596 karma · joined June 27, 2023
But if the water sources are publicly managed and water consumption is priced progressively (and sustainably) at the source, I don't see what the problem is of letting markets do the rest.
Although water pollution should be addressed as well, but this is required regardless of the scenario.
i.e. The more you consume, the higher you pay per gallon.
In that example, 1 oz of beef contains 10 of my taste units while 1 oz of almonds contains 0.5 of my taste units.
Since each person's taste units are different, humans have decided that the best way to allocate food is to sell it on something called a "market", where each person can express their own individual taste units, or "preferences", by buying the food on this "market".
The price of the food on the market reflects the scarcity of the food and everything it took to produce it, although sometimes there are distortions which should be corrected externally (e.g. by a government), not by restricting the types of food we consume, but by addressing their root causes at the source (e.g. by taxing water consumption to address the tragedy of the commons, or by taxing CO2 production to address global warming). These taxes should be increased up to the point where consumption/pollution becomes sustainable.
> By themselves, sequence to sequence models are not computationally capable of deductive reasoning with an arbitrary number of steps, since that would require recursion (or iteration).
Isn't the fact that LLMs perform their inference step by step, where in each step they output only one token, an instance of deductive reasoning with a (potentially) arbitrary number of steps?
I say this because on each inference step, the tokens that were previously generated do become part of the input.
At a higher level of abstraction, I'm also thinking about chain-of-thought prompting, in which the LLMs first output the easier-to-deduct steps, then build on these steps to perform more deductive steps up until they finally produce the desired answer [1].
Of course, they have a limited context, but the context can be (and has been) increased. And humans have a limited context as well (except if we consider long-term memory or taking notes, perhaps).
The main difference I see is that in LLM chain-of-thought reasoning, they are currently outputting their intermediate "thoughts" before actually giving the final answer, whereas we humans are capable of silencing ourselves before actually having figured out the answer, which we then "output" as speech [2].
So I think there is still a form of recursion or iteration happening in LLMs, it's just that it's in a somewhat limited form in that we are observing it as it happens, i.e. as they output tokens one-by-one.
That said, something that I think could really make LLMs take a big step forward would be to have something akin to long-term memory. And the other big step would probably be being able to learn continuously, rather than only during their training. These two potential steps might even be the same thing.
So I don't know. I'm obviously not an expert but these are my thoughts with regards to what you've just said.
[1] https://ai.googleblog.com/2022/05/language-models-perform-re...
[2] Interestingly, there have been studies that show that humans produce micro-speech patterns when we are thinking, i.e. as if we are really speaking, although imperceptibly. That said, I have no idea how trustworthy these studies are.
Edit: added a clarification at the beginning.
Yes, I can see that. But over time, you also learn and adapt the prompts to ChatGPT's peculiarities so that it provides more useful output.
Still, I'm sure there are many topics/domains for which it's not useful.
As another anecdote, I'm not a mathematician but at one point I was playing around with proving theorems on a theorem prover.
What I found is that ChatGPT is this paradoxical entity which makes the most elementary math errors all the time (I'm talking third-grade level math mistakes), and yet, it was by far the most useful tool ever in coming up with lots of useful PhD-level ideas and math theorems that would allow me to complete proofs when I was completely stuck (and not just for proofs which it had seen before).
It came up all the time with brilliant ideas and theorems which simultaneously I didn't even know existed, were not part of any theorem database of any theorem prover I had seen before (and I've seen the vast majority of them), and there was no way I was going to find them by searching on the web or writing things down on a notepad (I know this because I had tried, for days at a time, along with other ideas such as visualizations and simulations).
That's not to say a mathematician wouldn't be aware of them, but I don't have easy access to one, and I was surely not going to pay one given that I was just exploring, mostly for curiosity.
This seems like a paid ad, but I promise you, I have no affiliation whatsoever...
I think your answer made me realize something which might explain some of the different viewpoints we have.
You seem to have the general idea that, with some exceptions, ads are useful. This reminds me of my experience of doing a coast-to-coast road trip in the US and being amazed at how many more signs with ads I would see by the road and inside towns, compared to Europe. I was also fascinated by the radio ads, as everything was so different than what I was used to. The amount, creativity and sheer diversity of ads was astounding and something to behold.
As a tourist, I associate these ads positively in my mind because in many cases, I would have no idea of all the different things that there were around me if I didn't see those ads, like restaurants, museums, supermarkets, local attractions, etc. A few of these ads were extremely useful, but many were also interesting because it made me experience a part of American culture that I wouldn't experience otherwise, including its great capitalistic nature (I love capitalism itself) and all the variety of businesses that there were. Perhaps with the occasional exception, I don't recall these ads being obnoxious.
My experience with ads as a European citizen is the polar opposite. Here, I don't find them useful at all. I always see all the same ads, all the time. They're repetitive, loud, obnoxious, with no creativity, no diversity and transmit no useful information.
It's mostly large, multinational companies, with the occasional local or national company whose ad you see or hear over and over again, thousands of times, to the point of exhaustion. This is especially true in TV, radio (including online radio) and also the same outdoor signs which you always encounter when driving to the same spots.
If you've seen one Coca Cola ad, you've seen all the other thousand of them, basically. Especially when they are exactly the same ad. But I can't turn them off. It can get quite maddening when your favorite local radio only has 3 ad spots and they're always the exact same obnoxious ads, for months on end. Or when you're watching TV and it goes to commercials and you always see exactly the same $huge_company ads, in the same exact order, over and over again.
Online ads, such as in Youtube or social platforms, can in most cases be a similar experience. In my subjective experience, it seems like I've been exposed to 1000x more Coca Cola, Burger King, and $giant_car_brand type ads than things which could actually be useful to me.
Really, the only memorable experiences which begin to approach your arguments in favor of useful ads is if, say, I'm watching some video or podcast about some really niche topic and most or all the ads are related to that topic. The vast majority of these are still completely useless to me, but at least I don't find these as obnoxious as the generic ones as long as they're not too repetitive or in-your-face (which unfortunately is also common).
I also have the anecdotal experience of buying many different types of ads for a local business of an acquaintance, for extended periods of time, to see what worked and what didn't. This includes times when it was just physical ads (geographically constrained), or just online ads, in different ad platforms, at first somewhat generic but later increasingly targeted ads, to the point where in the end we were only showing ads to people we thought would definitely be interested in the service. We also tried a company that specializes in online ads. Perhaps our experience was not representative, but I can tell you without a doubt that it was a complete waste of time and money, as the acquired customers were very few and very low quality. What really worked, by far, was simply stopping the ads and relying on word-of-mouth recommendations. That's how the business really got going. This is not a niche business, it is something that is occasionally needed by most people, either by going to the business physically or online. The competition was only small, mostly local businesses, there are exactly zero large national or multinational businesses in this market.
So I don't know, maybe the ad market here where I live is crap or maybe it's simply that it's completely dominated by all the giant companies, but all I can tell you is that I would praise the Gods if all ads magically disappeared tomorrow.
There was a period of a few weeks or months in which it seemed like ChatGPT had really degraded to the point of being unusable (although it could have been my biases). However, it seems to be better now (again, my subjective experience).
Sometimes I still catch it making really basic mistakes, but most times I can convince it to correct the mistake (especially if I point them out).
But what's most amazing to me is how ChatGPT is absolutely brilliant at some things, and not just technical or even obscure topics.
Recently, it gave me the most amazing idea for navigating a complex and nuanced social situation I was having difficulty with. And given the constraints of the situation, there was no way I could have gotten that idea otherwise, especially in the allotted time.
So despite its flaws and mistakes, I still find it to be a tremendously useful tool, even if only to point me in the right direction.
But my question was geared towards the value of advertising itself, in general (if there is any).
I am aware of the unknown unknown problem you mentioned (I think), but in my experience as a layman, very very rarely (if ever) was I introduced to a great product or service through advertising that I wouldn't be aware of in other ways.
Conversely, the amount of ads for substandard products and services (i.e. those which I know for sure there are better alternatives, at least for me and others around me) is infinitely greater.
And I don't think it's just because the ads are not targeted enough. I'm pretty sure I am a hugely interesting target for many, many companies, but I am simply not interested in them (and never will) because other companies have much better products/services (many of which I already use).
I am assuming, of course, that the only reason they're interested in targeting ads to me, is to influence me to make a buying decision that I wouldn't do otherwise, and not just because I wasn't aware of the product/service. Because if it wasn't for influencing me making a buying decision, why would they spend the money to show me an ad?
That's why I always try to ignore (and block) ads as much as possible, even though that's not always possible (e.g. street ads). Yet, I am still being bombarded with non-stop ads and I have no question that I'm being negatively influenced by them, especially in those areas I know very little about (e.g. cleaning products) or am susceptible to being influenced against my own interests (e.g. fast food or other crappy, addictive food products).
In my experience, the success rate of my own research (when looking for a product/service) or even word-of-mouth recommendations has far, far outweighed the success rate of all the ad campaigns I've ever been a target of, from my own perspective (not from the companies' perspectives, of course).
So it's not that I don't see any value in advertising, which I don't (unless you're the advertiser), it's that I think it's actively damaging to society (due to leading people to make bad buying decisions) and the economy in general (due to increased inefficiency).
You've mentioned multiple times the "it's good at extracting huge sums of money out of people making decisions against their own interests, which goes on to fund other endeavors" argument, but I don't think that's a good thing on the whole.
If you can forgive a huge exaggeration from my part, to me it sounds similar to saying that criminal activities are great because the money earned from those activities can go on to spur economic activity in the region (I'm not saying advertising is a criminal activity, but I think you get my point).
Advertising negatively affects markets because it leads people to make decisions based on things that are not necessarily in their interests, i.e. it leads people to make more uninformed (or misinformed) decisions.
In effect, it's basically exploiting a market externality: vulnerabilities in human psychology.
I mean, this is not always true. Sometimes, you might become aware of a great product or service due to advertising. But I am entirely convinced that, in general, the negative effects hugely, hugely outweigh the occasional benefit, just by observing how people usually make their buying decisions in their day-to-day lives (including me, I'm not immune to that!).
Computers were already common household items before massive online advertising even existed.
So forgive me if I don't find your arguments convincing (and it's not just because of this specific argument).
You say that like it's a good thing.
Yes, but what are the negative effects?
Right. Why, is the name of the service an issue? In Backblaze B2 you basically pay per storage, which I thought is what you wanted but perhaps I misread you and you wanted pay per machine instead?
I actually prefer pay per storage because I think pay per machine (i.e. an infinite storage promise) is not a sustainable model and just leads to a bad surprise down the road, when the service becomes too popular -- perhaps a sudden large price increase, the service being shutdown or even bankruptcy/sale of the business.
Although this means I do have to be somewhat selective of what I backup, it's not a big effort for me. I basically just exclude some large unimportant media files, my OS/installed programs (no need to backup those) and downloaded files, which can also be redownloaded again whenever I want.
> If so, how much (in your currency) does it cost you to backup say 3TB with daily (x7), weekly (x4), monthly (x12) snapshots available for a year?
I currently have a total of 496 snapshots, all the way back to a year ago, corresponding to a total of about 240-260 GiB of compressed data each snapshot.
The number of snapshots is a bit misleading because many of them are of a separate folder which almost never changes.
Still, it's 1 year's worth of almost daily backups of about 250 GiB of data.
This month I paid exactly $2.00 USD plus $0.35 VAT (I'm not in the US but the bill comes in USD). I don't recall ever having paid more than that.
> Using their own calculator and assuming in a year you have a total of 10TB stored (3TB of "active" data and the rest point-in time) they estimate B2 to cost a whopping $1110AUD/yr.
restic doesn't actually care very much about what kind of backend storage you use, it's really extremely flexible. So for that kind of storage, you may also want to take a look at all the backends that are available in restic, including those available through rclone (IIRC?) as a mediator, although Backblaze B2 is usually among the cheapest, if not the cheapest.
In your case, I think I'd probably just look into renting a cheap server with lots of storage and just use restic in SSH mode.
You might have to look around a bit, as there are many, many options available, but most of them are priced very high. To get the cheap ones you need to find specific providers (e.g. like Hetzner for dedicated servers) that usually charge much lower prices than the competition.
The cloud/VM servers are usually much cheaper, although personally I prefer to pay more and get a dedicated server in a cheap provider like Hetzner or OVH's Kimsufi (but that's because I can afford it, of course). But the cloud/VM servers should work fine as well, and there are many cheap providers for those.
However, be aware that the servers that have the amounts of storage that you're looking for are sometimes named "seed boxes" or "backup" / "storage" servers rather than just cloud or dedicated servers, as the latter ones usually have SSDs/NVMe storage which, although faster, is smaller and/or more expensive per TB than HDDs.
Some providers have storage devices available over the local network which can be flexibly provisioned and this might be cheaper than getting servers with large HDDs, as usually you only pay for the amount you use (or the amount you reserve). This is sometimes called "block storage" or perhaps "object storage". That said, most of these are backed by SSDs so they can be really expensive.
I've never rented a server with such a large amount of storage, so unfortunately I can't recommend a specific server type off the top of my head. But Hetzner has some storage boxes you might want to have a look into:
https://www.hetzner.com/storage/storage-box
The "DataHoarder" and "Seedboxes" subreddits might also be useful to find good options.
It's nice because I get zstd compression, smart deduplication, encryption, snapshots, multiple sets of backups to the same repo, daily random verification of backup data, etc.
I also do the exact same backups every day to (admittedly, underpowered) dedicated servers using borg but the restic backups always complete much faster.
And it's also pretty damn cheap.
Never had a problem, highly recommended, five stars***** (no affiliation).
In some cases, you can get basically locked out of all essential services, including bank account closures, not being able to make payments (especially now with these laws), etc.
Real fun!
Yeah, that's not how it works in all European countries. Which can get really "interesting" in some cases, believe me (I've lived through that).
I've also been requested proof of employment, which is also interesting when you're unemployed. In one of the countries, they said I can just give them proof of unemployment benefits... which I don't have, because I left my job willingly.
And then they told me: "well, in that case you can get proof of unemployment from the municipality". Except... that I'm not even living in your damn country and the municipality where I live doesn't even know whether I'm working or not (why would they?!).
But this does not even compare to all the problems I've had when I've not been living in the same place stably for an extended period of time. It has been an absolute hell in some cases, because institutions (governments, banks, lawyers, etc) simply do not account for this possibility. They all assume that you have a stable address of residence.
In some countries you can't even receive some types of registered mail unless it is addressed exactly to where you are staying at that moment.
> You have a right to a basic account, not necessarily full service.
I don't think that's how it works. The governments have created a legal requirement for banks to provide minimum banking services, yes. But banks still have to comply with many other very strict requirements and customers may not be able to fulfill them, which prevents them from opening bank accounts.
It's not necessarily easy for migrants to open bank accounts. Sometimes it's even impossible.
Even for me, I assure you that opening a bank account would not be easy (or maybe even possible) due to stricter requirements in recent years, even though I've never done anything illegal (to my knowledge) and I'm not a migrant.
I know this because I've looked into many banks with the intention of opening an account and the requirements are all similar between them. This is in two different European countries.
And well, for the past couple of days I've been trying to set up an automatic monthly bank transfer for my rent and my bank is not allowing me because it's "exceeding the daily allowable limit", even though it's way below the daily allowable limit that I've ran into multiple times for normal bank transfers.
So there's that.
> Also, what kind of illegal immigrant rents a >€3000/month home?
Rents have gone up considerably in European capitals and consider that multiple immigrant families can live under the same (larger) roof.
Inflation will also eat up these limits over time, as governments almost never increase cash limits according to inflation (even though they do it for many, many other things).
Also, the limits are lower in some countries (500 EUR in Greece, 1000 EUR in Spain). I know for a fact that it's almost impossible to get a decent place in the center of Madrid for less than 1000 EUR nowadays.
It's in the two countries in Europe where I've lived.
> if I call my bank and tell them I need to transfer 500,000 to buy a house they will allow it
What you're saying is not possible in the banks I've used.
To buy houses in recent years, I've had to set up appointments and physically go to the central office of one of the banks, and to a local branch of another. They provided me with a special bank-issued cheque for the transaction.
In one of the cases, this required me to travel to another country just for this purpose.
It was a significant hassle and even then I was lucky that this was in an adjacent country. It could have easily been in the other side of the world.
> The limit is there is to prevent fraud.
Right... fraud... of course!
Is that why one of the banks only allows me to set up a 5 digit password (yes, only numbers) to access my account? And why the other one only allows me to set up a 6 digit password (again, only numbers)?
Is that also why they require me to dictate this same password (as well as other personal details) over the phone when I want to make a large transaction? So that other people who are physically near me can hear the password easily?
And that's even assuming I typed their phone number correctly in my phone, otherwise I would be giving my password to strangers unknowingly!
Look, I really don't care if it's fraud, or money laundering laws, or because the Pope mandated it. I've never been a victim of fraud, it's extremely unlikely for me to ever be a victim of fraud in the future, I'm not doing anything illegal and it's my money.
There are many other ways to deal with fraud, such as having most of the money locked (e.g. in a separate account, with more restrictions or delays), providing notifications, using two-factor authentication, calling the customers to confirm the transaction, etc, etc.
And yes, I know in many banks (including mine) they also do a subset of these, but even then the restrictions are still there.
I'm sorry, but fraud alone does not explain what's happening, unless the banks are extremely incompetent (and yes, it's quite possible that they are).
Regardless, the end result is the same: I simply cannot use my money easily, period.
One of my banks forbids making bank transfers of over 10,000 EUR. The other is not far behind.
Even then, sometimes they simply decide that they're not going to allow you to make bank transfers to certain perfectly legitimate accounts. There is no way to override that.
For the past couple of days I've been trying to set up an automatic monthly transfer for paying my rent and my bank is not allowing me because it's "exceeding the allowable daily limit", even though I haven't done any transfers or significant payments lately, and my rent is way below the 10,000 EUR limit.
You also can't withdraw large sums of money easily.
Furthermore, even when they allow these large transfers (which presumably would require you to physically visit a branch which might be in a different country or even continent), it's not uncommon to charge a not insignificant percentage of that money as a fee. This is significantly more common for large transfers than for small ones.
Large inbound transfers can be even more of a hassle, as banks often require you to provide documents justifying why you're receiving that money, which not only might be difficult in some cases (even when you're not doing anything illegal), but also invades your privacy and can be a significant security risk in some situations.
All of this basically makes banks a prison for your money, which not even you can access easily.
And besides, all that is assuming that you are even able to open a bank account.
There are many reasons for why opening a bank account is hard or even impossible in many cases.
And believe me, this doesn't happen in just one or two banks, it's quite common procedure in practically every bank, and increasingly so.
Also, it doesn't matter whether it's frequent or not. "Let's ban migrants from buying cars because they don't buy them frequently" is not exactly the most convincing argument.
In the absence of outside input, driving can just as easily be more dangerous than staying where you are.
I'll quote this from the Wikipedia article of the June 2017 wildfires in Portugal:
> The majority of deaths took place in the Pedrógão Grande municipality, when a fire swept across a road filled with evacuees escaping in their cars.
> 47 people died in or near their cars when a fire overtook the area; 30 people died while trapped in their vehicles while the other 17 died nearby trying to escape on foot.
It is suspected that they could have died from smoke inhalation rather than from the subsequent burn. But it is clear that many, if not all of them, could have survived if they hadn't tried to escape by car, because those who didn't try to escape did survive, and many of the houses were actually unaffected.
But yes, it could have easily been the opposite, as it happened in the same wildfire on another municipality.
And I would say it's quite possible that, in the absence of outside input, trying to escape by car could give you the greatest chances of surviving in most circumstances. But I'm not an expert so I really can't say that for sure.
And I'm sure it would also depend on the geography, the roads, and where the fire is.