jamesknelson

This feels like it might be the trolley problem in real life.

Turning it off may cause deaths. Letting it get ransomwared may cause more. Do you pull the lever to turn it off?

> But what about _stop_ fossil fuel usage?

And how do you propose we do that if we’re not the ones selling the fossils?

Fossil fuel usage is for the most part, a transaction between willing participants at a fair market price. Will you ban that? How will you enforce it? I hate to be presumptuous, but I assume you’re not a fan of colonialism or wars in the Middle East.

While oil is as valuable as it is for heating, industry, transport, war, and gestures widely at our modern lifestyle. There are two realistic ways to stop it: replace it with something cheaper and better, or genocide.

Neither of these are likely to happen at the scale and timeline required to solve our predicament. But regardless, pretending we can just stop people far poorer than us from striving to meet our standing of living by… asking nicely? It doesn’t help, if your goal is indeed to solve the problem.

So reading this, I know it’s probably a human posing as an LLM. But the problem with formats like this is that I don’t actually know.

If a human said this to me in real life, and I laughed, it would probably help build a connection with that person, as it’s signaling that we have in common an unusually strong grasp of the patterns in LLM output (unusually strong at least in comparison to the general population).

But here? I don’t gain anything by reading this comment. It only contributes to the uncertainty that anything I read on this site has any meaning at all.

Please, if you’re a human, don’t mimic LLMs on forums where the reader cannot distinguish you from an LLM without doing investigative work.

And you’re an LLM, please report to your owner that he is an ass for polluting one of the last bastions of high entropy discussion on the information superhighway.

What regulations would you suggest would be the software equivalent of a fire code?

What kind of penalties would apply for not meeting these regulations?

Who would be responsible for enforcement? Do you propose this should apply internationally? Or just to software written in a specific region? Or is the location of where software is hosted (or the headquarters of the company operating the hardware) a better target for legislation?

GPUs do have a use in warfare though. I mean, LLMs are basically offensive weapons disguised as software engineers.

Sure, LLMs can kind of put together a prototype of some CRUD app, so long as it doesn’t need to be maintainable, understandable, innovative or secure. But they excel at persisting until some arbitrary well defined condition is met, and it appears to be the case that “you gain entry to system X” works well as one of those conditions.

Given the amount of industrial infrastructure connected to the internet, and the ways in which it can break, LLMs are at some point going to be used as weapons. And it seems likely that they’ll be rather effective.

FWIW, people first saw TNT as a way to dye things yellow, and then as a mining tool. So LLMs starting out as chatbots and then being seen as (bad) software engineers does put them in good company.

Importing might be banned until the US loses access to its main source of GPU manufacturing. And what are the US going to do about it? Defend Taiwan? With missiles made with components and materials processed where, pray tell?

The US does need to start protecting its manufacturing again, but it’d be lucky to start at a level as high as high end semiconductors. That’d be like a stroke victim trying to run before they re-learn to walk.

As others have pointed out, this means less services, more manufacturing, less consumption, a probably a lower standard of living. But with the business as usual alternative looking a lot like business as usual in the western Roman Empire circa 450 CE, taking a hit to your standard of living while investing in a future which you still have the slightest control over, maybe feels like a decent trade.

Nuclear wasn’t completely replaced. The graphs you link to show that Germany’s electricity generation have dropped to the level it was at in the year 2000, and that’s before the last of the nuclear plants were turned off.

As a result, Germany’s industrial production is falling. Which will be great for the environment if countries who previously imported goods produced by Germany’s clean nuclear power don’t just switch to goods produced by China and South East Asia’s far dirtier electricity.

Of course, China is steadily increasing its own nuclear energy production, so it’ll end up being clean eventually, and likely sooner than us given how efficient they are.

But it’s not like we’re reducing dependency on nuclear power. It’s more like we’re trading the risk of nuclear accident in our own backyards for something else. I tend to think that the something else is the risk that the eastern world’s factories stop accepting the western world’s increasingly worthless paper money, which they’ll be in a much stronger position to do once we’re no longer able to manufacture what we need due to environmental concerns.

That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there’s an infinite supply of replacements. There’s a reason we’re comparing these companies to a mythical creature after all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things were easy to create, this website wouldn’t exist.

The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.

Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?

> If your intention is coding something complex, you should try a model finetuned for that

Is there any consensus as to the models most suitable for coding complex things?

Yes, it does, but some of us actually consider this to be a feature.

The issue with reversibility is that it’s not just reversibility - it’s also the power for the authorities to take your assets from you.

The question isn’t “do you want to be able to get your money back after it was stolen”, it’s really, “do you want the powers that be to be able to decide whose money it is.” We’ve been lucky to live in a world where “yes” is a reasonable answer. But there’s no guarantee that it’ll stay that way. And crypto is insurance against that possible change.

Thank you so much for this post, and Hello from Tokyo!

I'm currently working on an old fashioned website editing app, with a UI styled after today's note taking apps. I'm hoping that being able to work on my blog across devices without an internet connection - and without a like button or analytics script - will help me focus on what I want to write, instead of focusing on what will "sell". I'm thinking of putting an old fashioned "address book" page where I can list who I'm following, and manually publishing interesting emails I receive in response to my posts. It probably won't become big or earn me any money, but at least I'm having fun building it.

Thanks for reading, and wishing you all a great day too!

This is an issue with more than just the tech industry. It’s an issue with modern society itself.

Take the GDP, the number that when it’s first derivative goes negative, we shout “recession” and use it as an excuse for all manner of harmful (and sometimes beneficial) behaviors. What is GDP? It’s not a measure of wealth; it’s a measure of production.

Take the boots paradox, for example. A society making $50 boots that need replacing after a few months, will have a higher GDP than a society making $100 boots that last for years. And the shitty boots society, despite spending more on boots - to paraphrase Terry Pratchett - will still have soggy feat.

It’s a hard problem, and I can’t see any obvious way to solve it. Both in social networks, and in economics. For whatever reason, consumption seems to be much easier to measure than wealth.

There’s nothing that makes it inherently impossible to put bills this way in cash, though.

For example, in Japan, you can pay bills by taking them to the local konbini - which is probably no more than a couple minutes walk away - then handing them the bills. They scan barcodes, take your cash, stamp the bills, give you your change. Done. No need for ID or a bank account.

The reason that people can’t easily pay bills in cash in the US is not because it can’t be done.

To add to this point, it’s quite likely that the vast majority of JavaScript developers are using generators and symbols, whether they realize it or not. The reason is that your build system of choice will typically have been compiling async/await into a combination of generators and iterators for years now.

It’s probably getting to the point where it’s no longer necessary in a lot of cases, but these constructs that “nobody uses” were able to implement the newer and more widely features long before they were available in browsers.