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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

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Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#441

Post by jacquesm »

eric_cc wrote: post #291
exceptione wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

WOII is how dutch speaking/writing people would refer to WW2, it is literally 'wereld oorlog 2'.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#442

Post by famouswaffles »

measurablefunc wrote: post #433
famouswaffles wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, you are just confused. With LLMs, The "knowing" you're describing is trivial and doesn't really constitute knowing at all. It's just the physics of the substrate. When people say LLMs are a black box, they aren't talking about the hardware or the fact that it's "math all the way down." They are talking about interpretability. If I hand you a 175-billion parameter tensor, your 'knowledge' of logic gates does…

No one relies on "interpretability" in quantum mechanics. It is famously uninterpretable. In any case, I don't think any further engagement is going to be productive for anyone here so I'm dropping out of this thread. Good luck.

Quantum mechanics has competing interpretations (Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, etc.) about what the math means philosophically, but we still have precise mathematical models that let us predict outcomes and engineer devices.

Again, we lack even this much with LLMs so why say we know how they work ?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#443

Post by avazhi »

Most obviously AI-written post I think I’ve seen.

Have some personal pride, dude. This is literally a post written by AI hyping up AI and posted to a personal blog as if it were somebody’s personal musings. More slop is just what we need.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#444

Post by avazhi »

SirHumphrey wrote: post #213
pocksuppet wrote: post #173

Was this ironically written by AI? > The labor market isn't adjusting. It's snapping. > MMLU, tokens per dollar, release intervals. The actual capability and infrastructure metrics. All linear. No pole. No singularity signal.

Maybe it was, maybe he just writes that way. At some point somebody will read so much LLM text that they will start emulating AI unknowingly. I just don’t care anymore. If the article is good I will continue reading it, if it’s bad I will stop. I don’t care if a machine or a human produced unpleasant reading material.

100% AI slop blog post.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#445

Post by awesome_dude »

achenet wrote: post #316
nakedneuron wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that how Bitcoin "works"?

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…

> Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example),

For the record - the illegal transactions were thought to be advantaged by crypto like BTC because it was assumed to be impossible to trace the people engaged in the transaction, however the opposite is true, public blockchains register every transaction a given wallet has made, which has been used by Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) to prosecute people (and made it easier in some cases).

> 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 to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.

There are remittance companies that deal in local currencies that tend to make this "easier" - crypto works for this WHEN you can exchange the crypto for the currencies you have and want, which is, in effect, the same.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#446

Post by lotyrin »

nine_k wrote: post #118
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…

> * enough people believe it will happen and act accordingly* Here comes my favorite notion of "epistemic takeover". A crude form: make everybody believe that you have already won. A refined form: make everybody believe that everybody else believes that you have already won. That is, even if one has doubts about your having won, they believe that everyone else submit to you as a winner, and must act accordingly.

Ontological version is even more interesting, especially if we're talking about a singularity (which may be in the past rather than future if you believe in simulation argument).

Crude form: winning is metaphysically guaranteed because it probably happened or probably will

Refined: It's metaphysically impossible to tell whether or not it has or will have happened, so the distinction is meaningless, it has happened.

So... I guess Weir's Egg falls out of that particular line of thought?

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#447

Post by albumen »

Nevermark wrote: post #398
skissane wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won

People vote for people they don't agree with. When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you. EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.

Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference)

Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose.

https://www.rte.ie/news/analysis-and-comment/2025/1101/15415...

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#448

Post by nphardon »

snohobro wrote: post #309
nphardon wrote: post #183

Iirc in the Matrix Morpheus says something like "... no one knows when exactly the singularity occurred, we think some time in the 2020s". I always loved that little line. I think that when the singularity occurs all of the problems in physics will solve, like in a vacuum, and physics will advance centuries if not millennia in a few pico-seconds, and of course time will stop. Also: > As t→ts−t→ts− , the denominator g…

Eh, he actually says “…sometime in the early Twenty-First Century, all of mankind was united in celebration. Through the blinding inebriation of hubris, we marveled at our magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.” Doesn’t specify the 2020’s. Either way, I do feel we are fast approaching something of significance as a species.

Got it. Amazing prescience by the Watchowski's. I'm blown away on rewatches how spot on they were for 1999.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#449

Post by loire280 »

wiseowise wrote: post #401
accidentallfact wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of Dune is that the worst danger are people who obey authority without questioning it.

That's not the point of Dune. Who blindly obeyed who?

The Fremen followed a messianic figure into a galaxy-wide holy war because the Bene Gesserit seeded their culture with manufactured prophecy as a failsafe.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#450

Post by sealeck »

delegate wrote: post #437

It's worth remembering that this is all happening because of video games ! It is highly unlikely that the hardware which makes LLMs possible would have been developed otherwise. Isn't that amazing ? Just like internet grew because of p*rn, AI grew because of video games. Of course, that's just a funny angle. The way I see it, AI isn't accidental. Its inception has been in the first chips, the Internet, Open Source, G…

I think it's a bit hard to say that this is definitively true: people have always been interested in running linear algebra on computers. In the absence of NVIDIA some other company would likely have found a different industry and sold linear algebra processing hardware to them!
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