kdmccormick

Because raising children is essential to the survival of human society.

If we're going to be brutually economic about it: Are you invested in stocks or bonds at all? If our population collapsed, so would those. Today's investors' wealth is tied to the success of future generations.

Your point was my initial reaction, too. But hey, these people have been raising kids to survive in the freezing cold for hundreds of years, who am I to say they're wrong?

I bet there is a certain delicacy to telling the stories as allegories so that you can transition them from fantasy to rationality as the kid grows.

For example, the "sea monster that swallows you and brings you to another family" sounds like an allegory for "the water will drown you and bring you to the afterlife / death". If you respect your kid's intellect, I bet that you can explain that connection to them once they're getting too old to believe myths, while still holding onto the emotional connection.

I think GP means that picking fruit has a direct, meaningful impact on consumers--fresh food--whereas the positive impact of the next saas thing is indirect and often dubious.

But yeah, harvesting as a community sounds more meaningful to workers than mass fruit production does.

Nothing innately "wrong" but I can see it fueling resentment among working class Japanese towards these foreign, exclusively-wealthy digital nomads.

Agreed it is unsettling.

For what it's worth, there's some peace of mind in that this software is probably tested much more thoroughly than the average piece of Web software or whatever. Version control / security best practices / clean code may be too abstract for these old companies, but testing isn't. You'd hope.

You're comparing a situation that happens all the time (opposing traffic) with one that happens extremely rarely (blocked stairwell in a fire). If anything, you're strengthening my point.

We should design for situations to a level that is appopriate given their frequency and severity. Show me evidence that MANDATING the extra stairwell justifies the huge increase in national housing cost, and I'll concede.

> I can’t control if my neighbor blocks the stairwell with a couch that gets stuck while he’s moving in and now I have no egress if my other neighbor starts a fire.

That is an extremely specific situation!

> How is double stair MFH overzealous?

There is a cost to every regulation. The cost to this one is that housing is more expensive for all Americans. Stress, poverty, and homelessness all lead to negative health outcomes. Taken as a whole, those negative outcomes may very well outweigh the fire safety benefits of double-stair (which have never been proven to exist).

> I’m in favor of greater freedoms, and the freedom to choose a single stair MFH if I want. > But I don’t want.

Right, so it sounds like you are in favor of removing the double-stair regulation?

If I were Zuck with Zuck's goals or Zuck with my goals?

I have had both problems. As it turns out, unsurprisingly, it varies from person to person.

It can also vary within a single person. They might, for example, ask questions too quickly when stuck on a technical question that could be solved by reading docs, but ask questions too slowly when stuck on an ambiguous product requiment that can only be personally answered by the PM or UX person.

This is it. The real answer to this whole debate is "it depends" but for some reason that doesn't seem to satisfy people.

> I don't care about politeness I care about kindness.

Your original comment is not kind either, my friend.

Genuinely useful feedback is the best, for sure. But hearing a generic "no" still makes it easier to take a deep breath and move on as soon as they decide against you rather than weeks later when you've decided it's appropriate to give up hope.

FTA:

> The effect of getting ghosted for me, and likely others, is impactful. The narrative in my head played out like this: “was I really so bad that they wouldn’t even tell me no?” It was also a chilling effect for my projects that involved generative AI. I didn’t want to work on them. Every time I logged into my Github, I was reminded of the company because I still had a fork of the take home assignment. It took about a month for my project work to feel normal again, but I shelved some of my LLM projects and moved on.

How is this "half a breakdown"? They stopped working on their side projects for a month. That's a completely understandable result after having spend hours of your life interviewing and not even getting the courtesy of a "no". I'm happy with myself when I make any significant movement in my side projects within a month, so I can certainly imagine that a disappointing professional experience would zap my personal coding motivation for a few weeks. That's a not a breakdown--that's human nature. Most people aren't coding on the side at all.

> The whole idea that we can apply the norms of personal relationships to a business transaction like this with 100s of candidates, no pre-existing relationship beyond 1-2 calls at mostand at best a generic rejection is basically displaced disappointment turned to resentment and anger. To which I say, you can either rant about it online and hope they change, or you can learn to regulate your own emotions.

What? We can't extend common courtesy into business transactions? You sound... tough to work with. Yes, resiliency is important and great and we should all strive for it. That doesn't mean we should throw away longstanding norms of professional decency.

Also, calling this a "rant" is unfair. It was well-written and calmly worded. A lot of people are reading it. Some of them might go back to their job Monday and think "oh, I should ask if the recruiter ever followed up with the rejected candidates".

Driving brings out the worst in people. You're all trying to get somewhere, you're all a danger to one another, and, critically, you can't see faces well. So, you end up receiving offenses against you as if they're personal (because you're you!) but commit offenses as if they're impersonal (because others look like cars, not human beings).

Would you rudely shove youself in front of someone at the market to get the next spot at the cash register? Probably not. But, would you block oncoming traffic by tailgaiting the person who took a left in front of you, instead of just waiting one more light cycle? Absolutely.

I think there is a certain skill in being a go-to person in such a way you regularly unblock other people, but also respect your own time and ambitions.

Are you constantly being asked how a system works? Take some time to document it, and then answer future questions by just linking to those docs. It's harder up front, but saves you time in the long run, and also mean that come performance review time you can say "I wrote this documentation <link>!" instead of having to vaguely claim that you definitely answered a lot of questions for a lot of people.

Of course, some companies don't respect that sort of work. I would struggle to be happy at those places.

> But "Supporting" a browser doesn't really mean very much. As long as the browser is standards compliant and websites continue to build to the standard it will still work.

FTFY

"This website is best viewed in IE" was not just a misguided suggestion from the webmasters. It was a statement that the site may rely on nonstandard IE-specific features.

How confident are you that Apple and Google will never agree to add some matching non-standard "extension APIs" to Safari and Chrome?

Unfortunately, some gyms are now using 5.9+ to mean a grade between 5.9 and 5.10a, which is very different than the traditional meaning of 5.9+.

> Work to limit the scope and reach of US intellectual property law?

Very cool. I don't doubt that it's impactful work.

I still think you're way off base with your views on EA :)

Thank you! I love you. So so excited. Thank you, thanks. Love. Thank you, and you and you. Thank you. Love, Sam.

Hi, I'm pro-EA and also in favor of significantly higher taxes, higher infra spending, medicare for all, UBI, and changes to corporate law that would lessen the power that multinational corporations have over developing countries. A lot of EAs feel that way, perhaps most.

I can't singlehandedly change the US tax code, budget, and foreign policy. But I can donate a chunk of my income, and I can participate in online communties which debate the most effective way to spend those donations. So I do, and EA has made it easy for me to do that.

How does that square with your made-up history about billionaire philanthropy? What do you do to make the world a better place?

The idea is that you can have a belief and derive emotion from it without ever consciously acknowledging the belief.

Aaron had some deep-down, partially-formed belief that he worked harder than his partner Jim, without even knowing it. That subconscious belief led him to be passively aggessive.

By acknowledging that belief and the associated anger, he can now look at the belief logically and solve it. Does Aaron truly believe that he is a harder worker than Jim, and is that a problem? If so, he should talk to Jim about taking on a side job or more chores, or maybe break up with him. If not, then he should consider what might be fueling that belief. For example, Jim might work his ass off practicing and performing and cooking good food, and perhaps Aaron could do more to appreciate that.

I am not well versed in any of this, but from reading the counterarguments, I think two good points are being made:

* Analogies aside, neurons are quite different than NN nodes, because each neuron has an incredibly complex internal cellular state, whereas an NN node just has an integer for state.

* A brain is not a "function" in the way that a trained LLM model is. Human life is not a series of input prompts and output prompts. Rather, we experience a fluid stream of stimuli, which our brain multiplexes and reacts to in a variety of ways (speaking, moving, storing memories, moving our pupils, releasing hormones, etc). That is NOT TO SAY a brain violates causality; it's saying that the brain is mechanically doing so much more than an LLM, even if the LLM is better at raw computation.

None of this IMO precludes AGI from happening in the medium term future, but I do think we should be careful when making comparisons between AGI and the human brains.

Rather than comparing "apples to gorillas", I'd say it's like comparing a calculator to a tree. Yes, the calculator is SIGNIFICANTLY better at multiplication, but that doesn't make it "smarter" than a tree, whatever that means.

> what this nomenclature gymnastics buys you?

???

Are you writing off all abstract mathematics as nomenclature gymnastics, or is there something about this connection that you think makes it particularly useless?

I still find valuable the idea of evaluating charities based on their effectiveness, but I guess you could rely on charity evaluators for that without taking on the entire conceptual burden of EA.

Yup. I give to the extreme poverty and animal welfare funds, because they seem like a great way to give to well-vetted high-impact charities.

The longtermism stuff has always struck me oddly alongside those other obviously-beneficial causes. It's a bummer that's all some people think of when they hear EA.

Hundreds of examples? Can you name one?

As someone who works at a non-profit that partners with various for-profits, I'm skeptical that the IRS would allow such sort of large-scale tax fraud to happen.

I believe OAI Inc employees and board members have no equity, but OAI LLC employees can have equity.

I appreciate your take. I didn't know that was his stated reasoning, so that's good to know.

I'm not fully convinced, though...

> if you publish a model with scary capabilities you can’t undo that action.

This is true of conventional software, too! I can picture a politician or businessman from the 80s insisting that operating systems, compilers, and drivers should remain closed source because, in the wrong hands, they could be used to wreak havoc on national security. And they would be right about the second half of that! It's just that security-by-obscurity is never a solution. The bad guys will always get their hands on the tools, so the best thing to do is to give the tools to everyone and trust that there are more good guys than bad guys.

Now, I know AGI is different than convnetional software (I'm not convinced it's the "opposite", though). I accept that giving everyone access to weights may be worse than keeping them closed until they are well-aligned (whenever that is). But that would go against every instinct I have, so I'm inclined to believe that open is better :)

All that said, I think I would have less of an issue if it didn't seem like they were commandeering the term "open" from the volunteers and idealists in the FOSS world who popularized it. If a company called, idk, VirtuousAI wanted to keep their weights secret, OK. But OpenAI? Come on.

> "Open"AI (the name is an insult to all those truly working on open models, but I digress)

Thank you. I don't see this expressed enough.

A true idealist would be committed to working on open models. Anyone who thinks Sam was in it for the good of humanity is falling for the same "I'm-rich-but-I-care" schtick pulled off by Elon, SBF, and others.

You've got to be kidding. Really, are you kidding? That's an extremely weak litmus test for goodness.

Plenty of people maintain extremely close connections with their families while engaging in activies that are terrible for the world around them. Organized criminals. Terrorists. Business magnates. Political families. Corrupt police officers. Plenty of these groups are made out of tight-knit families.

It's common, dare I say human nature, to prioritize the needs of your family. That is honorable and important, but being a Good person requires caring about strangers too.

Any good LVT in my mind would robustly employ "conservation easements", which lower/waive taxes on land that is preserved for environmental protection. These are a common tool of land trusts today, and IMO they would fit great alongside LVT.