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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?

#531

Post by sillysaurusx »

tmoertel wrote: post #530
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..…

Beautiful. I don't suppose you have public, detailed installation steps for how to go from "nothing exists" to "Pandoc can push posts to https://blog.moertel.com/"? :)

The best I was able to do was http://github.com/shawwn/wiki, which has been broken since 2020. You can't spell Haskell without Hell.

If you wouldn't mind pulling up a `claude` in your repo and running `/init` and showing the result, that'd give me at least a vague idea of what to do.

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

#532

Post by copypaper »

We are one technological breakthrough away from AGI. Seriously what happens when, for example, a viable room temperature superconductor (remember LK-99 lol) gets discovered? Next thing you know we have 3d stacked chips operating at THz speeds with virtually zero heat output, batteries that can charge instantly, etc.

I know a RTSC is the holy grail, but it really feels like AI is in the same stage computers were in the 80s. I used to be extremely bearish and think AI was useless, but I've taken a total 180 the last 6 months. If these things get better (they will), nobody's job will be safe.

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

#533

Post by hackable_sand »

notpachet wrote: post #26
TeMPOraL wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger" - Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune I always preferred this take: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.” ― Alfred North Whitehead It's both opposite and complementary to your Frank Herb…

I guess it hinges on your definition of "civilization".

Or "advance"

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

#534

Post by yosame »

mckn1ght wrote: post #405
nradov wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I could flap my arms and fly to the moon? You haven't presented any scientific evidence that LLMs will enable such prediction accuracy. It's pure speculation and hope. Some smaller, incremental improvements to optimize research workflows are much more likely.

What is your opinion on AlphaFold? Doesn’t that provide a speedup for one part of medication development and understanding disease?

Not really, you still have to validate the structures it estimates, which minimises any speed gains.

It can help a little bit in the early stages of drug design, but even if it was perfect (which it's not), there's a massive gap between understanding a protein structure, and understanding how a drug will or system will interact with it.

In a broader sense, understanding the structure of a protein is only a small part of drug development. Unfortunately biology is complicated, and we're an extremely far way away from solving it.

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

#535

Post by lifeisstillgood »

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…

Maybe I am being naive but I think there will always be room for smarts.

Every professor at any university has a dozen more project ideas than they have graduate students, every factory boss has a dozen more optimisations than ways to implement them, and looking up into the night sky we have 95% of it that cannot be explained.

The gap is not too few smart people, nor too few "jobs" that need smarts. The gap is being prepared to arrange society and wealth so the "job" is discovery, science, sharing. We are no longer hunter gatherers, no longer a feudal society, perhaps we shall stop being whatever this one is and try a new one.

(and no, I don't think there is a name for the new one yet (its not socialism, maybe not capitalism).

Lets just not fall back to Feudal if we can help it

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

#536

Post by Aurornis »

copypaper wrote: post #532

We are one technological breakthrough away from AGI. Seriously what happens when, for example, a viable room temperature superconductor (remember LK-99 lol) gets discovered? Next thing you know we have 3d stacked chips operating at THz speeds with virtually zero heat output, batteries that can charge instantly, etc. I know a RTSC is the holy grail, but it really feels like AI is in the same stage computers were in th…

> what happens when, for example, a viable room temperature superconductor (remember LK-99 lol) gets discovered? Next thing you know we have 3d stacked chips operating at THz speeds with virtually zero heat output

Room temperature superconductors don’t enable THz chips with no heat output.

If superconductors broadly allowed this, we’d already have such chips available because we could super cool them and keep them at that temperature easily.

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

#537

Post by ted_dunning »

Glemllksdf wrote: post #334
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…

I think he is to pesimistic, a tool is a tool and if AI progresses without hitting a ceilling, i will see a potential future of a society which might explore space. Musks SpaceX Keynote was ridiculous, don't get me wrong, but we will be able to see AI progress in the next 5 years which will give us some kind of gut feeling were the journey can go. Also AI solves another problem: Compute. It was clear that we want som…

Actually, this AI Compute is not very useful for physics, protein folding or many other high performance computing.

The problem is that the connectivity required for much of AI is very different than that required for classic HPC (more emphasis on bandwidth, less on super low latency small payload remote memory operations) and the numeric emphasis is very different (lots of mixed resolution and lots of ridiculously small numeric resolutions like fp8 vs almost all fp64 with some fp32).

The result is that essentially no AI computers reach the high end of the TOP500.

The converse is also true, classic frontier scale super computers don't make the most cost effective AI training platforms because they spend a lot of the budget on making HPC programs fast.

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

#538

Post by lifeisstillgood »

dripdry45 wrote: post #527
DavidPiper wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 headline…

But ... they are only able to live their lives and amass wealth (good on them btw) because modern western society is arranged like it is - Maritime trade, international rules based order (mostly) with compatible legal systems, free and fair elections and half decent government accountability, individual rights and property systems.

Basically England Circa 1851, plus democracy.

And because it was all put together more or less accidentally, it can all fall apart. So worrying about that and trying to do something about it is like discovering that under the deck of the ship are engine rooms, rudders, riveted steel plates and navigation maps.

Its not a slight on your friend, but one would expect him to have a mental model of a rudder, even if he does not know about the impact of cavitation.

More Black pills flying around are just an indication that the rudder is hanging off or the rivets are leaking a bit. It can be fixed, as long as no one tells the passengers the ship is actually flat or the engine room is how elites maintain power.

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

#539

Post by [deleted] »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #351
anon84873628 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. Let's simplify it to the individualist vs collectivist spectrum. Cars became a self-reinforcing driver of individualism, especially in net new geographies. The negative effects are resisted better in societies/regions that were built long before them. (For both the cultural reasons and plain physical reasons, like not having wide enough roads). In the car centric places, a few generations later they beco…

The thing is, the Amish don't try to tell the rest of the world that their way is the "obviously correct" way and that everybody else is doing it wrong, the way anti-personal mobility advocates do.

[deleted]

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

#540

Post by tmoertel »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #531
tmoertel wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..…

Beautiful. I don't suppose you have public, detailed installation steps for how to go from "nothing exists" to "Pandoc can push posts to https://blog.moertel.com/ "? :) The best I was able to do was http://github.com/shawwn/wiki , which has been broken since 2020. You can't spell Haskell without Hell. If you wouldn't mind pulling up a `claude` in your repo and running `/init` and showing the result, that'd give me at…

Thanks. I do not have a public, detailed description of how my blog works. But in short, my site build system is powered by a Makefile that invokes Hakyll [1]. My Hakyll configuration has the following rule baked into it for generating HTML docs from Markdown docs in the `posts/` directory:

    match "posts/*" $ do
        route $ setExtension "html"
        let ctx = postCtx tags
        compile $ pandocMathCompiler
            >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/post.html" ctx
            >>= saveSnapshot "content"
            >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/add-comments.html" ctx
            >>= loadAndApplyTemplate "templates/default.html" ctx
            >>= relativizeUrls
The `pandocMathCompiler` bit invokes Hakyll's Pandoc subsystem with support for rendering formulas using MathJax.

The site Makefile also has rules to build PDF versions of the articles that I want to typeset. The rules just invoke Pandoc directly. For example, here's the rule used to generate the PDF file in my prior comment:

    sampling-with-sql.pdf: posts/2024-08-23-sampling-with-sql.md
            ( cd posts && pandoc --metadata-file=../templates/latex-header-includes.yaml -t pdf -o ../$@.tmp --pdf-engine=pdflatex ../$
It's basically a straightforward invocation of Pandoc with a little shell boilerplate to prevent the PDF file from being moved into its final location unless Pandoc exits with success.

The Makefile has a final "push" target that makes sure the site's assets are up to date (invoking Hakyll if needed) and then pushes the static site up to the content distribution network I'm using to publish my website.

[1] https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/

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