slibhb

Chomsky is incredibly dogmatic; his views and personality have held the field back.

There's enormous irony in Chomsky's mathematicization of linguistics sweeping away the linguists who came before him compared to his own stubborn refusal to acknowledge the fruits of the statistical approach. As far as I know, he's more or less been swept aside.

From what I've heard, the autopilot is very good and getting better. It is hard to distinguish the haters from the hype.

And agent is not the same as informer. Whether it's better, worse, or the same is up to you.

This is a meme that people constantly repeat "insects are all dead!" but I don't think it's true - these studies seem low quality. Maybe they're true in particular regions in Europe and North America.

As a counter-anecdote, I bought a house recently and the back yard is basically uninhabitable all summer due to insects. Insects may be less prevalent along some roads due to better drainage.

Another point I'd make is that there's no reason to think insect life should be stable across 30-40 years. Insects are not people. Even aside from climate change, insect population is very dependent on weather patterns.

> councils and government should treat high streets more like public commons, prioritising independent businesses and making places distinctive.

You're advocating central planning.

The real problem is that it's very hard to build stuff in the UK. This is a choice that the people have made and the status quo still continue until they choose differently.

It might turn out that way. Or it might turn out that we're better off with AI. There are plausible arguments either way, and so the debate comes down to vibes. Essentially it's "I'm an optimist" vs. "I'm a pessimist."

I decided long ago that - when there are plausible arguments either way - it's better to be an optimist. Optimism does not mean ignorance or denial; rather, optimists should acknowledge risks and problems while having confidence in our ability to generate solutions.

One of the biggest challenges facing us is a critical mass of pessimists. Not only regarding AI, but also with respect to the economy, democracy, liberalism, etc. And while these negative views are plausibly correct, they also act as a self-fulfilling prophecy in that they rob people of the agency that is needed to solve problems.

AI will ultimately prove better at generating the kind of message the author prefers. You can just prompt your AI agent to "avoid sounding like AI."

That aside, what matters is whether the company fixes the problem in a timely manner. If they don't, it doesn't matter how nice a message they send. And if they do, it hardly matters if their message is brusque, boilerplate, or obviously AI.

I suspect I have a higher bar for "knowing about something" than you. I know about Thiel's views because I've read his essays. I know comparatively little about his business dealings, and everything I do know is hearsay.

Ultimately people disagree about things and I think your worldview doesn't really have room for that, which seems unfortunate.

What does "support" even mean? He's not up for election. My interaction with Peter Thiel has been listening to interviews he's given and reading essays he's written. I don't know much about his companies. While I don't agree with him across the board (for example, I strongly believe in liberal democracy), I think he's worth engaging with.

It's bizarre to read through threads like this and see all the vitriol. I'm open to critiques but I mostly just see lazy meme-level comments.

Every time Thiel gets mentioned, people heap scorn. Even more than Mark Zuckerberg.

I find Thiel interesting. His views on stagnation are widely influential and seem to have presaged a broad revaluation of rules and regulations that have accumulated over the years (including zoning rules).

Right, but those mathematicians whose work might have been stolen were...using LLMs to attack the problem.

As far as I know, the controversy involves a pair of mathematicians using LLMs to solve the problem and another group who used LLMs to solve the problem. No one seems to be disputing the solution itself.

> Yes it is my personal belief that we are definitely much much better at creating than AI models, which the only thing they do is output an empty and dull regurgitation of its training. There's nothing truly personal and original coming out of it when it comes to creating music, literature, art, etc.

I guess those AI models were trained on solutions to Navier-Stokes and a proof of the Quasi-Riemann hypothesis.

> Do you know why I am so against all this hype? Because it is a poison for the mind, it deprives you from thinking from understanding and from questioning things by ourselves, and I'm already witnessing AI junkies that consume and take for granted every single output from a model.

This argument has been made against every human innovation, including writing. Maybe it's true this time but I doubt it.

> Why think if you can now outsource it to a computer, right?

I was already outsourcing plenty to the wikipedia, do-yourself-youtube videos, and so on. This doesn't seem that different.

Most people are doing something morally wrong by not having children, or only having 1 child. That seems like a reasonable conclusion to me.

However, I wouldn't push the point. My view is that "life is good so having children is good" but not "you must have as many children as possible." There are various ways I might justify this philosophically, but I would just say that parents have a special obligation to their children and, if you have too many children, it's impossible to fulfill that obligation. So you should have as many children as you can effectively parent.

I believe in free speech. It doesn't take "perfection," actually the opposite.

"CF might shut me down" applies to some groups but not most and certainly not to No Kings

It's not a fixed pool! The pool can grow.

Also wait times are longer in Canada. And an anecdote: I went to the ER last Monday. No wait. And had a referral to a surgeon that same day. And surgery on Wednesday!

This is a real problem but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with Zuckerberg or Meta in particular. The article admits it's unlikely that this hour-long ban was a top-down decision. People get banned with no recourse on all the big platforms.

But yes, a solution is for people to host their own content/sites. Or "protocols not platforms"

A strong culture of free speech is the clear solution to the problem you're describing. I.e. when both political factions censor, the only solution is a strong preference for free speech regardless of who is in power.

France has great healthcare but the downside of socialized medicine is rationing.

Because they're scientists and not activists.

> Millenials talk about not wanting children because they don't want to subject a new generation to this absolute shitshow of a planet

They often list overpopulation as a reason. But yes, it's not the only reason they give.

As an antidote to this kind of mindless negativity, just consider whether any individual human is happy to have been born. It seems very clear to me that most people enjoy being alive and so having children is moral on utilitarian grounds.

The population hysteria from the 60s was proven wrong a long time ago but it's still pretty influential. E.g. it's not uncommon for millenials to talk about not wanting children because of overpopulation.

It takes a long, long time for new ideas to diffuse through society. Most people are not paying close attention to the cutting edge.

A large minority of people cannot cope with losing elections. Shadowy forces are behind every loss. Ironically, it's this attitude that undermines democracy. More than Facebook at any rate...

That whole letter is criticizing woke censorship. So everyone on that list is a critic. And it's not all academics.

It's very clear to observers of reality that the vast, vast majority of prominent people and organizations who criticized wokeness have moved on to criticzing Trump. For the most part, "free speech advocates" are just normal liberals with principles, but that doesn't stop people in every one of these threads calling out "free speech" like it's something insidious.

Yes, Elon has disgraced himself. But the majority of anti-woke, free-speech advocates have seamlessly transitioned to criticizing Trump.

Just look at the signatories of the Harper's letter: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

The vast, vast majority have gone on to criticize Trump in his second term.

What tells you that? Do you have evidence? Or just a vague sense that no one actually has any principles?

My experience is that, for the most part, the people who criticized woke censorship are also critics of the Trump administration and its lawlessness.

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.