lambdaphagy

I don’t think I understand your argument. If a wealth tax causes the wealthy to leave then you have even less tax revenue than before, right?

Given that no one understands how the mental relates to the physical in the first place, I have no idea how you would reach such a confident conclusion about the phenomenological status of 200k human neurons in a petri dish playing Doom?

I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner?

I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?

I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.

The guy who authorized the Manhattan project:

- had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment

- threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda

- ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini

- interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity

- turned a national party into a personal patronage system

- threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked

Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.

There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent WWII!)

You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.

Say more?

I picked two random numbers between one and one million. The chances of it having seen that specific problem in its training set seem very low.

> For example, transformer-based language models can't reliably do multi-digit arithmetic because they have no number sense, only statistical patterns over digit tokens.

I asked Opus 4.6 to multiply 50,651 x 895,707. It immediately responded: 45,368,055,057. This was wrong, but very close (good to about 10^-5 relative error). I then asked it how it arrived at that answer, and whether it had used any tool calls. It said:

``` No, I didn't use any specialized tools — I just computed it directly. Though I should be honest: large multiplications done "in my head" like this are prone to error. Let me double-check by breaking it down: 50,651 × 895,707 = 50,651 × (900,000 - 4,293) = 50,651 × 900,000 - 50,651 × 4,293 First term: 50,651 × 900,000 = 45,585,900,000 Second term: 50,651 × 4,293

50,651 × 4,000 = 202,604,000 50,651 × 293 = 14,840,743 Total: 202,604,000 + 14,840,743 = 217,444,743

Result: 45,585,900,000 - 217,444,743 = 45,368,455,257 So my first answer was actually slightly off! The corrected answer is 45,368,455,257. I don't have a calculator tool available — I'm doing this arithmetically by decomposition. For mission-critical calculations, I'd recommend verifying with a calculator since I can make arithmetic errors on large numbers like this. ```

So I would rate OP's claim (which is supported by a paper from 2024) highly implausible. Opus 4.6 appears to be able to do multi-digit arithmetic formally, as well as give remarkably accurate estimates based on something like "number sense".

Hi!

I can’t speak for your friend, but as a former atheist who brcame a Christian (albeit a very mediocre one) I feel like I can see both sides of this so perhaps I can offer a perspective that might help you understand each other better.

When I was an atheist, I assumed that anyone who didn’t care for the kinds of jokes you mentioned was worried that God would zap them with a lightning bolt.

Now I see it a little differently: if you see something as being of great importance, then it simply feels off / wrong / weird / missing the point to treat it as if it’s of little or no importance. In a word, it feels cringe. If such a project holds no allure for you, then you’re not missing much by sitting it out.

Not to harsh on your sense of humor, but I hope it might help to understand your friend better.

Inspiring to see women getting into the far weeds of the unicode technical standard.

The Know Nothing Party had nothing to do with anti-intellectualism per se. It was a secret anti-immigration party whose members were required to say they “knew nothing” of the group if asked.

Yeah, that's precisely what I'm objecting to-- smuggling in assumptions about the relationship between Sami and other Northern-European populations by using a term that implies that Scandinavians aren't native to Scandinavia, at least as much as any human population is native to anywhere.

In particular it obscures what is fundamental to the conflict, which is state/settled vs non-state/tribal, not one group being native to the land and the other being some sort of outside occupying force.