salmonfamine

Speak for yourself. Copilot took my job and my wife

Despite this success, evidence about non-experts’ ability to distinguish AI-generated poetry has been mixed. Non-experts in poetry may use different cues, and be less familiar with the structural requirements of rhyme and meter, than experts in poetry or poetry generation. Gunser and colleagues14 and Rahmeh15 find that human-written poems are evaluated more positively than AI-generated poems. Köbis and Mossink16 finds that when a human chooses the best AI-generated poem (“human-in-the-loop”) participants cannot distinguish AI-generated poems from human-written poems, but when an AI-generated poem is chosen at random (“human-out-of-the-loop”), participants are able to distinguish AI-generated from human-written poems.

This is a huge difference. Writing is a two-step process: idea generation, and selection. The first part is similar to what a randomized algorithm or an LLM might do, in smaller chunks (and indeed, the history of aleatoric processes in creative endeavors is long -- see Oulipo for one example in literature.)

The second step -- selection -- is the heart of creativity. It's about taste. Knowing what is and isn't "good."

When you consider the creative processes of Dada, Duchamp, Brian Eno -- I think it becomes clear that this automation of creative generation is a continuation of existing trends rather than a sudden disruption.

If an LLM were able to, on its own, generate and select poems, independently developing a new style of poetry that resonated with readers -- that would be something else entirely.

All of this AGI/singularity stuff is quite literally science fiction, so it can be whatever OP wants it to be.

How is this sea-lioning? The evidence being requested is highly pertinent to the discussion.

What does it feel like to be a real-life mad scientist?

Can't fathom why this doesn't have more attention. Really cool project.

Also, big fan of the landing page design. Great stuff.

A complete failure to understand what and who Africa is.

Care to break it down for us?

What happens when I break the device?

Your friend and their memories are attached to the physical device. If you lose or damage your friend there is no recovery plan.

Surely this is some kind of performance art.

So actual anarcho-tyranny?

It's okay to just say, "designer."

I've met some people who have that outlook, and almost all of them have come from competitive high schools on the coasts, with successful parents who put a lot of expectations on them to achieve from a young age.

If your goal is to have some perfect career of "Perfect SAT -> Ivy+ -> Consulting/Finance/FAANG -> Senior Management -> C-Suite" then you're doomed to rumination and regret unless you end up falling into the smallest fraction of a fraction of perfectionist achievement, and I highly doubt even the survivors of that funnel are anything close to "happy."

As someone who grew up in a rural oil town and didn't go to high school, making ~200k at my B-tier tech company feels like winning the lottery several times over. Plus, I have time to pursue my actual goals (making art, building genuine relationships, hiking.) Any Ivy+ grad who ended up in my shoes would probably feel like a failure, and yet I'm in the top 1-2 percent of earners in my age group in the country and have never wanted for anything.

Also, just as an aside -- I know someone who has published some very ground-breaking research in genomics, runs their own lab at a young age, PhD from an Ivy+ program etc, and they actually did get a D in intro biology their Freshman year (at a B-tier school nonetheless.)

But they still ultimately out-performed entire cohorts of neurotic strivers because they were much more passionate, obsessive, and creative. Although their competition was very hard-working and ambitious, they ultimately didn't care about the actual research as much as they cared about their own careers. In the end, nothing beats passion and obsession.

And apparently they took place on subsequent April Fools Days -- 77' and 78'. Must have been a golden era for pranking.

A melancholic and romantic but ultimately useless perspective.

It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know. And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.

There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.

But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.

You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.

Not necessarily, you could just tax based on weight thresholds, established in legislation, in the same way you could ban vehicles based on the same factors.

"fixing the problem" would mean banning these vehicles, which is politically impossible.

I think the most practical solution will be to take all of the externalized costs of these vehicles, and charge them to their owners. I would argue that this is, in fact, less bureaucratic than creating more regulation.

Dark Forest theory of the internet in practice.

I have a modest proposal to end all time-zones forever: the fractalizing time grid.

Currently, partly due to a historical legacy of railroads, time-zones are longitudinal. That is, they help standardize time (and daylight hours) across east-west distances.

However, given that the number of daylight hours is even more starkly affected by north-south latitudinal differences, we should also implement time-zones in that direction. After all, what does "12:15am" really mean if its dark in London and sunny in Reykjavik?

So, in order to standardize daylight hours, we could implement north-south time-zones as well, producing time-offsets for each lat/long cell on the globe. We could standardize the number of daylight hours in a given 24-hour period (using the equator as reference) and standardize each cell to have the same number of daylight hours.

In order to do so, we would simply have to redefine what a "second" is (or really, all time measurements.) So, the further north you go during the summer, the shorter a "second" becomes (so as to preserve the same number of "seconds" per time-cell) whereas in the winter you would have the opposite effect. Therefore this also has the interesting consequence of changing the duration of all time measurements seasonally, with a greater delta the further away from the equator you are (a "second" would always have the same duration at the equator.) So the further away you are from the equator, the quicker the duration of time changes with respect to equatorial time as time passes seasonally. Still with me?

Good, because we can do even better! Why even have time cells? Time-zones were implemented as lines on a map because that was the technology that was available at the time. But now that we have the internet, we can instead standardize an algorithm that could be implemented into all RTC chips and run on reference servers a la atomic clocks. So instead of "crossing over" into the next time cell, all of your time measurements would be sped-up or slowed-down proportionally to your GPS-measured latitude (standardized to some number of significant digits.)

So all analog clocks would immediately be rendered useless -- unless you are exactly on the equator -- and we would live in a world where you could speed up time by running north, but only in the summer.

If you've made it this far without throwing your laptop/phone out of the nearest window in rage, thank you for your patience (and welcome to the time grid!)

Argument is invalid; r > g.

You're right that emissions-per-capita in Western countries are unsustainable, and that consumer demand is out of step with the true cost of fuel, meat, etc.

But how exactly would any country succeed in deliberately destroying their own economy? They would face revolts, civil unrest, and the economic vacuum left behind would simply open the door for any country that doesn't play along to gain a monopoly on forbidden economic growth, and potentially establish their own global hegemony.

No economic system has ever had "fair" or equal distributions of wealth, and no system will ever have a fair distribution of carbon emissions either.

Having kids was, effectively, not really a decision until the mid-20th century.

Would you say that all of your ancestors, prior to your parents, were utterly irresponsible?

You're drawing connections, but you're not making concrete arguments.

Perhaps China and the West will both face population collapse. The argument still stands that Western values (and Chinese values) will be lost.

But humanity won't just vanish in a puff of smoke. It just means that societies that do not share "our" values will live on.

Do you believe in human rights? Feminism? Racial equality? Well too bad, because, at the current going rate, very few people in the 22nd century will.

Haha, yeah it does fall apart on the individual level. I don't think I would convince my girlfriend to have kids by talking dirty with population statistics ;)

And for the record I'm just another childless, un-married late-twenties tech guy that wants to travel and hang out with my friends on the weekend. So I'm definitely part of the "problem" not the solution.

I just mean to say -- we've inherited a really rich intellectual tradition that has borrowed from thinkers around the world, and really we are torchbearers for that way of life. It's not a guarantee that progress will march forever onward. So we need to think about how to keep our societies going in a way that still produces families.

Maybe that means the government steps in and says that every workplace has to have a day care center. It seemed to work for Patagonia. Maybe it means we start some crazy scheme where companies hire married couples as a package deal. Maybe it means we have to rebuild our cities to have denser neighborhoods with lots of families clustered together. Maybe we all have to start living in hippie communes. I have no idea.

I don't want society to go backwards, but I don't want our values to die out either. So it's clear that we need radical change.

1. The comment you're replying to explicitly acknowledges this fact in an aside.

2. It is not full of "coded bigotry." These are simple fact that almost everyone agrees on. India has explicitly made it a goal to reduce their fertility rate over the past few decades because of the problems of overpopulation. China's economy absolutely benefits from a high population. And yet I doubt you would characterize their humans rights record as stellar. It does not mean that Indians or Chinese people are in any way inferior to Westerners. And I highly doubt that the OP would agree with that either.

3. Even if it was, that isn't a critique of the comment's argument. It just means you find it distasteful. So what?

Yes, exactly. This is what I'm trying to get at with "market failure" -- the total economic cost of doing all of that is drastically higher than even the cost of just childcare.

In the past, many of those duties would be distributed throughout a community. And on isolated farms, parents would intentionally have big families so that the eldest could help raise the younger kids.

Doing it all with two people is a huge burden. Doing it with just one is a heroic act. Throwing in the extra burdens and expectations of the upper-middle class professional world -- homework help, extracurriculars, etc -- makes it virtually impossible.

So it makes sense that only the 500k+ income crowd is having big families. That's probably a good approximation of the income required to afford the total cost of replacing all of the childcare benefits of an informal community with paid labor.

Do you mean First Nations Canadians or people born in Canada?

Not trying to PC-police you, just sounds like there might be some confusion here. It wouldn't surprise me if the First Nations people of Canada have a much higher birthrate than the rest of Canada, for many reasons.

A lot of liberal (in the classical, broad sense) young folks simply shrug their shoulders at this fact -- not everyone wants kids, so what?

I think it's worth considering, if you're one of these people, that without children being born to liberal parents, the "extremists" of the world -- fundamentalist muslims, christians, and so on -- will inherit the earth. Of course some of their children will grow up to be liberals, but that number will inevitably decrease as the total number of liberals does as well.

If you believe that equality, feminism, human rights, and so on would suffer in that world, then I think you should consider if not having kids is really a big deal after all.

There is no highly-developed country with replacement-level fertility. And, in fact, the only places left with fertility rates that are above replacement (and not rapidly dropping) are sub-saharan African countries with a median income below 5k USD. On the other end of the spectrum, you don't see fertility rates tick up again until you get to the 500k USD and above bracket.

My personal hunch is that this is a form of market failure. If you're a young woman, delaying childbirth in favor of more education and a higher income makes perfect sense, on an individual level. But the more young women take that path, the fewer are available to form communities of care. Consider the economic cost of replacing that network -- neighborhood moms, grandparents, immediate and extended family. Raising a child with one parent working is strenuous, with both it's only possible through expensive and sub-optimal childcare programs.

One typical response is that we should simply subsidize those childcare programs. Fair enough, but the countries that have taken this idea the farthest -- the Nordics -- have still not achieved replacement-level fertility.

Another response is that the earth is too overpopulated already, and we should have fewer children due to climate change. However, we know exactly how many people will be alive in the latter part of this century -- given relatively static mortality rates -- because those people have already been born. Crashing the population after 2100 won't really help anything, and will in fact only introduce more economic challenges and crises for our descendants.

"Corporate welfare" is nonsense. As opposed to what? A theoretical total free market? Western governments have tried that for the past few decades, and that's done nothing but hollow out blue collar jobs and produce instability along with deaths of despair and wealth inequality.

The libertarian "free market" myth is effectively dead -- welcome to the age of industrial policy.

Fair points —- I agree that the article is actually quite well researched and to-the-point, once you get past the title.

I guess I just see this exact argument being made all over the place, so I’m a little weary of it. But this article is one of the best iterations of it that I’ve seen.

I think this is a conversation worth having, but this is a tech news board. This isn't exactly on topic, and is guaranteed to be inflammatory.