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The Cognitive Dark Forest

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Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#281

Post by bitmasher9 »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #197
bitmasher9 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get a time advantage for doing this strategy, but your talent will be pouched and your competitors will be able to catch up fairly quickly.

I used to think this but it only seems to be true for a shallow tech advantage, which isn’t this scenario. A sufficiently deep stack of compounded tech is robust against even aggressive talent poaching. The knowledge is embedded in the network, not the random individual. We see this in jet engines, silicon fab, et al.

With these very deep tech stacks, does it really matter if you publish or not? Execution is still very hard for manufacturing these items, and will be for awhile.

We’re very very far from prompting to a silicon fab

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#282

Post by chongli »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #255
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enshittification specifically is when a product/service/platform gets worse from the user’s perspective because the platform vendor can directly profit from user-hostile design; for example, Google intentionally serves up bad results on the first search results page so the user clicks-through to the second page of results, resulting in more advert revenue to Google[1]. …whereas I feel what you’re describing is anothe…

enshittification is a hip, tech-bro term to mean "rent seeking" and is nothing new

Rent-seeking is too general of a term. You can rent-seek just by raising prices.

Enshittification specifically means deliberately making the product worse as a rent-seeking strategy.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#283

Post by nextaccountic »

xantronix wrote: post #278
nextaccountic wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Toledo family qualifies http://biyubi.com/

...I love this. You have made my day, thank you.

And I guess my point is. For the firstt some decades, while they weren't exactly bound by secrecy, I think they had some obscurity, and were just doing their things in private (which involved things like bare metal assembly, building an operating system, doing embedded work, retrocomputing, etc). Not exactly sure, but from what I gather the appearances they had with media, awards etc. were relatively recent

But when a younger member of the family published nanochess [0] and other entries to IOCCC [1] they gained international notoriety

In any case, see also the history page [2] in the family website for context

[0] http://nanochess.org but see repositories in https://github.com/nanochess for other projects

[1] https://www.ioccc.org/

[2] http://www.biyubi.com/eng_historia.html

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#284

Post by Ygg2 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #276
Ygg2 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And COPA didn't succeed at first, but try and try and you get COPPA, and now age verification laws. I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs. And if you get everyone on cloud? Then you can control Internet same way you can control TV or the press.

> I don't think we'll see PC affordable in my lifetime. It didn't happen after Bitcoin crash, didn't happen post pandemics. New price gets normalized and the cartels just agree to not make anything for PCs. What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable? By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap. I'm not sure what issue you're referring t…

> What's your definition of affordable? What years were PCs affordable?

That DIY entry PCs can be built for 400 USD or less. Budget PC should be able to browse net and play a few games on the iGPU (so overall 1TB SSD, some iGPU and 16 GB of RAM). Ideally on current generation of RAM and processors.

> By my reckoning PCs are affordable today. If you're not trying to run games they're downright cheap.

By what reckoning? And not just games, 3D workload, compilation. Hell. Even browsing + some productivity eats 32G of RAM as if it were nothing.

> I'm not sure what issue you're referring to with bitcoin

The first permanent jump in GPU prices. After Bitcoin prices of high-end GPUs remained at +1000 USD.

> Cartels just agree not to make anything for PCs? Why would that happen?

For bigger profits. You can see most hardware manufacturers moving from selling to consumers to selling to governments, cloud, and data-centers.

Why not make anything for PCs? Because individuals can't compete with the coffers of large corporations and governments.

> The point of restricting supply to a market is to maximize profits, not to refuse forever and lose out.

You can maximize profit by leaving a market. In the same way, you can still sell SSDs but for much bigger margins to data centers and governments.

Say all but one/two manufacturers leave the consumer market. The monopoly/duopoly hikes up prices again and again until you have a few stragglers on 40k USD workstations, and everyone else is on an iOS-like platform.

Once you are in the walled-in-cloud-garden, computer is not your own, and you can be monitored perfectly. This is something most governments want and is essentially the endgame for war on general computing.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#285

Post by Ygg2 »

adrianN wrote: post #229
Ygg2 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been writing code in Emacs for 20 years, I'll be writing code in Emacs in 20 years Bold assumption. On what will you run Emacs if average PC costs $12000? Yes. Even Raspberry Pi. It's not called war on general computing for nothing. If you say the cloud, that will be cut up and reused by the next AI crawler.

You can use old hardware.

Yeah, but it won't be cheap or easily repairable. And they don't make them anymore.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#286

Post by nicbou »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #258
Terr_ wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Industrial-scale plagiarism. A form of copyright-laundering only available to big actors.

OG feudalism involved owning knights and horses and armor and grain production; techno-feudalism involves owning all ideas

They don't own ideas, but they own the land we build on and the means of production.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#287

Post by spopejoy »

zenogais wrote: post #15

Might just be independent discovery, but the main idea of this blog post is more or less the exact theory advanced in the recent book "The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet" by Bogna Konior ( https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Forest-Theory-Internet-Redux/dp/... ).

I'm hoping the meme goes away. Internet is a dark forest, crypto DEXes are a dark forest, AI is a dark forest. Add the obligatory gloss of Cixin Liu (DF is only one of many amazing concepts in TBP but apparently the only bloggable one). Hard sci-fi references sound smart but in the end don't describe society very well.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#288

Post by voxelc4L »

The metaphor, as it relates to the Three Body Problem books, has some issues and is pretty misleading. e.g., What makes the forest dark...? It's not the act of participation, nor is it _all_ (or even a remote majority) of the participants. The issue with the forest is the imbalance. It's the lopsided distribution of ownership and power. Maybe instead of worrying about the forest we should worry about the elements of the forest that make it dark? Maybe the fact that the nations developing it are either outright communist or border-lining on some form of neo-fascism. I don't know about you, but I like the idea of all of humanity's knowledge being constantly amalgamated and disseminated in a semantically searchable and incredibly approachable way... I just don't like the fact that it's being owned and profited off of by a minute subset of us.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#289

Post by lifeformed »

the_af wrote: post #231
lifeformed wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Timescales that makes sense" may be a human reasoning but not necessarily the reasoning of inconceivably advanced timeless civilizations. Sure, that planet of fish may be harmless now, but what about in a quick three billion years when they have FTL and AGI and Von Neuman probes and Dyson spheres and antimatter bombs? Easier to click the delete button now to save the trouble later.

The laws of physics apply to the civilization of alien fish too, it's not a human specific timescale. They have nothing to fight over with us, no reason to spend effort developing weapons to reach us, if they do have weapons they'd have a much higher probability of wiping themselves up first, and no way for their weapons to reach us within a time boundary that makes sense for any sentient race. Dark Forest seems to b…

That's still making assumptions based on our human understanding of the cosmos. Our "laws of physics" could be a localized understanding in our region of space, and much, much, much more powerful entities could operate outside of that, where our perception of time and scale does not meaningfully apply. It would be near-zero cost to destroy potential threats, so they might as well. It's like humans eliminating pests and pathogens. It's standard hygiene, a low cost preventative practice. Nobody is targeting a single bacterium, they're just wiping down dirty spots. It's an interesting concept in the book because of how imaginative it gets with scaling.

Re: The Cognitive Dark Forest

#290

Post by xantronix »

nextaccountic wrote: post #283
xantronix wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...I love this. You have made my day, thank you.

And I guess my point is. For the firstt some decades, while they weren't exactly bound by secrecy, I think they had some obscurity, and were just doing their things in private (which involved things like bare metal assembly, building an operating system, doing embedded work, retrocomputing, etc). Not exactly sure, but from what I gather the appearances they had with media, awards etc. were relatively recent But when…

Thank you so much again for introducing me to this. The closest thing I was aware of, or at least most aligned with my interests previously was permacomputing, and maybe CollapseOS; the community aspect is really cool and something I'd like to explore more alongside my artistic intent.
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