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chanakyaon How accurately did science fiction stories predict AI?

Iain M Banks' Culture series seem to have got a lot right.

chanakyaon Chapter 1 of "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (1972)

I think we're now moving a bit far afield from my original comment, so I'll try to get us back. I'll give an example of how Berger's Marxism leads him astray. He called the Impressionist's work "bourgeois nostalgic art", art for the elite. But the Impressionists were the exact opposite of art for the elite, they were revolutionaries against elite, academic art based on patronage. They painted for the public and the market, and their work showed (for what was the first time), ordinary people enjoying themselves in routine settings like a picnic or a restaurant.

Why does ideology force Berger to diss their work and minimize how popular and well-liked they were? Because they showed ordinary people enjoying themselves in the first mass society in the world in ordinary everyday settings. But Marxism says ordinary everyday society is oppressive and the people ground down by a brutal capitalist elite. He can't get himself to understand that Western European everyday life of the late nineteenth century was the best life ever for ordinary people anywhere in the world or anywhere in history, and the fact that they were out happily enjoying it in a civilized urban way was a new thing in the world, and depicting that was an important advance in art.

chanakyaon Chapter 1 of "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (1972)

Agree with much of what you say. The art of a period reflects the culture of the time, including the structure of society. But there used to be a time when people looking at art (and critics presenting it to the public) weren't trying to analyze this structure, or mourn its oppressive nature. They weren't trying to "deconstruct" paintings or bemoan the "male gaze".

They were trying to absorb (and convey) the beauty and the often transcendent message of the painting. Of course, starting with modernism, elite culture's obsession with society and how bad it was meant that even the artists were mostly not aiming for beauty and an uplifting vision. This is where, in my opinion, it all started to go downhill for visual art.

chanakyaon Chapter 1 of "Ways of Seeing" by John Berger (1972)

Berger was a smart guy, but like so many smart people, his Marxism spoils everything. He has to see power emanating from every work of art, and traditional paintings all promoting "capitalist property relations that serve ruling-class ideologies".

Great art is above and beyond such crude bracketing. Berger is part of the trend in western art since modernism that abandons beauty and the transcendent for dull ideology.

chanakyaon The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their own interest"

When companies make profit, it doesn't mean we get screwed, nor even that they have a high profit margin. The grocery chain stores are a prime example. They typically make 2-3% net margins on revenue, and provide fresh, clean, reasonably well-tested groceries close to our home for that margin. Imagine trying to get equivalent quality fresh groceries ourselves from the producers, and I'm guessing it would cost at least three times as much.

chanakyaon The great crime decline is happening all across the country

I meant income. I think you may be confusing what "real" income means. It adjusts for the typical bucket of goods and services Americans consume, and the deflator used to correct incomes over the years includes housing and education. After adjusting for the increases in these, the resultant real median household income today is $88,000 vs. $58,000 in 1960.

I know it doesn't feel that way, but that's because of the hedonic treadmill.

chanakyaon The great crime decline is happening all across the country

This is not complicated. Median household income in 1960 (in today's dollars) was about $58,000. Today it's about $88,000. You therefore have more inflation adjusted money available to spend on everything, including children.

The inflation adjustment includes everything: housing, education, and their proportion in the average US family's bucket, so calling out a specific item like education or housing doesn't change that data.

chanakyaon The great crime decline is happening all across the country

Exactly. If you want to bring up kids the way they were brought up in the 50s and 60s, it will cost less as a proportion of people's incomes today. No one wants to bring up kids that way, though.

chanakyaon MiMo v2.6

How would that slow down the Chinese models, given that the US has no regulatory reach in China?

chanakyaon Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion

Not in my organization, or in any that I know of. I don't even understand why it would be in an organization's interest to do that. Why should they care if I'm harrassed for data of a political nature? They generally tell me not to even have any such data on their property.

They do, however, require that I take a burner device or wipe it completely, if I travel to China.

chanakyaon Border agents can search cellphones without a warrant or reasonable suspicion

I do that several times a year, and never wipe my phone. I looked at statistics of such phone examinations over the last few years, and I didn't see any difference between the current and last administrations, when nobody was wiping their phones.

chanakyaon Most people prefer traditional architecture

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/against-the-survival-of-the...

Not according to this article, which looks into it.

chanakyaon We must pace the frontier

Exactly right. A slow down to enable deeper work on alignment is welcome, not matter what the motivations.

chanakyaon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

Among the list of countries which supply arms to Israel are UK, Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, India, Italy, Taiwan, Romania and a few others. The US is not unique in this by any means.

chanakyaon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

Exactly. Decades of pax americana has lulled people into a view that the rest of the world are pacifists who will get along just fine but for the US.

chanakyaon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

There was more corporate and billionaire backing and donations to the Democrats than the Republicans. Also, studies have shown that the power of money in elections is overestimated. Money tends to go for the viable candidate, it's not the money which makes them viable.

chanakyaon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex?

That may be partly true, but in recent times, most western countries participated in wars like Afganistan and Iraq, and provided logistical or other support during the current Iran war.

chanakyaon Silicon Valley is transforming the military-industrial complex? (2024)

Serious question: should companies not participate in contracts from their country's defense department? Or is the argument that it's only US companies which shouldn't, because the US is uniquely evil?

chanakyaon A/I shuts down

The kind of problems you're describing certainly don't sound like things you should "pick up a weapon and give up your life" for, so this doesn't seem to add an argument in favour of "revolution".

chanakyaon A/I shuts down

I agree we should all be fighting to keep what we have, which is pretty good. But that sounds like the opposite of a revolution to me.

chanakyaon A/I shuts down

If everyone is so comfortable, what do we need a revolution for? Wasn't that the goal of civilization? If someone doesn't like civilization, why try to bring it down? There's plenty of places on earth you can go to live without it.

chanakyaon How AI is breaking the British state

The article is suggesting that there was an assumed dynamic in designing these mechanisms for petitions and claims - that there is a threshold of cost (time and effort, mostly) that the petitioner is willing to pay for petitioning the government, and that this cost is, at least to some extent, minimizing frivolous or "lets try it even if it's a long shot" claims.

When the cost of such claims goes to zero, that assumed dynamic will no longer work.

chanakyaon The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences [pdf] (1960)

It's just that the universe is ordered, and math is the study of order.

chanakyaon Einstein's relativity rules chemical bonds in heavy elements, new research shows

As you move up levels starting from physics (eg. physics-> chemistry-> biochemistry-> biology), each layer has several "laws" which are generally pretty established, but a causal connection between the layers is hard to provide satisfactorily. And that is how I think it'll always be, else we'll be expecting to explain Shakespeare's plays using physics.

Also, this is where Rutherford's "all science is either physics or stamp collecting" holds a lot of water. As you move up the science layers, the laws themselves become less mathematically rigid until by the time you get to the social sciences, explanations are all hand-waving, and all "laws" are statistical at best and empirical.

chanakyaon How to earn a billion dollars

Even AOC doesn't believe what she said. She's saying it because she has a startup of her own which sells ideas, and gets paid in votes. It may not be 93%, but she's had a pretty good growth rate, and when you get to about 50 million, you have a great shot at being President. Ideas which bash rich people have had a growing market for a while, and she's good at it, and people are telling their friends about her.

chanakyaon The Brand Age

I think he makes two points:

- This change of what used be a functional object into a brand was done to appeal to one-upmanship (my watch is more expensive than yours) rather than the aesthetic urge which drives appreciation for art. He doesn't blame the watch brands, it may have been the only way they could survive after the triple shock. But..

- If you're an engineer and techie type and are drawn to the complexity and mechanistic elegance of mechanical watches, he's warning you that the problems being worked on in the brand age actually take you away from good functional design which attracted you there in the first place.

chanakyaon 'Calvin and Hobbes' at 40

What are these contradictions and hypocrisies? Maybe I'm just old, but I've never understood the angst younger people seem to have these days.

chanakyaon The government information crisis is bigger than you think it is

> People feel hopeless, and powerless.

Some people, I guess. Looks like more than half the people approve of what he's doing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/politics/trump-approva...

chanakyaon Humans have caused 1.5 °C of long-term global warming according to new estimates

The effect of the shifting is minor. China's exports (to all countries, not just the US) make only a small difference to their emissions growth.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/production-vs-consumption...

chanakyaon Banning Private Jets and Going to a 4-Day Work Week Are Radical – and Popular

There were more wars and disasters before capitalism, not fewer. In recent times, both wars and fatal disasters have dropped drastically.