jmcgough

> Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.

I know it's easier to blame China than look at what we've done, but:

- The US generates more co2 per capita than China does.

- A lot of what China makes is products that we buy from them.

- The US has about twice as many CUMULATIVE co2 emissions than China does (remember, the co2 stays trapped in the atmosphere)

- The feds have gleefully killed as many clean energy initiatives as possible. Meanwhile, China leads the world on clean energy, has driven down renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010, is the world's largest renewable energy producer and investor, and is on track to generate half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Most people I worked with in tech cared about things like climate change, but they were making good money and the problem felt so far removed and difficult. What could they do to make a difference? It's always easier to focus on the next sprint, the next title, etc.

I mostly blame greedy billionaires, citizens united, and cowardly politicians, but I have a hard time respecting people making six figures who aren't doing something to improve our broken country, even if it's volunteering at homeless services.

What? This is like a drive by shooting or something. Several PhD students almost certainly lost months of work, and others considering a PhD will have more doubts. Those problems aren't necessarily important because of the solutions, but because mathematicians can make unique contributions to mathematics in the process of solving them. LLM proofs haven't created any new mathematics techniques.

Robots break down. Humans you can pay $15-20/hr and don't even need to pay health insurance. Robots running 24/7 doesn't matter for service jobs either.

> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans.

I've heard this so many times, but for most use cases, humans are more adaptable and cheaper than robotics.

Gillis (head writer for the onion) drafted the tone, arguments and jokes. He connected to Novak's lawyer through a friend at the firm. Novak's lawyer then connected Gillis to a former colleague who helped format it and provide relevant legal statute.

I was surprised that they didn't contribute to the jokes, it really does read like it was written by a particularly funny lawyer.

I don't think we can ever go back, and I'm not as convinced of the value of nationalizing Google, but it's clear that the monopolies held by massive tech companies are actively hurting society. Alphabet needs to be broken apart.

Louis is amazing. So cool to see how he's grown this project since starting it.

"Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing."

I can't tell if this essay was written in earnest or as a subtle troll.

Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?

I think the danger of anthropomorphizing is that 99% of people lack the technical background to understand the nuance. People have been primed by pop culture depictions of AI to think of LLMs as intelligent, autonomous beings, which leads to dangerous assumptions.

We should make the distinction between them, because openai and anthropic will not. A magical black box that does the thinking for you is a much more compelling sales pitch.

> There simply aren't any repercussions for this in their training envs.

It's also not like a child or a pet animal where you can try to teach it to learn from the experience. LLMs are not "intelligent", they just use language in a way that appears intelligent. They can't learn or develop ethics in the same way that we do.

The people you know aren't exactly representative of the whole country. Most people I know are on instagram.

This took about eight years of work by a private company (funded by US VC and an ex-SpaceX leader). This wasn't an intentional decision to decouple from the US, if that's what you're implying, but a business decision.