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The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

campedersen.com

731–740 of 800 posts

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#731
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…

That is an LLM right there. Wow.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#732

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…

> Not a bug. The feature. I actually think this was nice writing, and it didn't strike me as LLM thought at all, specifically because of the terse delivery.

My Claude uses that exact phrase rather frequently. I actually like it too! Not saying it's bad.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#733

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…

What is your argument for why denecessitating labor is very bad ? This is certainly the assertion of the capitalist class, whose well documented behavior clearly conveys that this is not because the elimination of labor is not a source of happiness and freedom to pursue indulgences of every kind. It is not at all clear that universal life-consuming labor is necessary for a society's stability and sustainability. The…

I think this goes beyond capitalism.

People willing to do something harder or more risky than others will always have a bigger chance to get a better position. Be that sports, labor or anything in life.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#734
post #263

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.

The space shuttle was a symbol of hope for a future while I was growing up, and now it’s a symbol of our political and societal cowardice.

That we had to give up societal control over our space program to billionaires is deeply shameful. We’re quickly reaching the end of the end of history.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the point - it's an economic point. Very little R&D was put into said processors. The scale wasn't there. The software stack wasn't there (because the scale wasn't there). No one is suggesting gaming chips were the first time someone thought of such an architecture or built a chip with such an architecture. They are suggesting the gaming industry produced the required scale to actually do all the work…

The Cray-1, which produced half a billion USD in revenue in today's dollars, at a time when computing was still science fiction, did not demonstrate scale? I just can't take you in good faith because there has never been a time when large scale SIMD computing was not advanced by commercial interests.

In this context scale = enough units/revenue to spread fixed costs.

I'll take your word on lifetime revenue numbers for Cray 1.

So yes, in todays dollars, $500 million of lifetime revenue - maybe 60-70 million per year, todays dollars - is not even close to the scale we are seeing today. Even 10 years ago Nvidia was doing ~$5 billion per year (almost 100x your number) and AMD a few bill(another 60-70x ish)

Even if you meant $500m in annual (instead of lifetime), Nvidia was 10x that in 2015. And AMDs GPU revenue which was a few billion that year, so it's more like 17x.

That's a large difference in scale. At the low end 17x and at the high end 170x. Gaming drove that scale. Gaming drove Nvidia to have enough to spend on CUDA. Gaming drove NVidia to have enough to produce chip designs optimized for other types of workloads. CUDA enabled ML work that wasn't possible before. That drove Google to realize they needed to move away from ML on CPU if they wanted to be competitive.

You don't need any faith, just understand the history and how competition drives behavior.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is making millions of TPUs per year. Nvidia ships more gaming GPUs, but it's not like multiple orders of magnitude off.

I'm willing to bet TPUs wouldn't be nearly as successful or sophisticated without the decades of GPU design and manufacturing that came before them. Current manufacturing numbers are a small part of the story of the overall lineage.

Of course you are right, but in addition they wouldn't have even made them if GPUs hadn't made ML on CPU so relatively incapable. Competition drives a lot of these decisions, not just raw performance.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#738

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.

We have taxes now though, how much is enough? Hint: The answer for the government is, it's never enough. "little bit of taxes" is never what we had. Seriously though, I wouldn't mind "little bit of taxes" if there were guaranteed ways to stop funding something when it's a failed experiment, which is difficult in government. Because "a little bit more" is always wanted.

Every time I hear an argument like this one, it's always phrased in terms of "the government is greedy and/or incompetent, therefore taxes are bad" and never in terms of "the government is greedy and/or incompetent, therefore our systems of controlling our government are not good enough".

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#739

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…

The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal If we get to the point where I can go through my life and never interact with another human again, and work with a bunch of machines and robots to do science and experiments and build things to explore our world and make my life easier and safer and healthier and more sustainable, I would be absolutely thrill…

>The goal is to eliminate humans as the primary actors on the planet entirely At least that’s my personal goal

and another of your post states

> The fundamental unit of society …the human… is at its core fundamentally incapable of coordinating at the scale necessary to do this correctly

You seem to contradict yourself if not entirely confused.

Re: The Singularity will occur on a Tuesday

#740
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

January 20, 2038 Yesterday as we huddled in the cave, we thought our small remnant was surely doomed. After losing contact with the main Pevek group last week, we peered out at the drone swarm which was now visibly approaching - a dark cloud on the horizon. Then suddenly, at around 3pm by Zoya's reckoning, the entire swarm collapsed and fell out of the sky. Today we are walking outside in the sun, seemingly unobserve…

Thank you for taking the time to write this.

Thanks. I just thought, wouldn't it be interesting if the singularity didn't fix the 2038 problem.

It's 3pm instead of 3am since I figure AI military drone swarms wouldn't care about timezones, and you can guess from the place names that the survivors are somewhere in Kamchatka at +12.

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