khafra

I feel like "relatively" is doing a lot of work, there: at about $4k per GB10, that's $36k for a 1TB cluster. Cheap compared to equivalent H200's, but out of reach for home labs that aren't funded with OpenAI or Anthropic RSUs.

In the dark ages of machine learning, researchers tried to fit natural language into a defined, human-curated taxonomy.

It kinda worked, for a reasonable amount of stuff; but failed quite a lot of the time, and there's an extremely long tail of things that would have been pragmatically impossible to ever address with that method--indeed, without adopting an entirely new, unsupervised model of language, continuous in places where the old way was discrete.

If this becomes cheap and widespread, there'll likely be an initial iatrogenic spike, of course--but how could you think that having an enormous amount of precise, quantifiable data about a lot of bodies, and the ability to analyze all that data, is a bad thing in the long run?

Today, you keep seeing "sovereign" LMs that are subject to the sovereignty of some human-led state. Tomorrow, the "sovereign" LMs will be called that for a completely different reason.

> fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors.

Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.

> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.

That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.

I don't think he meant "show the actual data," I think he meant "what leaked? My name, address, phone number, email, medical records, payment history, bank account number?"

We get a "your private data is now public" email, but knowing exactly what data turns that from a depressing statement on how much corporations value their customers' privacy into something actionable.

Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief.

Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.

You're correct that, generally speaking, policy debates should not appear one-sided (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...). We should put very little prior weight on the hypothesis that one side is actual cartoon villains, from a children's TV show, with the simple goal of looting the system and no concern for how much of the future they destroy while doing so.

However, to be effective reasoners, we can't assign that hypothesis 0 prior probability; and once sufficient evidence has come in, our posterior distribution must shift.

I don't think there's any reasonable case for shutting down an early warning system which costs around the price of the new white house thunderdome every decade, and instead waiting to find out AMOC has collapsed when Scotland is hemmed in by year-round ocean ice and agriculture is impossible in Western Europe.

Stranded assets alone, in the latter case, will easily run to hundreds of billions. Knowing when to change crop profiles, reinsuance schedules, etc., would save much more.

Ted Chiang is a great SF author, but it's bizarre how much foggier and more obfuscated his thoughts about thinking machines got, once those machines became real. Same with several other SF authors.

I'm willing to buy the idea that most fund managers have the lattitude to give SpaceX the standard seasoning period, instead of buying in right when they hit the index. Which funds will do that? If it's all or most of them, that'd be nice.

And for a dev, that's essential professional ethics, and good personal pride as a craftsman.

However, from an operations perspective, a dev is a piece of the qa pipeline with a nonzero error rate, and an optimal throughput rate, above which that error rate rises dramatically.

As a dev, you'll never merge a bad PR; in ops, we want to help you with that goal, and also have plans for what happens when it fails.

When "guess with some magic" can solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to, it seems fair to ask whether it's approaching risky levels of intelligence.

This is not a contradiction; it's an augmentation. As an operations guy, I can tell you that well-constructed automation to reduce the amount of manual checking a human has to do almost always increases the quality of the overall process's output.

If you want to talk about ends, you're talking Axiology, not strictly Ethics. By "ceteris paribus correct," I mean that if you were programming a superintelligent AI--and you knew exactly what you were doing, rather than structuring a learning schedule and feeding that a corpus--you would want a consequentialist.

Deontology and Virtue Ethics are patches for flaws in human morality. For example, the deontological rule "never kill the leader of the group and take over, even for the good of the group" is there because power is instrumentally useful enough that evolved social animals will deceive themselves about why they want power, so naive consequentialism doesn't work for them.

Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends; only the tradeoffs. You could have a deontological commitment to never giving a sucker an even break. You could have a virtue ethicist who considers the Joker a paragon--I think some of them are in politics. Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing long-term gains. Consequentialism is ceteris paribus correct; but ceteris is often not paribus for humans, so pure consequentialism has a lot of footguns in it.

The death toll per heat wave can easily hit 5 figures in just france. A hybrid portable-minisplit that will cool a 100m^2 apartment is under a thousand euros, and draw just under a Mwh per year. A portable to cool one small bedroom is much less power-efficient, but can often be found between 200 and 300. That's not cheap, per se, but funerals aren't much less expensive in Europe than in America. Many EU countries allow some limited cooling in public buildings, but I still sweat in most grocery stores, malls, libraries, museums, etc. during hot weather--they just don't take air conditioning to a comfortable temperature as worth the power bill, the way America does.

If power is so cheap mid-day, why don't european buildings have sufficient air conditioning not to kill the elderly during heat waves? The laws restricting AC all have power conservation as their rationale.

Are you sure they're not the same thing? I'm quite certain I've heard people talk about "beef curtains."

What about your rouladen? Articulated steel blinds block quite a lot of light, don't they?

Should be able to use the local LLM to generate a short "They Live" style phrase based on the content of the ad.

The other scary part is when they have a fantastic negotiating position; because all of commerce depends on their continuing to work, and they can easily coordinate with each other because they're mostly copied from the same few templates.

A wise man once noted that the word "amusement" has the same structure as "deforestation."

(@stevenkaas on twitter).

"Did the vehicle just crash" has a short feedback loop, very amenable to RL. "Did this product strategy tank our earnings/reputation/compliance/etc" can have a much longer, harder to RL feedback loop.

But maybe not that much longer; METR task length improvement is still straight lines on log graphs.

One bad possibility is that AI & robotics advance to the point where they can do every job better and more cheaply than humans; and then humans are no longer employable and all die if they have insufficient capital to survive the period between unemployment and post-scarcity.

Another possibility is that, once AI exceeds human performance in all economically useful activities, including high-level planning, governance, law enforcement, and military actions, it discovers that the benefits of keeping humans around aren't worth the costs and risks.

> what does Anthropic do to prevent malicious use of its software by its own government?

Anthropic has ameliorated that danger by being designated a supply-chain risk by the DoW, preventing the USG from using it.

George Lucas vindicated once again.

Of course, once loitering, intelligent munitions make it too dangerous to be an economically valuable human outside of a bunker, we'll need robots running the robot factories, then we get Philip K. Dick's scenario in The Second Variety.

xkcd 1053, my friend.

Nice! Last time I had a custom temporary tattoo made, I had to copy and paste from Attention is All You Need; this provides a much cleaner and more varied source.

Oh, for sure, the capital "owners" get ganked either simultaneously with the rest of us, or shortly after. But that's not a factor in their decisions; because if they didn't build it, China would; and there's obviously nothing we can do about that. (and to some degree, they're right; international treaties to limit the development of world-ending technology is something that requires minimally competent governments, with an interest in preserving the world, on the majority of the sides of the treaty).

Ok, but when the looms can autonomously analyze the market, design the products, organize purchasing and sales channel, run production, and deliver the products, the workers will not be squeezed. We will be discarded.