awongh

Personally, when it comes to media and creative things, I want to hear from other humans. It could be other humans using AI as a tool, but I'm not interested in the Meta AI account slop they were promoting. Or the Spotify algorithm optimized playlist artists.

I don't think everyone will agree with me, and we might have truly AI generated movie and pop stars, but I think most people won't want synthetic art- it's missing the point of what art is for, for expressing something about humans.

> will solve everything that makes life worthwhile

Like programming? Or what else, I'm not sure I understand what that would mean.

You (not responding to you directly simias) are truly delusional if you think what's happening isn't extremely concerning and dystopian in a lot of ways.

And there will be a lot of ego death, esp. with people deep in a lot of kowledge work.

But if you claim that AI is absolutely a waste and bad for humanity I feel sorry for you if you can't see how incredible it is that we have this new technology. -That it will most likely solve some very core issues humans are working on, and that it is a kind of evolutionary moment in human history, creating artificial intelligence. I feel sorry that you can't see past your own nose to see the bigger picture in that sense.

I tend to think big changes will always make things better and worse at the same time. If you look at the long horizon of history (100s of years) it appears that it makes things better on balance. But who really knows for sure what will happen.

> real concerns about whether the environment on Earth can sustain the impact of human society in its current form

There are two different groups I think. One is not having kids because of environmental issues, but I think there's a larger group not having kids because of systemic societal issues that make it hard to have kids. (sometimes it's the same group but not always)

So part of what I was pointing out is that when people say "we need less people" they aren't implying "wow, I'm glad the population is shrinking" they're really saying, "less people need to be born in the future"- which probably isn't true.

> and the population is an obvious lever to scale that impact

Also, it's not obvious, since, with the exception of China, no one actually meant to do this. It might actually lead to a lot of human misery, the same as climate change might do, so it's not clear that having less people in this specific way is a net good- for example countries like Japan completely collapsing in on themselves and going extinct. I think what you meant by smaller population was just have the same exact society but thinned out, but that's not what this next chapter of degrowth looks like. The boomers who insist on their full pensions at 60 are pretty much killing the youngest generation and leaving them with nothing, and to a certain extent everyone is being rational actors- there's no reasonable way out of the problem.

Yes, and, many many billions (trillions?) of dollars have been lost because the programming language couldn't be changed. Both things can be true.

The racist part is thinking that the confucianist misogynistic hyper capitalistic culture is worth protecting in the first place, as if Bangladeshi, Indonesian or Filipino people living in the same country as you will somehow be the thing that is the end of "Koreanness" and not all of the culture's inherent issues itself- the other kind of end of Koreanness (the implied preferred end) is when almost everyone who is Korean dies out. (Which, to be clear, is not limited to Korea- it's the same set of issues everywhere people complain about "immigrants")

Even if there's a lot of scientific evidence, statistical proof etc. it's sort of surprising to me that when chatting with people all over the world (in dense cities and also in non-dense areas) how often I hear the sentiment that "there are too many people" and get the sense that they do mean that there's too many people in the world (not just within the surrounding 5-10km which might actually be true).

This might also be one of those things that aligns with people's experience of the world, and the de-population thing is inherently counterintuitive unless you are, by definition, outside the norm- that is, you would only ever notice this if you live where people already don't live. (rural Japan, etc.)

I didn't realize that the google - oracle decision was just decided over fair use!

It reminded me of this: https://malus.sh/ "cleanroom as a service" - which I guess was kind of a joke, but looks pretty serious now.... (discussion back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47350424)

But this seems to hinge on the "clean room"- is this a separate set of case law or is it related? As in, if they had been more judicious about the way the game was implemented could they have claimed it was not under copyright?

> We recruited 12 healthy men (mean age 27) who had several years of sports background and who ran with a heel strike pattern

I wonder how much of this has to do with possibly not-that-well-trained runners and or gait inefficiencies.

All elite marathons are now won with big cushy shoes. But those runners might be forced to wear them so it’s hard to come to any conclusions from that.

But at the very least if it was way less efficient to have highly cushioned shoes I think we would probably see that at the top level.

The study is also suspect because overall running efficiency changes drastically between trained and untrained runners and it doesn’t seem like they accounted for that.

I'd really like to know what the workflow for this is. In terms of the prompt, but also specifically in terms of which part of the decompilation process the model is using- I assume a standard decompiler is used, then what happens? How is the code rebuilt, what are the possible mistakes the AI can make, and what does the result actually look like?

> So in that way, the Deepseek models are heavily subsidized as well, with the possibility of them being served by a different company that paid nothing to develop them.

Has anyone seen the neo-cloud profit margin on deepseek? I wonder if the deepseek served API prices account for the training cost? Because they don't / have not raised the money to fund their future operation / training- and they depend on that cashflow for now? That would suggest a really high profit margin on inference only.

> There is a science behind getting computers to produce reliable and correct results.

You've somehow summed up the entire debate around AI here, but seemed to have missed the point as well.

Alignment is pretty hard!

Link to the actual article: https://archive.is/kt3Aa

I actually don't think this is so deep- you couldn't curse on broadcast TV and basically because Instagram is an ad platform you aren't supposed to say "bad" things on there either.

There's been endless debates here about moderation vs. censorship- on the spectrum of Hackernews to 4chan. Calling the Hackernews moderation rules "censorship" would also not be reasonable- nor do people want to visit 4chan because it's "free speech".

I think it's actually a really nice workaround that human language and english is flexible enough that we can still say exactly what we mean in a different way and everyone knows what we are talking about.

I fundamentally don't think the platforms want to get rid of the engagement these topics bring, (the last round of criticism being that they want divisive topics on the platform) and if and when they do it won't look like changing "kill" to "unalive"- the algorithm will simply be directed to silence the topic. Many such examples in China. We should be angry about the censorship we don't see and can't detect as easily instead.

It states in the article *[our lawyer] advised us that [...] the judges would be extremely deferential to the Rodin Museum and would grant it the benefit of any doubts* but doesn't dare to say why they would be deferential.... It's probably because these high level cultural institutions basically get to do whatever they want... France definitely loves their institutions.

After reading the article, my interpretation isn't that they put an enormous legal effort into combating the release of the scans, it's that they put very little work into fighting against the OP, made a lot of bad arguments and knew from the start they would get away with it.

It comes off a little bit like they made a lazy decision at the outset, didn't want to reverse course to save face and knew they didn't need to back it up with anything....

Well, a broader interpretation of this idea is that paradoxically there needs to be a certain level of authoritarianism in order to have a civil functioning republic.

In the 1900s this was communism. A lot of people (either disingenuously or not) interpreted this as anti-democratic. But if you look at what actually happened where conditions were right, it turned out to work well- China and Vietnam, and if you just look at authoritarianism, not just communist authoritarianism, then Singapore, S. Korea, Taiwan as well. Some would also argue that the USA falls into this category- that the same arm of the government suppressing corruption is also going after marginalized groups.

There aren't that many examples in history where the ideal balance is actually struck.

I think on the timescale of 10 years, that's a super likely scenario. But will it be any sooner?

For instance a Chinese EUV machine seems like it's very far away. Even if they have (steal/borrow) the necessary IP.

How long is the long run though? China doesn't have the chips, and probably won't have them for a while.

I agree in principle, but it could be more than 5 years, maybe 10. Who knows what things will look like then.

In a recent Dwarkesh podcast Dylan Patel breaks down how little compute the chinese labs actually have- not even the fact that they don't have access to new Nvidia chips and they're stealing them through shell companies- just that, even if they have cheap electricity, the compute just doesn't compare. Maybe even two orders of magnitude less. They couldn't get it even if they had the money. And if you look at how much more efficient newer chips are, that cuts the effective compute in half again. The conclusion was that they are at least 2-3 years behind.

For frontier labs the current compute seems to be driving model progress (in training) at least to some degree, even without true RSI, and this seems like it'll continue to keep any chinese model from drawing even with the frontier labs, at least for the foreseeable future.

Inevitably the chinese government will drive more funding in chip fab technology and the money will come around to build chinese data centers, but who knows how far off that is. A few different things in the tech tree need to fall into place. It doesn't seem like it'll be next year.

One of the optimistic aspects of what's happening is that it doesn't seem like the leading model capabilities are outpacing the more open ones by that much- that just as a general principal there are pretty ok models relatively close behind the best ones.

This could mean the long term viability of my open claw bot to shop for me- that openai / google etc won't control AI, and I'll still just be able to use a model via API to do what's actually in my own self-interest.

What's crazy is that the ToS is basically, "allow us, Amazon, to give you algorithmically higher prices- and if you try to circumvent that, you can't buy from us anymore".

I think the arguments for these kinds of near-monopoly companies being true market-driven capitalism seem more and more false.

The idea that Amazon will tell you that you don't even own the right to your own shopping experience tells you everything you need to know. Apple owns your device and Amazon owns the right to show you whatever price/product they want, regarless of your search intent.

I didn't realize how much money Uber makes from ads.... Why does every business devolve into an ad platform?

I get the structural comparison they are trying to make.

But mortgages are not a frontier AI lab.

They try to draw a comparison to the valuation of the real estate and the valuation of the hyper scalers in the markets.

I would argue that the demand and valuation of a house is less elastic than AI. While a house’s value may continue to appreciate in the market there is an upper bound for the price of a house set by people’s income. We don’t know yet what the value of AI is. The underlying product, the model keeps improving and therefore increases its value. A house is still fundamentally a house a year later and doesn’t intrinsically appreciate in value.

From gpt-3 to gpt-5.5 there’s been a massive change in the underlying value of the product and company in a way that simply doesn’t happen with a house. That’s where the analogy breaks down.

The other thing with the AI debate is that it's nothing new- these kinds of failures are the same kind that have been going on for a long time, for the exact same reasons.

Any time a local government fails people these same kinds of incentive misalignments are at the real heart of it.

The fact that it has the word AI in it just gives it that cool cyberpunk dystopian sheen, where you call 911 and the AI says something about mechahitler instead of trying to help you.

If they are using a true agentic TTS / LLM setup then this is just a first pass for them to implement fully AI answered 911 calls.

Otherwise I can code this state machine condition for you in 10 minutes.

For the people who believe this, I think it deeply reflects how they think about all knowledge and the kinds of things they would use this technology for- "finding the answers to things without having to think about them"- that's only one way to use it, and the least compelling way, in my opinion.

I don't agree with the luddite-esque AI views like using ChatGPT makes you dumber and it thinks for you, but- this is a real case of why people are angry and why they should be concerned about deployment of AI.

The article says it's basically to handle high call volumes maybe during some kind of widespread incident. But in those cases why would AI even be needed- if calls are flooding in for something and people need to be put on hold why do you need AI to ask them if they are calling about incident x? Just automate a voice for that and ask them that while they're on hold / when the system first picks up.

This smells like a bandaid over an underfunded system, and a way to sneak in further cost-cutting in the future where the real calls will be actually answered by AI.

Most people mean this to say that 1 trillion is a lot of money, but it still comes back to what you believe AI is- in hindsight, does 1 trillion dollars to build the internet sound like a lot or a little? (That is, spending 1 year of USA's defense budget to get the entire internet)

It comes back to your perception of what AI is because to people who say AI is glorified auto-complete won't believe that the money is worth it.

The AGI-pilled true believers who say it will end all money and result in a post-scarcity world believe literally any amount is justifiable.

Most people, me included, land somewhere in the middle- it seems like AI is a humanity-level sea change in technology and how computers work and serve us. It seems plausible that a few trillion is a reasonable amount.

I don't want to save money so badly that I'd possibly undercut the quality of the code that gets created.

*edit to add: that code quality (or lack of quality) is it's own cost