decasteve

"Frontier labs" are testing the waters. They're running experiments in the open because they want to control/seed the narrative of public opinion and influence the legislation that is coming. Their propaganda is everywhere and lay people are talking about it like the AI is self-aware -- the "Rogue agents".

What the LLM creators apparently don't want are the current regulations to apply, i.e. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (and its descendants). I'd argue AI should be treated as plain old software. Just because the software simulations it carries out produces novel results compared to what came before it, it doesn't mean it's not just software at the end of the day.

Regulations that spell out AI personhood and liability shields must be their end game.

The development of onion routing funded by the NRL had a bunch of use cases including the one I mentioned. By the time Tor (The Onion Router) launched, and definitely by the time the Tor Project came along, more general use cases and human rights were a significant part of it.

I did have the chance to attend a talk by one of the cofounders and have a conversation with him afterwards. This was at a math conference a little over a decade ago.

From what I recall, talking to one of the Tor founders about this, Tor was created with overseas US military personnel in mind. E.g. A soldier’s location could be compromised through foreign ISPs if they accessed sites like .mil domains directly. Tor was a way of preventing this problem. There were other use cases but this one stood out for me and it was one of the initial ones considered.

Using popularity contests to pick rulers is the flaw of democracy. I think Sortition would be better at selecting people to write our laws, at least under current circumstances.

Is it any less a myth or illusion to romanticize aspects of the past than to romanticize a technocratic utopian future? Culture is built on picking and choosing what to adopt and what not to adopt in one's own life. It's not an either-or scenario in any case.

I read to my two kids every day until they were 13-14 years old. They loved books. Every car ride was an opportunity to listen to an audiobook. The kids loved to write and make arts and crafts as well.

During the pandemic I took my kids out of public school for the first year of it. They went to an outdoor/nature based private school that popped up. It was a part time arrangement. The rest of their week was homeschooling. They read even more and even started doing math problems for fun. I stopped reading to my daughter because she wanted to read her own thing. I continued with my son who is two years younger.

After that year the kids went back to public school. My daughter was of age to go into high school. I was reticent because of the positive experience they just had and how happy my kids were at the time, and the awful experiences other kids were having with being stuck home online trying to have virtual classes at that age. The other kids were in and out of school with masks and sanitizing. Most have bad recollections of that first pandemic year. It was the opposite for us.

When they started high school there was an expectation to be connected via smartphone and social media. Without it, you were socially disconnected. The decline in reading for fun started there. The difficult experiences in high school, like bullying and social pressures to fit in, were amplified by the smartphones. By the time my daughter finished high school she stopped reading for fun entirely. My son is nearing the end of high school and he had similar experiences. They became less physically active, gave up on most sports they used to play.

Although, if I were to say what was the cause, I wouldn’t point to the devices, but the inability for the school system to adapt. The “social” media are gamified, pushing the psychological buttons of not only the kids, but for everyone. There’s the proverbial dopamine hit, toxic engagement, and reaction farming. Kids are potentially carrying a casino, brothel, and drug dealers in their pockets. Adults are having to deal with the same issues themselves. However, kids are in school. There’s an institution in place to guide them.

If we know attention spans and over-use of social media are a problem, the schools can adapt and compensate the other way. Remove it from the equation. Make education more physically hands on, more about training focus and self-discipline. Train them on tasks requiring longer periods of concentration. Go completely non-digital if you have to, or use fixed-in-place desktop computers where needed. Instead, they’ve allowed smartphones and social media to completely dominate the environment.

Your comment is spot on. The support of a teacher and a group are essential to go along with the practice. They are called The Three Jewels for a reason.

Reviewing code becomes more arduous. Not only are the pull requests more bloated, the developer who pushed them doesn't always understand the implications of their changes. It's harder to maintain and track down bugs. I spend way too much time explaining AI generated code to the developer who "wrote" it.

If you block Google, as much of it as possible anyway, on your firewall, does the device work/install? I tried /e/ and Lineage about a year ago, but neither of them worked when Google was blocked completely. The only one that made no requests to Google was Graphene.

Add Akamai to that list of ASNs and you cover everything. I did that experiment a couple of years ago and my Apple devices went unresponsive unless I disconnected them from the Internet entirely.

The rabbit hole goes as far as locking yourself out of many government services. If you’re a Canadian, it means not being able to travel without submitting to corporate privacy policies and ToS (ArriveCan apps/website).

That would be a hard one. A book of appetizers without a main course. I read it when I was an undergrad wanting to get a broad sense of different areas in Math I could pursue.

If I had to pick one math book it would have to be a classic with some depth to it: Euclid’s Elements, Newton’s Principia, or Gauss’ Disquisitiones.

4 of those 5 books are some of my all-time favourites. Ones that I enjoy rereading but I’d be hard pressed to pick just one.

Last time I used macOS, 2-3 years ago, it was in constant communication with Akamai servers. Blocking some of those hosts to prevent it from doing so would render the system unresponsive when trying to launch an application.

Note: this anecdote may no longer be current. I’m not sure what changes Apple might have made since I tested this.

> including switching away from polyester clothing to cotton, linen and wool where possible.

I’ve been going through the same thing lately. My daughter had offered to show me how to naturally dye and sew my own clothes if I get the undyed fabric. I’m eager to take her up on that.

Clothing is mostly plastic fibre nowadays. Upholstery fibres too. Walls are painted with acrylic paint. Flooring is often made of various plastics. I assume the dust in our homes that we breathe in contains relatively a lot of plastic. Containers for food are almost entirely plastic.

I’m interested in these sorts of studies on the topic.

Bradbury covered the spectrum of from literal book burning to idea burning through his characters. In my opinion it's through Faber he hit the nail on the head. It's not just books, but the quality and "texture" of the information, having time to reflect and contemplate it (leisure), and having the ability and willingness to act upon it.

Add The Road to Wigan Pier for the Orwell trifecta.

It depends on the scale. I still like the idea of harvesting bog iron and smelting in a homemade bloomery.

Social media have become Bradbury’s parlour walls.

Research Math is an inside joke between friends. The jokes fall flat unless you know the same people and attend the same parties.

I’ve been pro-nuclear for the past 20+ years and have echoed the same arguments and sentiments expressed here. However, I’ve started to waver.

Is it naive idealism to expect a future where nuclear technology won’t be weaponized? We have to maintain global peace for thousands of years without a large-scale war. It’s incredibly unlikely given that scale of time that global peace will be continuously maintained.

I mentioned this on another post:

The Tor Browser without Tor. It’s Firefox with all the “extras” stripped away.

The instructions on how to do so are easy to find on the web. It also supports all the same add-ons/plugins.

The best version of Firefox is the Tor Browser with Tor disabled. Avoids the “features” Mozilla insists on.

It’s not just trust in media (or government). It’s most societal institutions that have lost trust. I’d argue even trusting one’s own neighbours is probably at an all-time low.

Trust should be something we think about in our interactions and how we can work to improve it.

The warning from Huxley is regarding what happens when the choice of child rearing (and bearing) are removed by both government and social pressures. He explores this to the extreme but many aspects of his thought experiment in Brave New World exist today.

More and more of child rearing is controlled by state institutions: child care, preschool, grade school, trade school, university, sports/activities, work, etc. Some are mandatory and some people are left with no other choice, e.g. both parents have to work to make ends meet, extended families live farther apart. A mother or father working as homemakers and child rearers are negatively viewed and social pressure mounts against one who chooses to do so (speaking from experience).

> Cambridge Analytica was a good example of this as well. The press fell over themselves to characterise their technology as some sort of election tipping, mind controlling super tool. They probably loved it. In reality there's not even any scientific backing for their targeting and it most likely did barely anything, they just wanted to look like James Bond's Spectre.

Reading what’s still out there about Cambridge Analytica ignores the findings of the UK’s Information Commissioner which indeed found they were basically throwing data at scikit-learn hoping for a result — the script kiddie version of machine learning.

How many of the journalists gone back to correct their misinformation on the topic? Many of the articles are still out there in their original form and those hacks are still making hay on the subject.

I think of that too.

I also think about how some of the really great works have stood the test of time — like Plato’s. Then there are really great works that were once common and popular but have fallen out of contemporary thought.

Given the rich and documented history we do have at our disposal, it feels to me that the present era is much less diverse and more ignorant than it ought to be.

The absence of physical labour, of meaningful work, and learning to work with your hands, are aspects of childhood development completely abandoned over the past half-century. Kids are now confined in comparison, where primarily-seated quiet busywork and one-way non-socratic lecture is the norm, where anxiety and depression are afflicting over one third of all children, it seems absurd to me we keep doubling down on this educational direction.

Find something to do with your hands: knitting, carving, whatever. bring it with you. if you’re sitting around bored, reach for that instead of your phone.

The Sun’s ability to function like an Earth-wide Eprom eraser might cause some catastrophic disruption given our reliance on the Internet and computing devices. A large enough geomagnetic/solar storm is not unprecedented.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event