pandoro

Excellent point! Considering the history of these companies definitely makes it clearer how you could reach this point over a few years similar to the boiling frog story. A slow moral decrepitude and moving goalpoasts in the name of "national security" and "humanity's safety" over a backdrop of ultra-utilitarian rationalist thinking ("if it's not us, it's them")

I wonder if national security is used as a justification in those circles

That's a perspective I hadn't considered, it might be hubris for sure

I cannot fathom how you can intensely work on a problem that you genuinely believe has a "10 to 25%" probability of causing immense harm or even present an extinction-level risk to humanity. How can you truly believe this and be ok with it?

I understand it as sunlight so bright that your eyes are half-closed, obscuring the landscape

If you are not familiar with Camus' work, I highly recommend reading the essay collection Nuptials (Nuptials at Tipasa, The Wind at Djémila, Summer in Algiers and The Desert). It was written in 1936, when Camus was in his early twenties; several years before he articulated his "philosophie de l'absurde" in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger.

Camus himself described Noces as belonging to a pre-absurdist "pagan" phase. It describes, in beautifully poetic french, the intense, sensual love of physical existence and the here-and-now that gives the absurd its stakes.

A quote from Nuptials at Tipasa:

In the spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flower-covered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone. At certain hours of the day the countryside is black with sunlight. The eyes try in vain to perceive anything but drops of light and colors trembling on the lashes.

[...]

I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.

Depends on your point of view. Has the web been a net positive overall? If your criteria is "instant access to any information" or "catalyze more technological progress" then positive, if your criteria is "young people's mental health" or "how easy it is to control the public's perception about a certain topic" then negative in my opinion. It's all relative.

The general idea is to deliberately shape the geometry of spacetime to allow for effects such as faster-than-light travel (relative to another region of spacetime).

Einstein's field equations link geometry to matter and energy:

G_μν = 8πG/c⁴ · T_μν

Left side describes how spacetime curves (the metric tensor). Right side represents what's causing the curvature (the stress-energy tensor): mass, energy, momentum. The usual approach is: you specify T_μν (what matter is where) and solve for the resulting curvature. Metric engineering takes the backward approach. You pick the geometry you want first: e.g a bubble that carries its contents faster than light relative to the outside universe. Then you work out what T_μν would have to be to produce that geometry: what distribution of energy and stress the equations demand.

The classic example of spacetime metric engineering is the Alcubierre drive.

The limitation with this is that the required T_μν has negative energy density in some regions (the bubble walls) which violate some assumptions about how "reasonable" matter behaves. But Quantum Field theory allows such local regions of negative densities and we have created such regions in labs experimentally already (Casimir effect). We "just" don't know how to sustain the effect at bigger (atomic) distances.

Could you give an example of the value that only training a model can create but none of the rights-holder could? I feel like if you got a direct, instant communication channel to any of the rights-holder that created the content in the training set of those models, you'd get more value than what the LLM could ever give you on any specific subject.

All frontier models have been trained without any regards for IP protection laws. I don't see how anyone can argue in good faith that distillation is not fair game and does not ultimately "benefit humanity™"

Exactly. Imagine what would be possible after a billion year of technological evolution, heck even just 100'000 years. We already know that space time metric engineering is theoretically possible within our current understanding of physics, we don't have either the technology or access to energy density necessary to do it. And that's only within our limited understanding of how the universe works.