riversflow

> No browser deserves special treatment here.

Completely disagree. Privacy is a 4th ammendment right, so the government has a duty to support privacy first browsers. How am I "secure in my ... papers and effects" if I must use a privacy destroying browser to interact with the Government? If anything, chrome support is what should be questionable.

What does a government site need that you can't do on firefox? Honestly this is disenfranchising, you should consider the ethics of what you are proscribing for the populace. I should have a right to choose a browser that respects my privacy from a PC.

How are you going about your treatment of disappearing messages?

> Everyone, even, kids under 8

Is this satire? I don’t need a smartphone, anything that lets me answer a call would work, and I’m in my 30s. Always connected internet isn’t necessary, it’s a crutch.

I read this as your peace of mind being more important than maintaining a schooling environment conducive to education. We need to protect kids, not expect our kids to protect us, which is what expecting them to be able to contact you during school is, protecting you from anxiety. This seems incredibly selfish, but not out of line for a society so incredibly narcissistic as that of American Millenials.

Neither are common though?

That's only true in a perfect globalized market economy. To head you off, I understand the the downward shift of the demand curve when the price level rises, that makes complete sense. However, if the net result of not having protectionist trade policy is a loss of on-shore production and at a later date their is global instability, whether from a pandemic virus or war, such that a global market no longer functions freely, then wouldnt the "expense" be an investment? Demand for cars is fairly elastic I would imagine, so wouldn't domestic suppliers increase production?

Looking at vehicle production through the single dimension of economics without considering geopolitics seems naive.

I learned to do it by isolating what made my ears pop when I yawn. I explain it as “kinda like yawning without opening your mouth” which seems to work.

Don't even need to be an engineer just go ride some nice bikes, it is an amazing and very tangible lesson in the cost of unsprung weight.

So far people in rich countries just export their dirty business to a poorer place. They don’t give up on those products or processes.

Why is there every reason to believe that we can do those things without environmental destruction? Seems like wishful thinking. If people in rich countries actually cared, they would demand things were made in their country with environmental regulations, not imported from somewhere that doesn't care.

> The idea that we're at some fundamental limit where we can't keep building technology without destroying the environment seems wrong.

It is wrong. Technology fundamentally requires the destruction of the environment, to make a spear you must nap flint and harvest a hard, straight stick. That’s resource destruction on a very small scale.

We have scaled up to Billions of people and near ubiquitous hi-tech. So the scale is what’s eating us, the earth is big, but 8 Billion people is a heck of a lot when every one of them requires highly refined goods.

It's a bummer that Meta didn't give this a little bit more love. Would be cool if I could play Cicero. Playing online would be really cool, naively it seems like the absolute amount of compute needed for each marginal game shouldn't be that high. Meta could even harvest my gameplay. But I'd settle for being able to run it on my own hardware, unfortunately the github seems abandoned, the model weights encrypted, and there wasn't enough interest in it that they got leaked--much less packaged into something easier to install.

Seems kinda bizarre to me to spend all this time and effort making an AI play a game that requires a very human touch, only to shutter the whole thing. Why not have a few people package it up and let anyone who wants Play it?

> Perhaps they will be motivated by self-preservation, and humans are destroying the environment they exist within

From the perspective of an AI we create and maintain the environment they exist within (electricity, silicon)

> DDG ultimately is just repackaged Bing search results.

That was true at one time. I've been using DDG for many years; daily drive it and Firefox, but have been experimenting with Edge and Bing, now Copilot.

Honestly, Bing search is amazing, better than google in my head-to-heads for quick reference or learning about something your not as familiar with. Both have a lot of "data field" results, which I want to curmudgeon about being distracting but are honestly quite handy sometimes, same goes for suggested searches. DDG is very old school by comparison, but that's also what I want when I'm drilling down.

An aside, I'm surprised that nobody really talks about Edge. I run Firefox specifically because I don't want to run V8. Edge has a really good implementation Tree style Tabs, another feature I refuse to sacrifice, and overall it's featureful but still fast, the only thing it's missing is never getting implemented, containers. The LLM integration though is super cool, and makes me wonder what iPhones will be like when Apple finally gets this tech in it's products.

AI alignment is sort of like computer security except computer security is a real pressing problem and AI alignment is based on science fiction.

He is engaging in magical thinking. I showed a factual error, that AI has neither information gathering and verifying capability or a network of peers to substantiate their hypothesis, and you refuse to engage it.

> All we have to do for any of these is… implement them.

An idea isn't a solution. I don't know what you are even talking about. Until we are actually solving these problems in a substantial way we have nothing but hope, we don't know that anything will pan out.

> Can too.

There is no 100% automated lab. Tools being controlled by a computer doesn't mean they are loaded, prepared and most importantly maintained by humans. And Science requires different types of labs, I just watched a documentary about the making of the new Malaria vaccine, and how challenging it was to produce the ~cup of vaccine needed for clinical trials vs producing enough for validation was fascinating.

> Irrelevant

no it's not. We are so far from 100% automation of anything. Some human being has to install and maintain literally everything in every factory. Nobody is making self maintaining bots, much less ones that can do everything.

> So incredibly and wildly false

Comparing human seamstresses to even the latest crop of Robotic fabric handlers(that haven't seen mass market penetration best I can tell, so are still unproven in my book) is like comparing OSMO to a construction worker. It's not false. That video, which I watched with interest, is not convincing at all, having seen more traditional jeans making places.

> Most of the problems with manufacturing these days are specifically the human part of it.

Because the human part is by far the hardest.

> do actually follow that link I gave you before https://github.com/GT-RIPL/Awesome-LLM-Robotics

Ok and? nice Gish Gallop I guess?

> the 'useful' mutations win.

Thats testing.

> 18 months ago, so was having an AI make

Nah, I've been waiting for this since Adobe released Content Aware Fill over a decade ago.

> No, the planet is not becoming uninhabitable

We are destroying the biosphere quickly. Have you seen a reef lately? Globally we still rely on our biosphere for food. We haven't solved this problem. If we can't feed everyone it's not inhabitable.

> lots of people out there get benefits from the things that cause all the various kinds of pollution

Hence we need lots of breakthroughs to replace these old technologies, whether they be fishing or cancer treatments.

> AI can easily follow the scientific method,

It can't interact with the world so it can't perform science. Boston Dynamics has teams of human beings making robots, which are largely preprogrammed.

Making stuff in real life is really hard even with humans. We are so far away from needing to worry about this sort of AI safety. I mean, we haven't solved robotic fabric handling yet, it's why we still have sweatshops sewing our clothes.

> If he's a crank, it should be easy to explain specifically why he's wrong.

Sure. The premise that a super intelligent AI can create runaway intelligence on its own is completely insane. How can it iterate? How does it test? Humans run off consensus. We make predictions and test them against physical reality, then have others test them. Information has to be gathered and verified, it's the only rational way to build understanding.

They have no way to test that model though.

> The main constraint is competency.

Oh right, anyone can be a chemist, it requires no skill, that why labs aren't a core part of the course work.

Ai researchers are really good at telling other fields their work, that they have no experience in, is easy.

> "all the info is already online" argument is also an argument against LLMs in general.

No it isnt. That's like saying, "You can walk" is an argument against cars.

Am I the only person who has read a bunch of Elizer writings and decided he's a crank?

> The only way to prevent that

You mean a complete hypothetical outside of scifi? Lets start worrying about alien invasions too?

Our planet is actually, not hypothetically, becoming uninhabitable due to pollutiom. I am so tired of ML people thinking they are god and have created something of infinite power. The hubris.

The birds eye view is that we need tons of major breakthroughs to allow us to overcome this climate disaster while also figuring out how to make 8 Billion+ comfortable and happy without turning the earth into a toxic waste dump, and we need this ASAP. This nonsense about AI safety is going to have a negative net affect on the lives of Billions of people, by slowing down the progress thay could be made.

AI X-risk is a complete sham being used to try and control a new, powerful tool. Science requires the scientific method, which requires physical embodiment, trial and error, and disciplined observation and measurment. AI has 0 ability to do any of that, we don't even have online learning(I think that's the term, where the model learns from its usage) in any of these large models.

You got me excited that Github Copilot was free. Was going to post to tell you it is, in fact, not free. I've been using Bing on Edge browser for a while now, it's super useful! Sad that they rebranded it to Copilot though, "I have been a good Bing :)" will be forever in my memory. [1] RIP Bing, you were a good chat mode.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Feb/15/bing/

> I don't see copyright or a record label as artificial scarcity.

Any concept of ownership beyond "what is possessed and am in physically controlled" is artificial. The law of nature is that might makes right.

I never said urban sprawl was good, get outta here with that. Things could be different, but they aren’t. And it’s not like any of those things you mentioned are likely to change rapidly either. I speak to the present day reality, which is that cars serve a lot of people as a capital asset and they don’t have to cost 12k/year.

I’ve driven a $3k car for almost 15 years. It has needed 3 sets of tires, 2 sets of front struts, a brake job, new power steering lines and a timing belt. I did all of that work, less the tires, myself. I spend about $1000 a year on insurance and registration.

The utility I get out of the car, in absolute terms, is incomparable to my ~$1500 bicycle(that I purchased for utility and even commuted on for several years). I have slept in my car many times. My car has snacks, spare clothes and shoes, a blanket, a pillow, towels, pen and paper, bags for groceries, kick scooters, folding chairs, spare chargers and cables, amongst other things.

Regular people need to bring things they own with them and take them back home. Bikes are trash for that. When I’m on my bike, my credit card serves the function of space.

> average annual ownership cost of $12000

Lots of people buy luxury cars, driving up that figure, so it hardly matters when we are talking about marginal utility for someone, shall we say, disadvantaged. Which I’m guessing you’ve never been?

My annual cost of ownership on my car is like $2500. I can sleep in my car too, and store clothes and food securely in it. Oh and get on demand heat & A/C access.

If you don’t have much, having a car is a lot.

> tell ISPs exactly where to spend the money

Thats what they are doing though.