281–290 of 518 posts
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I pay for codex & claude. Both out-code me but I'm a novice. Fable is really good and shockingly capable. But they're still dumb as hell in various ways. They're faster than the best humans but they are not better problem solvers, especially for novel stuff like implementing SOTA 3D boolean algorithms in Blender.
For now.
The excessive scepticism on Hacker News has poisoned any attempts at rational AI discourse. The American Government has weaponised state power in a clumsy, corrupt and punitive attack against Anthropic, in an escalating war over control of AI. Meanwhile, HN has anchored on "marketing hype" as the only possible explanation - all evidence is contorted to fit into this increasingly contrived explanation. Object level an…
This take feels a little like the clergy saying printing presses are dangerous because people will read bad things and spread bad ideas. Turns out they totalky did, but on net it's a small price to pay for widespread literacy.
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Safety handwringing? Mythos found 1000 zero days in a few weeks - if I had asked your thoughts on this a few years ago, I'm sure it would've been "that is a super-weapon". Plus, scaling laws are impossible to deny: More compute = more intelligence. AI is going to completely redefine the role of human cognitive ability - if you think this is about "state monopoly", you're really thinking too small.
Yes, I want that 'super weapon' in everyone's hands. Better than the hands of a few. Same thing as literacy. I believe in the power of the do-gooders to overwhelm the do-badders.
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> unless you presume government is beneficial That's the constitutional bedrock of our societies. That doesn't mean it's always true but if you denounce that as a legitimate and achievable goal then you don't have a society anymore.
The alternative is worse. No government at all implies anarchy which is worse that all but the very worst governments, and from which IMO some form of government will emerge anyway.
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Small government has always been a euphemism for a government working on less distribution of wealth. Governments always intervene in the economy one way or another.
That's exactly right. The US Government is ruthlessly efficient - yeah, people don't want to hear that. Sure, there are Pentagon-related boondoggles, but that's different. Try working in a government office - you will be lucky to get a water cooler - BYOW. "Small government" means "fuck you, I got mine, now let's gut the IRS so I can do some white collar crime".
> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined. Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! This is structurally the same fallacy as "p…
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> belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key propos…
> Americans voted for Trump hoping There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.
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I think it should be noted that the current government, which did this silly thing, belongs to a party that is pretty much advertising on wanting to be a smaller government that gets involved less. That is a large part of why people vote for them.
In a two party system, do you vote for the party that promises small government and never delivers, or the party that promises bigger government and does delive?
> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
This government is corrupt to the core, with individuals in it wanting a piece of the pie for themselves. Anthropic wouldn't share, hence the reprecussions. It is an extreme edge case and the argument for a sane government oversight is still perfectly valid. No oversight makes corporations dump waste into the water supply and market asbestos-lined cigarettes. It's naive to think that no oversight is needed.
> But this government [...] I'm hearing a lot of this kind of thing. "Oh if only it was a different government". I'm sorry, but when you cry out for government involvement, it's not always going to be coming from the government you personally wanted. This is the whole problem with government involvement! I don't think that message is getting through, but it's the real lesson that should be learned here.
We should demand and work towards good public institutions that do their job. It's perfectly consistent to say "this is a job that legitimate democratic institutions should perform" and complain that currently the legitimacy of institutions is undermined. Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad! This is structurally the same fallacy as "p…
I'm not convinced you understand the sentiment of the parent comment. It's that one should consider all possible scenarios of one's actions when making requests of a powerful entity they can't control. The mechanics of government make it such that once something is under their control, it'll be more effort to remove those controls than what it took to initially add them.
It should also be expected that legitimate regime changes can put people in power that current lobbyists may disagree with. Lobbyists should then be conscious that by lobbying for regulation, they implicitly trust that the will of the people will always align with what they think is best for the industry being regulated in the long term (otherwise they wouldn't be lobbying or would do so in a way that confines the power to the current administration).