slibhb

Evidence for g in LLMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

If our ancestors worried more about technology obsoleting human labor we'd still be subsistence farmers. Priorizing usefulness is why we're rich today.

> If you are an engineer, how often has an LLM told you (without you explicitly prompting for it): Wait, what you are doing here doesn't really make sense, there exists a much more elegant abstraction that nobody has thought of, let's remove all that code, let's tackle the problem in a different way by thinking from first principles. Pretty much never.

You have to ask for this. As in "I'm not sure about this approach due to X, Y, and Z. Can you think of something more elegant?" It works!

But also, how many people actually need to do the kind of "deep" work you're claiming LLMs can't do? Most people aren't contributing to the frontier of anything. I'm not.

Finally, I think you're appealing to a fuzzy distinction. The difference between a "genuinely new idea" and an idea that "combines existing ideas in a new way" just isn't very well defined. In retrospect, a lot of the most revolutionary idea look like a combination of many, smaller, prior ideas.

> If something that previously took weeks for a human to design, now takes 10 min, that means a whole week of salary went up in smoke.

To me, this is the depressing sentiment. The idea that, somehow, the goal isn't to produce useful things but to spread work out over a period of time in order to maximize payment.

At a high level,I conceptualize my job as "doing useful things." Whether that's design, writing code, debugging, sysadmin, CI/CD, writing doc, whatever. I just want to be useful. If there's some tool that makes that easier, I am happy about it. I don't think that tool will result in my getting paid less. But if it does, oh well.

> It doesn't have to be "not free speech" to be deleterious, that's an insane argument.

I didn't say that. My point is that you need to tolerate "deleterious speech" in a democracy.

If you disagree, you should just admit that you don't believe in democracy. Which is a perfectly respectable position.

I think the answer is boarding school:

> Most students at both preparatory and public schools were boarders, meaning that elite Victorians were generally sent away from home by the age of eight and spent their childhoods more with peers than with family. In this respect they were distinctive even in their own time: elite families in continental Europe and the United States were far more likely to keep their children at home and educate them at small local private schools. It is plausible that this contributed to the lack of subnational loyalties in the British elite, in contrast to the distinct elites of, for example, the Southern United States, Catalonia in Spain, or Hungary in the Austrian Empire

Less developed, more dysfunctional countries tend to have closer family ties. More developed countries tend to have looser family ties. Sending children to boarding school starting at age 8 is a good way to diminish family ties.

> But really, how much does it matter? It seems like the four of them each contributed a lot. The Nobel prize only went to the other three, in large part because Franklin died before it was given out.

A Nobel can only be split among 3. Agree with the rest of your post.

> As I see it, online communication is more like de-humanised, context-free access to singular statements on a topic. As such, it does not equate to "people communicating freely".

Yeah, I don't like how people choose to communicate on the internet either. But that doesn't make it "not free speech."

You're working backwards from "I don't like what people are saying" to "the communication is not legitimate".

I have seen no evidence that "actual humans are the small minority".

If you think that people freely communicating on the internet is "harming democracy" then maybe you just don't like democracy.

The foundation of liberal democracy is the idea that people are capable of thinking for themselves, making choices, and don't need to rely on kings, popes, presidents, or CEOs to tell them what to do. It's fine to doubt this. Skepticism of democracy starts with the Greeks (who invented it), and runs through Hobbes, Nietzsche, Mencken, Schumpeter, and Thiel. But it's self-refuting to see people arguing, basically, "we have to restrict people's ability to communicate to save democracy". Maybe you can square that circle, but it's hard to see how it can be done without undermining the original argument for liberal democracy.

My view is that, while the internet, social media, etc have raised real challenges, it's simple cowardice to back away from liberal principles because of people lying on the internet about this and that. The liberal experiment has worked well and we should keep running it.

I agree with everything you wrote. There really are nutty right wingers who want to "claim" Norm.

I'm a huge Norm fan. Having watched his many interviews, seen and listened to his stand-up, seen his podcast and netflix show many times, I can say that he was clearly quite conservative, though not a bigot or hateful.

There's also more to the story here. Not that it's in any way justified, bur this guy's wasn't targeted only because he tweeted about Norm Macdonald.

Sure, intution is necessary, but they just took a bunch of data from all over the world and fit it to curves. This particular appoach hasn't born a lot of fruit; at least give us some natural experiments.

Just feels like makework. And even if the data show that, e.g., killing off all hummingbirds would improve pollination rates, no one would be like "yee-haw let's do it", right?

This doesn't seem like serious science. They just looked at correlation between biodiversity and a few dozen things.

Of course, for many reasons, we should try not to drive species to extinction. That's not really science; it's just basic moral intuition. People seem embarrassed to admit that their motivations are perfectly reasonable things like "I like living things and we shouldn't kill them off".

This narrative has been around for a long time in one form or the other. In its pure form, it's arguing that the form of human society is downstream from military technology.

The earliest mention I'm aware of is "the old oligarch," who claimed that Athenian democracy was justified by the fact that Athens was a naval power. Since every able male could man an oar, wider sufferage made sense. He contrasts this to Sparta's less democratic structure and its military, which was supposedly based on its few elite hoplites (helms/greaves/shield/spears were expensive).

You could compare this idea (military tech shapes society) to the Marxist claim that societies are shaped by economic forces. Both claims have some truth to them, but reality is more complicated. In particular, human societies today are less violent and founded on mutual consent/social contract moreso than on violence. Therefore, I would expect new military technologies to have limited disruptive effects within states and more between states. We'll see!

He's absolutely not saying iron caused the collapse, only that it prevented the recovery.

> The causes of the Bronze Age collapse are still debated by historians: a series of severe droughts; the sudden appearance of mysterious Sea Peoples, who raided along the Mediterranean coast; the disruption of the tin trade routes; internal revolts; or possibly all of these at once. But there is another unifying factor that could have prevented the resurgence of empires: iron.

The claim is that bronze enabled complex, highly centralized states because it was rare (due to a dearth of tin). So only the connected/rich could afford it, and they used it to build empires/kingdoms/etc.

Iron wasn't superior to bronze (in the fact the article claims it was worse), but it was good enough and widespread. All you needed was a furnace with bellows, charcoal, and an iron source (which were everywhere). Since everyone had access to iron, no one person/group had an edge over the others and this prevented highly centralized polities from being established.

Hmm, I kind of like it. It comes across as hand-crafted and I spent longer there than I planned.

All I mean is that you shouldn't swear, call people "cucks," flip people off, etc. It's not an effective means of communication, and will get you removed from whatever room you're in.

Based on reading between the lines and watching the video, here's my sense of what happened:

1. Some protestors showed up at a council meeting to complain about flock

2. The council moved to disallow discussion of flock cameras

3. The protestors started disrupting the meeting, chanting, etc, and were forced to leave/were arrested

4. One protestor went to the podium and started talking about flock cameras, was politely interrupted, then had her mic cut. She flipped off the council and was arrested

If you oppose flock/this kind of surveillance, fine. But this kind of behavior is not tolerated at council meetings, and it's not a surprise that some of the protestors were arrested.

> “Well, I said: ‘Jeff Schrag is a cuck.’ I said: ‘Fuck you Jeff.’ I said: ‘Worthless’ and then, also, the final thing I said was: ‘Jeff Schrag has a tiny, stinky, cock,’” Powell explained. “I just let myself get handcuffed and let them do whatever power trip they wanted to do. Got my ticket and left.”

I mean, really?

If there's value in writing, then it's in the writing. It doesn't matter who wrote it, even if it was monkeys on typewriters.

"AI-generated" looks bad to a large minority of people. It is not clear if the majority notices, much less cares.

That aside, if you spend 5 minutes prompting AI, you can create an image that no one will clock as AI.

> the frontier labs are priced according to the narrative that they have produced or will in the very near future produce a fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers

That's a reason to be bearish about AI companies, not LLMs. But is it even true? OpenAI and Anthropic have each reported ~50 billion in revenue with ~900 billion valuations. That's a high ratio but I'm not sure if follows that the only way it pans out is if we get "fully automated drop-in replacement for most knowledge workers".

It wouldn't shock me to see those revenue numbers scaling up to where they need to be over the next decade ( to, say, ~400 billion) without ever achieving drop-in worker replacements.

You see the same thing in literature, where modernism has crowded out of other styles. As one example, you see way less description today than in older books.

I'm not a hater on modernism -- I like stripped down literature and architecture (though I wish concrete buildings were cleaned more regularly). But there does seem to be some truth in this idea that "the elite critics" have dominated these fields, resulting in the production of art (and buildings) that are broadly unpopular. I think the overriding goal of these critics is avoiding kitsch, which they see in classical forms.

"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.

I understand people just get off posting stuff like this. But creating LLMs from the entire corpus of human text was a huge achievement. Distilling those models is much less of an achievement. It means China is further behind than we thought.

That's why we have an independent judiciary. What's the alternative to fixing this with laws/lawsuits? Do we riot when "the police and governments break laws"?

The modern legally bound nation state has done much better at guaranteeing rights and protecting freedoms than any other configurations despite the fact that it's constained largely by "pinky promises" (i.e. laws, courts, etc).

If red light cameras are incorrectly calibrated, that seems like something that could be challenged in court and changed.

> If your approach is that we can fix abuses by having the abuser write down rules that say they're not allowed to abuse us, why limit it to public surveillance? Stick cameras in everybody's houses while we're at it. Think of all the horrible crimes that go on behind closed doors. Solve the privacy issues with legislation.

People have a constitutional right to privacy in their own homes.

This post is a good example of why I find the anti-surveillance people so tiresome

> Just wait til we have an administration in the White House (I’m guessing not this one?) which directly threatens your freedoms in such a way that they can easily use cameras to prosecute those who they disagree with.

"You must not be gay/trans/black/hispanic/female or you'd agree with me" is not a good argument.

We're living in a brave new world where cameras and storage are cheap, networks are fast, etc. People have cameras at their front doors, stores have cameras, appartment buildings have cameras, etc. We need to deal with these facts productively, i.e. with legislation and serious thinking, rather than inane comments like "women seeking abortions have been tracked therefore we need to ban cameras".