cornel_io

Your brain merely computes correlations. Does that make it any less intelligent?

At some point we have to accept that when you layer simple ops on top of simple ops enough times you get complex behavior.

Human intelligence is primarily limited by the 6-10 item limit in short-term memory. If you bumped that up by a factor of 5 we could very easily solve vastly more complex problems, and fully visualize solutions an order of magnitude more subtle and messy than humans can manage today.

That's a relatively easy thing to do architecturally once you have a model that can match human intelligence at all. TBH if we could rearchitect the brain in code we could probably easily figure out how to do it in ourselves within a few years, but our wetware does not support patches or bugfixes.

We can't improve ourselves, but that's only because we're meat, not code. And of course no AI has done it yet, because we haven't actually made intelligent AI yet. The question is what happens when we do, not whether the weak-ass statistical crap that we call AI today is capable of self-improvement. Nuclear reactions under the self-sustaining threshold are not dangerous at all, but that was not a good reason to think that no nuclear reaction could ever go exponential and be devastating.

Seeing modern day "best in class" is a great way to become pessimistic about progress, you see the best of now but don't realize it's the worst of "soon". In 8 years you'll reverse course completely based on machining automation, and in 11 we'll have true AGI.

What is your estimate of the probability that human intelligence is actually anywhere near the upper limit, rather than some point way further down the S-curve where seemingly exponential growth can still go for a long time?

I'd bet a ton that we're nowhere near the top: evolution almost never comes up with the optimal solution for any problem, almost by definition it stops at "meh, good enough to reproduce". And you don't need a ton of intelligence to reproduce.

Evolution's sub-optimality is actually one of the strongest arguments against intelligent design, so I'm really hesitant to agree that it requires any sort of leap to estimate that with some actual design it won't be very difficult to blow way past human intelligence once we can get there.

What in the world does any of that have to do with birth rates and overpopulation, which is the only thing I mentioned? Are you just spamming a link and quote?

Thank you, I really appreciate the support, and I will pay it forward.

Yes, I understand, I will be more respectful, and I apologize.

I'm an incorrigible angry mess right now because I'm dealing with close impending death (edit: not my own, but very close) in RL and it's bleeding over into every sphere and making me behave terribly, but it's not a valid reason to be a dick. I'll dial it back heavily and do my best to either act like a normal person or be quiet.

Even with a pessimistic estimate about the rate of progress, fully general AI will be here loooong before population decline decimates the economy, as will good robotics and all the stuff needed to basically put resource gathering and production on autopilot. At that point "on welfare" would easily be the equivalent of living like a millionaire today.

The bigger questions are whether global warming or WW3 will fuck us all before we get there, not to mention the question of whether fully general AI will be its own mega disaster.

Did we "get our shit together" in all the rich countries on the planet, which are barely at replacement levels? Did we hit a massive die-off level by overexploiting our resources?

No. We got rich and having kids was less economically valuable (in fact it becomes a cost in rich societies). The Elon Musks of the world are now more concerned about lack of growth than the opposite.

Who knows if Elon is right or you, but it's not as trivial as it seems to predict whether we will ever hit the carrying capacity of the planet.

Yep - "hurr durr I fit a two parameter exponential to three data points OMG guys we should panic now" is just about the weakest argument that has ever been made about any of this stuff.

At the very least, many of the things he's showing would be theoretically expected to follow logistic curves of some form, not pure exponentials.

Many communities are toxic as fuck, and for many people every community anywhere near them is dangerous.

You're insane to think that community is necessary to find purpose/meaning in life. Plenty of us have had to escape and avoid all communities in order to survive, and we are doing extremely well. Fuck your "fiction promoted by modern society", the life that works for you does not prove that everyone else should live the same way.

I know nothing here, but it sounds from other posts like it is being moderated very aggressively, and posts like these survive for mere minutes.

Violence absolutely should not be tolerated. But it's going to show up briefly on every site, and that's just reality. What's different about KF is that hate is allowed, and people are suspicious that the real reason it's being targeted is for allowing hate, not violence.

I'm sure that's true, and I don't super hate that this shitty site is getting its just desserts, but pretending that this is a "we need to protect life" decision rather than a "we are agreeing with people who want this speech silenced" decision is pretty shady.

Right, and zoomers would probably broadly agree with that, but almost everyone else doesn't, so it's very contentious. "Sticks and stones" liberals still basically control the world, at least until we start dying off in 30 years or so.

Is the US any different? I'm pretty sure it's almost impossible to get a criminal conviction for bad debt these days. Maybe in a really extreme case like a deliberate fraud scheme that used defaulting as a key part of the process, but not a normal person just normally not repaying a loan.

If you're able to get the answer, it's correct, so no need to quote anything. Could be a hard-coded loc key.

Good resource! Alas, the specifics really depend on the language.

Try to profile the code and see where it's spending time.

Get a good flame graph up, and you'll have a really solid visual representation of what's going on.

Bonus: on almost any project, nobody has done a profiling pass in at least a few months, so you'll probably discover some extremely easy performance improvements and you'll look like a goddamn hero when you speed up e.g. the test suite by a factor of 3 in your first week on the job.

C suite comp is largely stock, so they are held accountable financially, their compensation literally rises or falls directly with the company's value.

Arranged marriages are barbaric and effectively rape in many cases, though, especially when they are forced based on threats of disownment or worse, which is common depending on the culture. In some places it is a lot more explicitly threatening. I don't really care whether people who are abused and brainwashed into signing on to participate in and perpetrate on the next generation horrific practices claim to be fine with the crap themselves, that's basically the story of every abusive religious practice ever, beat kids into thinking God will hate them unless X and they're going to tell you X is amazing as adults.

Eh, by that logic you shouldn't consider any fintech company to be "real world" either because they just involve moving bits around in the banking world.

The difference is that you consider the traditional banking world legit and the crypto one scammy and fake, which is a perfectly valid opinion to have, but completely begs the particular question of whether any of this shit has real world utility.

But once you merge 1, your test suite is broken, and many/most companies wouldn't allow that.

As an American who lived through the 90s, Brian Eno is a household name. YMMV from other backgrounds, for sure.

NB: when you share links like that, nobody who doesn't have access can see the results

I'm guessing you're well under the age of 40?

This is a universal complaint that can apply to almost any heritability study. And I'm not aware of any situations where a further investigation found it to be devastating to the original conclusion (mainly because actually covering all the edge cases you're calling out is somewhere between "cost prohibitive" and "impossible").

That makes me think it's just a generic "I don't like this conclusion so I'll criticize it" Joker card that people play, and not a legitimate debunking.

You're seriously comparing driving for Uber to working in a coal mine, selling your organs, and selling yourself into slavery or prostitution?

When I was in college I drove pizzas and Chinese delivery for $2 an hour plus tips. It was fine, and I was happy for the work, which was the best I could find part-time. I'd have been much happier if I could have driven for Uber, and I'd have missed rent payments far less often. Miss me with the "this should be illegal" stuff, it's a completely different thing than any of the other stuff you mentioned.

Jesus f with the "slave" overdramatization, that is just ridiculous. Most of the people driving for Uber would not have been driving cabs and living wonderful lives otherwise, they'd be slinging burgers at McDonald's or just unemployed. They wouldn't be making the choice to drive if it didn't make sense for them, which makes it "work", not "slavery".

I'm sorry that the world doesn't offer magical fairyland jobs that are super easy, require zero skill, and pay super well, I really am - as a society we should be aiming for an abundance economy fueled by automation, where everyone shares in the spoils. But running a business that gives people work that they are generally happy to have the option to take is not infringement on anyone's independence or freedom. Just don't drive for them, and you'd be in the exact same position you were in without them existing (unless you were profiting from the heavily cartel-ized taxi system which abused all the customers, in which case I can't give a bigger shrug).

If you've ever run analytics at even a mid-sized company (let alone large, where it's even more critical to keep this stuff), getting daily mDAU is trivial and you'd have to have a grossly irresponsible data policy to be unable to pull that.

Nobody worth their wage drops data that aggressively unless they are compelled by law.

At a certain type of design-centric company the culture shifts, and divas are both created and elevated to a degree that you don't see elsewhere. Most companies don't tolerate that sort of artist/designer because they're obnoxious and generally horrible people (and they don't work well with others so unless the culture is one that prioritizes them over everyone else they tend to flail and fail pretty quickly) but here and there you'll find pockets where they thrive.

I think you're absolutely right that in general artists are not like that. It's a few bad apples, and for the most part they don't ever have much opportunity to do damage because it takes an exceptionally weird company to enable them.

That has failure modes, though, especially death on one of the N (might seem unlikely but I just had to help a friend unfuck a family member's finances after he died in a car accident next to the one trusted associate who had all his logins saved in an account locked behind 2FA secured by his iPhone which he didn't leave the unlock code to with anyone). I know there are other schemes where you only need M of N to turn the key, but really...

Leave. Your. Passwords. With. An. Attorney. And also your phone unlock code. A reputable attorney (preferably attached to a big firm) won't lose your stuff, and if they die or go out of practice they will have procedures in place to make sure you are set. This is not a situation where you want some clever DIY scheme that might fail and leave your loved ones scrambling to sort your finances when they are already devastated and mourning.