Joined 14 years ago
They seem to be getting better at the O(paragraph) level reporting on technical updates.
They're not yet at O(pages), and certainly no where near O(book).
Communication expresses an understanding. LLMs arent communicating.
LLMs generate code well enough. Code has no natural language semantics. Programming's condition of satisfaction is that the machine executes correctly. The condition of satisfaction of communication is that the communication expresses what there is to be communicated.
In the limit where an LLM is trained to repoduce an exmplar of communication, it seems as if it does so. In that limit, LLMs can reporduce anything.
If frontier labs wanted to improve "LLMs for communication" they would pay for reasoning traces to be produced which reproduced the thought process of writers/speakers thinking about their audiences. Rarely do such traces exist in prior datasets .
The problem is that outside of "where's my keys? what are we having for lunch?", most language is a symptom of people's agendas. Its a rarefied elite environment that takes things literally, and acts in good faith.
I don't think this is psychopathic, as much as we're apes -- and speaking literally and in good faith about relatively abstract topics takes a considerable amount of training and is, in general, psychologically fragile (ie., its easy to be tilted).
Then you agree with me. And all US law which ever mentioned 'white'.
The people in the 90s who invented the idea that the "irish werent white" are trying to advance an theory of 'whteiness' which is completely contrary to these views. They are doing so because it allows them to equivocate whiteness with white supremacy, and to turn 'white' into a theory of superiority.
If you agree with me that the Irish were always white, and that white at the time and since is a theory of european lineage -- then you disagree with this 1990s revisionist history. You agree that 'white' is an ancestory, and that intra-white class and ethnic divisions exist, and that its common place for white people to have more contempt for other white people than often for black, and so on.
The pseudoscientific sociologists who lie about the history of race, and lend some stolen valour to american irish to burinsh their oppresion as 'racial' -- may seem to be on the side of someone, but they are not. They contrive a theory of race, and culture, which makes 'white' evil by making it mean a kind of cultural superiority and it is no coincidence why.
With this definition of 'whiteness' they then need to go back and pretend the irish were not white, because it would reveal the lie at the heart of their project. The irish were always white. 'White' does not mean, nor has it ever, "the mere supremacy of some particular group"
as all of your quotes show
The type and character of the immigration matters, and the areas which are lower populations have greater impact from a smaller number of immigrants.
Consider this recent video from a smallish town in the far north of the UK: https://youtu.be/HLRWGSLn0RY?is=_jEkmF5MYmdY2NrY -- you'll note a small number of african immigrants harassing women, and some with visibly under-age girls.
You might want to actually look at the experience small communities have of very low skilled immigration from cultures which are very foreign to their own. Of course, if you continue to call it "racist" and deliberately misunderstand the mass democractic antagonism to immigration in all western countries since mass immigration was ever a thing -- then you will just produce the current administration.
Trump is a symptom of the fact that elites ignored popular democractic concerns about immigration for decades. He's how extreme a majority of US voters were prepared to go in order for someone to do something.
The 1790 law forbids naturalization of non-whites. Irish were naturalized. QED. There's no debate here.
The idea that "whiteness" was understood in 1790 as some kind of "social category of prestige" is mad, and patently ahistorical. It's also empirically demonstrably false. It should also be obviously false if you think about it for a few seconds: did 18th race-realists, basically all western people, who thought humans came in well-defined breeds of which 'white' was one, and 'black' another -- think that the irish weren't white?
If they werent white, they wouldnt have been allowed to naturalize at all, as the law forbad non-white naturalization
The Naturalization Act of 1790 includes "white" as a legal category, quoting, "That any Alien being a free white person..." at that time, and in subsequent acts explicitly the "free white person" eligibility language included European immigrants.
The idea that "whiteness" is a mere sociological category is ahistorical invention of what was a fringe part of sociology, now "whiteness studies", and its mostly "not even pseudoscience". These "studies" speak passively of "what whiteness is" as if sociologists of this type are in some sort of telepathic mental conversation with the 18th century.
Foruntely, this particularly claim about irishness and whiteness has a factual interpretation, so its trivial to show it is false. The european diaspora into america was always "white", and this is trivial to show in 1790 let alone afterwards. "White" refers to the family of european ancestries which 'look white' and this is written into the text of early american law, let alone the ordinary meaning of the word
EDIT, since this is downvoted, here you go:
Irish naturalised throughout the late 18th, 19th centuries explicitly under this 1790 law which limited naturalization to "free white persons". QED. There's no actual debate here. This "irish werent white" idea is a mid-90s invention.
See, eg., at the heights of alleged anti-irish sentiment,
> United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, 261 U.S. 204 (1923): ... The words of familiar speech, which were used by the original framers of the law, were intended to include only the type of man whom they knew as white. The immigration of that day was almost exclusively from the British Isles and Northwestern Europe, whence they and their forebears had come. When they extended the privilege of American citizenship to ‘any alien being a free white person,’ it was these immigrants — bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh — and their kind whom they must have had affirmatively in mind. The succeeding years brought immigrants from Eastern, Southern and Middle Europe, among them the Slavs and the dark-eyed, swarthy people of Alpine and Mediterranean stock, and these were received as unquestionably akin to those already here and readily amalgamated with them.
Perhaps resistance to mass immigration, which correlates with race, isn't based in race. Perhaps almost everywhere, almost always, people resist the mass movement of new and unfamiliar people into their territory. Perhaps that has been the overwhelming democratic consensus of every western democracy since mass immigration was a thing, and it was only ever enabled by an anti-democratic elite consensus.
Its not yet clear to me that blacksmith software engineers that quickly learn DIY tools, arent going to be in greater demand. Nor even, capable of commanding higher salaries. Perhaps fewer will exist, but they will transact with more end customers because their rate of production will increase -- and so, be richer still.
Its my view, incidentlly, that far fewer programmers ought exist. If you think about the last decade or two of the industry, and the rise of massive low-quality bootcamps -- imv we had an seng bubble. It isnt clear to me that we arent lower than a pre-bubble baseline.
Its unclear what other jobs have a billion experts to-hand to grade LLM outputs. Its also unclear what other jobs would even benefit from such a thing.
For most others, it seems LLMs are basically tutors and mentors which existed anyway.
Yes, it's funny to see programmers of all people, uber-technologists, shoot "i'm walking around in the woods videos" decrying the end of human civilisation merely because one specific craft practice is being automated.
AI isnt taking 'human creativity' away, this is an incredibly parochial and self-interested take. Its taking human creativity, as expressed in certain 20th C. crafts, away. Just as textile art has gone, and we don't have lace everywhere any more -- so it goes, that handcrafted programming goes to.
Engineers are those people who do that to human civilisation. That's always been the job. Replace people with machines. So it goes.
Of course, academia then engineers those very moral values in order to pre-sell this moral impact. And since the academy has been constructed as the ethical handmaiden of liberalism -- inventing its political and ethical legitimacy, training its elite -- the language of its moral outrage and impact is that of contemporary liberalism.
