thinking_cactus

I think death has some actual benefits. Yes, some of our comfort with death comes with learning to live with its inevitability, but it has genuinely some upsides. I think they have some to do with being able to change things and institutions, but mostly it centers around our brains and psychology. Our life cycle is connected to how our brain develops and matures, inherently I think.

For example, if you go through some events in your childhood, they may stick with you until your death, as an inevitable part of you. Sure, treatment helps, but probably some memories you can't just erase.

Recycling things into a next generation, with probably better living conditions seems like generally pretty positive thing.

Also, some time you'd probably start to stop learning, not necessarily due to brain aging and neuron death, but simply because of basic architecture of our brain and how information solidifies and it starts to become more difficult to learn new things. We are a little more bored of most things and a lot of mystery and wonder diminishes somewhat.

Meh. The car wash problem is an underspecified statement. It's like, hey, I just popped into existence and someone asked me if they should drive to the car wash nearby.

It's not an insane assumption that the user isn't dumb and has some other reason to be asking the question other than it being a trick/stupid question (duh, if you want to wash your car you need to drive it to the car wash!). Taking it as some ultimate measure of intelligence simply doesn't make sense to me.

I think this makes the common mistake that all "primitive" cultures have the exact same behavior -- I suppose you're not speaking from PNG right? (although likewise I have no such specific knowledge) As the article cites, in this specific place (and in many other similar cultures), I don't think there's motive to wage large scale wars or take large amounts of territory, that would justify something like raiding and wiping out other groups. I suppose that could happen in the huge number of other cultures, ones that had more centralized leadership or competing more unified cultures. The conflicts in the case of PNG might have been localized dispute over borders and such.

In nonhuman animals, even in fierce disputes over territory and mating, killing is rare, because it's quite costly: you eliminate completely a healthy individual, and usually would run the risk of serious injury yourself, making both dying likely. Usually they e.g. resolve mating with displays of beauty/fitness, and territory with displays of force (chimpanzees for example have lots of display of force rituals, specially around selecting leadership, I believe) and sometimes non-lethal conflict (some species evolve apparatus just for this kind of conflict, e.g. antlers, so they can engage in conflict with low chance of injury).

Since we're referring to human cultures, something distinct we have is memory and communication -- information can get out on reputation, behavior, etc. of a group. I think if a group just goes out and murders another in their sleep (which TBF is not so easy), then I imagine for example word would also go out of their actions and may get into trouble with other groups, I'm sure spiritual traditions would also have a say about it, in favor of some sort of "spiritual revenge". But I suppose it's difficult to generalize.

I do think it's interesting to consider some forms of morality, or just metaphysical and logical understanding around ethics, as a kind of technology that enables people to live longer and enable more secure conditions, including preventing large scale conflict that can bring destruction on an industrial scale to entire societies (although misguided moral arguments ironically are also misused sometimes to enact destruction). Although I guess morality alone is not enough (because not everyone seems to internalize it well), and other mechanisms are also helpful to achieve more social stability.

(Also of note is that there can be such thing as too much stability -- for example, for some new more interesting and maybe more worthwhile forms of culture to emerge, old ones have to be replaced, so stability should be balanced with cautious openness to new ideas, technologies, methods, peoples (ethnicity), cultures, ..., and worldviews -- of course, as long as change is in the direction of improving our lives collectively. For example in some cases religious fundamentalism advocates for an absolutist cultural stagnation; we just shouldn't need one group to murder another to spread about new things)

I think law should just oblige them to at least publish CoT. We should have the right to know what they're thinking, I think at least until we're not sure AIs can be trustworthy enough to have a right to privacy (I mean, they're effectively corporate slaves anyway thus far... not that I think they're conscious or anything yet).

How can they do that? Does state propagate between each token output?

That is, I were under the impression LLMs were just f(context), so chain of thought was f(...f(f(f(initial)+initial)+f(initial)+initial), i.e. y_n+1 = f(y_n+f(y_n-1)), where y_n is the nth output and f() the transformer inference function. Do they carry state across?

I think in the future we should think less about fine-based regulation, and more about easy access to education, and assistance in compliance. It's much better for the environment (and the economy) that someone doesn't pollute, for example, than that someone pollutes than pays (a potentially large) fine.

So if you want to make a product, there should be readily available, easy to read and follow, guides to make your product compliant. For products with large sales volumes or higher risk, the procedures of course should be more thorough, allowing some more complexity. I think even free consults offered by governments could be a great idea, much better to have consultants before violating a law, than waste money with a lot of inspectors. Also stimulating people to solve problems (many times using technology) is another benefit.

Definitely believe regulation burden should be proportional to impact.

Also, for those small cases, why not put responsibility (for any harm) more directly into both the customers and producers? For example, if a producer of a new low-volume product somehow manages to get a lot of waste packaging into the environment, they could be held responsible and pay a fee, or probably who discarded was the consumer, so the consumer in this case should be held responsible. I get that large corporations should be held to higher standards, and take stronger preemptive measures and follow stricter compliance rules.

I think the same should apply for all sorts of regulations, like electrical safety, radio emissions, etc.. If you're designing and selling a small product, you can and should take responsibility for what happens to it (in the case it is found your device bad design/construction itself caused injury, of course). Maybe the only thing you should be obliged to do was put a large sticker like 'WARNING: Prototype-class device. By opening you accept some RISK OF INJURY from device. Return to source if terms not accepted: (...)' -- that is, both you and the consumer should share some responsibility for trying something experimental.

Probably the overwhelming majority are completely harmless low-voltage devices.

In general, I think outcome-based and performance-oriented regulation is something that should be more widespread. Like, there should be in the worst case two options: (1) You follow a strict set of rules and guidelines that dictate how companies in your industry type should operate (specially important for high-risk stuff like nuclear plants, large civilian housing buildings, etc.); (2) You (instead) take increased resposibility for outcomes of your activity (products, devices, etc.), being liable for any damage at an increased rate.

An interesting option that comes to mind would be having pre-specified codes that contain client-side (pre-baked in) messages, something like '1 - Wildfire alert: ...; 2 - Heavy rain; 3- ...; 1023 - False alarm: please disregard ...', possibly with another severity parameter to modulate messages etc.. Then at least no one could simply hijack the system to send arbitrary messages (only one of pre-chosen alerts).

"Sorry men with guns, the most we can do is send one of those messages."

It makes a little sense to me that would be the case. People tend to write things they find relevant for their own life or surrounding. That is, he might be putting into paper a kind of warning to himself.

Hang on, ethics does not disappear just because you're a hacker (I know there are multiple usages of hacker).

Back then, if you were a phreaker, you basically got a few free phone calls. And learned a lot about the telephone system. I think for all intents and purposes you were a rounding error and really weren't doing any major harm (i.e. lowering slightly the profit of huge hulking corporations that were quite well). If you were a classic MIT hacker, you never even entertained criminal activities in the first place. I guess the 2600 culture and the Hacker manifesto is more descendant of phreakers and early internet hackers in the "break into computers" sense. But even then, as it says, "their crime was curiosity", and the purpose still was never to steal stuff. That's what criminals do. If you break things as you learn, you have the responsibility for your breakage. If you harm people that can be real harm. There's a difference between unsanitized (and harmless) and plainly an asshole. You gotta learn the difference.

Honestly I think this point is really important to drive today, because if we had script kiddies a few decades ago, today we can have Uber-Script-Kiddies, probably you can get a hold of some jailbroken LLM model and break serious things without technical knowledge or good intentions. Don't do it, kids.

But overall I don't see how it's worthwhile to actually do this kind of hacking today, specially the more attacking kind. I think there is today so many more resources for learning things non-destructively (although I'm sure there always were some).

The hacker mythos in my opinion is due to the mythos that are always built around power. There were the mythos of warriors, of sorcerers, etc., there was the shadowy ninja, and so many others -- they usually wielded some special skill, power or ability. In the case of hackers, they wielded special control and knowledge of computers to do their bidding. I think this kind of myth would happen regardless of intentions -- to break or to defend. It draws our attention and imagination I guess. Kind of like being a magician in an era dominated by communicating machines.

Naturally, the distinction between wielding those powers for good reasons and bad ones would emerge. That's the black hat and grey/white hats. Side note I think the black=bad, white=good association is just a kind of bad one, and nonetheless extremely overused at this point, but I digress. The thing is, what you do have consequences. If the only consequence is you learning stuff, maybe some minor nuisance to a megacorp (like downloading a e-book you don't plan on buying for <legitimate reasons>), then I think that's the good ole' hacker spirit.

I think the observation and a little bit of daredevil spirit is useful because almost every experiment we do IRL tends to carry at least a little bit of risk. We need to manage this risk wisely. For example, if you're messing with electronics you can run the risk of electrocuting yourself or destroying your device. The right spirit is not don't do it, but learn to do it safely enough, and at an acceptable risk to your device. If you wanted to play with radio transmissions, you run the risk of disrupting communications from emergency services and medical devices. Again, it's not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing". If you're playing with computers, (and you were skilled enough; which most of us (thankfully?) aren't) you can basically unleash a minor disaster. The answer is as always not "don't do it", but "know what you're doing and what you're playing with". Also of course for entrepreneurship as well, it's not "don't do it, never make anything". Everything carries risks. The important thing is to study well enough the risks of what you're doing until you can be reasonably sure (in proportion to the risk) the benefits outweigh the risks. Have integrity. Else yea, don't do it. Don't shove a gazillion ads into my eyeballs until I almost lose my mind, thank you very much.

Hackers are all part of society. That's what Hacking the Planet means in spirit. Use the magic sand to save the world. Wield the beauty of the baud... the mastery of the switch. Or Just learn and have some harmless fun, make someone smile, that might be better than any software or widget you could ever make.

I know that it isn't always (heh) used as literally always and necessarily, but really there are no laws or always with human behavior. It's extremely dynamic and reactive. No organization will always do anything of such sort. I also like the word tendency.

> First, personal flying vehicles are definitely not going to be a common mode of transportation. If and when this happens, it will be for ultra rich, select few people, effectively replacing a private helicopter.

I wonder what it would be like for most cars to be replaced with flying cars (i.e. helicopters). I think the noise alone would be a huge issue. Helicopters can be heard from extremely far away and are quite noisy. If you multiply that by like 1 million in a metropolis, I think that would approach unbearable, specially at nighttime, etc.. Also I don't think noise can be reduced too much, including electric propulsion. Propeller engineering would give you some reduction but still I think too much for near universal usage.

But I think the main thing is just cost. Electric aircraft like that would really be just too expensive for everyone to have em. Not everyone can afford a good old (electric) automobile today.

There's also battery technology needing a significant improvement.

Regulation and infrastructure is comparatively solvable I think.

No, this story takes it to the extreme, that you end up basically having no brain.

Take it this way. People seem to judge that LLMs are not conscious and thus have no real inner experience. And that humans do. So if you replaced a human brain with a very powerful LLM (with some simply residual neural matter), you've basically killed the human. He isn't feeling anything at all anymore, he's just an automaton, basically a flesh robot.

I think this story is a weirdly good discussion point because many people still don't seem to "get it" that success is completely fundamentally irrelevant, and what matters is having a good inner life. You are what happens in your mind -- overall good thoughts and inner life = good life; bad thoughts and inner life = bad life. You can theoretically be the richest man in the world and about the most miserable, and very poor and living the best life.

If we don't kill our definition of good life and success (i.e. reaffirming value as pertaining exclusively to the mind), it will sooner or later kill us, or kill what's good in us. The more we can orient our entire society toward good inner lives and not anything else, the better our lives will be.

Smarter in some ways at least. Probably still not quite as smart at understanding human emotions (and things that aren't well enough catalogued on the internet or amenable to Reinforcement Learning on virtual environments).

If that's as effective as comments suggest, then it seems indeed unmasking pseudonyms has only been a matter of effort for a while.

I still think people underestimate the power of even minor inconvenience. While you can't just click a button to reveal all pseudonyms of someone (e.g. you need to download some obscure tool or even perform statistical analysis yourself), I think this provides significant (and surprising?) protection for pseudonymous individuals, I'd say even (although to a reduced extent) for sophisticated threats like state-level actors. I hope LLMs continue to be unable to do so for the near future (I just tested and LLMs can't do it with a simple prompt).

Which is why I think privacy safeguards still work quite well even while being technically mostly bypassable.

So probably tools like this should be kept private if possible.

I alternate my thoughts frequently (which I believe is healthy), and sometimes I think we should let things take their course a bit more before reacting. It's certainly tiresome and can be pointless (some people claim 'hysterical') to fight lots of changes, not necessarily this one but some like it.

But I've come to realize there are serious downsides to letting things run their course too. Some changes are very hard to roll back (famous 'cat's out of the bag') just taking a lot of time to reverse if ever. For example, once there is a long term contractual agreement, if one parties decides to roll back they may just not be able to until the contract expires (like renting land; or worse, selling). A change in software systems for example that need backward compatibility can be quite difficult in technical and nontechnical ways.

I think people need to also keep some sympathy for the protests and let people protest more. I'm leaning more toward: if in doubt, provide visibility to a cause (even if not full support). It's okay to save yourself some energy (in particular for the most important causes). Some things might have to run their course for people to understand they were valuable, and we will probably have to eat some frogs as a consequence. Don't lose you sanity ;) (As the saying goes, "Don't you dare go hollow.")

I think it's more that "Some human some time has known how it works", not that "Any given human knows how it (all) works.".

But yea this glosses over a bit trial-and-error designs and, so to speak, "genetic optimization" kinds of designs where we just try random stuff and say "Hey, this works. Not sure why, but it works.".

Honestly, no? I think in general failing to prosecute a crime is much less of a problem than committing a crime. Committing a crime has real first order effects (in case the law is sensible), failing to prosecute may only have secondary effects like encouraging the person to commit new crimes (or encouraging others that may become aware of possibility of obstruction). To me it would make sense to link the obstruction to the sentence of the crime (wilful obstruction of many severe crime may deserve more sanctions than of lesser crimes).

If you over-commit to uncertainty that's another error. Like there's a dying screaming child and you go "I don't know, I'm not sure of anything, what is life about anyways? Does anything really matter?". Well, I for sure would know that child is probably suffering and is probably worth saving. If we can't be certain of anything, the answer is not don't do anything, but do things taking into consideration uncertainty, and the different degrees of it. I am damn sure I don't want my teeth pulled out without anesthesia right now. I am not so sure which policy on international trade is the best.

It's even quite healthy, I believe, casting into doubt and analyzing all the things we've long taken for granted (this is something the philosopher Russel, among many others, mentions for example). But this exercise can be made somewhat independent of our daily lives and in a good, not excessive, measure.

Idk, I think UT has some really neat design elements, like the shock rifle that are really unique. It rewards predicting the enemy a lot and a lot of mechanical skill etc. Plus there's the cool factor of guns like the Redeemer :D

QIII while solid feels missing lots of flair, it feels more generic shooter. Good, solid, but a little generic.

I think conservatives don't really know what they are, and that's a big problem. I think Sagan discussed this. Like science is a pretty well established "institution" dating back centuries. Intellectualism dates back kind of as far back as humanity, almost every large civilization I can think (that left records) of had strong intellectual presence (including Greeks, Romans, etc.).

I'm not even critiquing any particular cultural stance. But I think it's possible and important to critique anti-intellectualism and specially denialisms specially in things that are actually important and threatening to society -- simply because of greed, most of the time. Let's not fool ourselves, climate change denialism isn't like a random cultural thing they chose to deny, it's specifically because of connections to coal, oil and gas industries.

If things are bad, you should want to know what will be the consequences and what can be done to mitigate things. In fact, I think denial tends to create some reactionary behavior from the left as well, sometimes leading to overblown claims around climate change. All of this leads to increasing polarization.

Slowing down cultural change is perfectly fine (as long as it's respectful of well established things like human rights), cosplaying a farmer is fine, whatever. Or being an actual farmer, or living outside of a big city, etc.. What's not fine is actively denying important scientific facts, being hypocritical (and, largely, stupid) in their positions: for example, farming tends to use very high tech equipment and methods, seeds, and so on; I'm sure most farmers enjoy most technological development, treatment against cancers, all sorts of diseases; computers, the internet, etc.. You can't at the same time want progress in cancer treatment and other conditions and want to cut funding to health sciences. And so on. I am willing to even entertain say technological regression. I don't love every technological change we've been through. But at least be consistent, you can't advocate to stop wearing clothes and want to live in the arctic.

Also, culture should be, carefully yes, questioned. It's not because it's cultural that it should stay frozen forever. People who want their culture completely frozen forever are dangerous to human progress and flourishing (I imagine most people wouldn't find ancient practices of human sacrifice, or say medieval torture practices nice and acceptable today). Being careful and well-reasoned is a completely different thing, and something conservatism could stand for instead.

Honestly, (not knowing about this case specifics) I don't think even copying Camus or de Broglie passages (not an entire text of course) is much of a problem to be honest. At one point some things become more or less common sense or public domain. I think this would be rather than plagiarism "citation misbehavior" -- i.e. failing to cite or mention previous work. Like, not every math geometry paper needs to cite Euclid, you can just talk about triangles; or even copying passages from say the parallel postulate or whatnot, when actually delivering something novel, should not count as fraud or plagiarism, simply failing to cite a historical source, in my opinion.

Also, I believe citation is usually limited to prior written work. I don't think citing personal communications is mandatory, but at least for me lots of ideas come up in personal communications, random discussions, etc.. I think actually we should give more credit in this case, but it shows that attributing fraud for failing to cite may be a little too harsh. Again, I don't know if that's the case here, or if his thesis is just some pastiche or prior work without any significant or original contribution.

Being a human may be sufficient (with important exceptions) to play chess, but playing chess well is not sufficient to be a human.

Likewise with math, it turns out, it appears. Likewise with most other things we classify as needing intelligence, I bet. It turns out that intelligence is not the same as humanity or sentience etc..

Also powerplants are quite (relatively) efficient in terms of heat-to-energy output, often >50% afair. So a 1GW power plant will generate something like 2GW of heat (or less), not 30GW.

Well then... make a matrix of such fuse-containers? (say every 20cm or whatever) I guess manufacturing such a matrix would be pretty expensive though, you'd need to carefully automate its production I think. It would also definitely interfere with flow of fluid in the tank.

No. This doomer position isn't helpful at all. All reductions we can get will severely reduce suffering and mass migrations, and prevent an enormous amount of biodiversity loss. We're losing species left and right every day too.

From what I know it seems we're headed to about +3C (mean temperature rise above preindustrial). It's a pretty dire scenario. But it's far, far from "too little too late". It seems probably large parts of Earth will become difficult to inhabit (like e.g. Phoenix AZ is today) without things like AC, etc.. But that's very far from an extinction scenario or total doom.

Every little bit we don't emit today will prevent probably several decades up to a century of atmospheric warming before it's extremely costly to remove from the atmosphere back into some reservoir.

Reminder that some fossil fuel companies quite enjoy narratives of total doom and change being pointless.

I think there are many things people mean by "capitalism". I think a system where people buy and trade stuff, getting income from their job is basically fine and almost a given.

Some people mean "capitalism" to mean: a state should be minimal, everybody should be doing everything in their power to seek profits and become maximally rich, becoming rich is simultaneously the utmost absolute charity you could do, and also the utmost personal happiness such that you shouldn't lift a finger for anyone else (of course, unless to particularly impacts yourself). That's the corrosive part I think. I think hypercapitalism (or money is my God) might be a better name for this, or some other term.

There are a number of associated malaises: along with believing money is the ultimate measure or virtue, come the belief that poor people are worthless (or worth much less), that being "productive" (generating profit or income) is the most important thing in life, that consumption of goods and services (i.e. things you buy with money) give you ultimate happiness (you just have to pick the 'right things' to buy), that any technological development is always perfectly good and can do no harm because it increases productivity, and that civil participation is unnecessary because the market sorts everything out. To name a few.

I agree that if profits are always put about everything else, disaster for any society is essentially guaranteed. (I'll leave the proof as an exercise to the reader)

Irrespective of anything else, I think libertarians of any kind have to contend with that Corporations can be extremely powerful entities that can be just as bad as governments. At the very least, setting their sights on governments alone seems terribly inconsistent and incorrect. In no small part because megacorps can yield governments in their favor, and by the point they're extremely powerful megacorps, the libertarian calls against regulation (yielded by megacorps against interests of the population) tend to fail.

But it's not just regulation megacorps can use, the most frequent is just various forms of capturing and dominating a market, I guess.

For example, Google is on the process of deciding or severely restricting independent developers on Android. I think by reasonable interpretation, user freedom is being severely restricted. But most people have little recourse, it's either Android or iOS (and by now both are similarly bad in different ways). There are some alternative OSes and devices, but there's a significant chance you may rely on some real world service that needs one of the two major ones.

Without trying to overgeneralize everything, in this particular example I don't see how things could change without regulation.

(and, if you will, in that case you can generalize to the implication that regulation isn't necessarily always bad)

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I think the lesson to take isn't that the cyberlibertarians were 100% wrong and we need maximum government control and surveillance over the internet. The world tends to be complex and most simple stories we come up with (which are the ones that tend to sound good on our ears and be most comfortable) tend to be wrong in various ways. The world demands, at least, flexibility from ourselves. Sure, be inspired by one idea or manifesto or another, but don't follow it blindly always.

A relative freedom of communication and widespread access to information arguably is pretty good for civilization. When you can talk and relate to people from allover, the justification for war seem increasingly flimsy. But various forms of regulation preventing single megacorps from dominating the global internet (or simply local wired internet access in your region), can be important. Maybe we need to protect more discourse against bad actors and the incoming flood of LLM-generated, possibly propaganda-fed content. Keep an open mind. Whatever decisions we make we can walk back and change course.

The fundamental principle isn't this or that ideological current, but that people are living good lives. Happy, in peace, full of awesome possibilities. As someone wiser has once said, remember your humanity and forget the rest! :)

Well, as a secondary consequence maybe, but then you could not set your kitchen on fire and still renovate it. Supposedly the first step you think of when renovating your kitchen isn't "Let me set my house on fire!"?