feoren

> [Americans] have cultural values that change the nature of the society

I can almost guarantee you are wrong about this, especially about Americans who would ever emigrate to New Zealand. You are voting based on xenophobia. The only reason it's not racist is because "American" is not generally considered a race. But it's xenophobic, nationalistic, and based on deep-rooted stubborn ignorance.

It's not terrifying because it's unknown. It's terrifying because a tiny number of obscenely rich psychopaths are trying to take sole control of it so they can enshrine themselves as living gods and make 99% of humans so obsolete that they die sick and cold in the streets. That's their overt goal, and almost all evidence we have from history and current politics suggests that they will be wildly successful at this. None of this is for you, it's all for them. All of it. That's why it's terrifying.

> Perhaps they could allow mass immigration to fix it but that would destroy the culture.

This is the racist part. The majority is always worried about how awful everything would be if they were to become the minority. Usually it's because they treat minorities like shit, and they'll worried that they'll suddenly be treated that way too.

Why would that possibly destroy their culture? Are the cultures of all minorities always destroyed? Why would that be? Is it because of racist assholes?

It's an incredibly weak argument when you think about it. The South Korean culture doesn't have to go anywhere: there will be the same number of Korean pop stars and artists and chefs as there was before, it's just that there will also be others coexisting with them in the same country. Somehow this is a huge threat? They're worried about their culture being "watered down" by lesser cultures? These are racism-adjacent fears, similar to their pure blood being mixed with the lesser races. If you're worried that the South Korean youth will get so much exposure to other cultures that they somehow drop or forget the Korean culture, that just feels like weird gatekeeping and more "mixed blood" concerns to me.

Is there a limit on how much culture can exist? If so, it's surely based on population. We're not talking about the South Korean population declining more due to immigration; it's already declining. If their culture is in danger, it's surely due to that, rather than some sneaky danger of all those dirty immigrants. How is it not based in racism? We're just talking about more culture overall.

Not to mention the fact that most culture spreads over communication channels, not physical bodies. Those terrifying 8 billion non-Koreans who are threatening to destroy Korea's culture are already influencing Korea's culture. Would it really make that big of a difference if they were physically within its borders?

Mathematicians always define their terms exactly, in order to begin their discussion. Philosophers never define their terms exactly, because then they would have nothing to discuss.

That's the is-ought fallacy. We know humans can survive on many different levels of oxygen saturation, and it's clear that very high oxygen content is sometimes helpful. We are not "adapted for ice caps", and they are clearly not a requirement for our survival. Sure, ice caps help maintain Earth in a climate that is favorable to us, but think about all the many different climates that humans have existed in for thousands of generations. There's no real reason to assume ice caps are necessary for a favorable climate. Not to mention the fact that ice caps seem pretty common in the universe.

Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.

Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?

Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.

> if you start very publicly shipping a cryptographically secure hash, you better keep it cryptographically secure

So if my API happens to return text strings that always happen to have an even number of characters, I better make sure that all future versions of it also always return an even number of characters, just in case some moron decided to bank their application's functionality on that? No. If you decide to write a fragile application tethered to some incidental property of some upstream software, your application deserves to break.

> He does correct for the efficiency of both electric cars, and heat pumps in later chapters.

There's something really important to understand when evaluating non-fiction books: nobody reads the later chapters, and the authors generally know this. They can present tremendously one-sided information in the first few chapters, giving the spin that they want, and then in later chapters give a more balanced approach to shield themselves from criticism. Almost everyone who reads the book will read only the spin, but any criticism levied against the author will be met with "but I specifically say, in the later chapters ...". It's a slimy technique that you start to see everywhere once you're aware of it.

I don't care how hard it was to live in Abyssinia. This is absolutely the worst time to try to make a life in the United States since WWII ended 80 years ago, and there's every reason to believe it is going to continue to get worse for a long time. I have no idea why you are dismissive of people saying this is a difficult time.

This company's goal is to ... change an aspect of hundreds of different million-dollar highly regulated machines made by dozens of different multi-billion-dollar worldwide companies? And somehow make money doing this? Good luck, I guess.

That's a major theme repeated several times in the article. Like, what?

It's almost a certainty that LLMs have a "core" that will essentially never become obsolete, possibly even 80% to 90% of their parameters. The rules of English and other languages, core ideas in math and science, all of history, nearly all literature, etc. We don't really understand what's going on inside LLMs enough yet to make good use of this, but one day we will have "core logic" neural networks with stable weights burned into ASIC that are doing the heavy lifting, with more dynamic continually-tuned models manipulating the inputs and outputs into those core models. There are also likely stable expert models on topics that don't change much that we could already do this with.

Inference costs cannot keep falling forever, but they do still have a long way to go.

The danger of AI has always been the recklessness and maliciousness of the humans who wield it, rather than some Skynet or paperclip maximization fantasies. So yes, just like with guns, with mass media, with any other powerful tool.

"Okay, then I'm going to rewomble the dinglehop, which should un-galvatrate the percapitator." Why is the SVP in the meeting at all? If they don't want the details, they can't contribute to the change, or even evaluate whether the change makes sense at all. The SVP could be completely removed from this situation and the outcome would be exactly the same. Which shouldn't be surprising, since that's almost always true of all executives anywhere.

> Everyone nods their head, says "that makes sense", and we all move on with our day.

Why? Why do you need to be intimidated into actually making effective change? Why is everyone walking around with their hands tied, unable or afraid to enact change? Probably because of the terrible leadership at this company.

>> "We missed it because Alice was on holiday and Bob thought the Widgets team owned it".

> Okay. How do we make ownership unambiguous when someone is unavailable?

You cannot take this step without details. That Bob-Alice story is the details. You do actually need to know that story before you can take the step of knowing that "unambiguous ownership" would be a worthwhile change to make. What exactly is this SVP doing again?

This entire post could be summarized as "executives are useless" and "do the 5-whys", both of which everyone already knows.

It's the same vibe as "They called <insert genius> crazy for his ideas!"

Yes, the also called lots of actual crazy people crazy. In fact the probability of actually being crazy, given people are calling you crazy, is very high.