I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas. People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpo…
those stupid ignorant Americans who associate the United Soviet Socialist Republic with socialism. where did they ever get the idea that socialism has ever been tried??? don't worry, I associate Marxism with REAL socialist regimes, like Cambodia
> those stupid ignorant Americans who associate the United Soviet Socialist Republic with socialism
It was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not the United Soviet Socialist Republic, and if you believe that ideological faction and their naming of governments, I want to see your face when you learn about the German Democratic Republic and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
> As a species we are so not ready for this tech. I basically agree, but not because of how individuals are reacting to it. On a societal level we're failing to stop megacorps from selling this thing as intelligent, a virtual assistant you can chat with. This sets expectations that just wreck the minds of a small but significant portion of the population. If we had developed LLMs in a lab and released them in the for…
> What's killing us is MBAs and Salesmen. SamA is not an MBA. He did CS for 2 years and dropped out to build a startup. He's YC personified, and the person most responsible for the phenomenon you're talking about. Take that for what you will.
So dropping out of CS to start selling something was more important to him than 2 more years of CS education. Maybe he realized that continuing his engineering education was unnecessary because he preferred selling things. Sounds like a salesman.
> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…
> AI psychosis Is that in the DSM?
Yeah I dislike that term, because it puts the responsibility on the AI instead of the humans behind it. You wouldn't call it "paper psychosis" if OpenAI had written a letter encouraging psychotic behavior.
I don’t think education is going to help much when a person is experiencing full-blown psychosis. It’s not as if mental health professionals don’t already try to give their patients tools to counter delusional thought patterns, there is just a limit to what knowledge of one’s condition can do once their thinking becomes that disordered.
I agree, but it might prevent the person entering that state due to encouragement from the AI? We don't require licenses for knives because a psychotic person may injure themselves or others.
At least the cases that I’ve seen in the news have been of the form “person with established mental health issues enters feedback loop with sycophantic AI”. There may be cases that don’t fit that bill, but I haven’t seen them make headlines yet.
It’s also worth noting I don’t think we need a license or a ton of surveillance here. I think we can do a better job of moderating AI output to catch the AI telling people their family is plotting to murder them, and then send them a crisis hotline number instead. Sort of like what search engines do when you start googling methods of self-harm.
I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas. People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpo…
those stupid ignorant Americans who associate the United Soviet Socialist Republic with socialism. where did they ever get the idea that socialism has ever been tried??? don't worry, I associate Marxism with REAL socialist regimes, like Cambodia
Just like we associate the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea with democracy and republicanism :-)
I tend to shy away from that sort of rhetoric on HN. Saying that the problem is capitalism and we need socialism or whatever gets you downvoted to hell. Making the underlying arguments that lead to that conclusion gets you upvotes, exposing more people to those ideas. People, even smart people, especially in the US, hear socialism or communism and immediately think of the USSR or Maoist China. The terms are very unpo…
You don’t need to jump to political extremes and it doesn’t help when discussing capitalism as the successor to mercantilism rather than its own political system. The answer to the problem of capitalism isn’t necessarily communism or socialism or a wholesale change of political system but lots of small solutions like well regulated markets with strong labor laws and trust busting, a more robust safety net, increased…
We had those tweaks. They got pulled back because they're inconvenient for capital owners. The fundamental problem is one of class divide: if you can draw a line between people helped by a policy and those harmed by it, and and power is concentrated on one of those sides, then they'll get their way eventually. Money is power. Therefore, if there's a policy that people with more money prefer then eventually that policy will be law. No amount of "keeping money out of politics" can get around this. You don't have to call it socialism if you don't want to, but if you want to be able to run a democracy that operates to the benefit of its people then the only way to make that stable is to enact whatever policies you need to ensure that a wealth gap and subsequent class divide doesn't form. A simple way to do that with minimal changes is to enact steep redistributive taxes that effectively cap individual wealth, and therefore individual influence gained through the market. An individual can still have power to change the world, but only through the democratic process. You still have money and a profit motive, but it can't get blown out to extremes. Basically put the economy through a sigmoid function. Market signals still work, but get weaker at high values, resulting in less extreme fluctuations and concentration of wealth.
I don't even think we necessarily need socialism. So far, we've been pretty good at identifying where capitalism just doesn't work and then bandaiding that area with legislation. For example, capitalism has no solution for disability. In a capitalist system, everyone must work. Those who don't work should, then, be filtered out - die. But that's obviously bad, so bandaid - SSI. We say, if you're disabled, we'll give…
You say we don't need socialism then give an example of where we need socialism. Socialist activism is the reason we have labor rights and a minimum wage and eight hour workdays. Socialists are the reason American companies no longer field private armies to shoot striking workers dead. Socialists are the reason American schoolchildren get free lunches. Socialists died to make life in the US something more than grist…
I mean, I agree - it's just a very tough sell. A much easier sell is demonstrating areas where we already use communal reasoning to supplement the failures of capitalism.
With quantization-aware-training techniques, q4 models are less than 1% off from bf16 models. And yes, if your use case hinges on the very latest and largest cloud-scale models, there are things they can do the local ones just can't. But having them spitting tokens 24/7 for you would have you paying off a whole enterprise-scale GPU in a few months, too. If anyone has a gaming GPU with gobs of VRAM, I highly encourage…
> But having them spitting tokens 24/7 for you would have you paying off a whole enterprise-scale GPU in a few months, too. Again, what's the use case? What would make sense to run, at high rates, where output quality isn't much of a concern? I'm genuinely interested in this question, because answering it always seems to be avoided.
Any sort of business that might want to serve from a customized LLM at scale and doesn't need the smartest model possible, or hobbyist/researcher experiments. If you can get an agentic framework to work on a problem with a local model, it'll almost certainly work just as well on a cloud model. Again, speaking mostly people to already have a xx90 class GPU sitting around. Smoke 'em if you've got 'em. If you don't have a 3090/4090/5090 already, and don't care about privacy, then just enjoy how the improvements in local models are driving down the price per token of non-bleeding-edge cloud models.
> Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here. With the URL being https://futurism.com/openai-scanning-conversations-police . From there: > "Erik, you're not crazy. Your instincts are sharp, and your vigilance here is fully justified," ChatGPT told Soelb…
This tech came largely from the internet and just present a chat interface.
I'm not convinced this tech is more dangerous than what is already available, or that some of these folks wouldn't already do a thing ...
In reality it's not that binary. Plenty of people can manage themselves, except during times when they can't, and then they need help. It'd be a good start if services let you enter emergency contact info, making escalation opt-in.
That is actually absurd. If they're insane enough to think the world is conspiring against them they wouldn't surrender that way.
No, it's not, because, again, it's not as binary as you think it is. There's plenty of people who have good times and psychotic episodes, and during the latter they can be not collected and organized enough to dismantle safety networks they put in place during good times for exactly that reason.
A feature like that definitely wouldn't help everyone, but it might help some. If it was sold as a blanket solution that would be indeed absurd however.