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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#411

Post by BarryMilo »

chasd00 wrote: post #321
ericmcer wrote: post #93

Great article, super fun. > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory. You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that…

heh devops was suppose to end the careers of DBAs and SysAdmins, instead it created a whole new industry. "a shitload of people have meaningless busy work corporate jobs." for real.

Well, I've worked as a developer in many companies and have never met a DBA. I've met tons of devops, who are just rebranded sysadmins as far as anyone can tell.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#412

Post by impossiblefork »

burkaman wrote: post #140
gojomo wrote: post #18

"It had been a slow Tuesday night. A few hundred new products had run their course on the markets. There had been a score of dramatic hits, three-minute and five-minute capsule dramas, and several of the six-minute long-play affairs. Night Street Nine—a solidly sordid offering—seemed to be in as the drama of the night unless there should be a late hit." – 'SLOW TUESDAY NIGHT', a 2600 word sci-fi short story about lif…

This is incredible. > A thoughtful-man named Maxwell Mouser had just produced a work of actinic philosophy. It took him seven minutes to write it. To write works of philosophy one used the flexible outlines and the idea indexes; one set the activator for such a wordage in each subsection; an adept would use the paradox, feed-in, and the striking-analogy blender; one calibrated the particular-slant and the personality…

Something of that sort also exists in 1984, with the caleidoscopic plot-generation machine used for stories for the proles.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#413

Post by tim333 »

csallen wrote: post #250
stego-tech wrote: post #28

This is delightfully unhinged, spending an amazing amount of time describing their model and citing their methodologies before getting to the meat of the meal many of us have been braying about for years: whether the singularity actually happens or not is irrelevant so much as whether enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly. And, yep! A lot of people absolutely believe it will and are acting accordin…

> prior to reforming society into one that does not predicate survival on continued employment and wages There's no way that'll happen. The entire history of humanity is 99% reacting to things rather than proactively preventing things or adjusting in advance, especially at the societal level. You would need a pretty strong technocracy or dictatorship in charge to do otherwise.

The UK seems to be prototyping that. We're changing to a society where everyone lives by claiming benefits. (eg. https://www.gbnews.com/money/benefits-claimants-earnings-rev...)

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#414

Post by elictronic »

lbreakjai wrote: post #380
stego-tech wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

History paints a pretty clear picture of the tradeoff: * Profits now and violence later OR * Little bit of taxes now and accelerate easier Unfortunately we’ve developed such a myopic, “FYGM” society that it’s explicitly the former option for the time being.

Violence was a moderating factor when people on each side were equally armed, and number was a deciding factor. Nowadays you could squash an uprising with a few operators piloting drones remotely.

Flying a drone around is easy. Identifying who is on the in group and out group and then moving them is the hard part.

I’m not sure you have really thought out what the drone part is meant to do. Militaries gave outgunned populaces for decades at this point. You don’t need drones to kill civilians.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#415

Post by n4r9 »

jrflowers wrote: post #374
teo_zero wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't take a sci-fi writer's words as a prophecy. Especially when he's using an ingenious gimmick to justify his job. I mean, we know that it's impossible for anyone to tell how the world will be like after the singularity, by the very definition of singularity. Therefore Herbert had to devise a ploy to plausibly explain why the singularity hadn't happened in his universe.

I like the idea that Frank Herbert’s job was at risk and that’s why he had to write about the Butlerian Jihad because it kind of sounds like on the other side you have Ray Kurzweil, who does not have to justify his job for some reason.

Does seem funny to think of sci fi writers as being particularly concerned about justifying their jobs.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#416

Post by hackernudes »

malfist wrote: post #124
ericmcer wrote: post #93

Great article, super fun. > In 2025, 1.1 million layoffs were announced. Only the sixth time that threshold has been breached since 1993. Over 55,000 explicitly cited AI. But HBR found that companies are cutting based on AI's potential, not its performance. The displacement is anticipatory. You have to wonder if this was coming regardless of what technological or economic event triggered it. It is baffling to me that…

Or it's just a logical continuation of "next quarter problem" thinking. You can lay off a lot of people, juice the number and everything will be fine....for a while. You may even be able to layoff half your people if you're okay with KTLO'ing your business. This works great for companies that are already a monopoly power where you can stagnate and keep your customers and prevent competitors.

KTLO = keeping the lights on

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#417

Post by ActorNightly »

dan_mctree wrote: post #383
ActorNightly wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its pretty clear that the problem of solving AI is software, I don't think anyone would disagree. But that problem is MUCH MUCH MUCH harder than people make it out to be. For example, you can reliably train an LLM to produce accurate output of assembly code that can fit into a context window. However, lets say you give it a Terabyte of assembly code - it won't be able to produce correct output as it will run out of c…

>So obviously, error correction with inputs/outputs is not the way we get to intelligence. This doesn't seem to follow at all let alone obviously? Humans are able to reason through code without having to become a completely discrete computer, but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code, so why is that requirement necessary and how have you shown LLMs can't achieve human levels of competence on this…

> but probably can't reason through any length of assembly code

Uh what? You can sit there step by step and execute assembly code, writing things down on a piece of paper and get the correct final result. The limits are things like attention span, which is separate from intelligence.

Human brains operate continuously, with multiple parts being active at once, with weight adjustment done in real time both in the style of backpropagation, and real time updates for things like "memory". How do you train an LLM to behave like that?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#418

Post by measurablefunc »

tim333 wrote: post #402
achenet wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked? Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due…

Most bubbles have a peak and crash. "The Bitcoin bubble" keeps peaking and crashing and then going on to a higher peak.

Mining rigs have a finite lifespan & the places that make them in large enough quantities will stop making new ones if a more profitable product line, e.g. AI accelerators, becomes available. I'm sure making mining rigs will remain profitable for a while longer but the memory shortages are making it obvious that most production capacity is now going towards AI data centers & if that trend continues then hashing capacity will continue diminishing b/c the electricity cost & hardware replenishment will outpace mining rewards.

Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.

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