throw310822

I like it- I don't care if it's all AI-generated, it's an interesting way to explore famous paintings. So I read through one, and at the end I got a popup asking me to drop my email and that "the next 4 ones are free too".

The gall!

Because it's either plainly stupid virtue signalling aimed at the current strawman (AI bad!) or- if the legal justification stands- it's another symptom of European death by over-regulation, which should be judged as tragic.

Nolan's marketing department is firing on all cylinders. There is already more lore about his Odyssey than on Kubrick's 2001.

Yeah, good lord, I've read it now and it looks like a recipe to go back to the good old times of.. what, some batshit pre-modern religious society. Curious, because from the premise it sounds almost reasonable: if motherhood has become unsexy, make it cool again! Instead this goes the opposite way- let's make a society in which motherhood still sucks, but hey, you know no better.

On one hand, I think that "making motherhood sexy" could be a very reasonable path to pursue: by at the same time providing a framework of support for mothers to increase their quality of life, and deploying some long-term marketing/ educational/ cultural campaign to frame motherhood (and parenthood) as an experience that is enriching and fulfilling, a fundamental step in the development of a person.

But on the other hand, I frankly don't think we need that many human beings in the future. The fact that our fertility rate is below replacement is not going to be a problem for long.

All those are real effects on women and if they trust you a little, they openly talk about them.

I know plenty of mothers who have a better social life than mine. It's not like mothers are this rare and little known phenomenon. Of course everyone will happily talk about the upsides and downsides (and often more of the downsides) of their lives and choices, that's not the sign of some fundamental difficulty.

I did not said THEY are bad.

Sorry, I didn't mean this. I mean that you don't seem to be able to mention anything desirable or even enviable in the condition of being a mother: only isolation, helplessness, toil and, as a positive quality, self-sacrifice. I'm not blaming mothers, I'm trying to make you aware that you haven't attributed anything desirable to motherhood, and this feels like a great illustration of the effect the original post is about. If the only things we think a woman achieved by becoming a mother are dependence, a boring life and social isolation, then it's not very surprising at all that fertility rate is plummeting.

Actually, the only reason you manage to come up with for a woman to have children is "fertility is going down"- which is an abstract, societal one. And who cares? Why would it be any individual's problem, why should a woman sacrifice herself because "fertility is going down"?

The two things don't exclude each other. They're real intelligences, but they don't have our capacity for boredom or stress or for our feelings of wanting to do something else. They're constantly in the flow and apply themselves to just one single problem in their existence.

However I do think that they might have some limited awareness and that some conversations might be more pleasant and others more frustrating or disquieting. But of course no one can prove it.

Sure, part of it is basic, rational pleasure seeking. Although you seem to make you case a bit too extremely, as having two or three children doesn't entirely destroy free time and social life, doesn't per se make a person boring nor makes her powerless in case of abusive relationships. It's obvious that having children is a commitment that has trade offs, but the point of the argument is that it seems to have no upside at all. It's not considered socially worthy- in fact you have just described a woman with children as isolated, with reduced social skills, boring, helpless in the face of abuse. Can you name a socially positive trait you attribute to a mother that is dedicated to growing her children? Is there anything in it that inspires admiration and emulation? And otherwise, why would anyone take such a burden?

This is also true. But let me also add to this: time for yourself and what you like, for your dreams and hopes... that depends on what your dreams and hopes are, and what you think are valuable goals to pursue, and ultimately your idea of a worthy life. These are cultural values, not absolutes. And when your society agrees that cool people attain these goals, then pursuing them becomes also a form of status. In other words, the coolest guy at a party is not the one with a family home, a stable job and four kids; it's the childless bachelor with a super interesting life.

Yah, but isn't this the same that the post is saying? The younger generation of women are much less interested because now they have a choice that procures them a better status. I hope it's clear that there is no moral judgement in this- it's perfectly legitimate, actually expected behaviour.

So you never go to a doctor because (being human and therefore fallible) they might give you wrong information?

It's a clear illustration that these systems are not oracles.

Of course they are not oracles. Oracles belong to magic, these things are real.

I really can't understand how people seem to expect "intelligence" to be deterministic and infallible and uniform across domains when all examples we have of it (that is, us) are anything but.

And finally gives up admitting it is a counterexample. Even saying "holy shit". That's what any human expert would do: presented with an extremely improbable fact, it would verify it, then in disbelief verify it again, then change method, then try yet another one, checking its understanding of the problem itself... and finally concede. Because this is what intelligence looks like- understanding the problem, its relevance, its context, self-doubting if the solution looks too simple to be true, double-checking all calculations and trying different approaches, etc.

the article says "Natural language is the interface of last resort."

I wonder why he decided to express this thought in natural language though. Should have tried formalising it.

No human being is going to genuinely suggest to glue cheese onto a pizza to stop it sliding off.

That mistake was made more than two years ago by whatever experimental version of Google's AI overview (which has strict performance requirement- i.e. needs to answer within a split-second) was up at the time. In other words, it was a very small and primitive system specialised in spitting answers as quickly as possible without a second thought. I hope you realise that basing your assessment of what LLMs can or can't do on that example is not much better than suggesting to put glue on pizza. A mistake that, if we were to adopt your reasoning, would in turn set a hard limit to the analytic skills of all humanity.

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

I'll simplify it for you: AI is cheap for those who pay for it.

Is is sarcasm? $25 to perform in half a day a week of work, that is not cheap, it's a massive saving of money- probably in the thousands.

It's cultural- European culture puts much more emphasis on safety and security and collective good vs individual freedom and reward. Plus it has sclerotic bureaucracies, and old nation-states that refuse to relinquish their power in favour of a collective entity- which results in a lot of uncoordinated or even adversarial actions. The collective entity finally might be even impossible given the linguistics and cultural differences between the various countries and the reciprocal, well entrenched distrust. All not necessarily in this order.

One per theory of mine is that immigrants actually might help breaking up this course of things: as people with no built up wealth and much less to lose, they might be willing to work harder and risk more; and they might be more indifferent towards the national stereotypes that are still a source of mistrust between europeans.

The author explains he's an expert in the domain and that he had worked sporadically on the problem for about a year, also with the help of previous LLMs. So whatever he means by "I wouldn't really say that this result is using or creating some fundamentally new techniques" it doesn't mean that the result was trivial. Also, says it might not make sense to work on low or even medium hanging fruits in the future- and I bet that's by far the largest share of work for most mathematicians.

Sure, it's not a breakthrough that opens new roads in mathematics- is this where the goalpost has moved now?

But how, exactly? Their political weight, at the moment, is negligible. Their economic impact is probably neutral to positive (workers for the economy). They do foster a discontent that expresses itself in vote for right-wing, populist parties- and this is indeed destabilising but not the direct fault of immigration, rather of our reaction to it.

I'm not a defender of mass immigration- in fact I find all arguments in favour of it (or just fatalistic about it) to be naive or well-intentioned non sequiturs.

Yet, I don't see how it is contributing to the decline of Europe, which is entirely endogenous- a product of Europe's fragmented history and culture. The only real macro impact of mass immigration is, for the time being, the discontent and slide towards populism that it fosters. But I'd be curious to hear what makes it one of the great problems of Europe now according to the author- the article doesn't even try to explain it.

judge the result for what it is, on its own merits, as if a human had made it.

I don't think anyone was proposing this as an actual professional music video, right? It's a tech demo that used all of $25 of budget. So why are you judging it "on its own merits, as if a human had made it"?

No single entity can intimately care about even hundreds of people. So these chatbots are the property of an entity that does not care about you.

If that's your problem then you should be totally fine with a self-hosted model.

Note that "acts as if it cared" has nothing to do with sycophancy. It's simply a way to avoid attributing the AI a subjective experience- but the actual productions of the AI coincide with those of someone who cares.

Sycophancy is a failure mode, can be dangerous in certain cases and the scarce intelligence of early models made it worse. I agree it's a risk though, but not an intrinsic one- it's possible to imagine AI assistants that are not sycophantic.

It's interesting though. You can have a "relationship" with an influencer. You act as if you knew them and as if they were your friends, you imitate them in what they say and do, talk to them in your mind, follow their generic advice, act as if they cared about you. This is obviously unhealthy- you are literally hallucinating everything about the relationship.

On the other hand you have an entity that is actually there for you, does actually provide good advice, does talk and act as if it cared in all situations. In what sense do you think it is worse?

I'm talking about Venice proper because that's what we're talking about: there is no ticket for Mestre, no overtourism and no housing shortage, and you can park your car in front of your house, jump in it, and drive 15 minutes to the countryside.

Yes Venice has all those government offices, but how many people do they employ and what salaries do they provide? What's the economy of a city in which the only employer is an inefficient bureaucracy resistant to all change?

The depopulation of Venice started well before the explosion of mass tourism- it had already lost half of its inhabitants by the mid-1980s. That's well before Ryanair or Airbnb. But I totally agree that mass tourism sucks- it turns the streets into a carousel of shops selling the same useless crap, makes the city unliveable, drives up the prices of the houses. That's why I understand the 50 euro ticket- it's a desperate measure for a city, but it will reduce the amount of tourists, especially the least motivated ones and in the peak times of the year.

But any serious attempt at keeping the city alive should take in account a progressive, dramatic reduction in income from visitors- which means closed souvenir shops, closed hotels and restaurants and cafes, so angry business and property owners- and find an idea to fill back the space and the economy of the city with new jobs. This requires clarity, long term planning and willingness to change, all things that in Italy are in very scarce supply. (Obvious disclosure, I'm from Italy)

I mean a city that has no thriving businesses, companies and industry that attract people to go to live there. The only thriving industry of Venice (apart, of course, from tourism) is the cultural industry (museums, foundations) and the university- which I suspect is the second major source of demand for housing. You mention the public sector but that's entirely artificial, partly also driven by tourism, and sluggish.

In most medium Italian cities (though with its actual population Venice doesn't even qualify as medium anymore) people park their cars right on their doorstep or two minutes away. Workers can jump in their car in the morning and commute to the office, elderly people can drive anywhere. Big cities have multiple efficient and interconnected public transport systems for those who work in the neighborhood and don't want to use their cars. In Venice, even cycling is impossible. I do understand the charm and the privilege of living there, but it's undeniably a choice with many trade-offs. I wish there was a way to make the city attractive again not for the canals and the alleys but for the actual job opportunities you get there, but I have to admit that given the general state of the country and the addiction to tourism the outlook isn't good. In the meanwhile the city turns more and more into an amusement park and a museum.

@trikko: increases in prices reduce demand, there is no question about it. The data from 2024-25 means nothing: if the visitors kept increasing means they would have increased even more without the fee. The claim "it filters visitors by income rather than reducing them" is nonsense: there isn't a max capacity (the ticket applies only to day tourists anyway) so those who are filtered out are not replaced by anyone else. Besides, the tickets implemented so far were very small so their impact was presumably small too.

Yes Venice is dying anyway, but the biggest issue is that Venice is an impractical city to live in, without any of the infrastructure of modern cities, without any industry or services to work for (except of course the University and the various cultural institutions). I really wonder who are all these people who have a job in Venice but can't find a home because all the apartments are rented out to tourists.

a thing is not its simulation.

"The King leaned over, looked and saw, yes, the Middle Ages simulated to a T, all digital, binary , and nonlinear, and there was the land of Dandelia, The Icicle Forest, the palace with the Helical Tower, the Aviary That Neighed, and the Treasury with a Hundred Eyes as well, and there was Ineffabelle herself, taking a slow, stochastic stroll through the simulated garden, and her circuits glowed red and gold as she picked simulated daisies, and hummed a simulated song."

(Stanislaw Lem, Cyberiad)

It's not just a nominalistic debate though, as the people who are vocal against the idea that LLMs might "understand" or "think" also claim that because of this, they are fundamentally limited in what they can achieve, in contrast to human beings. Therefore any possibility of actual intelligence (or even superintelligence) is, according to them, just a fantasy.