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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#291

Post by eric_cc »

exceptione wrote: post #212
nine_k wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you replace "taxes" with more general "investment", it's everywhere. A good example is Amazon that has reworked itself from an online bookstore into a global supplier of everything by ruthlessly reinvesting the profits. Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA. If you're looking for periods of high taxes and growing pros…

> Taxes don't usually work as efficiently because the state is usually a much more sloppy investor. But it's far from hopeless, see DARPA. Be careful. The data does not confirm that narrative. You mentioned the 1950s, which is a poignant example of reality conflicting with sponsored narrative. Pre WOII, the wealthy class orbiting the monopolists, and by extension their installed politicians, had no other ideas than t…

What does WOII mean?

I assume you are talking about WW2 and at first thought it was a typo.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#292

Post by baxtr »

atomic128 wrote: post #51

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. ... Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. -- Frank Herbert, Dune You won't read, except the output of your LLM. You won't write, except prompts for your LLM. Why write code or prose when the machine can write it for you? You won't think or…

"The end of humanity" has been proclaimed many times over. Humanity won't end. It will change like it always has.

We get rid of some problems, and we get a bunch of new problems instead. And on, and on, and on.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#293

Post by stnmtn »

shinycode wrote: post #216
xmprt wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then wouldn't open source models running on commodity hardware be the best way to get around that? I think one of the greatest wins of the 21st century is that almost every human today has more computing power than the entire US government in the 1950s. More computer power has democratized access and ability to disperse information. There are tons of downsides to that which we're dealing with but on the net, I think…

Does it also means the US government has x1000000 more power than the one in 1950 ?

speaking strictly from an energy standpoint (power grid, megatons of warheads, etc).. it's probably close to that number.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#294

Post by stoneforger »

nine_k wrote: post #263
taurath wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the state is usually a much more sloppy investor I don’t find this to be true The state invests in important things that have 2nd and 3rd order positive benefit but aren’t immediately profitable. Money in a food bank is a “lost” investment. Alternatively the state plays power games and gets a little too attached to its military toys.

State agencies are often good at choosing right long-term targets. State agencies are often bad at the actual procurement, because of the pork-barrelling and red tape. E.g. both private companies and NASA agree that spaceflight is a worthy target, but NASA ends up with the Space Shuttle (a nice design ruined by various committees) and SLS, while private companies come up with Falcon-9.

Sounds like a false dichotomy. NASA got all these different subcontractors to feed, in all these different states and they explicitly gutted MOL and dynasoar and all the air force projects that needed weird orbits and reentry trajectories so the space shuttle became a huge compromise. Perverse incentives and all that. It's not state organizations per se but rather non-profits that need to have a clear goal that creates capabilities, tools and utilities that act as multipliers for everyone. A pretty big cooperative. Like, I dunno , what societies are supposed to exist for.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#297

Post by yoyohello13 »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #210
dakolli wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just say it simply, 1. LLMs only serve to reduce the value of your labor to zero over time. They don't need to even be great tools, they just need to be perceived as "equally good" to engineers for C-Suite to lay everyone off, and rehire at 50-25% of previous wages, repeating this cycle over a decade. 2. LLMs will not allow you to join the billionaire class, that wouldn't make sense, as anyone could if that's the cas…

You may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I learned more last year from ChatGPT Pro than I'd learned in the previous 5, FWIW.

Just say 'LLMs'. Whenever someone name drops a specific model I can't help but think it's just an Ad bot.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#299

Post by XorNot »

awesome_dude wrote: post #264
bee_rider wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument. I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination dep…

The "Silent Majority" - Richard Nixon 1969 "Quiet Australians" - Scott Morrison 2019

We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.

Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#300

Post by tinfoilhatter »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #243
nine_k wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like a very comfortable, pleasant way of civilization suicide. Not interacting with any other human means you're the last human in your genetic line. A widespread adherence to this idea means humanity dwindling and dying out voluntarily. (This has been reproduced in mice: [1]) Not having humans as primary actors likely means that their interests become more and more neglected by the system of machines that…

Civilization suicide is the ideal

Your ideal. Definitely not mine.

Get rid of everyone else so your life is easier and more sustainable... I guess I need to make my goal to get rid of you? Do you understand how this works yet?

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