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

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

#571

Post by lmm »

dripdry45 wrote: post #524
joquarky wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a contingent fact about the place and era you live in. Medieval peasants - the majority of people who have ever lived - were not dumbasses, not all of them - but there simply wasn't a way for even the smartest to accumulate long-term wealth. At best you could maybe get your neighbours to owe you a few more favours, and maybe once in a generation if you played every card right there might be a chance for a patriarch to acquire one more piece of land, but that's it, that's your lot. (Sure you can work your ass off and produce a bit of extra grain in a given year, but then what? It's going to rot, and selling it for money is surprisingly useless to you)

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

#572

Post by janalsncm »

ernst_klim wrote: post #123
yubblegum wrote: post #63

I fear that outside of cataclysmic global warfare or some sort of butlerian jihad (which amounts to the same) this genie is not going back into the bottle. This tech is 100% aligned with the goals of the 0.001% that own and control it, and almost all of the negatives cited by Kyle and likeminded (such as myself) are in fact positives for them in context of massive population reduction to eliminate "useless eaters" an…

> to eliminate "useless eaters" It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people. It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replaceme…

This is where the logic behind AI goes against conventional wisdom.

It doesn’t have to be effective. It has to make CEOs believe it is effective.

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

#573

Post by trinsic2 »

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 don't need any of that. I built a life for myself with discipline and hard work. I avoid most of the drama you describe because I create my world instead of letting it be created for me.

Here are some words to live by[0]. I don't agree with everything Derek Silvers says, esp about philosophy. Its more of a guiding principle that drives rather than divides.

[0]: https://fluidself.org/books/self-help/how-to-live

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

#574

Post by eschaton »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #416
121789 wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is kind of hilarious to hear people just keep making the same arguments as ted kaczynski

Neither Ted Kaczynski nor Senator McCarthy were wrong, even if we can criticize their ways and means.

Crazy that someone would use this pseudonym while at the same time saying that all society's problems are caused by socialist and Communist conspiracy.

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

#575

Post by sillysaurusx »

tmoertel wrote: post #540
sillysaurusx wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "t…

Thank you so much!

Would you be willing to paste your entire Makefile here? Or are there secrets in it?

It would help me greatly — I don't have much experience with pandoc or hakyll. I understand the basics, but the actual usage in practice isn't so easy to set up from first principles.

I've been using Claude to help me with a lot of this, but I'm extremely curious to compare notes vs your setup.

If not, thank you anyway for your time.

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

#576

Post by ahartmetz »

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.

Seasons, at least, are entirely predictable. Plant growth is somewhat predictable. Travel times are mostly predictable (early trading). The timeline of children growing up is predictable if (big if) they survive. Livestock lifecycles were known. They knew how long various kinds of food took to spoil.

These are very important things and most of them take place on longer or much longer timescales than a few months. Early humans weren't monkeys, and after they had left the tropics, they couldn't survive without planning because getting food is difficult in winter.

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

#577

Post by ButlerianJihad »

janalsncm wrote: post #572
ernst_klim wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> to eliminate "useless eaters" It can't. It can't even deal with emails without randomly deleting your email folder [1]. Saying that it can make decisions and replace humans is akin of saying that random number generator can make decisions and can replace people. It's just an automation tool, and just like all automation tools before it it will create more jobs than destroy. All the CEOs' talks about labor replaceme…

This is where the logic behind AI goes against conventional wisdom. It doesn’t have to be effective. It has to make CEOs believe it is effective.

Ah, you mean, like lithium or Prozac?

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

#578

Post by tmoertel »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #575
tmoertel wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "t…

Thank you so much! Would you be willing to paste your entire Makefile here? Or are there secrets in it? It would help me greatly — I don't have much experience with pandoc or hakyll. I understand the basics, but the actual usage in practice isn't so easy to set up from first principles. I've been using Claude to help me with a lot of this, but I'm extremely curious to compare notes vs your setup. If not, thank you an…

Sure, here's the Makefile. Also, if you want more examples of working Hakyll setups, there's a long list of them here: https://jaspervdj.be/hakyll/examples.html

    # Binary tool we use to build the website.
    bins = dist-newstyle/build/*/*/*/*/site/build/site
    tool = $(bins)/site

    # By default, we build everything if you invoke `make` without a target.
    all: build
    .PHONY: all

    # The tool used to build the site is a Hakyll binary configured by `site.hs`.
    # This rule automatically builds the tool if it's out of date.
    $(tool): site.hs site.cabal
            cabal v2-build

    # The `build` target builds the web site's out-of-date static assets.
    .PHONY: build
    build: $(tool) pdfs
            $(tool) build

    # The `rebuild` target forces a rebuild of all web assets.
    .PHONY: rebuild
    rebuild: $(tool)
            $(tool) rebuild

    # This `push` rule publishes the static site to our CDN (firebase).
    # It requires:
    #
    # - the `firebase` tool:
    #   wget -O ~/bin/firebase https://firebase.tools/bin/linux/latest \
    #       && chmod +x ~/bin/firebase
    #   # Docs: https://firebase.google.com/docs/cli#linux
    #
    # - `firebase login --no-localhost` to have been run.
    #
    # You may need to run `firebase login --no-localhost --reauth` if
    # the local authentical credentials time out.
    .PHONY: push
    push: build
            firebase deploy --only hosting

    # Generate PDF versions of selected blog posts.
    .PHONY: pdfs
    pdfs: images/public_html/blog/pix-20240601/sampling-with-sql.pdf

    images/public_html/blog/pix-20240601/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 ../$@.tmp --pdf-engine=pdflatex ../$

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

#579

Post by cindyllm »

hackable_sand wrote: post #525
chungusamongus wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#580

Post by coderenegade »

armonster wrote: post #46
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.

Their negative effects are much more vast, subtle, and cultural. You could say many of the broad and widespread mental issues we have in the US is the result of automobiles leading to suburbanization and thus isolation of people. It has created an expensive barrier of entry for existing in society and added a ton of friction to doing anything and everything, especially with people. That's not even getting into the cl…

Except rural communities are both more car dependent than cities, and have more tightly knit communities, so isolation probably isn't just a function of owning cars. Cars are probably the wrong mode of transportation for large cities, but then the question becomes: is that how we should all live, and to what extent does a better solution for the group override a better solution for the individual? Because, like it or not, cars are a better personal solution if you aren't bumper-to-bumper in a commute. I'm not going to take my dog or my surfboard on the bus or a train, and I have a life that doesn't end at the city's boundaries.
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