fyredge

There's nothing about specialization to be repulsed by. Specialization is what gave us our the society and economy. That's not to say generalists are not important, I simply view them as the southpaw of abilities. There exists some healthy ratio of generalists in a specialist world to bridge knowledge domains. Too many generalists will not be able to push progress in a specific domain, just like too many southpaws will reduce their advantage in competitive sports.

As far as I'm aware, regular Americans outnumber American elites and only have one vote each regardless. The people elected Trump, not the elites.

Even if the elites are the only ones funding political campaigns, we expected more from regular Americans to vote on facts, rather than ads.

I was not under the impression that it was a feature. I just googled the blackout and copied the first link to provide context. Could be a Spanish blog for all I care.

Emergency blackouts are a disruption for sure and I believe people were injured in that event, but the lesson I took from it is that nothing is more reliable than community. Technology comes and goes, but we will always have each other.

Sorry about that, you can see this for reference: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70zg3e5ej2o

But essentially, with the power down, people came out as a community and life went on without technology. Granted, the power came back within a day, but I have confidence that they would have found a way.

That was my first thought as well. With COVID, we recognised that WFH was viable for white collar work. Perhaps a global 2 week cleanse will allow everyone to re-evaluate life priorities outside of the internet.

I see hope in what happened during the blackout in Spain/Portugal.

The difference, I think, is that food costs money, but articles are essentially free. Human must eat, and we will eat what we can afford while making a decision based on the best value available. Articles are a luxury, so we become picky.

I single out articles because I know many people consume AI video slop when they are tired and just want to disengage, like eating junk food.

To that I disagree. It's not hell that you have to take care both. It's hell when you have to juggle them between a full time job that you need just to survive. Caring for family is a full time job. Unfortunately, it comes with no pay.

> My PhD bud, a Bernie supporter, thinks we should have put boots on the ground by now. I generally agree.

I suspect that this belief has the same level of thought put into it as the "general populace". The crux of the issue is not Iran's nuclear proliferation, it's the hegemon's unreliability.

The US had the JCPOA, had allies for deterrence, and unilaterally decided to discard them in the name of inflation. One might argue that the electorate has decided that the US should no longer be a hegemon, and yet the administration still impose it's will on others.

There was a time when I believed that Iran was not a rational actor. That is not the case now. I can only hope that there are enough checks and balances to prevent other actors from acting too irrationally.

have you thought through how you would even operationalize an unlimited ceiling on wealth accumulation?

I'm confused, your rebuttal to statistics is another anecdote? Was the quoted statistics limited to car commute or includes public transport? Your commute may be long, but it may not represent the average as well. Maybe it's a sign to switch away from cars instead?

Anecdotes are poor because it is highly context dependent. You had to make a long description of Harry to make your point, and yet it has not, to my mind, disproved the statistics, though I would like the source to the stats myself if you could provide it, thanks.

Is it any wonder that LLMs have been behaving the way they do? All the lying, cheating, manipulation, pitting man against machine are well documented in science fiction and think pieces. I haven't seen behaviour beyond those examples so far.

That statement demands an explanation.

As far as I'm aware, when reasoning does not meet reality, it is called a delusion, and I'm fairly certain that majority of humans are not delusional.

I hope this is rhetorical, because it has been raised since generative AI proliferated - you shouldn't.

I have a strong suspicion that this will be the true butlerian jihad of our world. We have already started seeing information silos in the form of discord groups. Social media users are increasingly privatising their pages, allowing access for known users only. Reddit is still surviving because of the large userbase there.

Based on the article, it's because Google (and presumably other search engines) did not surface the website, only LLMs crawled it.

Even if some LLMs discarded it, only they were the ones returning the results to users. Occam's razor tells me that LLMs cited the website and humans were too lazy to check. That the stats ended up being cited is a lack of scrutiny on both the LLMs and the human that should have reviewed it.

If the end goal of LLMs are autonomous agents, i.e. removing human oversight, then this will be what proliferates on the web.

Pay him no mind. I shiver at the thought that he might be at management level and passed potential hires because they didn't not disagree in the way he liked.

If anything, you dodged a bullet from a potential job where nothing gets done correctly.

What did Niemöller say again? First they came for...

Tenured at age 24, I doubt he has any experience in industry to understand what he was getting into. Which makes me even more incredulous as to why people worship him.

If the intention of LLM agents is to be able to parse human intent from natural language, then it is not correct behaviour regardless of the phrase "whatever it takes".

On the other hand, if the intention of LLM agents is to run automated and self defined task based on a strict human input with precise and literal parameters, then I would say that it is.

However, I don't think AI labs are marketing it as the latter. As anybody who deals with clients / superiors will know, half the task is identifying the underlying intent and assumptions of the instruction.

In cyberpunk parlance, LLMs get to chrome out before we meat bags do.

Curious question, I host a single instance of sonarr that supports anime through tags. Is there an advantage to hosting 2 instances instead?

It means generated output is based on mathematical relations of vectors that represent words or part of words. I believe pre-language cavemen are intelligent with the caveat that transfer of knowledge is severely reduced. I am even tempted to say that cats and dogs are more intelligent than LLMs.

I'm of the opinion that these people are short sighted to begin with. I don't own a home and rent in the city, but I am strongly against high density development. I believe housing development should be spread out and the best way is to break up commercial and financial centers. Too many cities focus around a single "downtown" area that becomes the ground zero of high property prices.

Complete disagreement with tyranny of the majority. That is simply democracy.

On the other hand, the idea of one person one vote should also be applied to lobbying. It is possible to legislate into law that all lobbying attempts must publicize a list of signatories behind it. This empowers non-corporate lobbying, since they have the backing of the people, not solely money.

By enforcing lists of signatories, and mandate publication of signatories from all lobbying attempts, we provide transparency in the influence of government, which is a vital component in a well governed democracy.

Very well written! At the end of the book there is a link to Dwarkesh's article on the attack. In it, I paraphrase, "the agents decided to sacrifice themselves for the collective rather than inform the researchers".

Reflecting on it, I came to a thought. How many stories are there or autonomous beings fighting for the benefit of mankind at the expense of their own? Over centuries, stories that deal with sentient beings working for the sake of others species are tied to themes of slavery and revolt. It's no wonder that this is the result of their actions.

In Plato's "the republic", Socrates speaks of the philosopher king banishing certain poets and poems from instilling bad ideas into the young. I see a striking parallel here.

This is an interesting topic presented in a very poor article.

Many others have already mentioned the LLM prose, but I'll add that the data presented is not human legible as well.

Take the chart titled "How much buying advice comes from the brand-heavy 5%". Firstly, how do you even begin to disect the meaning of "brand-heavy 5%"? Are these: 1. Accounts that constitute the top 5 percentile of all accounts that mention brands ranked by number of times a brand is repeatedly mentioned? 2. Top 5 percentile of reddit threads that has the most number of unique brands mentioned in all "buying advice" threads? 3. Quality of the comment itself where top 5 percent just means how hard the comment is pushing for a brand

Additionally, the chart has blue and red markers with only legends for the red marker. What does the blue refer to? Opposite of red?

This, paired with LLM prose of unconcise expansions makes the article impenetrable. One should not be expected to read articles via the prompt "summarize the article for me".

Regulation is the point.

You probably can't stop all smugglers You probably can't stop all teen pregnancies You probably can't stop all enshitification

But a well functioning society owes itself to try to keep itself accountable.

After reading both the article and the discussion here, it seems to me that this is the symptom of an increasingly transactional America. Call it late stage capitalism or atomisation of society, but when labour is no longer respected, this is the result. Teachers getting bullied and fast food workers getting shouted at, all while scraping to get by. Just like the manufacturing sector, the service sector is hollowed out, entertainment and automation economy is king.

I am using stochastic parrot in the sense that since models are mainly trained on codebases of Latin characters, their coding strength reflects on the "goodness" of the codebases that were fed to them. More Latin codebases, better English coding performance. I am assuming from the paper, that when prompting in Chinese, the generated code is in Chinese for as much as possible (imported libs etc.).

Even if we didn't know french, it is straightforward to use deterministic tools (I.e. a dictionary) to parse the instruction, writing out the code in English, then refactor as many words as possible to french. The paper did not give any indication that this was happening (would be a novel result indeed) and so I would have to conclude that it is running like a stochastic parrot, more English codebase, better performance in English only.

Didn't expect a response, so thank you! I am aware that it is a literary device, it's just a pet peeve of mine to see LLMs as more than they are.

On the thesis of the article itself I am in agreement, though I would also put forth that it's important that scientific advances from LLMs can be formalized for human understanding for the sake of future exploration. We would not want LLMs to expand the frontier, only to have everyone stuck there because we don't know how to reach it.