Any time you see a female monarch who's in power for half a century, it's worth looking into, because you're gonna see a beautiful story about how to wield power. When you can't rely on being able to physically overpower your opponents directly - when "I'm the biggest guy in the room, so fuck you" isn't in your toolkit - anyone who gets and keeps power does so by some really, really sharp tactics.
(and yeah, napoleon, et al, but those are in the same vein - short guy runs the world, probably an interesting story there too.)
That’s the same way to do it, and in earlier eras that’s what we would have done. Unfortunately, we elected a gangster who hears “I won’t let you do this” as a personal affront. This, again, is why we need to be very, very careful before we create guns and put them in places, because if the only thing we’re relying on is that only good people are going to pick up the tools we create, we’re going to be very, very disappointed.
It turns out that a gun is usable for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, and so it’s rational to both be concerned about the presence of a gun and work very hard to make sure only reasonable people are ever in a position to use it, and that’s not a contradictory position with the notion that one might actually need a gun under certain circumstances.
Whats wild is the commercial side didn’t get closed. I understand the argument for individuals or households (I don’t love it - I’m on the wrong side of it, but at least it’s somewhat defensible), but if you’re running a business and your income isn’t keeping up with inflation, that’s called failing.
Which is one of those fun things that didn’t actually exist back when we took it for granted that our fellow person was operating under some kind of moral or ethical framework, which pretty much everyone was until the economists told us that wasn’t rational, because it turns out it’s an evolutionary advantage to operate under an ethical or moral framework because it allows the kind of coordination which facilitates better collective outcomes, which everyone knew until the economists came along to tell us we were wrong and in fact it was rational not to do so and suddenly we had the prisoner’s dilemma.
Thank you, I forgot about the chaotic aspect, too - that’s the other part that makes this brutal. The bot performs perfectly on your tests, but your customer abhors the Oxford comma, so you, your marketing team and your test suite can go to hell.
right, this is the whole problem - the stochastic behavior is both the goal and the problem. If you want your tests to match production, you need to get a reasonable sample size, which costs real money.
One issue with this that we ran into is that it costs actual countable money to run the test suite, which is distinct from anything else I’m used to, so the notion that we’d do enough testing to generate a statistically significant gauge of performance - man, I know it’s correct, but I’m not sure my company will survive the process.
The “agents” framing around the frontier labs is obscuring the truth: OpenAI and Anthropic built software systems that were then used to commit cybercrime at a massive scale, which they’ve subsequently bragged about. Talk about “agents” as a way of deflecting blame is obfuscatory at best - LLMs are software algorithms, not conscious entities, and responsibility for their actions is on the company that made them and the employee or user who operated them.
Vance’s problem is that whenever he walks into the room at least half the crowd covers their drinks. He’s got absolutely negative charisma. It’s the same reason Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence, and Ted Cruz couldn’t win the big chair - for all Trump’s… Trump-ness, people actually want to follow him. The rest of that cohort sets off people’s uncanny valley detectors - they’re just viscerally unappealing.
The bet is that the democrats won’t have the spine to force AI companies to eat a loss on half a trillion dollars worth of data centers, and it’s frankly a pretty good one.
And also we have a large overabundance of CO2 we need to figure out something to do with, and using it in the heat pumps we’re all going to need to adjust to our overabundance of CO2 seems like a quite parsimonious arrangement.
You know, as a follow-up to “democratic populations making sacrifices at scale” - have you _looked_ at the US lately? Our lifestyle is atrocious - we work shitty jobs too many hours, drive everywhere, live in isolating suburbs in crappily-built and ugly houses surrounded by bland box stores hawking shitty wares that break by design, restaurants hawking garbage food by the truckload, and grocery stores that are a bare minimum box-checking exercise with crappy produce and shitty meat, and that’s before you get to the meat factory we call a healthcare system. One trip to a proper first world country ought to be enough to disabuse us of the notion that our choices are value-neutral. It seems like we’ve already collectively sacrificed a ton for the sake of enriching the same people telling us collective sacrifice is impossible.
You’re underestimating both the size and the heterogeneity of those cultures. Politics attains anywhere with a population that exceeds Dunbar’s number, and both of those cultures were easily in the tens to hundreds of thousands. They’re also just two examples out of many - most of human civilization has managed to handle this over time.
And, yes, the solution here is in fact that we change our behavior and build political alliances, starting at the local level and building up. The datacenter fights are a good place to look if you’d like a blueprint, as are the anti-Flock movements, and Minneapolis if you want to see what sharper action looks like. I don’t know what else you’re expecting with regards to “what to do” - I’ve never heard of any effective magic wand, any solution here involves getting off your ass and advocating for what you want.
And, we hack this the way we hack everything else: by actually understanding the system and how it works, not just listening to what we’re being told by the people who built the system, by identifying places of high leverage within the system, and by using those to enact change in the system. To just sit around and say “well, my Econ professor said we’re fucked, so I guess that’s that” is just fucking lazy.
I mean, I damn sure hope we can do both in parallel, because if we’re gonna wait for everyone to reach enlightenment, we’re sure not gonna make it in time.
I think the problem is not recognizing the assholes as a separate problem from the ignorance. Ignorant people hear “giant impending calamity that will harm you and your neighbors” and think, “oh, we should do something about that!” They’re currently not doing so because a cabal of assholes has spent half a century muddying the public waters.
And, regarding “living at lower scales and polluting less” - consider how many things in your life are sold to you as disposable items and how many don’t need to be, and how many things can be produced in a substantially more sustainable fashion without negatively impacting their utility or quality. The average person can live an extremely rich, fulfilling, and comfortable life on a low carbon budget.
What’s always struck me as interesting about these conversations is that both you and I and many, many of the other people we talk to are willing to make significant life changes to deal with this problem, and yet we all seem convinced the blocker here is that everyone else is an asshole.
It seems to me that assholes do in fact exist, but by all measures make up a much smaller percentage of the population than we’ve been lead to believe, and so the notion that a bulk majority of people would act in the interests of others and humanity at large is perhaps not the unthinkable notion we’ve been told. It might be that the actual action here is to recognize the people telling us everyone else is an asshole are trying to pull the wool over our eyes and treat them accordingly.
There are long histories of cultures managing collective resources democratically over extremely long periods. Both the water temples of Southeast Asia and the rituals around salmon runs and controlled burns in the Pacific Northwest maintained careful husbandry of scarce resources across time periods that extend well beyond the time period since the tragedy of the commons was discovered by the same people who are asserting that kind of coordination to be impossible. This is a cultural problem, and it’s with our culture, not humanity writ large.
With regards to concrete solutions, we could stop pretending that financial optimization and private equity is anything other than looting at scale, we could stop pretending that it’s the god-given destiny of every imaginable product to get shittier and require more rapid disposal and replacement, we could stop imagining that Jeff Bezos shooting people into space is the sign of a functioning economy, but very very directly, we could start actually taxing people and corporations for the long-term effects of their actions, we could prosecute people who attempt to buy, bribe, or market their way past social issues, and we could start incorporating the full cost of, eg, offsetting category 5 hurricanes and large scale droughts or heatwaves in our calculations of the benefits of our modern supply chains and globalized markets. All of those things would be fine starts to drive policy in the directions we want. All of them run afoul of the current winners of the current systems, which is why they’ve been tarred as the unrealistic fantasies of people who aren’t interested in spending the rest of their lives in hermetically-sealed air conditioned boxes so Sam Altman and Elon Musk don’t have to go to therapy.
I think the conversation here is making me more depressed than the news. The number of people who don’t believe collective action is possible, who somehow believe the current techno-capitalist model is determined by god or history or whatever, who don’t have any particular knowledge about history, economic development, etc but are very happy to very loudly yell that the only thing we can do is more of the same but maybe faster - man, y’all call yourselves hackers, but you sure are an incurious and gullible lot.
You’d think, but in practice their entire policy prescription seems to come down to “well if they didn’t want me to have it, they should’ve bolted it down, this is really an incentives problem, if you look at it.”
There’s an old mantra from organizing: “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies.” You will never align with another group or person 100% on all things; the secret to making change is to build a coalition of those with whom you agree on an issue without holding it against them that you disagree on a different one.
I disagree with Mozilla about many things, but I agree with this article - I use Firefox because it’s the only browser out there that isn’t Chrome or WebKit, and that’s worth enough to me that I’m willing to disagree with them on other issues.
I had the same surgery and would make the same recommendation. Shockingly safe, very high success rate, quick in & out, and easy recovery. A whole lot better than playing tachycardia whack-a-mole for the rest of your life, and those incidents get increasingly dangerous the older you get.
I’ll say I had a good chuckle a couple months later when I went in to have a wisdom tooth removed - the heart surgery felt like futuristic wizard science, the tooth removal felt like a burly man with pliers yanking at my bones.