theonemind

They might have a conflict of interest so that they shouldn't be trusted implicitly even if they can theoretically do a better job. Also, we live in a democracy, and these are public companies. With that much money on the line, they become quasi-governmental in shaping the economy and such. If they don't like public scrutiny, probably best not to be a public company. The workings of a public company should probably be a public interest, so the public can support laws and regulations appropriate for them

Maybe. I'm not so sure. If you change skin color, it might identify race by other aspects. If you stage the same situation with an entirely different person or otherwise digitally edit it, it might detect in some way that it's not a real situation or an altered image and respond based on that. They're black boxes.

I remember someone talking about AI detecting lung cancer from MRIs, and they discovered that it was assigning higher probabilities based on the age of the machine that took it (or maybe fMRI, and maybe it wasn't lung cancer, I'm forgetting the details). So those communities were poorer and had worse health and a higher incidence, or they'd have had the newer machine. You never really know how it's deciding anything (though in that case they did figure it out, it might not be impossible, but in the end, you probably end up figuring it out at a statistical level--I suspect the counter-factuals wouldn't be reliable), so you're introducing variables attempting to make a counter-factual, which makes me think that in the end, it'll come down to statistical analysis from real data/people/situations. Which is after you've let it loose doing the thing, unless you run it in parallel for a while before relying on it at all and statistically analyze that before relying on it. I'm not sure you can isolate a variable sufficiently except by statistical means on real data, because it looks at everything, and it might find a correlate to your correlate, and a correlate to that correlate, and reach the same conclusion based on your counter-factual not being able to sufficiently hide what it was looking at

I don't know, random thoughts

I don’t think so under historical English common law. If you lift a finger to help, i think so. If you see everything with no aid whatsoever, I don’t think so

Curiously predates US law, it’s old English common law still operating as a principle

IANAL blahblah

I'm sure it would to a great many of them. The money would be insignificant, but there's a congnitive overhead that you had to have a subscription so that paying for it becomes thinking about that becomes friction even while the cost is insignificant. Like, hm, am I willig to just forget about it and let it charge forever so I can read this one article, do I care enough to remember I have a subscription to the site in the future, can I read the one thing and cancel on the spot, will that work? blahblah. To be sure, I'm sure some quite wealthy people could be completely unbothered by it, but I think it's far from a foregone conclusion simply by the price being insignificant for them--the subscription is a mental non-monetary transaction, you have to take at least a small mental journey of being an 'x' subscriber in a sense, and that's friction

The top comments there seem against the AP on this, which seems really strange. I wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes but not enough to dig up a twitter login

Article says it’s a symbolic/community building thing. People will do the first 6 meters, machines will do the next 74 meters to finish it

It seems like a frontier model LLM could probably do it in day, probably less. Someone would have to read and correct it, though

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it - H.L. Mencken

Moby Dick is often quite high on the lists of greatest novels of all time. It seems to me that all of that stuff you think is not part of the good novel trying to get out is part of why it’s considered great, not merely good

I rather take the tedious parts as Ishmael seeing the divine in the world of tedious particulars, although such kludgy pointers as me saying that destroy the real meaning, as the thing represented itself

It looks pretty clear LLMs don't get us there by themselves, no amount of duct tape, WD-40, etc. gets us past, say, the mathematical certainty of hallucinations.

I mean, we don't know it any more than we don't know someone won't come out with cold fusion tomorrow, but it's a fundamental breakthrough away from where we're at. This isn't some routine engineering project with a guarantee of completion if you're just willing to keep pouring the billions. That's playing the lotto, you can pour away and get flat nothing.

The only difference is they're pouring billions and praying a rabbit comes out of the hat, but it's actually not much reason to expect they're going to pull the cold-fusion level rabbit out of their hat they'd need to get us past bikes.

I suppose they started with 451 and decided it was too on-the-nose.

I find the way that issue was opened incredible obnoxious, but it is baffling that the maintainers seem to have let AI loose on rsync. Like, why? Why try comparatively experimental crap when your fortune and reputation is made and you're the leader of a niche and immune to market pressure and the people love the thing and it does exactly what it's supposed to and works well?

It's like the Matrix, with the little rant about the primitive human minds not being able to accept paradise. You wrote the perfect tool, you won, almost undisplaceable in a niche, reliable, a metaphorical household name. It makes no sense to anyone to gamble or mess with that, it's just mind boggling.

And that's still a damn obnoxious thing to do in the formal issue tracker. Bad attitude, bad faith.

The “wealth” will mostly be numbers in a database without an economy. Sure, they could have an island or disaster shelter, huge, elaborate, and well stocked, and own lots of land, but even the land ownership is a paper filed in an office without a functioning government, which needs a functioning economy, to actually enforce keeping people off of the land. They can pay private security, but I feel like that has limits

Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy

I can't tell whether you're defending AI or blind optimism. I don't agree with either.