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Do we need a new MAD treaty? Maybe agree on doing something positive for once?

No one is signing an arms reduction treaty or giving up weapons while Russia has troops in Ukraine. That's an object lesson in relying on paper barriers that the whole world is watching.

I mean, true, but also, nobody is going to give up weapons while the US is kidnapping heads of state, launching decapitation strikes and invading a half dozen new countries.

The Libyans gave up their WMD program shortly after the USA invaded Iraq…

and look what happened to them ....

True, It will be a decade before it'll even be considered. Even then...I wouldnt trust my country.

What if Reagan and Gorbachev signed while the Soviet troops were fighting in Afghanistan? [Mongolia… Cambodia…] What object lesson was that?

M.A.D. … “treaty”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction#O...


Dont worry it doesnt work, just ask the Houthis or Iranians.

If it worked both straits would be open yesterday.


People seem allergic from holding them accountable...

I do not buy that LLMs and the capability to run them are fundamentally different from other software or general purpose computing infrastructure in this regard. Moves to ban open source software or force OEMs to put little cops in everyone's computers are bad.

They aren't open source? And no one said anything about cops.

The proposal I’m hearing is to make people training models accountable for anything users do with them.

Obviously you’re going to keep the model behind an API and be very selective about the people allowed to call and the queries it’s willing to answer, in that case. As Anthropic has done with Fable. But that is voluntary restraint - mostly in today’s regime we get frontier capabilities in open weight models on a ~year delay.


It’s to keep “the people running it accountable.” The context is agents ran by OpenAI/Anthropic doing damage outside.

There is no user-involved damage. No one is recklessly running agents by the thousands without air-gapped containers, except “the people” than run these labs.


Why don't we just build high speed electrified rail and busses. Why this rollout of electrified golf carts? My car is fast and fun to drive, that's part of it's job alongside getting me where I need to go.

If I just need to get somewhere, I want to take a clean fast train like Japan and then walk.


Is this implication here that you think this car is an electrified golf cart? What makes you think that it wouldn't be fast or fun to drive? Most electric cars are extremely fun to drive due to their extremely high acceleration.

The development and building of newer, more efficient electric vehicles does not preclude the investment in more high speed electrified rail and busses. That complaint is a non-sequitor.


That depends on your definition of "fun to drive". Flooring it loses its charm within a week, and with the additional weight most EVs are awful when it comes to taking corners at speed.

EVs might be fun for drag racing, but if you want to drive on a circuit ICE is still the better option for now.


Yeah I can't speak much to circuit racing (nor drag racing for that matter). I just know that the EV's I've driven have been fun to drive. I don't believe that most people talking about "fun to drive" are taking their cars to a racetrack either though.

I guess I haven't taken any corners agressively enough to really notice the problems you describe with weight.

I will say though that at least for non-racetrack scenarios, the extra weight isn't always as noticable as you'd think because the centre of mass tends to be extremely low relative to an ICE vehicle.


More and more buses in my local mass transit system have moved to EV's (these specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_GB_Kite) as they age out their older buses and build out the infrastructure they needed.

I like them, they are smoother and quieter than the ones they replaced (in fairness that was the oldest diesel buses mostly), I don't like the new on board announcement "Next stop <X>, You are at <X>" style but that's because I'm not partially sighted/blind and it's a small price for making life a lot easier for those folks (and headphones exist).


Why can't an electric car be fun to drive? I have an old car I'm not planning on changing but electric cars I've driven just seem quieter, smoother and just better than ICE vehicles.

That /just/ is bearing a lot of weight there. And what is Volkswagen going to do to build highspeed rail, they're a car company so they're making cars...

The US is trapped in a local maximum due to history, geography and finally politics. There's a lot of local resistance specifically to highspeed rail because to stay highspeed the trains usually bypass smaller local towns so they don't get the benefit but all the negatives of it's construction.


> electrified golf carts

I'm not clear how something that ran up to 138 kmph (85 mph) during an (intentionally low-speed) efficiency test, would be equivalent to a golf cart?


> Why don't we just build high speed electrified rail

Good luck convincing all those Americans the rail line has to run through their property to freely give up the right-of-way. You're already dead in the first few hundred feet of rail when the first person says "fuck off, no" and starts challenging your eminent domain.


How on earth would that work in Houston? Why on earth would people want to arrive at any destination soaked in sweat? Everyday on here someone makes a tendentious post about the viability of public transit.

What does that have to do with being soaked in sweat? I could understand if they suggested everyone get around by bike, but this is just silly.

Electric busses and trains can have quite powerful and good air conditioning systems.

The problem with this in Houston is the disgracefully stupid urban layout that makes it very hard to effectively serve the city with public transit.


Trains can only get you right next to a very small fraction of the city. The rest of the way you have to walk(I call it the “last mile” problem)

Mostly due to the poor design of the city, yes.

Do we really need to turn this into a discussion of lost causes? Yes, you monumentally fucked up urban design in many parts of your country.

Yes, fixing it is theoretically possible. No, it can't be done in any reasonably small time scale.


Euros own hundreds of millions of cars

What is your point?

The light rail is especially chilly, but it has to be with how often they open all the doors at every stop and let in a little heat each time.

As a planned city the downtown urban area was ideal for all kinds of transportation, with streets wide enough not to be obstructed by double-parked wagons, and suitable for streetcars to be installed just about anywhere when they arrived. Much more amenable to public transport than SF or New Orleans, even though horses were the primary consideration to begin with.

The problem was always overpriced real estate downtown, and it got to be too late for newcomers to afford, so anyone that could then started or settled in nearby communities at different distances outside city limits.

With unbridled growth, the city gradually annexed or enclosed these "suburbs", some of which are inside the 610 loop. Pretty much part of the urban area now, but not originally connected by more than one trail usually, which must have left some residual bottlenecks to this day. And that's inside the loop, where people once commuted in from the western suburb of Bellaire, or the close-in location of the Heights.

Just outside the loop to the southeast, people used to consciously depart from Houston and drive "all the way out" to Pasadena. When public transport was on the rise in the county (far too late) about 50 years ago, Pasadena voted not to pay the extra 1% sales tax which was earmarked for Metro, simply because they did not want innumerable people in the big city who couldn't afford cars to descend on their much smaller industrial suburb so easily.

I guess without intervention, stupidity trumps planning if growth is excessive or too accelerated.

For me, I'm just fine on a bike in 100 degree heat with (life-giving) humidity to boot, but I'm probably not the average senior citizen. The homes I like best were built specifically for this climate before A/C, and have more than enough windows to open, and I prefer not to use A/C when driving alone either.

I came from Florida so this is Northern Living to me, if I didn't like it hot I wouldn't be here :)


"No way to do this", says only country not doing it yet.

No country has a city the size of Houston with its low density where you can get anywhere with public transit.

Yeah that's because it's not a city. Cities are dense enough to support a bus network or else it's just a town or sprawling suburb.

Yeah it's concerning hearing elites on the left looking at the current admin's model and salivating at the power. For the people, by the people, etc, etc.

Ah yes, another way for EA people to gain financially and socially. These "embedded auditors" will be universally friends and family. Even if they staffed a government department for it, it will just be a revolving door of insiders.

Well with each new thing we get the grifters, lesswrong is an AI grifter hangout.

Grifters don’t usually spend their entire lives devoted to preparing for something that doesn’t yet exist, giving up whatever else they like doing to work on that problem, and spending years trying to plan out how to make things go well for everyone when that thing materializes.

Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that.


Eliezer spent his life devoted to science fiction and building a cult around himself, and now him and the rest of them are trying to vindicate themselves before they fade into obscurity.

They are true believers. Terrible philosophers but true AI believers

yes.

I think it's fair to hold the government to account, but it's good to be cognizant of how entrenched corporatism is in our modern governance.

If your "just increasing shareholder value" is found to cause damages to the public, you should be held to account for that.


Just to be clear, I absolutely agree with you but corporations are made solely to create a profit and it tends to be lower when one is ethical. I would love if these companies act more responsibly, I would be very glad even for bare minimum eg. not causing harm actively but I just don't expect it. Because their sole existence is usually profit. Not public wellbeing. The "Increasing Shareholder value" is a joke because I noticed that some people are using this unironically.

Why is a 3rd party company keeping videos of people's children? Why aren't the parents concerned about this?

Genuine question, because "abundance" is meaningless unless you qualify what you mean.

You're saying that we ask the ASI for "abundance" and everyone gets a mansion in silicon valley and doesn't need to work unless they want to? That doesn't seem like a realistic thing to be thinking about.


Interesting thought.

My view is that ASI could be created and benchmarked to know that it reached that level of intelligence.

Once we have that, we must sit to talk about abundance to define where to implement it and at what rate in full details.

It's like creating the magic tool to do anything, but we decide what to do with it.

But that is the ideal state that may seem far away, only time will tell how far it is.

I see it not that far due to this simple fact: AI is learning human experiences.

Note: this needs fully functioning robotics as well (software + hardware level intelligence).


What if under the no-pause scenario within a couple of years we get cures for N diseases each one of which affects tens or hundreds of millions of people every year - how many years would you wait and keep your hand on the pause button?

Couldn't we just break the pause button? so it is not usable?!

Not pausing means more people knowing truths of everything faster in this world.

One of them, that I'm very excited about, is science & research.


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