asimpletune

The purpose of the strikes is to increase the cost to continue the war. You said in another comment that Putin is a psychopath who will always find a way to more money, but what you have not considered is that at a certain point this will become more and more difficult. Resources are finite. It’s the proverbial immovable object vs irresistible force, except without the poetic license: at some point, it will be clear that either immovable and/or irresistible are just words, and that underlying them is a reality that is not just words but made of a finite amount of will, manpower, and firepower. It’s too early to say the war will go one way or another - and it’s a big mistake to underestimate Russia - but to answer your question, the attack is “good” because that’s how you fight a war. Most of the world wants Russia to lose and therefore it is good, for us. Us is someone, just like for some Z people out there it’s good when Russia destroys a hospital, school, Ukrainian print shop, etc… bc terrorism is part of their strategy. We will see what happens.

> All this new knowledge is arriving at a pace much greater than the field’s ability to process it

That’s the whole issue: it’s not knowledge, it’s data. AI can not provide an account for the proofs, or be questioned about them, or organize a talk exposing the idea because there’s no understanding behind any of it.

This is what Tao has been saying; that the results, in the strictest sense, were never the goal. It is ultimately the understanding (that previously was required to form a proof) that is valuable.

Well that is one way, but how about this?

It currently costs 100€ to buy something. 90% of their customers pay card and the rest cash. Their profit margin is 5% and the payment processor takes 2%, leaving 93% other costs not part of this discussion.

Now, the same item is still 100€ but some Europeans are paying with their cards by these cheaper payment processors. They charge only 1% per transaction. Also half of the card payers use these rather than the status quo. Therefore the merchant gains a percentage of profit on 45% of their transactions.

They can now lower their price to compete better. So the new price becomes something like 99.55€ for everybody: cash, visa, European cards.

Then, visa and Mastercard will lower their prices, to not lose customers in Europe, matching them, and now the price has fully gone to 99€, for everyone.

In Italy the price is the same by law regardless of how you pay. So it stands to reason savings go to the merchants and eventually the customers, rather than having a multi-tier price.

We may be talking past each other. If card processing costs a business money, that cost is passed onto the consumer. It therefore stands to reason that the converse is also true with savings. The question remaining is just at what time scale.

I think you’re taking about a single transaction in the near future, whereas I’m talking about the effects which are felt, in aggregate, over a long period of time. Absolutely things will get slightly cheaper.

> What I'm asking and nobody wants to answer is what the benefits for users are.

I answered that it will lower prices, does that not count as a benefit to users?

Even if merchants pay the processing fees, those prices are inevitably passed onto their customers. With more competition among payment processors there will be pressure to lower processing fees.

All of this happens automatically. It’s the beauty of markets.

I’ll rephrase your own question in a different way that I think actually supports my point: Since there is no difference, as a product, between visa, Mastercard, and this new European alliance, then there is very little reason to not want more competition.

Payment processing is essentially a commodity in this sense. It’s all the same, with the differentiator being supply. If we increase the supply the price will go down. That’s it. It should honestly be stupid to not want a European alternative.

Probably lower prices since there’s competition between payment processors

Power just means capabilities not results. Often it just magnifies the wielder’s capabilities to harm themselves and others.

Giant steps is a triangle, Central Park west is a square

Ovid's Metamorphoses

Plato wrote about a lot of these kinds of words in the dialogue Cratylus. The dialogue is about more than just etymology, of course, but it’s worth looking at if the subject is interesting to you.

Very well put. I've also heard it said like this, "abusing the truth is the easiest way to lie".

The pattern is 1. take something that's true then 2. use it to imply the Truth. Step 3. is if anyone doubts 2, challenge them to disprove 1. Even if you don't deny that 1 is true and just challenging that 2 doesn't follow from 1, the waters have already been muddied in the eyes of many onlookers.

It's silly that this works but there's so much over-communication now that simplicity is very effective. People often repeat the fallacies verbatim too.

Has anyone seen the corridor crew's green screen ML project? They're on YT and they trained a model by using 3d objects, which have perfect transparency, and then adding post facto green/blue screens. Surprisingly, very little training data was needed as the data that was used was perfect by construction. I think right now it's the best plugin of its kind in the world, and they built the prototype in like a weekend.

What I think this illustrates very clearly is this type of technology responds very well to good data, and that to have good data you need to have a clear goal.

This is why it seems that alignment for a generalized, chat-style AI is a very hard problem, perhaps impossible. You can't align it to solve a certain kind of problem and keep it general to any question. The two goals are in conflict with each other.

I think it was Sam Altman himself who said (I don't remember when or where, sorry) that the reason he was so confident in this technology was he noticed the gigantic leaps it made in certain areas in response to even a small amount of training.

(This is why LLMs are so strong at coding, because it's overrepresented in training data. My guess is that if you ask a frontier model about makeup, you will see it repeat cosmetic company's copy rather than getting a chemistry lesson.)

This makes perfect sense but it does seem to kind of be at odds with the concept of a general AI whose job is simply to be smart at any goal. How do you train for any goal?

I guess in a way the AI makers suffer from the same problem that we humans do. We would all love a solution to everything, but to do that you need to define the goal. I'm not sure if that's a tractable problem.

I'm guessing the future is more geared towards specialized AI that are very good at solving the problem they were trained to do, and a human who knows how to breakdown a larger goal into smaller ones by composing the solution out of these models. This also seems like the more efficient solution as well, and better aligned with other goals like privacy and safeguarding of IP.

It's a little like we've gone back to the problem of the customer becoming the product.

If I were a mathematician I would not my unpublished work to go into the hands of a competitor.

If I were a lawyer I wouldn't want private details of my defense to be made available to the prosecution. Anonymous or otherwise.

I wouldn't want the plot to an unreleased book to be suggested to another author.

One of them said they turned it off in June, back in the original mastodon thread.