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

aphyr.com

651–660 of 830 posts

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

#651

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…

I'm tempted to (bitterly) point out that feeling responsible for future generations was already off the table decades ago when we decided to ignore our ecological footprints.

Ecological footprints are more about the distribution of resource burdens between first and third world countries. Predictions about resource exhaustion have proved mostly false.

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

#652

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This a very silly view of the past through modern eyes. Intelligence, cunning, and wit have always been immensely valuable. Read the mythology of literally any culture for examples. To extrapolate from fewer people were formally educated or literate to intelligence wasn’t valued is absurd. As for your part about reading and writing. Literacy has always been a very valuable skill that would increase your social standi…

You could drop the first sentence without losing anything other than an unnecessary insult.

Personally, I find "silly" to be a useful adjective to sum up your impending disagreement without being insulting.

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

#653
post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Gender is mutable. Sex is determined by genetics, though in a handful of creatures, sex could be considered mutable.

You can change sex

And people can be born intersex

Your data is wrong

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

#654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Ear…

> Seasons, at least, are entirely predictable. Plant growth is somewhat predictable.

Decreasingly so, thanks to climate change. The increase in temp isn't the problem. It's that climate change increases the frequency of outlier temperatures on a seasonable basis. Crops don't just fail if the average is too hot. They fail if there are too many hot/cold days in a growing season. And that is the unpredictable thing we're going to be running into in the future. Certainly while we're all alive. It's already happening.

Latin American climate refugees have been fleeing north precisely because of climate change decreasing crop yields.

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

#655

"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…

  > So what was valued? ...
None of that was valued much compared to lineage, though.

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

#656
post #496

"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…

> Physical robustness. Strength, perhaps brutality. Competence in physical tasks. Honesty. Parentage. Birth order (see primogeniture.) Those matter in per-technological societies, and they matter in failed societies now. Those are perhaps humanity's core values. This is really bleak to me. We can do better than primogeniture, and of course the gender discrimination that goes along with it. You might as well write tha…

Primogeniture is not actually unreasonable if you consider that children can range in ages say 15 to 20 years. On average the oldest is most mature and experienced. Both reasonable qualities up to certain point. If your existence depends on decision of single leader. I generally would pick the 30 year old one over 20 year old or 25 year old over 15 year old. Post 30 year old, it gets different, but to around there I would reasonably expect maturity and experience to matter.

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

#657
post #618

Eh, this has been a disappointing series to read from the person that wrote all those Jepsen write-ups and the technical interview series. All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. This is more befitting Zitron than aphyr. Where's the sharp incisive wit and deep insights? At least he realizes thi…

> All articles are mostly a regurgitation of all the negativity that gets aired here all the time (a lot of it already fixed or debunked) and 0 discussion of utility. There are multiple sections that talk directly about utility. Here's one of them: [0] But, sure. I'll bite. Here's the third paragraph of the first part of the essay [1]: This is *bullshit* about *bullshit machines*, and I mean it. It is neither balance…

[0] is a throwaway paragraph that handwaves at second-hand accounts of generic things LLMs can do, with no further discussion, apparently because he (surprisingly!) has almost no first-hand experience with them. Then there are 10 pages of negativity with dozens of links to stuff that has been discussed to death here and in media. The "negative spaces" he's filling are already overflowing.

His lack of personal experience with LLMs was the most disappointing aspect, because he does not really know what we're dealing with. He's just going off what he's read / heard. So again, where's the incisive insight?

Now, here's a concrete example of what I mean by utility: a single person being able to rewrite an entire open source project from scratch in a few days just so it could be relicensed. Is that good or bad? I don't know! Is it a stupefying example of what's possible? Yes! Is that "breathless boosterism?" Only if you ignore the infinite nuances involved.

> Eh. Carefully read through and consider [3].

Hadn't come across this one before, but there's not much in there I hadn't seen and even discussed in past comments. As an example, it still mentions the METR study from 2025 without mentioning the very pertinent follow-up from just a couple of months back... which is not very surprising to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47145601 ;-)

It does mention (and then gloss over) the real finding of the DORA and related reports, which is pertinent to my original point: LLMs are simply an amplifier of your existing software discipline. Teams with strong software discipline see amazing speedups, those with poor discipline sees increased outages.

And, to my original point, who knows what good software discipline looks like? Hint: it's not the capital class.

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

#658
post #470

From here in the Uk the site just says: "Unavailable Due to the UK Online Safety Act [...] Now might be a good time to call your representatives." So I fired-up a vpn, and it appears to be a personal blog. About ai risks. The geo-block is kind of a shame, as the writing is good and there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA.

> there appears to be nothing about the site that makes it subject to the OLSA. The regulators of OSA say otherwise. Or at any rate, they refuse to agree and won't rule it out. ____________ For the geo-blocked, reproducing relevant content [0]: > A few months back I wound up concluding, based on conversations with Ofcom [1] that aphyr.com might be illegal in the UK due to the UK Online Safety Act. > [...] This blog h…

The OLSA is far from perfect, particularly in the definitions it uses, but its focus is social media platforms and the like, not simple blogs.

OFCOM has a q&a-based tool [1] to advise on whether the OLSA applies to a site. I'm not a lawyer, but its pretty clear that a non-adult-themed personal blog where people can post only textual comments on content that they dont control, is not going to be subject to the act.

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/illegal-and-harmful-c...

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

#659
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.

what was Senator McCarthy right about?

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

#660
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regarding bad weather; if winter is bad enough for bicycles to fail, then certainly it is not safe to drive either This is a big claim with no justification. Cars have dynamic traction control, internal temperature control, etc. You may get frost bite on your bicycle, but almost certainly not in your car. Having four wide wheels makes the vehicle radically more stable. Add seat belts, air bags, etc. cars have far m…

There’s probably very little weather that is safe for cars but unsafe for bikes. Uncomfortable, yes, possibly extremely so. But you can bike in a downpour so severe that it’s unsafe to drive specifically because you’re not in a 2 ton deaths machine. Maybe a severe enough snow storm? Even then we’re in Goldilocks territory for the storm to be unsafe for bikes but safe(ish) for cars. The biggest factor is that people s…

> There’s probably very little weather that is safe for cars but unsafe for bikes.

Any weather where the wind is >15mph will be safer in a car. Hail. 100 F days. Thunderstorms. I love walking and public transportation but holy hell the thought of biking in some of our Texas weather is horrifying.

Not to mention that my 6yo and 9yo are much safer in my car than cycling through inclement weather! Not everyone is a single individual with no children! Holy hell, the trip from a kid's bday party to my house two weekends ago would've been deadly for my kids, but in a car, the weather wasn't an issue.

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