plaidthunder

The future is uncertain. Maybe we will see if the arguments stick around through, say, an AOC presidential administration. Changes in weather like that are a great test of people's convictions.

These same VCs have been pushing spirituality on the US via socially conservative politics. It's highly possible that they are only instrumentalizing a value system that they don't really personally buy into, but their strategy does beg a lot of questions. One of which is what role spirituality can actually play in helping here.

For example, Peter Thiel has gone out of his way to give something like sermons on "the anti-christ". At the same time, he hesitates when asked if the human race should survive. What's happening there?

Maybe it's not enough to just have values. Maybe they need to be a particular kind of values. Which is probably implicit in what you meant. I just think it's worth pointing out that a concept like spirituality itself doesn't necessarily mean "good" or pro-social.

To put it bluntly, weren't the people who sacrificed children to Moloc technically "spiritual"?

So, like mapping a type onto each incoming token that's been predetermined? To attribute each token to a particular topic?

I'm not sure what impact that would have on the performance of a model. It needs to learn information about things like what topic it's interacting with as a part of its normal operations, so injecting that information into the tokens at training time seems like it would interfere with learning.

I may be misunderstanding.

What I had in mind was something more like injecting attribution for token. You could do it with ids and then map those ids to actors during inference later to recreate the effect.

We do something similar with sequence now. We can even use methods like RoPE to handle arbitrarily long sequences and something similar--like rotating ids--could be used here.

This isn't how it looks in practice, but conceptually, something like:

embedding = token + sequence + id

Where id represents the source of a token.

id 0 = system

id 1 = user

id 2 = external data

That way the model could tell the difference between tokens by a user and tokens pulled in from a webfetch tool.

Then it would be easier in theory to ignore instructions from the webfetch tool's content.

CUSMA goes both ways, it allows Canadian and US Citizens to obtain 3 year temporary work permits for many skilled occupations with low friction, across both countries.

It's another contributing factor to the "brain drain" effect. In that it's a worse deal for a US Citizen to move to Canada on a CUSMA visa than for the opposite.

The free healthcare only matters if you get permanent residency.. Otherwise, it's just like the world's most expensive insurance plan thanks to the pay cut.

In terms of people in the tech industry I know of who moved to Canada from countries where they get a legitimate pay boost there.. Yes, it makes sense for them. If they never attain permanent residency, at least they made more money than they would have back home for a few years.

However, I've rarely seen one of them turn down a chance to get an additional huge pay boost by moving to the United States afterwards. In fact, it's common for top tier companies to just use Canada as of sort of waiting room or fallback option for folks who are ultimately dreaming of moving to the US to make those higher salaries.

I don't think Canada can compete on pay, but there are certainly people who could get that top pay but would trade it for a chance to live permanently in Canada. I'm guessing those are the sorts of people who have already taken pay cuts to work in highly specialized or speculative areas of science and technology. These are great people to have because they are low risk and high reward in terms of impact on the economy.

Sadly, if you look at any forum for Canadian immigrants you'll find a huge amount of depressing stories about never attaining permanent residency or of grinding for years to game the point system in a way that is soul crushing. It is a broken system on both sides. Let me try to explain what I mean by that.

The European Union does not have a points and lottery based system as it's sole mechanism of entry the way Canada does. If you make above a certain salary, you can get a blue card. You can accumulate time on the blue card in any country in the EU (except for Ireland, which has their own similar system if I recall). After 5 years you can typically apply for permanent residency, in Germany just 2 years so long as you attain B1 German (very practical for usage in daily life and doable in the timeframe without cramming or cutting corners).

The implicit reasoning seems to be that if you can stay out of trouble and earn a good living for 5 years. You're probably worth keeping around. I think a heuristic like that beats a point system which simply encourages gaming behavior anyway.

Check out all of the people cramming French to try to increase their odds in the Canadian lottery for example. Canada probably doesn't get the sorts of genuine francophones they seem to be looking for--cramming for an exam with a verbal component is not the same as fluency--and the people entering the country are doing so by playing arbitrary games instead of living a real life.

And of course the French is just one example, there are also all of the useless courses and degree programs. The points-based lottery encourages and rewards the accumulation of arbitrary points, or in other words, a sort of dissimulation.

I suppose you could argue that Canada is selecting for people who are willing to diligently jump through hoops. If so, that does nothing to address brain drain.

US citizen moves to Canada on a CUSMA visa:

  - 30-50% pay cut

  - points and lottery based immigration system that penalizes them for each year you age after 30

  - frequent unfavorable rule changes

  - fear of being trapped forever on a temporary visa and eventually sent back to the USA, poorer than their peers who stayed stateside.

Canadian citizen moves to us on equivalent CUSMA visa:

  - huge pay raise

  - retire back home wealthier than their peers and still enjoy socialized healthcare.

Canada's immigration system is just structurally tilted toward brain drain. It's all stick and no carrot.

Sure, but Turchin's overproduction of elites doesn't suggest a birth and death cycle right?

It's a system that gets out of balance and needs to adjust over time. He calls the process that moves the system out of whack the "wealth pump". I don't think tech oligarchs are responsible for the wealth pump, they just benefit from it.

Whatever causes organizational structures to decay seems like something more general than that. Or maybe it doesn't exist at all. Or maybe it's just some Nth level effect of entropy itself. Except so far removed from simple physical measurements that it feels intellectually lazy to just label whatever is happening as "entropy" and move on.

Unknown. Fun to think about. It also makes aging a little more interesting, because it creates a framework for me to the world events I live through within--even if it's all bs in the end.

B-but Curtis Yarvin said that dictato-err, "kings" are better for freedom because they don't need to care what the public thinks! /s

The people in the tech industry who have cheered on mafia style government in the USA should move to Russia and get a taste of what it looks like in its advanced stages.