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The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

aphyr.com

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Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#521

Post by asdff »

Gigachad wrote: post #493
asdff wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Negative effects were immediately noticed. The change in smog was apparent. Road laws rapidly advanced. Road building standards rapidly changed. Congestion was also very much apparent, and the reason behind massive highway building effort that came some thirty years after the car's rise to popularity. Really these people decades ago had a great grasp on these things. But why did they "fail" and we still have traffic?…

They failed because traffic can’t be fixed by adding capacity. The inefficiency of cars will mean you can never build enough roads to keep ahead of consumption. Traffic gets fixed by getting most people to use some other form of transport and leaving cars to the edge case uses.

Sure traffic can be fixed by adding capacity. Demand is ultimately finite. You see this in places like the midwest where there is overcapacity on the highway system and you can go a mile a minute across the region pretty much at all hours of the day.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#522

Post by joquarky »

munksbeer wrote: post #477
mrdependable wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be difficult, but not necessarily THAT difficult. With enough pushback from the public, AI would start getting regulated in meaningful ways. The problem is too many people love it, and see no problem with it. Because the momentum and money is on their side, it feels like it is impossible. Maybe things will turn out fine and we will just live in a similar but more depressing future, but if the pro-AI crowd ge…

> Maybe things will turn out fine and we will just live in a similar but more depressing future Or things could turn out more than fine and we progress as we've always progressed, towards more abundance and humans in 30 years will live massively better lives than we live today, just as we live massively better lives than people at just about any previous point in history.

> more abundance

This is blatantly unsustainable.

> just about any previous point in history

The late 1990s is an exception for most people.

It sounds like things are going well for you. Be mindful of psychological projection.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#523

Post by gosub100 »

estimator7292 wrote: post #451
baal80spam wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. You say it in a way that it sounds like automobiles don't have a positive effect. I don't agree - they have some negative effects but overall they have a vast net positive effect for everyone.

What benefit do cars provide that public transit doesn't? How are thousands of individual cars better than light rail? Cars aren't a positive in society. Transportation is the benefit, and cars are the worst possible way to transport people. A functioning public transit system is better in every possible way apart from egotistical arguments like "I don't like seeing poor people on the bus".

I don't like urine puddles on the bus or train seats. How egotistical of me being repulsed by human waste.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#524

Post by dripdry45 »

joquarky wrote: post #502
ahartmetz wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you forgot discipline and long-term thinking in your core values. Even before high technology, there were things to plan and resources to manage. Especially after the beginning of agriculture.

Long term thinking is out when you can't predict more than a few months ahead at most.

You have to make those opportunities to plan long-term. Once you start to form those, it will be amazing how many opportunities present themselves.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#525

Post by hackable_sand »

chungusamongus wrote: post #73
throwanem wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. I'm doing it because I care more whether I can live with myself than whether I impress people with the name of who I work for. Hence much of my recent comment history here, for example. I don't want any of these people getting the idea they should want me to work with them, either. I do want my name on every industry blacklist I can possibly get it on. Those will eventually be revealed - remember Franklin's dictu…

That's nice for you but other people have kids to feed and don't particularly care about your little crusade, which will fail.

What makes you think none of us have families?

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#526

Post by Gigachad »

asdff wrote: post #521
Gigachad wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They failed because traffic can’t be fixed by adding capacity. The inefficiency of cars will mean you can never build enough roads to keep ahead of consumption. Traffic gets fixed by getting most people to use some other form of transport and leaving cars to the edge case uses.

Sure traffic can be fixed by adding capacity. Demand is ultimately finite. You see this in places like the midwest where there is overcapacity on the highway system and you can go a mile a minute across the region pretty much at all hours of the day.

For long distance highways sure. But not commuting routes in cities.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#527

Post by dripdry45 »

DavidPiper wrote: post #512
Animats wrote: post #445

"I could retrain, but my core skills—reading, thinking, and writing—are squarely in the blast radius of large language models." Yes. For the lifetime of almost everyone alive now, reading, thinking, and writing have been valued skills which moved one up in society's hierarchy. This is a historical anomaly. Prior to 1800 or so, those skills were not all that useful to the average farmer. There were more smart people t…

I'm seeing a lot of comments like this lately: "Oh well, we were in an anomalous time of social growth, time to go backwards! We won't even need to read or write or think! It's all just too bad, but that's just the way the world works, like it did in 1800." [or pick your date before any current person was alive] Lots of people have started considering a time of significant "progress" as "an anomaly", as if the world…

I have a good friend who doesn’t pay attention to any of this stuff. Nothing gets them down for long, they do pretty well with work, and just enjoy living life simply. They have amassed a reasonable amount of wealth, are moving up at their job, and just don’t pay any attention to all this stuff we here on the Internet talk about all the time. There is no AI black pill because they aren’t caught up in all the headlines and propaganda and bullshit. there are plenty of people out there like that. They are just living their lives. In some ways, we might be the ones who are the anomaly and getting hurt by the Internet.

I think, in a way, the Internet itself is the virus. It has infiltrated us and our minds. Rage and suffering are what get clicks and engagement. The Internet has become a suffering engine, which spins angst into gold.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#528

Post by madeofpalk »

lukev wrote: post #17

This is a must-read series of articles, and I think Kyle is very much correct. The comparison to the adoption of automobiles is apt, and something I've thought about before as well. Just because a technology can be useful doesn't mean it will have positive effects on society. That said, I'm more open to using LLMs in constrained scenarios, in cases where they're an appropriate tool for the job and the downsides can b…

> Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act

> Now might be a good time to call your representatives.

Well, not that must-read I guess

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#529

Post by Gigachad »

gosub100 wrote: post #517
Gigachad wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental cars are expensive because they are covering the risk and increased wear and tear of rental drivers. As well as the downtime of when the car is rented to you but you aren’t driving it. Self driving cars would make this massively cheaper and remove most of the reasons to own a car. It would make about as much sense as owning a train for most people.

Yep just like how massively cheaper housing is to rent, right?

I use cars more like I use a hotel. Inconsistently on demand when PT doesn’t cover the route I need.

If I bought and sold a house every time I needed somewhere to stay on holiday, renting would be massively cheaper.

I’ve already done the math and uber occasionally is cheaper than owning a car. Self driving electric will be even cheaper.

Re: The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?

#530

Post by tmoertel »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #518

Question: The author makes this article available on the web as a series of posts, a PDF ( https://aphyr.com/data/posts/411/the-future-of-everything-is... ) and an EPUB. What do you suppose their tooling looks like? Is there a single "document containing all the words," and it updates the website, pdf, and epub whenever you change it? What struck me was that the presentation is beautiful. It seems worth emulating. Bu…

I am not the author of the site in question, but I suspect that your guess is right, and that Pandoc is the hub between the spokes.

For my blog, I write posts in Markdown. Then the build process uses Pandoc to convert the posts into web pages and, for certain pages, PDF files typeset with TeX. For example, here is a post in both web and PDF versions:

(Web) https://blog.moertel.com/posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql....

(Typeset PDF) https://blog.moertel.com/images/public_html/blog/pix-2024060...

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