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Close, but sadly Markov could not afford a car and Turing was more of a man’s man.

What’s even the story here? QA Engineers Perform Job?

This is really a great laugh! It’s like watching a germaphobe come to the realization that germs are everywhere. It reminds me a little bit of how the new left approaches consumption as an identity forming action. It’s really beautiful to behold.

Edit: we need a food-coop take on every digital product. The same shit in an unbleached-brown, compostable container with social justice catchphrases splashed on the label. Produced at the same publicly-traded factory as the old, unethical stuff.

So his plan is to just take what he wants from the people who built it? What the fuck. That’s not a plan. Why are these people incapable of making the world better on their own.

I too, long for the days of 5 years ago when people understood how systems were built. What a peachy time that was. People were so knowledgeable, curious, and engaged with the systems that defined their lives. I am glad you reminded me about those happier, erudite days, as I was almost struggling to believe that such a time ever existed.

Turing, McCarthy, Shannon, Minsky, Rosenblatt, Hinton, LeCunn, Sustkever, Markov, Shazeer, Vaswani, etc.

What do all these AI pioneers have in common?

I know multiple employed, functional people who do not own a cell phone. This is absolutely not a requirement. People have simply atrophied in the machine’s embrace.

And not being able to afford having someone cook for you and serve you is not equivalent to subsisting on gruel. I could not even conceive of a word in which my parents or grandparents casually paid people to cook for them. People whining about this just comes off as entitled and out of touch.

Unironically, yes. Look at photos of people today, and then photos of people a century ago. You can’t hide the sloth.

Should we perhaps look at the top 51% instead? Why pick one perspective over the other?

I’m not familiar with Dalio outside some weird pseudo-academic paper he wrote where he attempts to provide a new grand theory of economics based on “transactions”, but I would be interested to hear this perspective supported.

Edit: samiv above answered my question

Thank you for this; you are completely correct but this is not the narrative on the streets. He was a tyrant (in the original sense) and dictator who believed in absolute power of the executive, which paved the way for Trump. His federalization program wiped out the America that existed before. Like Trump, he ruled via mob passion. He was America’s Marius.

For real. Reading old comment threads makes me sad, because the level of discourse was so much higher in the past. Although this place is still deeply appreciated, it’s clear that its culture is going monotonically towards reddit.

Is there anywhere public anymore that isn’t being overrun by lobotomized p-zombies (partisan zombies)? Is it even possible to make such a public space? Ressentiment consumes all discourse.

Crypto and AI are deeply connected, and you see similar structures/problems in both. Shannon, the “Father (or whatever) of AI”, worked for the NSA and published many papers there that were later declassified.

Here is a banger quote on this by Shannon’s boy Warren Weaver, keeping in mind LLMs came from translation problems:

“One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

Thanks for this! I have been reading through early information/automata theory lately, and hadn’t come across this one. If you have any more recommendations, please share.

It’s like The Machine Stops, except that ~10% of the population still understands how the machine works.

Yeah, I did not use Jira or other project management software. There was no need as the project could be implemented very fast with essentially one contributor.

However agents (not just LLMs) were definitely involved.

It’s possible I misunderstood your question.

It’s also worth considering that a lot of this software will never be marketed, compared to in the past. For example, since it is now trivial to build a tool, why sell it? It is now economical to build a lot tools in-house.

I used claude for a small project last weekend that will 100% create significant value in my workplace. It’s a non-tech setting. Going to be vague so as not to give out too much personal information.

Basically it allowed me to easily spin up a highly usable front-end as well as scrape together a large dataset to back it. The dataset is industry specific knowledge that does not exist in any public, single source. Part of this dataset creation was generating geolocation polygons based on legal documents that verbally defined physical territory. Absolute precision is not necessary for our purposes, but as far as we have confirmed so far the agent basically one-shotted the data with negligible errors and sufficient precision.

Humans were involved in the process, but there is zero chance this project would have happened without agents. The dataset alone would have taken weeks of full time effort. The front end would have been easier, but still time consuming.

I don’t really understand how people aren’t seeing the value in this.

Capitalism is what replaced slavery, to generalize. By turning slaves into wage laborer-consumers, capitalists increased market sizes, thereby increasing the absolute size of the profit they get from owning the capital enterprises the laborers operated.

The US civil war is the most explicit demonstration of this process. Northern industrial capitalists ended the southern agrarian slave economy, increasing market size and generating extreme wealth in the latter half of the 19th century.

I’m not sure you’ll read this because you made an obvious throwaway, but your action/comment is clearly not appropriate for a place like HN. And from the comments in general, it seems like maybe this article isn’t either.

I would also argue that the killing of George Floyd sparked the BLM riots, if that helps. But yes, I agree that media helps people become aware of these atrocities and certainly riles them up. But it’s not like pogroms didn’t happen before the internet.

I think maybe what was instrumental in the Belfast riots was a Sudanese man attempting to behead an NHS worker in the street.

But, you know, that’s just a guess.

Let’s not obfuscate this. At the end of the day, we get there by people with guns (or some other weapons) forcing a global monopoly on violence.

At some point you need to forcefully take the things from the people who own them now and give them to the one-world government.

I think you two commenters have both expressed the opposing ideas at the core of so much of the political/worldview divide of the world today.

Position 1: a human is an entity distinct from their family.

Position 2: a family is an entity that exists across generations, and no individual in the family can be abstracted from it.

I don’t think you two, or anyone else, is ever really going to suddenly change their mind on this point. It’s at the foundation of the irreconcilable divide between leftism and conservatism.

Ultimately, since we have plenty of evidence to show that people will just shout past each other when they hit this ideological sticking point, I think a better approach would be to individually answer the question: “Which is a better model for predicting the world?”

I agree with you on this point. This is a very weak line in an otherwise interesting post. Sometimes it feels like people have forgotten what nation states are.

I appreciate this post a lot, even if I don’t agree with all its points, as I think it is grappling with the right problems. Europe needs to build and build with urgency if it’s ever going to get out of this mess it’s in.

The reaction to the US government restricting access to foreign nationals is interesting to me. On the one hand, people rail against US imperialism. On the other, they get angry when they don’t have access to the tools of empire. It feels very “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

Really enjoyed this, thanks for sharing!

Sorry, I mean about David Sacks fraudulently obtaining citizenship.

I am almost afraid to ask, but do you have a source? When I put your claim in a couple of search engines all I get is your comment here.

A requirement of digital sovereignty is the ability to build competitive digital companies. It seems unlikely to me at this point that the EU is going to turn that ship around.

To be clear, the restriction is not to native-born citizens of the US but citizens of the US in general. David Sacks is a US citizen.