 day course. More effective targeting within the body could be key. Either way, saying "nothing can be done" and just throwing in the towel when valuable info could be obtained is not the way to go. Personally, I have a general interest in the virus (though I'd never work as a virologist due to my germaphobia) so I think it's worth investigating for its own sake.

I'm honestly of the opinion that all of the ethical questions that arose during this search are fairly minuscule compared to the potential findings that could help us end this never-ending outbreak altogether. (At least by developing better targets for drugs like Paxlovid, if their hypothesis about GI tract replication turns out to be correct.)

Of them all the potential to reveal that the patient X is hiding their HIV status is probably the biggest tragedy that can happen, since it will compromise their social and work standing due to stigma. If, however, this person does NOT know they have HIV or something similarly immunocompromising, it's in fact their moral prerogative to find this person and inform them of their disease, instead of beating around the bush trying to go easy on their feelings instead of potentially saving their life.

Either way, at some point it becomes a question of common-good vs individual good and these options aren't so bad to even have this debate.

Have there been any studies that show that people treated with antibiotics against F. Nucleatum showed improved outcomes in any of comorbid diseases? I'm not saying it would actually improve anything but would be interesting to see. I assume there isn't enough momentum to run a study like that.

damn we got a Kwisatz Haderach over here.

sure man, woke mind virus has ravaged my brain lol.

The fact that the poster focuses on the term ("leftism") rather than on the substance is itself a red flag imo. It puts the discussion on a weird tripolar spectrum: you're either leftist, centrist, or rightwing (of which the poster is likely to posit themselves as a center, to avoid being called biased). I don't think it's terribly productive, and unless the article was calling for Bolshevik Revolution, I don't mind a certain bias. The fallacy here is that it's possible to come in with objective lens--it isn't.

"Heartwarming: The Worst People You Know Are All Fighting"

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2535073-worst-person-you-kno...

i'm not sure if know this but a concussion increases a risk of another concussion. your brain loses ability to balance the body movements and it's a death spiral that a lot of people can't get out of. unless you mean someone who plays sports known for the risk.

I honestly am not sure what you were arguing for in the first place. I agree that I was being rude to an extent, but your previous comment didn't lend itself to most charitable interpretation as it wasn't clear to me what in mine practically got you to respond refuting my points?

My argument is why are these different mediums deserving of different moral judgments? What makes reading, doing math, playing video games, or watching tv for long periods of time more or less reprehensible? These all serve one purpose: activities meant to entertain (maybe not math). Why does the medium the entertainment is delivered through make it any better or worse?

I'm not making moral judgment on the medium itself. I love the medium, I'm a cinephile to be honest. I'm saying any entertainment that becomes gamified like this (be it books or shows), and having more and more control over you by the way of gathering data while you use it, is worse than the same type of standalone entertainment that has less influence. I don't think you will argue with me that a passive TV cannot influence you as much as a system that actually keeps track of your activities.

Basically, any medium that outstays its welcome in your life by underhanded tactics is bad in my opinion. If you've read The Diamond Age then you remember the "Illustrated Guide..." book which is basically adaptive AI that weaves in your life into its storytelling. Imagine an e-reader with GPT-6 embedded that does just that but instead of teaching you, it just keeps creating a more and more compelling story full of ads or something. I'd be equally opposed to that (and the reading of it). It's not the medium for me it's the vehicle of delivery becoming bigger than the delivery itself. The horse becomes the cart if you will. So a period of seeming freedom followed by this winter isn't good for the industry basically.

Now I'm not claiming Netflix is responsible for Marvel/Disney, those are separate beasts and processes. But I do argue that they come from the same tendency and desire that fuels other companies I mentioned prior: FB, Twitter, YouTube etc.

In terms of how Netflix itself is responsible, my argument is that its underhanded tactics in 'disrupting' the industry (lowering threshold of entrance, running at a loss for a time) just forced other players in the same local minimum and now everyone stayed in this way. And to make it even clearer I think my issue is that Netflix ushered an era of greater centralization and homogeneity, where practices throughout the industry became even narrower, and things like cancellations mid-season even more a norm. Now I'm not sure if it's necessarily different from the past (probably not) but knowingly creating a bubble and then resultant layoffs and losses of jobs are no different than a drug dealer who got you pure stuff first few times and then sells you diluted dope once you're hooked.

As I said I don't think anything fundamentally has changed in terms of how money men operate, what I don't like is how we keep giving them tools to become more and more powerful which is what I was railing against throughout this thread. Yes, we depend on their funding but it doesn't mean we have to help them secure their empires to a 1984 extent. Because at the rates it's going it will happen. Altman is a person who (given his recent actions, like military contracts) will lead us down that way. The employee revolt showed that these engineers only care for their bottom line.

Anyway, apologies for misinterpreting your point, but I do think you also didn't necessarily get mine. Since we are not in disagreement we can keep the argument but in more civil terms.

No one is saying you don't have agency as an individual. This is an aggregate statement. In any A/B test you're interested in proportion of people converted who displayed increase in desired behavior. What you can't do is to go on an extrapolate this to any individual person, because that's now how statistics work or are designed.

You're taking an rightwing/libertarian approach (no judgement) where everyone has complete free will to do anything they want and make fully informed decisions. Rational actor and all that. Reality is quite different, and if you don't believe me you can peruse a ton of work in behavioral economics that show it.

Hell, I don't even need to go far to conjure an example: gambling addicts.

I'm not sure if you're joking about binge-ing but you have to be delusional to think that someone taping their favorite show on their own or waiting for it until it ends is nearly the same as dropping all episodes at the same time on principle for every show and only offering that as an option for a long time. building your whole UI around it and encouraging this behavior? The point about others jumping on the bandwagon can only happen if Netflix broke down the barrier and over-invested (by going into deep red) to justify accessibility, knowing full well they won't be able to keep up the steam indefinitely. I know you're trying to be smart here, and failing, but are books built to be binged? Do they know when your attention is dipping? Do books have such UI to do this? You can make same inane argument about doing math for 8 hours a day or something.

Also the scale at which Netflix was throwing money around was unprecedented, so much so that other tv shows and writers were making fun of it. That's like saying periods of good investment client are equivalent to a dot com crash or a housing bubble.

I said YouTube isn't a net negative. Even then you have to think globally, what about children who grew up consuming AI generated abomination animations made with 0 oversight of even its greedy creators?

Netflix was the cause for current slate of tax writeoff cancellations (no Netflix no overinvestment by Warner etc and no clumsy Zaslav cleanup), terrible shows being greenlit, homogeneity of camerawork, casting, identity-politics pandering that nobody asked for, oversaturation of the market with streaming services that is almost as bad as cable etc. It's basically a cancer overgrowth, good short-term and terrible long-term. Binge-tv model is also not a good thing, in terms of how much time it takes up, how little it brings in terms of pleasure and validates our growing impatience. I could go on and on. Does anyone even remember Mank or The Killer? Imagine Poor Things being Netflix-only release. Nobody would even say a single peep about it outside of niche film twitter accounts.

Generally speaking, if you've read "Seeing Like a State", then you can apply the same logic to companies and the entire industries, or really any aspirations of "man". We crave control and fear uncertainty, so we make environments far more deterministic, which brings more short-term profit but ruins the environment (be it nature or film itself). Look at Disney, Iger created the superhero movie boom (by making it super deterministic and boring: every movie is part of a giant puzzle so that each piece brings money) but in the process killed Star vehicles, killed experimentation (by directors, actors), and now Scorsese and Coppola need to throw around their weight to reverse the course. Sure, A24 exists, but before this all movies were A24 movies essentially. Now a major star being in a horror movie is an "Event". (Who is even a star anymore? DiCaprio, Cruise? These people were around since 80s. You think Chris Evans will have the same longevity?) Yeah, there were similar periods of dominance (80s action movies) but they weren't so precisely fine-tuned and featured greater directorial freedom and less emphasis on being non-offensive.

I guarantee you none of you will quote Avengers (Ultron onwards) in next 20 years. People still quote Terminator 2 or Predator or Lethal Weapon, despite them also being brainless flicks (some not so brainless actually). Look at Dr Strange 2, they forced Raimi to stop being Raimi basically (the first movie has some good moments), and made him fall in line with the "agenda", because the plan™ is too important to compromise on. In reality the plan™ is the money perputuum mobile lol. Sure, these people were always greedy, but stochasticity of the system allowed for good stuff to pass through their Eyes of Sauron lmao.

Tbh I don't even know why I'm responding a "throwaway" account.

The issue is that without loud declaration like this money men will just soldier on with implementing shittier future.

It's always do something first and then ask for forgiveness. But at the point you ask for it it's too late and too many eggs were broken. And somehow you're richer at the end of it all and thus, protected from any consequences. While everyone else is, forgive my French, fucked.

Has Facebook been a net positive so far? Has twitter? You may make case for you YouTube, but what about Netflix?

It's only been good to us (engineers) and our investor masters, but not for the 90% of the rest, which may I remind you is the distribution that created us in the first place. Sorry for being dramatic, but I do seriously think these things need to be reigned in, and especially people like Altman who while believing themselves to be good-willed (and I have no doubts that he is better man than Musk for example) end up being Robert Moseses' of our generation. That is someone with good intentions who ends up making things worse overall.

At the point you're thinking AI is superior at generating Ghibli-like movies it essentially is as powerful as any human (understands the world and our preferences for storytelling), that is smarter than all of us by some margin. (I'm not talking about ASI yet.) Which by the way renders the whole argument (your point included) meaningless because you shouldn't even be giving it commands at that point. It should do have freedom to make its own decisions.

I think the funny result of our ML work is that we essentially bringing the value of being online down and will eventually force people to interact IRL as costs of verifying these generations becomes too high. That is we are going back to pre-Internet era interactions.

I agree with the author, but I also don't see lower usage of all this already meaningless human-produced content as inherently bad.

The hope is dim, but I do wish being online would be restricted to strictly work-related purposes and we'd be forced back to human-to-human interactions as primary modus operandi. We'd see the depression and polarization rates go down significantly. These online community feedback loops are too toxic and bring little to the table.

If nothing online can be trusted then only offline can be the way to go, up until you people (the ones screaming Luddites at everyone 'normal' here) will decide that we need start augmenting our bodies to make better future, or in other words make profit to line your pockets.

I work in ML btw (for a loooong time).

I've heard the same shit about Claude 2.0 and GPT-4 and now that the hype has died down we can be impressed without acting like it's Skynet. So please stop fueling pointless hype.

We are not in VC's office, we are amongst ourselves for God's sake.

Yeah this pretty much sums it up: https://medium.com/the-spike/evolution-doesnt-give-a-damn-wh...

Also, Pinker isn't a scientist of any sort, he's an accredited and institutionalized evangelist. You guys wouldn't take opinions of someone going to conferences and trying to convert you to use Go lang instead of something else as seriously as those of Guido Rossum would you?

His whole thesis requires an idea of linear progress which is highly contested, and the metrics of happiness he uses also can be easily "Goodhart's Law"ed by him to show whatever he thinks is happening.

I'm not even getting to his Epstein stuff, which some might cry foul about, but I grew up around regular people and not in Silicon Valley, so a liar and a cheat in one field is probably a liar and a cheat in another to me, sorry.

The bikeshed color argument never ceases to be relevant. Would you say "large language model multimodal"? I doubt it.

same here, I remember reading a random reply on here about it and then getting Claritin-D or whatever at a CVS near me when I had a cold and then covid. Both times I experienced huge relief.

the biggest leverage is the billions in compute that Microsoft holds over OpenAI. Without this compute they can't run most of the experiments to get number five before others, who are very close, especially Anthropic.