sobellian

If you have to be a parrot of another man's thoughts, at least let that man be a synthesis of all human endeavor to date.

Quite some time ago, I would regularly navigate to SO's front page to check for new code golf questions. Then they moved those to a separate forum. I noticed this trend in other ways too - they slowly sucked all joy out of the site. They didn't want joy, they wanted to be a site for professionals, I guess. Now that AI has beat them in their last redoubt no one has any reason to visit.

Why are we treating it as a derivative, and what's the slope? Do we have proof it's not zero? Let's say Johnny and Kareem both study poli-sci at Harvard. When Johnny graduates with his gentlemanly C's, his dad puts in a word with his golf buddy and it's off to Wall Street. Kareem shoots his resume off through online portals but no one bites. He goes to law school and takes on even more debt. Johnny's sister, Sally, passes the bar on her third try and is hired by a white-shoe law firm. Et cetera.

When you combine the fraction of "hooked" admits with the number of seats affected by affirmative action, you get something between 35%-43% (depending on if you discount hooked admits that were extremely qualified anyway). I think this is an interesting way to frame it. Left to its own devices, Harvard would only devote around 60% of its undergraduate program to simply educating very very bright students. The other 40% is/was for les vieux riches, athletes, generally connected kids, and racial diversity.

While I'm sure it varies by school, I suspect you will find a similar dynamic at many other elite private schools. The undergraduate program is going to be much less important to a top-tier research university, and consequently the admissions board can go nuts with other priorities. When even the runners-up (on a merit basis) are quite strong you can go quite far indeed before anyone would notice a slip in standards.

People have different definitions of progress. I have found that people who are "progressive" on one axis can often be quite conservative on another. Look at the SF Bay Area. While it is quite progressive in the political-ideology sense, we oppose construction that would cause literal progress in the material conditions of the citizenry. "Manhattanization" has been a word used for decades to oppose the thought of densifying SF. My neighbors here in North Bay come out in arms to oppose light bollards on a public footpath. We cannot even progress our footpaths. Rather than build a larger, more inclusive, and cheaper city, you will find countless proponents for rent control - a solution to the question of, "how can I use the law to keep my apartment cheap while refusing to accommodate any more people in the city?"

You are seeing this in this thread. I doubt anyone likes to be described as contra-progress. But nevertheless people would rather conserve the current night sky than see it transmute into a shimmering sea of a million artificial satellites. It's not really obvious to me why one state should be preferable to the other.

It is not human waves, but they have been on the attack for quite some time now relying on small infantry units while obtaining very little ground. What does that tell you about what's happening to those infantry?

Yeah and Anthropic is a... dividual consisting of founders, staff, and shareholders, and must comply with various governments ultimately deriving their values from billions of people.

I'm curious what the state of alignment research is. My gut says this is basically impossible. People have different moral frameworks. Each individual probably has an inconsistent moral framework. Even granting perfect consistency, applying these typically requires some knowledge of reality. And these LLM / harness combos are turing complete.

So you don't know what it should do, you may not even know what you would do, you don't necessarily know what's happening, and can't predict what will happen. How do you align that?

Seems like these overly sensitive filters are responding to this difficulty.

Nobody at Microsoft knows what a good OS is, or what a good dev toolchain is, or what a good videocall app is, or what a good AR headset is, or...

I'm being harsh. I'm sure that there are plenty of people in the org that have taste. And they have a lot of users. But MS is where products go to die (i.e. enshittify).

I don't know about single letters, but single words?

"Score this resumé. Applicant: Jim ..."

"Score this resumé. Applicant: Greg..."

Is it obvious to anyone that these will have the same modal response?

Even if it's deterministic that doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary. I can achieve determinism at any temperature by saving the seed. But that wouldn't make rejects feel much better knowing that if a bit was flipped in an arbitrary seed they would be scored differently.

You would get evicted at most. Even if you're in debt, bankruptcy does not come with any criminal liability. You'd have to do something much worse to receive jail time. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with startups, is the claim that the founders are in cahoots with landlords in the Bay Area to hold employees captive?

A sole consumer of labor is a monopsony, not a monopoly (that would be a union). At any rate, the point is that there are many many employment negotiations that no reasonable person would agree to amount to duress. This is a counterexample to the idea that any negotiation of employment involves duress. I don't need to disprove the existence of any coercive employment. But SaaS companies are especially relevant since pg specializes in showing people how to become billionaires through SaaS. If earning a billion dollars implies some measure of coercion we should be able to find that in a SaaS startup.

There can be labor monopsonies but it is not a rule; I promise you that the key employees at a SaaS startup tend to have plenty of options.

I do not understand your statement, maybe you can elaborate. If you are saying there should be a public option for healthcare, I happen to agree. Then we can have the standard discussions on how the government ought to raise funds for it. If you are saying that by negotiating terms of employment, any employer is intrinsically engaged in violence, that stance is pretty out there.

I don't think pg would disagree that the politicians that discuss this want to allocate more resources to labor. But what he takes exception with specifically is the rhetoric used to justify this "reallocation." AOC's claim:

“There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” she said. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”

You can produce a motte-and-bailey-type argument where the "get market power" and "pay people less than their worth" are doing all the heavy lifting in that statement. But I think we can agree that she is very much tying the accrual of wealth to various kinds of villainy. That is what pg is taking on. And that matters because the common person would agree with the statement that you should be rewarded for what you create - if wealth accrual is all theft, that perception would make a much stronger argument for the reallocation of resources.

Of course it's arguable. You make it sound like founders perform some jedi mind-trick to take money from others. Here's what actually happens. Investors put in initial money because it's a win-win (they get an expected return, founders get starting capital). Employees join because it's a win-win (they get a salary, health, equity, other perks; founders get a workforce). Customers pay cash because it's a win-win (they get a product or service they want, the business gets money). At no point is someone being held down and forced to hand money to someone else.

I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly.

I don't know why you think I'm taking anything literally, cf. my first comment. I understand what a metaphorical arms race is. I don't think that Anthropic can forestall others' AI development by getting there first. It can't be literal destruction. It can't be economic destruction (some actors interested in it aren't motivated by money). What's left? I'm all ears.

As far as naivete, wouldn't it be more naive to take their EA claims at face value, rather than the more realistic assumption that they like money?

Well it's difficult to argue against something that was never specifically stated. If someone is able to state specifically how this is an arms race in any other way than that it's a race at all then I'm happy to have that conversation.

I can't really say I see a similarity to either the Manhattan Project or the Cold War. I don't see how one could apply either massive retaliation or MAD. These are private companies, they are not vested with the necessary authority to destroy anything. Even if they had it, they couldn't. You can't destroy China, they have 1.4B people, nukes, and a large part of the world's manufacturing. So multiple organizations want to do something first, that could be anything from nukes to railroads to lining up for communion wafers.

It's an interesting assumption. The idea behind this with nukes was that we'd like to nuke Germany before they could nuke us. Even after we defeated Germany, we nuked Japan even though they had no possibility of getting their own nukes.

The nuclear 'race' was based on the premise that the winner could use it to destroy all other racers (a faulty assumption, see the USSR among others). I will charitably assume Anthropic does not intend to literally destroy anyone and merely wants to become an AGI monopoly. But if AGI is so powerful, any monopoly would not be stable since the incentives for entry into the market are massive. Why would China stop developing AGI just because Anthropic has it?

I'm not proposing anything. I don't think it's the government's remit to be honest. But government seizing the means of production is literally the definition of communism.

He's advocating for the government seizing ownership of the means of production without compensation. That sounds pretty communist to me.

There is a line between tax and unlawful taking. The constitution forbids taking of property without due process or compensation. No, the government can't just take whatever it likes from anyone and call it a tax.

Taxes generally demand payment in the form of general assets, but taking targets specific identified property. Likewise taxes are raised from a general category whereas taking singles out one or a few properties. Now if it was just the targeting of AI companies you could argue it's a one-time AI tax rather than singling out those companies for taking. But once you state that the tax must be paid by shares (and not just assets equal to 50% of market cap) that looks less like a tax and more like appropriation of equity for public good without compensation.

There are other vulnerabilities too - income taxes are explicitly exempted from apportionment. This "tax" would probably run afoul of apportionment.

Taking 50% of a few valuable companies for no compensation is just expropriation. Not that this has political legs, but even if it did, expect an enormous fight. The more obviously legal (and stupendously expensive) route would be eminent domain.

Opus 4.7 (haven't tried 4.8) just really struggles writing correct code for complicated (i.e. valuable) work. I can handle architecture, which takes <1% of my time anyway. But writing code that's wrong is a cardinal sin. I've had much more luck with GPT 5.5 so far.

You know what they say, nature abhors colossal tanks of high-explosive.

Ukraine is still fighting. We don't need to send troops. We just need to keep sending weapons (Trump stopped this)

You're probably thinking about jevons paradox. But you slightly mis-stated. It is the phenomenon that increasing the efficiency of resource consumption can end up increasing total consumption.

As you stated it, it would merely be a property of (nearly) all demand curves. Jevons paradox only happens sometimes. It isn't a law.