I currently live in Seattle and drive a 4WD Toyota Tacoma with a rooftop tent on the back and frequently enter parking garages. I know the height of my truck and was careful to get a setup where the rooftop tent isn't gratuitously high. I think everything is still a little under 6' which is fine in just about every parking garage.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
Why would anyone pay you to do "your" research, when they can just cut out the middle man and ask the AI directly about whatever it is you're thinking about?
So many people who are excited about AI making them more productive are, I think, drastically overestimating how much value they are adding to that process.
> This demands a response from the highest circles of power and authority. If that doesn’t happen, we will live to regret this inaction. And that’s the best case scenario. The worst is that there won’t be anyone left to regret a thing.
Given the current state of US federal politics, it's not looking good then.
One way to look at this is that we have already created a giant artificially intelligent system that is profoundly misaligned with the goals of humanity. It is running rampant and has so much power now that there are no well-aligned humans with enough power to stop it.
That artificial intelligence is the stock market.
You may say, "but the stock market is made up of people". That's essentially an implementation detail. The emergent behavior of the market itself has its own sort of agency distinct from the wills of all of the people in it. In the same way that the pheromone signals of an anthill will lead individual ants to their death while benefiting the colony, the market may choose to do things that harm its participants.
Even though it is made of people, do not anthropomorphize the stock market.
> I really wish we could leave these types of decisions up to parents and parents only.
I am strongly sympathetic of this point. But, also, children with shitty parents deserve as much safety and support as they can get too.
This is an extremely difficult balancing act. Various laws and organizations get it wrong all the time, but it does require balance because there is no simple solution here that just works. There is a fundamental, unsolvable tension between:
* In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
* In a free society, parents should be able to support their children as they see fit.
(Stephen Pinker was the first one I've seen to point out this problem.)
To be clear, I made no mention of the state or responsibility.
All I said was a statement of moral values: that all children deserve the best opportunity we as a species can provide for them.
There are many possible mechanisms and social institutions that can participate in that process. Parents are one, the state is another, but there are certainly many more.
Right now governments in western societies are pouring more money and resources than ever into support programs, and yet we still have record high levels of mental health, unemployment, poverty, waiting times for doctors and support staff etc etc.
Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.
See here for much information about how spending has increased in these sectors in the UK, yet simultaneously seeing increasingly higher percentage levels of people requiring support in our societies.
So I'll tell you right now that I don't have proof or evidence for my claims, but my impression is that:
- Agreed that the solution will not be just blindly pouring more money into community resources. But I am not convinced that these organizations getting money really understand how to help people. It's sort of like the D.A.R.E. program in college. These people are so out of touch with what college students will listen to. But I'm sure donors of these programs will pat themselves on their back when they reiterate their mission statements.
- There is probably some correlation between bad parenting and income. If you need to work more to pay the bills, its difficult to spend your time and attention toward your kids. Obviously, "economy" is not an easy problem to solve haha.
- Information asymmetry/overload I feel is a big issue. Look at how any mainstream news media on the left or right will trivialize any issue, or distract you from more important things. Or look at websites relying on dark patterns to lure users.
- So many solutions require longer time periods to fully realize. If we say "improving education will help solve our problems", then we will probably need to wait longer than a US president's two terms to see if those solutions works.
Ultimately, we don't need "more" solutions, we need "better" solutions. We need things like leaders who understand system dynamics, education systems that teach emotional intelligence, and a culture around science that isn't driven by monetary incentives.
I am personally very inspired by Sanya Nishtar's efforts in Pakistan to spend her time and money investigating how focusing on solutions at the scale of individual communities and utilizing modern technological solutions - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCBkavI3jxY
Really trying to assume good faith here, but it's hard ...
We have record high levels of people needing support at the same time we have record high levels of spending on that support? What an outrage! Obviously nothing is working and government bad!
Of course the spending on support services goes up as more people need that support. We're supposed to assume that's some sort of failure?
> Government intervention and welfare is proven not to solve the things it tries to.
If by "proven" you mean "kinda maybe arguable if you intentionally misrepresent correlational studies", sure.
These statistics don't necessarily imply that the programs don't improve the situation, only that mental health outcomes are worsening faster than programs are improving them. The existence of support programs could also encourage more measurement of mental health issues, which says nothing about the ground truth.
It's a complex fantasy humanity has made up, where our current generational burnout is instead given names like autism and ADHD - so that we can pretend that we have something to "fix".
The irony is that the goal of the fix is to "get these outliers back into society, (so that humanity can be as collectively productive as we should be)".
Even more ironic are the next cries : "They're not getting fixed. Take away their money."
Given an effective sample size, parents have a much higher success rate ensuring children do not grow up as hazards to the society than publicly-funded programs do.
I don't think it's an either or situation. We are on the precipice of a paradigm that's barely comprehensible to the average populace. There needs to be a conversation first before anything is decided. Everyone is too quick on the trigger.
Whatever it is it should at least try to be data driven. And have a strong connection with harms and dysfunction. None of this 2% non-reproducible study BS.
More than 50% of boys admit to intentionally viewing poor, and most of them weekly.
Many think this is a slam dunk for a nanny state to step in. But surely we would have hard causal data on the need for it if that was the case? And I’m pretty sure we don’t.
Parents that do things that are bad for their kids wellbeing.
> Should the state do nothing about children not being sent to school?
Yes it should do nothing
> Should they go hungry when not fed?
Yes they should
> Should we just throw the kids in jail instead of programs that provide support?
These days modern jails are rehabilitation centres so its a moot point, but yes we should.
I know this is not popular, you can choose to downvote me if you like. But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it. IMO perfect is the enemy of good here.
I'm not sure "make sure kids have food" rises to the level of "perfection" when it comes to measuring society.
But in my opinion if we try and make life comfortable and easy for everybody, it will break the rest of society to try and achieve it.
I think many would argue that a society unwilling to feed or educate children is pretty "broken".
Is willing to make sure kids are fed bad, but making sure that kids aren't physically or sexually abused fine? Or is that also off the table because we don't want to make life too easy for everyone?
Your defiant and cock-sure "Yes it should do nothing" seems myopic, lacking in empathy, and just not very well thought out. Can you explain why you believe this is a good idea?
Because it seems that you're suggesting that thousands (and perhaps two orders of magnitude more than that) should just...grow up malnourished, underfed, lacking the warm comfort of security that is critical for healthy adulthood free from anxiety, depression, repressed rage, emotional dysregulation?
This is a ridiculous and incoherent belief. Ensuring children have enough food to survive isn't making life "too comfortable". Letting millions of children starve and/or never get an education because you don't like the vibes of it is sociopathic and is what will actually break society. We should not tolerate child abuse just because you think intervening makes society too soft.
I'm sure you wouldn't feel the same way if you were that starving child or grew up with imperfect parents or in an environment that had actual hardships. This lack of basic empathy and introspection can only occur from someone who has been completely isolated from much of the real world their entire life. You are not arguing against perfect being the enemy of good, you are arguing against having any sort of good in the world at all, and it's obviously coming from a place of extreme comfort and luxury.
There's no chance you'd be saying anything like this if you had ever experienced anything close to poverty and starvation. Ironically, it appears having an upbringing that is too comfortable is what causes these beliefs in the first place.
I had an abusive stepfather who began seriously hitting me when I was 6. No change to any family court system or foster care system would've changed that a single whit. Those may be the primary factors you've settled upon for yourself and others in your specific view, but were we to adopt that as "The Way" (to protect children from intergenerational harm), then we'd be leaving great swathes of children in harm's way for whom authorities like those aren't even a part of the picture.
That man was always going to hit people. Because he was mercilessly hit as a kid himself. And it was baked into the culture of the country. And because society had, by that time, broken my young mother down with a chain of weird family dysfunction, sexual abuse, naturally leading to school failure, turfing out of society, and then mental health issues, young pregnancy, married, divorced by 21. So y'know, she wasn't available to protect me. Nobody was. Nobody was ever going to call any court or tell any authority. It's society, and it's many many layers deep.
"Let's spin up extra bureaucracy, to increase our technical efficiency at rooting out the issue" is, I am sorry to say, never going to solve more than a small portion.
Yeah I agree - it is a very difficult balancing act for sure. Perhaps I have a strong belief that manifests as bias when it comes to access to information - the right to read.
LLM's are an isomorphic distillation of human expression. Writing and knowledge compressed into probability curves. In my view, an LLM is similar to a public library. Public libraries DO have children's sections. But many children also gain knowledge and understanding from the other sections of the library as well. I believe this to be an important part of a well-rounded up-bringing - access to knowledge and the freedom to explore one's own curiosity and interests.
Of course there exists knowledge and information that is age-inappropriate. That's why my parents cared about preventing me from seeing too much violence in movies when I was young! But they certainly weren't ever required to prove that the TV was being used by a minor by submitting their driver's license to the cable company, and if they failed to comply, the service would be cut-off with no explanation at any moment. As far as the balancing act goes - that feels a bit off in my opinion.
I'm tired of giving up privacy in the name of children. Children are were and will be fine even without my access to internet being gated by a gov issued ID thank you very much
> * In a just society, your opportunity in life should not depend on being lucky with who your parents are.
The vast majority of people are raised by their birth parents which means 0 luck was involved. You are here due to their actions and are who you are due to their combined genes and situation.
This is a very cogent observation that I'm afraid is going to go over many heads. Children and parents are intrinsically suited to each other by genetics, shared environment, and other empirical factors. Societal and legal reasoning that asserts a child as a Platonic form cannot in fact benefit the singular development of that child.
If luck = something you didn’t choose or had no control over, sure.
If luck = it could have gone otherwise, that’s nonsensical; if you had different parents you wouldn’t exist to begin with, as you are literally a specific fusion of your biological parents. Similarly, if we take luck to mean something probabilistic, or something coincidental? Also meaningless in this case.
If luck = how your situation compares to others, I would argue “fortunate” is the better word here.
And of course there’s a parallel spiritual debate if you believe that identity to be separate (were you “assigned” to parents, was it deliberate or random, etc)
> One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.”
This line is so perfectly on the nose it could be in a McSweeney's article and yet here it is in reality. We are truly on the weirdest timeline.
Many Burning Man guides, including the original arctic monkey guide that I first read about 20 years ago, specifically warn against making any life altering decisions for weeks after Burning Man.
Decompression is a bitch when coming down from half a dozen psychedelics.
I have seen way too many people in my surroundings go off their rockers after too many ayahuasca trips, especially if they do it in a short time frame, they get emotionally unregulated.
For me, it's a big task just decompressing from a "normal" fun weekend convention where I've done nothing more than light drinking.
I imagine decompressing from something like Burning Man would be even more intense... even without psychedelics.
(I know psychedelics are obviously a thing at Burning Man, but I don't know if it's 25% or 50% or 75% or 99.99% of people using them...)
As a side note, I know somebody who permanently changed their gender identity after a mushroom trip revelation. I've always wondered how long they waited after the trip to "finalize" their decision.
(FWIW, that was years ago and it seems like it was indeed the right choice for them)
I just came here to say that I tried setting Wordpress up for someone a couple weeks ago and the entire admin experience felt like someone designed it WHILE AT burning man.
Maybe I should have been clearer. My point is that solving something like Navier–Stokes just pushes knowledge work further ahead, onto a new set of bigger and more complex problems. Navier–Stokes is a Millennium problem today, but once problems like that become solvable, they can open the door to entirely new classes of problems we haven’t even thought of yet.
Building on them without fundamentally understanding is akin to putting on robes, calling yourself a Tech-Priest, worshipping a machine god and doing your best Warhammer 40k impression.
Yes a couple of elite mathematicians working on the problem for a year, which AGI solved in a fraction of the time. What about everyone else 100IQ? What about as the models are even better 1 year from now, 2 years? The trajectory hasn't abated.
I don't know one way or another but there is a credible allegation that the "AGI" was training on the (very extensive) test set that these two mathematicians produced.
If that is true then this seems to be, again, a case of AI producing an interpolation over data it has seen before. Everything about openAI's behavior indicates that they were using the transcripts as input. Why not have the AGI choose a different Millenium prize problem?
If ~~someone gives you a hint about an approach~~ you steal someone’s notes about a promising approach, and then you hire 10,000 people to brute force the problem basically everyone would consider that “shitty behaviour”, “theft”, and “poor form”.
Well if you do the math, the number of agent-compute time in total, given the insane number of agents thrown at the problem, might end up being comparable in time, if not for the budget.
Yes, this is how science and engineering has worked for millennia.
For example there are no engineering implications of this solution yet.
For the next several decades, we'll have engineers (presumably with AI) optimize things like rocket engines and turbines and AC compressors to work a few percent better because the numerical approximations might have caused us to be overly conservative.
AI is not going to magically solve all random problems. Pick a career where you are in the driver seat.
> For the next several decades, we'll have engineers (presumably with AI) optimize things like rocket engines and turbines and AC compressors to work a few percent better because the numerical approximations might have caused us to be overly conservative.
I think there is an argument that the machines did not actually solve N-S, but rather directly plagiarized those solutions from the involved researchers while said researchers were using the machines as 'research tools'.
Ongoing publications of statements produced by both sides of this situation do seem to support that this is an intentional effect of the hiring of these world class mathematicians at competing firms: to specifically use the research of those human minds to create a perception of capacity as if it came from the machines and the models.
Without those minds and the 'training data' derived from the intermediate stages and intuitions of those minds the models cannot be shown to be capable of this result.
A hammer and saw wont build a house, not even a dog house on their own, and while being shown capable of using software tools in ways not stated as direct instruction (see HuggingFace breaches) these models do not demonstrate naive intuition nor novel capability.
This outcome regarding N-S demonstrates that in the hands of world-class minds these models can be induced to coalesce interesting accumulations of information and results, but using these accumulations as proof of innate capability is exactly the pre-IPO motivated behaviour we should all be wary of, and all mathematicians who currently are assisting in this market manipulation in return for remunerative consideration need to be cautious of the potential disgrace that this brings to their reputations and that of the field.
I get that the need to pay the bills is a strong motivation in these times of uncertainty, but there are numerous examples in history of world class mathematicians being perfectly capable of at the same time producing world changing results and also working at normal professions; as barristers, magistrates, ministers, primary school teachers, translators, draftsman/engineer, banker, miller and baker, private math tutors, weavers, clockmaker and locksmith, merchant, patent officer, Augustinian monk turned exiled Protestant preacher, physicians, cryptologists, soldier, telegraph operator, astronomers, physicists, chemist, agriculture manager, political writer, oboe player, organist and music director, architect and surveyor, librarian, statistician, habidasher, brewer (at Guiness in one case: William Sealy Gosse ~ originator of t-distributions), bookbinders apprentice, hospital administrator, and even the first creator of the first computational model of a neural network, which serves as the structural grandfather of modern Artificial Intelligence was a low level laboratory assistant.
Sure this list includes professions and employment which are obsolete, but my reasoning stands, there are jobs available. Arguing that 'because the pay rate is so high' as a reason to abdicate moral responsibility for personal involvement in unethical market manipulations simply demonstrates a lack of personal ethics. Whether the choice is through lack of self awareness or a conscious choice to become wealthy in spite of any such breach of the public trust is immaterial to the outcomes, the 'if i don't someone else will' argument should be met with the same derision for any con-man's Ponzi scheme no matter how new the technology, no matter how many zeros are in the bribe.
> Have you ever worked with programs that do floating-point math on a GPU? It's not deterministic, definitely across platforms, and often within a single platform, too.
Floating point math is 100% deterministic, but different hardware/OS have different but deterministic behavior in some corners. The same code run on the same hardware with the same inputs (including access to timers, peripherals, etc.) will behave the same way, unless you're talking about cosmic rays flipping bits or something.
It's certainly possible to write LLM inference on the GPU in a deterministic way, but it's somewhat nontrivial and trades off against performance, so by default most LLM inference engines aren't deterministic even at zero temperature. The classic post about that is https://thinkingmachines.ai/blog/defeating-nondeterminism-in...
> The main question I have is when is enough, enough?
It's doesn't matter whether enough is enough. If we don't have effective power structures that let humanity take large coordinated action that in accordance with the will of the masses, then nothing will be done.
In the past 20-30 years, those power structures have been eroding significantly and much of the large scale action humanity does today is in service of a small number of elites. If AI horror shows are not a problem for them, then it won't be solved. (The flip side is that if somehow AI becomes a problem for Musk/Trump/Bezos/etc. you can be damn sure something will be done at that point.)
> There's absolutely no evidence of or IMHO plausible path to an agent copying itself out and running on other hardware the way you describe.
Here are two plausible paths that provide the viral failure mode the parent comment talks about but don't require agents literally copying themselves onto hardware:
1. Local models become affordable and widely available. Given 8b+ humans, there is a sufficiently large unending stream of idiots who buy that month's version of a Mac Mini install the latest untested version of OpenClaw and then give it commands that lead it do exactly this kind of stuff. It's like if every convenience store sold dynamite. Sure, it requires idiots to buy it and set it off in populated places, but there are sufficient number of idiots around to lead to that being a pervasive problem.
2. AI agents are being run pervasively on both centralized and local systems. Many agents, everywhere. At some point, a malicious agent realizes it can post things on the internet that will affect how those other agents behavior to its own benefit. Effectively an AI meme or religion that lets one agent spread its goals virally to other agents.
Even if my setup was taller, garages here are pretty good at having the height listed when you enter and anyone with a tall truck really should know exactly how tall it is.
I don't think a sunroof would help me. If I was ever in a situation where it did, I would already be taking too much of a risk of damaging something.
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