Gangway0829

If you're extraterritorial, who is protecting you from ASATs?

It's pretty clear lol. OP definitely thinks we were living in mud huts before the British gifted us railroads.

We've traded power cuts for pollution. The current government seems energetic enough in trying to fix the problem, but frankly it's something every single developed country in existence went through at some point, so there's probably no escaping it. Hopefully the pollution era will be shorter than it was in other places!

I think this is a self-deprecating canard that's oft-repeated, but I think fails the credibility test and encourages a kind of fatalistic resigned attitude among Indians. Are we to take from this that efficient bureaucracies lead inevitably to coups? Is the pathetic state of most African countries a result of their stellar bureaucracies?

I'm not referring to the World Bank, but rather the idea that BJP's privatization push is somehow benefiting cronies. This is a widely reported accusation by the INC, but like most of their accusations, it seems to be a matter of slinging mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Part of accountability is the possibility for failure and the associated consequences. PSUs have no fear of failure, since they're fundamentally parasitic, living as they are on the tax receipts of the beleaguered middle class. Private industry either increases efficiency to the point of profit, or goes under, simple as. Show me the incentive, and I'll show you the results!

Of course, if there is complete government capture by industry, then there is no more risk of failure, and you have privatized PSUs. But let's say this, from 1947-1991, India traded the British for the IAS. Hardly much of an improvement. The only way to reduce their power is to transfer it to the private sector, outside of areas where the utility of the activity is all externality (e.g. defense, scientific research). We have to move in this direction or risk returning to the License Raj era. Perhaps this will create more problems, but at least our children won't curse us for leaving them with our parents' problems.

Singapore is a very small city. Distribution losses are linear with distance!

It's once again lamentable, but somewhat predictable that even on a post about how privatization fixed, in five years, a problem that persisted for 50, you insist on spreading boogeyman tales about privatization. The Indian government is what American libertarians are afraid of, and in their defense, they should be afraid.

I think that's a bad read of Indian institutions. They are incredibly powerful - in fact, they are far too powerful. That's the problem. The license raj is the epitome of authoritarian, centralized political and economic power. I suppose it was justified on socialist grounds, but it would be fair to say that saying so doesn't make it so! Before 91, nothing, and I mean nothing, could happen without government say-so.

The problem with Indian institutions is that they are far too powerful, centralized and bureaucratic. Just read the article - the problem was created by a lazy, corrupt, powerful and centralized bureaucratic system. The solution was to dismantle it and decentralize power.

I am aware. The initial privatization push was initiated by Congress in 1991! My lament is that privatization has remained anemic, even under the so-called right wing BJP.

But you should also acknowledge that national electrical reform was done by BJP. The real problem for Indian politics was the re-entry of the Gandhi nepo-baby dynasty. We would be a lot better off if they hadn't gotten their claws back into the INC.

Do you remember the scheduled water cuts? We would stockpile water in buckets so we could flush the toilets. Good old days!

Being to the right of the current INC is not an achievement. The only people not in that position are Maoists.

Anyway, I think it's reasonable to be suspicious of the wealthy and powerful. For instance, I personally quite dislike our new AI ruling class. But unfortunately, in India there was an attitude since independence that it is impossible to generate wealth in a legitimate manner. Which is going way too far! And has predictably bad outcomes for the country.

We're talking about people that unironically think eugenics based on IQ is a good thing. I think it's very effective altruism to socially ostracize such individuals.

You're so offended at the idea that your experiences are not generalizable that you're failing to read the thread. The OP that started this said "We all use the same Internet. I would find it strange for anyone who's seriously interested in AI to have never heard of Yudkowsky or Scott Alexander or the Rationalist movement."

Part of my comment addressed that. It's rather amusing that you completely skipped the first part, but I think that's par for the course for the Internet rationalist crowd.

You didn't claim hpmor isn't niche in the fanfic community, you claimed it isn't niche on /the Internet/, and implied that basically anyone in a technical role would have heard of it. I'm sorry that you're upset to learn that very few people care about sophomoric LW thought experiments, but that's the reality of your existence.

My view - there are a few outcomes 1. AI is never fully realized, but domain expertise is derated and society stagnates (bad ending for everyone, I think unlikely) 2. AI is never fully realized, but empowers people with domain expertise (Google wins, weird rationalist nerds go back to their LW cave and leave us alone, goodish ending) 3. AI becomes real and kills everyone (bad ending, but at least I don't have to read people claiming that the Harry Potter fanfic isn't niche) 4. AI becomes real and we live in the Culture universe (people like scam Altman get slap droned, most domain experts have the time of their life working with Minds on really interesting problems. Best ending)

The only outcome where we get swirlies is the first one, and we can take solace in the fact that all of humanity is getting swirlied with us.

Literally over half the Earth's population doesn't read English. You need to touch grass. I work with extremely technical people in physics and AI and none of them have read any fanfic of any kind. Most of them have never seen a meme outside of me showing it to them.

My extremely uncharitable view of of these kinds of people, who now infest the American AI scene, is that they got cyber bullied by domain experts for saying the most ridiculous crap on repeat, and have therefore decided to spend their life on eliminating domain expertise.

You have to be quite unaware of your bubble if you think knowing about a niche Harry Potter fanfic is "standard" for people on the Internet.

There's complex politics around hyperscaler data centers, and I'm sympathetic to the complaints against (though in full disclosure I am biased towards building anything, having seen my country held back for years by people opposed to building anything). But the UMich supercomputing center isn't a hyperscaler data center, and it's the height of disingenuous, cynical and dishonest politics to claim that it is. It's an academic research supercomputer. And FYI the protestors have been harassing UMich professors and their families, so sorry. I'm not going to be polite and give them any benefit of doubt. I know the people they're harassing personally and professionally and they're wonderfully kind and intelligent.

If the supercomputing project dies because of this, yellow journalists like 404 media have scientific blood on their hands.

Given that we have an embodied intelligence that is capable of being reasonably good at physics, it would be foolish to state categorically that AI can't do physics. I am however skeptical that LLMs can do physics. My experience is that it's really great at doing the stuff I can't be arsed to do, and is therefore very useful, but it has very poor "understanding" of physics

Can you elaborate on why you think the OP is incorrect? The hit piece on the Ypstilanti data center is quite an embarrassment for any honest news reporter.

Freedom from League of legends AND Facebook? Linux Torvalds just can't stop winning

Indeed that is true, which is the point of both OP(or at least my takeaway). Attaching a moral value to trade deficits or surpluses, as the current administration seems to be in favor of doing, is fairly nonsensical.

You wouldn't need 8 billion dollars to set up an NPP if not for hysteria driven regulation in all countries not called France.

0. It's not about "looking pretty", it's about being nigh impossible to understand or reason about. There is a 1000 LoC subroutine that I'm convinced was ported from FORTRAN 1 unchanged that cannot be understood by anyone under the age of 50 that underpins one of the "flagship" physics codes in my field. It's a fucking nightmare every time I have to worry about that stupid thing. I remind you that this was 100% the product of a human brain (pre computer age, pre social media, and I'm told quite the genius too). Perhaps one should not place the human brain on too high a pedestal and deify it.

1. Why did you take from my OP that I tell codex "write a climate simulation code, make no mistakes" and go suntanning on a beach in the tropics for the rest of the semester?

2. Perhaps you have a different experience from me in writing HPC codes, but my experience is that > 90% of the code is boilerplate. I find GPT 5.6 can be prone to overengineering, but with a little steering and good judgement it generates very nice interfaces and high level code. I just have to think about the solver structure or metastructure.

3. Even with core numerics - pre-AI, it was a bunch of iteration going back and forth between code and optreports. Now codex will just do it. I suppose this may seem grim to you if you loved decorating every variable with !DIR$ ASSUME_ALIGNED, and manually batching array operations or whatever, but I didn't and I'm glad I no longer need to.

4. I'm now highly motivated to write tests, and AI makes it way easier to write the immense boilerplate around good tests (sorry not sorry, my {FUNDING_AGENCY} program manager doesn't give a flying fuck what my test coverage is, and my next grant won't depend on that in the slightest, so pre-AI I did the bare minimum. You can argue that the results will be worse, yadda yadda, but the incentive structure that {FUNDING_AGENCY} has in place don't promote good software standards, and my career never suffered for it)

5. I can generate docstrings with high accuracy (see the above)

Have you seen the average physicist code? I've crawled around in the muck of Fortran codes written in 1970 with unreadable 8 character variable names (the first of which encodes the type), with implicit typing, zero comments, computed go-tos, SAVE, the works. Tests? Never heard of it. Bugs everywhere. You would be far less sanguine about physicists coding if you looked into some of the "flagship" codes used today. And believe me, it isn't a "boomer bad" phenomenon. Every incoming student I've had in the last decade writes shit code too.

My (only somewhat facetious) opinion is that physicist access to programming languages should be controlled like doctors' access to opiates.

I can't speak for that guy, but I'm a physicist and work in clean energy... So it's not too hard! That said, I usually am closer to 10M on days I do heavy coding, so not nearly that bad.

I think it says more about the person reading it as an implicit insult than it does OP. I am, I think, a fairly competent scientist, and know many great scientists. I know very few great scientific communicators.

If 90+% of whatever society you are from was killed off by disease, and the people who came across the survivors treated them as little better than cattle and systematically destroyed any remaining trace of your society, how literate would history judge you to be?

I mean, not really? Most Jax code is only marginally more restrictive than numpy, and most of the annoyances I have with Jax are shared with numpy.

And having spent too much of my life writing some extremely high performance physics code, 99% of the code complexity comes from the stupid stuff, like handling configuration and IO and restarting. Python handles that stuff great. Oh, and tests. Ever tried to write unit tests in Fortran? You'll hug python tight and promise it you'll never leave again.