dwallin

I’m just trying to understand, there’s an issue you’ve been unable to deal with for a month, and Astra not being able to handle it in 36 hours is disqualifying?

> How does a person even make the claim that the abolition of slavery didn't happen? We don't have slavery now, so if we ever did, we obviously ended it. On the other hand, if you make the claim that slavery didn't happen, or that it wasn't that bad, I can't easily prove you wrong just by pointing to the current state of the world.

It's funny you use this example given that the Constitution still famously has a pretty massive loophole that allows for legal slavery:

> Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Instead of one large channel throughout the whole print, why not multiple small 2-4 layer bridges?

Moving prices is not the same as moving the market, and famously the market might cause them to go insolvent faster then the market goes rational. Which would mean that they weren’t actually rational and this is all circular reasoning?

You don’t need to make that argument. “I changed the font when reviewing to one that is easier for me to read.”

Yeah, they only “proved” hallucination is inevitable by defining it to be any case where the llm doesn’t provide the “correct” answer. By this definition, an LLM deciding not to answer is also a “hallucination”.

Some people point at LLMs confabulating, as if this wasn’t something humans are already widely known for doing.

I consider it highly plausible that confabulation is inherent to scaling intelligence. In order to run computation on data that due to dimensionality is computationally infeasible, you will most likely need to create a lower dimensional representation and do the computation on that. Collapsing the dimensionality is going to be lossy, which means it will have gaps between what it thinks is the reality and what is.

The question is not whether the alternative is perfect, the question is can it be made better than the status quo. It’s not that hard to come up with potential mitigations for the problems you state.

- A taxable threshold, so people who can’t afford lawyers and accountants don’t need to deal with it. Works well for family gifting.

- You don’t need to tax immediately, tax it when it the profit is realized, eg. When you sell that art.

- Taking out a loan against an asset at an increased valuation should trigger a taxable event. (Eg. Stocks go from 1b to 2b valuation and you take out a 500m loan. You are realizing 250k of gains and should pay tax on that gain.)

- Eliminate stepped up cost basis. This is a ridiculous give away.

So if I email the company a TOS and say that continuing to allow me to use the tool should be considered acceptance of my new TOS that should be valid? Sometimes it's amazing to see the legal contortions people use to justify bad behavior on the part of companies.

When did Ben Thompson go so far down the path to autocratic sympathizer? This is such an anti-democratic, anti-free market, anti-free speech view on this whole situation.

First, everything revolves around a core conceit that "Might makes right". The idea that entities might might push back with the tools at their disposal is treated as a fools errand, you should just acquiesce.

The role of the legislative branch in deciding what private entities are allowed, or not allowed to do is treated as a side note. He equates the dictates of the executive branch as if it was the will of the United States itself, above even the Constitution.

It's dismissive of the rights of private companies and individuals to make decisions for themselves about the actions they take and whether or how they choose to transact within the law with parts of the executive branch.

He acts as if it's a foregone conclusion that every AI company should be considered an arm of the executive branch of the US government. The analogy to nuclear weapons is super flawed, there are multiple laws on the books (written into law by Congress) specifically regulating Nuclear research and development.

And most astonishingly he ends it dropping an implied threat of violence towards Anthropic (and assumedly anyone else who doesn't agree with his point of view):

> I don’t want that, and, more pertinently, the ones with guns aren’t going to tolerate it.

Wow.

It’s a non-clause that is written to sound like they are doing something to prevent these uses when they aren’t. “You are not allowed to do illegal things” is meaningless, since they already can’t legally do illegal things. Plus the administration itself gets to decide if it meets legal use.

This is such a bad faith question, it's annoying to see it come up again as if there's any utility to asking it.

The question itself never specifies that the car you would be driving is the same one that you need to be washed. The car that needs to be washed could be waiting in the parking lot of the car wash already. It doesn't state that you plan on washing your car at the car wash. Perhaps the car wash sells car cleaning equipment that you can bring back to wash your car at home?

The question is designed to be ambiguous so the llm answers it in a way that seem facially absurd to the people who are in on the scheme. What it's actually showing is a failure of imagination for those asking the question.

Do you want your chatbot to be suspicious of you trying to trick it? To me this seems patently unhelpful outside of LLMs tuned for roleplay or to operate in a highly adversarial environment.

Do you want it to assume you are an idiot asking the question because you didn't realize you need to have the car at the car wash to wash it?

Or do you want it to take the best faith assumption as to what you are asking and try to be as helpful as possible given the poor question?

Given that these tendencies are not evenly distributed throughout the population, you can have structures that leverage the large mean to mitigate the worst tendencies of the extreme tails. Given that the natural state of things is that power begets more power, these are harder to build and maintain, but it can be done. In particular, Democracies and Republics are major historical examples of this.

A important point though is that llm code generation changes that tradeoff. The time/opportunity cost goes way down while the productivity penalty starts accumulating very fast. Outcomes can diverge very quickly.