StableAlkyne

That is the correct way to use a knowledge retrieval chatbot. The problem here is the AI companies present them as these all-knowing things, and they're so new that most people do not know how to use them effectively (sort of like how Google-Fu was a superpower 20 years ago).

Taking a response at face value is just asking for trouble; they're useful primarily for finding references. The summaries are a good way of prioritizing what to read, and if nothing else the documents it cites tend to be relevant.

The people who get burned by these things are the ones who just blindly trust the generated text.

Also some of the skill is learning to feel out when you can trust it and when you can't, but if you're just starting out, always assume the bullshit machine is generating bullshit.

I'm in the same place. I hate how AI is being shoved into everything... But I feel like I'm living in a completely different reality than the people who find the Google bot useless.

Though, most of the time I use it to find a reference and ignore the AI summary. Or to put a label on a topic I'm pretty sure exists but don't have a name for (e.g., "<insert problem statement here>. I'm pretty sure this is a known problem in <insert domain here>. Is there a name for it and what is the most recent literature?"

Cigarettes have definitely gotten a trashy vibe in the US. It's kinda nuts how fast we went from smoking sections in fast food restaurants just 30 years ago to even bars banning it. In college 10 years ago, the only people I knew who regularly smoked cigarettes were from Europe, China, and India.

Cigars are still cool though, but those have always been the higher status tobacco due to the cost per stick. Also most people don't go through public spaces smoking a cigar, so it doesn't have the annoyance factor of vapes. Hookah still has a fun vibe too, probably because of the social factor.

This is something I keep struggling with.

If someone wants to vibe code an alternative to a SaaS tool, my gut feeling is "no, this is bad and it will blow up" as vibe-coded projects tend to do.

But then the alternative is often paying $X million per year for licenses to a half-assed program that hasn't had a UI update since 2005.

I just don't have a good argument on why they shouldn't when the outcome will be just as dogshit, only cheaper and flashier.

This is very cool work, and probably necessary to help prevent false positives

But what prevents a malicious actor from iterating with their LLM to minimize the score on their text?

IIRC it is a cooldown to prevent less tech-savvy individuals from being tricked into installing malicious apps.

I don't think Google is doing this out of some egotistical obsession over "control," it's more that developers and FOSS enthusiasts are a vanishingly small fraction of their customer base.

There are plenty of problems with walled gardens, but IMO this isn't one of them.

You're missing the last bit - shareholder value is return on capital for shareholders

The interests of the shareholders diverge quite strongly from the interests of electrical utility customers. It is generally a parasitic relationship where they consume resources that could have been spent improving utility service for the customers, either directly via dividends or indirectly by avaricious behavior on the part of the company in pursuit of their stock price.

There needs to be regulation that discourages the behavior. Some ideas that have been floated include expanding corporate responsibility to include the workers and customers, loosening corporate responsibility laws so that companies don't have strong obligation to its shareholders, ending quarterly earning reports, reviving the ban on stock buybacks, etc.

I love jazz, but my problem with newer stuff is a lot of it feels like the composition is second to the players showing off their chops. Maybe I just listen to bad playlists, but often it will be a 7-8 minute track where everyone takes turns vaguely riffing on the melody. That's cool from a technical perspective, but doesn't interest me compositionally.

Compare that to some of the older stuff like Take 5, Giant Steps, or any of the big band stuff from the 50s. Sure, there was a lot of incredible skill on display, but the music itself didn't seem to take a back seat.

One of my favorite albums of the last couple of years was Against the Fall of Night by Sungazer. Whalefall, the first or second track is probably my favorite song on it - there's still a lot of technical skill, but the composition is also on display. So you get this conversation between the song and soloists, instead of a backing track with a few skilled players. Moon Hooch and Fox Capture Plan are also in this same vein IMO.

So... Any recommendations of newer groups like that? Would love to find more like it.

> He was proven wrong in that what he predicted didn't happen.

Not really my point. Malthus was wrong about a future food crisis, but that doesn't invalidate the tools he used to make that prediction. Re-read the first line of my original post, it's pretty clearly about the theory and not his predictions.

The underlying idea is that population growth outpaced food production, and we know it is bad for food consumption exceed production.

> And you missed one point with your discussion of linear and exponential

You're also missing the forest for the trees: agriculture and population growth can be any two functions for the idea to work, so long as the agriculture function starts higher than the population function (technically there is a third function implicitly here connecting population growth to food consumption) and grows slower. Population growth was approximately exponential, and food production was approximately linear. This is a sufficient condition to forecast future changes. Pick any overfit function you'd like for food or population as it was known to Europe in the 1790s, and you will arrive to the same conclusion if you do not "cheat" and allow for magical technology advances in 50 years.

> How much more wrong does he have to be before you are willing to call him "wrong"?

Math would have to change to the point that subtracting consumption from production no longer leads to a negative number for me to consider him "wrong."

Now, I wouldn't say his model was relevant to famine after technology changed, because it no longer was useful for that particular thing. But the core notion of "if demand grows faster than supply, you will eventually hit a crisis when they intercept" is a pretty clear-cut conclusion to draw.

It is a bit odd for a thread to get this heated over a pretty simple economic theory that stopped being relevant a century ago. Is there some political side to Malthus I am missing?

You do not have to believe population growth is fully exponential for it to be a valid conclusion. You just have to have human population grow faster than agricultural capacity, which it was.

Additionally, it is reasonable in the 1790s to assume exponential population growth. It would not be until the 1830s that Verhulst would even model it as a logistic curve. Moreover, human population growth really was on a roughly exponential trajectory until very recently.

Obviously we did not experience such catastrophe. But it's also a bit wrong to call it "invalid" when it was a completely logical conclusion to make. If we're going to allow him to invent a magical technology that addresses it in 1798, then all reason goes out the window.

I wouldn't say proven or disproven, as much as it became no longer applicable.

The world he was modeling in the 18th century is a very different world than we ended up getting. IMO it's neither right nor wrong, it's just a reasonable observation that made sense for the time.

It's somewhat analogous to Y2K, in that there were obvious problems that were going to happen. We didn't experience those negative outcomes because immense engineering effort solved the underlying problem. That doesn't mean Y2K was "invalid" or "wrong," just that the problem itself got addressed before it could blow up. Same with Malthus, chemistry and mechanization allowed us to solve the underlying issue of food production scaling slower than population growth.

> And if it didn't hold because it's true on it's own terms in some abstract sense, so much the worse for its inability to model changes that would prove to be relevant to actual population dynamics.

That's a bit unfair to Malthus though; sure it was the enlightenment, but all he could rationally go on was to assume that the last 2000 or so years of civilization would be similar to the next, in terms of food and population growth.

What would be abstract would be to make the assumption that unprecedented technological advancement would be made in the next hundred years, bordering on ( to what Malthus would be) magic. You can assume any problem will be solved if you also assume a technology will be invented to fix it. But that's not a reasonable approach to make if you have no reason to believe it is possible.

> Malthusian theory had been proven wrong

It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.

The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.

What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.

But none of that invalidates his idea. If you believe that an exponential function and linear function sharing a point at (0,0) must cross each other (subject to other reasonable conditions like not having crossed yet, the linear having a positive finite slope, etc), then it is not logical to reject Malthus. It just no longer applies because we decoupled our food production capacity from the population size.