607 karma · joined February 16, 2023
if it's not clear to you may i suggest with the upmost respect that you read surveillance capitalism by zuboff (a successor to manufactured consent in my humble opinion).
I guess my question is where do you get the confidence or belief these companies are doing anything BUT evil? how many of americas biggest companies' workers need food aid from the govt? look up what % of army grunts are food insecure. in the heart of empire.
Where on earth do you get this faith in companies from?
does it ever occur to your types of commenters (derisive of an entire field because of personal experience) that some people who talk about stuff like control systems/ai/safety recognize this, and it's actually why they want sensible policies surrounding the tech?
not because they're afraid of skynet, but because they observe both, the reading comprehension statistics of a populace over time, and the technological rate of progress?
tech very clearly doesn't have to be a god to do serious societal damage... e.g. fossil fuel use alone...social media has arguably done irreparable harm with fairly simple algorithms... the ottomans went to great lengths to keep the printing press from their empire, and certainly not because it was bullshit or god.
Or do you recognize those types and classify them as a negligible minority?
For anyone reading this, read Chip Wars by Chris Miller. The Lithography sub-story that threads through is amazing and fascinating and the whole book is incredible besides.
For those who think Ai Is a bubble and longshot, look up how crazy of a bet EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography was.
Anyone heard of Monero? Kind of their whole purpose... I know, I know, crypto bad, but when censorship comes for [insert your thing/country here], it kind of becomes obvious why people talked about crypto before btc was six digits. Anyone who knows how tech works and also any history about how authoritarian states work should probably see why crypto got so big in the first place, long before [insert scam that makes otherwise sensible people disregard an entire class of technology here].
How to best get masses of robotics operating in the real world data is debated. Can you get there in Sim2Real, where, if you can create a physically sound enough sim you can train your robots in the virtual world much easier than ours. See ... eureka ? dr eureka? i forget the main paper. Hand spinning a pen. The boston dynamics dog on a rolling yoga ball. After a billion robots train for a million "years" in your virtual world, just transfer the "brain" to a physical robot.
Jim Fan of nvidia is one to follow there. Then there's tele-operation believers. Then there's mass deployment and iterate believers (musk's "self driving" rollout), there's iirc research that believes video games and video interpretation will be able to confer some of that data from operating in the real world, similar to how it's said transformers learned utilized the implicit structure of language to learn from unclean data, even properly ordered text has meaning embedded in its relative positional values.
Just my summary of what I've seen of researchers who agree scaling text and train time is old news, I mostly see them trying to figure out how to scale "embodied" ai data collection. or derive a VLA model in fancy ways (bigger training sets of robotic behavior around a standard robot form factor maybe?) all types of avenues but yes most serious people recognize the need for "embodied" data - at least that I've read.
Take one quick look at any wealth inequality graph over time and "who's winning" will be pretty clear. Someone always wins. This is simply a step at privatizing everything. Straight out of project 2025.
Kagi 2025 noaa. I shouldn't even have to link it. The fact that their entire game was publicly laid out years ago... and still, people act ignorant or are legitimately not paying any attention to politics... We deserve all that this administration will cost us as a collective.
rest of the link is tracking to my (limited) understanding
e.g. jamal kashoggi (and his partner) had it on his phone when he got murdered by SA.
>examples where quality far exceeds our existing best in class work
I'm no expert, but what percentage of the economy needs/is best in class work?
I agree running up against the limits of these models after reading the marketing material can give the impression they're "a kludge for the mediocre" and they certainly are in part that, but they're also so much more.[0]
If only there was a metaphor to explain that. Maybe something about a mythical creature, hoarding piles of treasure.
Sorry, I guess I should've been clearer and added Properly implemented anti dragon tools. I assumed that was self evident. I suspect it is, given you clearly are capable of recognizing the problematic dragons I allude to.
>2.
No, it's definitely a question of basic needs. I exclusively mentioned income, healthcare, housing, food security as the policy objectives, and not cheap consumable goods/treats. There's a wealth of evidence that a society that provides guarantees around those basic needs has way fewer issues downstream. For a start, look to the healthcare outcomes in countries that have universal healthcare vs the US.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, as they say.
Yeah, almost like that MLK guy knew what he was talking about. Changes from the original quote will be italicized
"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the economic moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the poor's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the libertarian or socialists, but the economic moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the poor to wait for a “more convenient season.”
It's not that, dragons hoarding mountains of gold has always historically been an allegory for the rich hoarding wealth.
>'fulfilling' (for some) is always going to mean becoming a dragon.
Luckily we have anti dragon tools, like progressive taxation, wealth taxes, and robust social programs to prevent the dragons from sitting on too much gold.
>One example of a dragon was Saddam Hussein, who characterized oppression of the marsh Arabs as "being firm". So it goes. One possible exit from the cycle is the realization the 'fulfilling' is not necessarily measured in materialistic units.
Yeah, the fulfillment is the downstream byproduct of not having to worry about the difficulty of meeting daily material needs, not the justification for the policy itself.
Your assertion about tax planning misses that proper UBI implementation would include tax reform to ensure the wealthy can't avoid contributing. If anything it demonstrates your clear understanding of whom would actually be taxed to achieve the funding for such social programs. The dragons.
More importantly, the data shows UBI recipients spent money locally on necessities and small businesses, not funneling it to large corporations. The 'indirect subsidy' theory contradicts spending patterns observed in UBI trials.
Regarding Cuba and Venezuela - their economic challenges stem from complex factors but primarily U.S. sanctions, embargoes, and intervention attempts, not the "Marxism" you're hallucinating. More relevant examples would be the successful social welfare programs in Nordic countries, which maintain robust market economies while ensuring basic needs are met.
Try to focus on actual evidence from UBI trials rather than silly McCarthy era rhetoric.