Anvoker

The rest of the world is not in a tight alliance against Cloudflare though.

I'm not sure I believe in FOOM, but I don't think the hardware argument is so cut and dry. LLMs have had vast improvements to capabilities attributable purely to software improvements.

Considering how calorically efficient the human brain is when it comes to the breadth and depth of general problems it can solve, I don't feel like LLM software improvements have hit a theoretical limit yet.

I don't want to be uncharitable but the Mt. Everest analogy is not that far away from directly justifying not adding accessibility features in order to satisfy the ego of specific gamers.

I agree with you that in some sense it undermines the achievement, but tending to the ego of players that feel undermined by the existence of accessibility features is not high in my hierarchy of values personally.

In the era before the advent of mass digital surveillance, it was well understood that there are many different ways to fight crime. Now every time I see this conversation being had, it's treated as if keeping any amount of privacy beyond what you personally find acceptable is tantamount to endorsing the existence of human traffickers. Warrantless spread-shot digital surveillance is now often treated as essential.

I have a question for you. Why don't you advocate for more surveillance? The more active and widespread the surveillance, the more criminals can be caught. If you think it's not entirely practical, just embark on a thought experiment with me -- assume it would be practical. Would you do it? Would you have everyone be under perfect surveillance 24/7 in order to catch every criminal? Let's call this stance surveillance maximalism.

If you agree with surveillance maximalism, then we're just very different people and I don't think we can find common ground. I hope we can live peacefully in different countries with different laws that suit our preferences.

If you disagree with surveillance maximalism, then why is your arbitrary tradeoff so good? It's not obvious why it's better. You are assuming the moral high ground, but you're also doing the same thing you're accusing me of -- you're accepting some amount of traffickers existing by not being a surveillance maximalist.

By adopting this moral high ground, the discourse is kept at a shallow level. We talk less about which surveillance measures are actually effective or not, what has happened to crime rates over time, what is the context in which crime occurs, what are the negative consequences of undermining privacy, what are the negative consequences of mass surveillance etc. Instead we waste our time and energy on cheap moral opprobrium.

And why not? Law enforcement does not represent supreme justice and good. There are higher moral principles out there. Respect for law enforcement in the absence of justice is a disaster for society. All it does is give cover for bad actors.

I feel the opposite. It is one of the genuinely competent languages out there, if you're the kind of person that isn't upset about it being a "kitchen sink". Instead, I feel like the ecosystem, community and reputation hold it back. There are nowhere as many useful and popular packages to reach for as Python for example. Unity3D always lags behind in runtime and language version and had amazingly bad package management -- this further hamstrung C#, because the language is never used in a vacuum.

This kind of opacity is unacceptably user hostile. It's not okay to treat some amount of developers as acceptable casualties, without them even knowing, in order to help enforce a restriction that only serves Anthropic's interests. And if you want to tell me this is for managing the x-risk factor, I'm frankly unimpressed.

Because the poor will suffer tremendously if they are ill equipped for the job market. If we want to have education have a strong humanistic focus then we should start by changing society in other places. Or we'll get unemployed and suffering well rounded human beings.

Regardless, at the moment education does not seem to be doing great on either the humanistic or "pragmatic" axis.

Unfortunately, framing the problem as this kind of dichotomy is something people are inclined to do because then the problem can be reduced to the unwillingness of the opposing side to face reality.

Sometimes the dichotomy is correct, but the bias exists.

What about setting environments for normies that mitigate this problem? I don't know that you can do it on Windows, but Linux offers various tools for isolation where you can give full rights to an LLM and still be safe from certain classes of disaster.

Maybe this kind of isolation neuters the benefit you're thinking of, but I do believe some sort of solution could be reached.

I recall having a conversation with a friend that was angry at this kind of thing sometimes being called "Tail Call Optimization". It's a guarantee that your program won't literally crash by stack overflow if you recurse too much using tail calls; the fact that it might have performance benefits is secondary in importance. So the name can be a bit misleading.

Back then Rust's tail call story looked bad. The problem slipped my mind for years and now I'm suddenly made aware of this become keyword, and it seems like a great idea -- to make the developer's intent more explicit. Getting better target support for this is doing god's work.

As an aside, I would slightly argue against the idea that it's useful only for a narrow set of libraries. It's useful for the developer as a user of the language to be able to express things in either iterative or recursive style without worrying as much whether the latter is going to panic. Maybe if I had to deal with all the work of making such features functional in a language, I would value expressiveness a bit less!

Trump's second term has had dire consequences for the US that are simply not on the same level as Obama, and it could have been avoided. The democrats are also terrible, but it's a matter of harm reduction. In this case, I would strongly argue that the difference was greater than 99 and 100.

You should vote to do harm reduction. Elections happen regardless of what you do. Whether 30% or 100% of Americans vote, the winners of elections still get access to the same amount of state power. The system does not require our political participation to continue to exert control our lives. Abstaining from voting is not an effective tactic in reducing the legitimacy of the system. That tactic might work in other situations, but not in this one.

I hope you will keep your distaste for both parties, but still vote for the lesser evil, even if it's distasteful. Because I think we should help that one person not get stabbed. And if indeed you have voted for the lesser evil and my post has a tone that assumes otherwise, I apologize.

The fact that the police won't use surveillance data in a way you would consider good and effective does not mean you don't live in a surveillance state.

One of the key aspects of police and surveillance states is that the incentives are structured so that the policing and surveillance need not be done with the interest of public welfare in mind. As you said there is no political will.

They are a tool like anything else.

Exposure and Response Prevention therapy works. You will never get fully well without exposure. However, it requires that you find stimulus of a magnitude that makes you uncomfortable, but doesn't send you outright spiraling. You need to keep steady while experiencing it for a while.

Content warnings give you the ability to estimate what intensity of negative stimulus you will experience, and this is important when dealing with actual triggers.

Not everyone is yet at the phase where they can handle a certain level of exposure. For some unfortunate cases it takes a long time to be well enough to start being able to handle exposure.

That being said, I do think content warnings need to be specific, not generic. The most useful ones are spoilers, not generic messages to put you on guard. Careful Ao3 authors do a better job at this than most games. There are technical solutions that allow interested parties to get this information without having to spoil the default audience, but we live in a busy world that has a lot of things to care about other than this.