throwaway_7274

I agree that it’s a little weird, insofar as people don’t talk about it, but I’m not sure it’s very woke at all. It’s in a lot of tension with conventional woke ideas.

The usual way people talk about all this is more or less idealist (as opposed to materialist): people thought hard and got better morals (or worse morals, if you have a reactionary bent). The claim I’m making is that it’s not a coincidence that egalitarian norms happened to be correlated with the falling cost of energy. It’s basically the same idea as “God created men [and women]; Sam Colt made them equal.”

Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.

I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.

It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.

There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.

Wow, I didn’t even notice how badly I underexplained that! Yeah, thanks, your edit is what I had in mind. jbay808 explains it well, too.

Incidentally, the relationship is bidirectional. You can try it out just for fun. zstd is a pretty crappy language model :)

This perspective is a useful source of intuition against the “LLMs can’t have new ideas, they’re just next-token-predictors” style arguments. What if you shift your perspective to thinking of training as optimization over a vast parametrized family of compression algorithms? Well, it suddenly looks a lot more plausible that “new” “ideas” can emerge from that process!

Your may have been thinking of peyote, which is somewhat endangered, and widely poached.

Well, you know, it depends on who “we” are! Lots of people predicted what would be lost. I thought many of them were a bit silly for a long time, but they were right in the end. Many others still think they’re a bit silly.

It’s so interesting to me that there are still so many people who see the monkey’s-paw thing as somehow secondary or incidental, even those who acknowledge that it’s often there! I don’t really understand why this is, or why I feel differently. To me at least, the monkey’s-paw aspect is primary now, to the point that the gee-whiz aspect hardly bears on my thinking at all.

I’m not telling you that I think you’re wrong or foolish, to be clear! I just have this different instinct from you, although it sounds like we basically agree on the reflective level. I’m interested in what it is that directs peoples’ attention and interest in such a way that new information technology products pattern-match to “cool, shiny, new, handy, exciting; freedom” or to “dystopian social control, creepy surveillance capitalism; unfreedom.” People have different System 1 intuitions, orthogonal to their System 2 thinking!

It’s so weird because I used to be the other way. I can’t put my finger on when or how the phase transition took place in my mind.

Yeah absolutely. And obviously I’m overplaying my naïveté and idealism for effect here, a little bit, but I was still surprised how much it really did improve my quality of life.

I don’t even buy a lot of things, really, I still don’t own a car and hope I never will. But now I just don’t feel quite so wracked with guilt over getting a haircut or getting the organic raspberries or whatever. There are so many little waste-of-time tasks that I don’t have to waste as much time on. I dunno. It’s funny. “Selling out” is real easy. It makes everything real easy.

I do wonder if this is the first step down the path to “I am a prisoner to my Stuff. Where did my life go”

Just thinkin out loud into the internet

It’s funny, people are so different! I’d always taken it as an axiomatic Truth of the world that money doesn’t buy happiness. When I finally caved and took a high-paying job, I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to find that it made my life a lot easier. So much breathing room :)

This isn’t a disagreement or a hook into some discourse or anything. I don’t have a point. Just thoughts

More importantly, why are there always 30 people who insist that you can’t know it’s claudeslop? Or, “so what if it is,” or something like this? It boggles the mind.

Yep, that’s the one!

I didn’t know there were HREaboos out there. Please, how do I take this pill?

Maybe you’re thinking of the Eastern Roman Empire, which, unlike the HRE, was actually a continuation of the classical state?

Fascinating how different peoples’ intuitions can be. Thanks for the earnest response.

:)

I am not a religious person, but this feels to me, intuitively, for lack of any better word, and with only the mildest flippancy, satanic.

‘Tech’ culture has gotten very, very weird. It’s turned sour. It’s so far past the point where I no longer feel the joy and excitement and liberatory potential of computing. I’m not even that old. What happened?

“Now I know exactly what is going on” is what Claude says right before it commits a baffling blunder.

This Fox has a longing for grapes:

He jumps, but the bunch still escapes.

So he goes away sour;

And, 'tis said, to this hour

Declares that he's no taste for grapes.

It costs advertisers three whole dollars for a user to click on one of these things? That’s hilarious. I’m switching to ChatGPT and I’m going to click on every one. Maybe I’ll even write a browser extension that does it for me.

Assertions are for testing at runtime. They demonstrate that the behavior is correct on one input when it runs. Formal verification proves that the code is correct on _all_ inputs _before_ it runs.

Only four Maya codices survived destruction by the Spanish…

They do. Often for different kinds of things. It’s not “government good, private bad” or the other way around. Both are facile views.

They do, and they often do collect accurate data. Philip Morris, for example, knew about the danger of smoking for decades, and Exxon knew all about the greenhouse effect. They didn’t publish that data, of course, and publicly argued to the contrary.

It’s astonishing how quickly attitudes have shifted on this forum since engineers have been reminded which side of the labor/capital divide they’re really on. I can scarcely believe some of the comments I’m seeing on here these days.

comment reads clean. drafting response when it lands.

＊onanizing…

Me too. It feels like I’m taking psychic damage from reading so much of this stuff. Contrary to the theory that it’s “just the contract workers’ Nigerian English,” I think the models are developing an ultra-terse hyper-stylized dialect of their own under RL pressure. They seem to be writing increasingly in _code_, and I don’t mean computer code. The words don’t mean quite what they mean to humans.

I literally will not buy a car that has a microprocessor in it

(I will, apparently, never buy a car)

Correlated events :)

The team behind this post is (or at least was as of a few months ago) working with Midjourney.