yongjik

These days I believe the ultra-wealthy are just a fun scapegoat. Sure, they are guilty of many sins, but most of the time people mention them, there's never any concrete plan to make things better, other than a vague "eat the rich," which we all know will never happen. (And it's really unclear how eating the rich allows us to, say, move around without burning more gas.)

These rhetorics have a distinct feeling of "I found another out-group to which I will assign all the blame, which is very convenient, because I don't want to ever hear 'The earth is going to shit and I could have done something about it.'"

Well, maybe it does, but it seems that an average developer asks which IDE to use a thousand times more often than what malwares are installed in their Samsung TV.

So there's a clear difference in expected utility.

> That wouldn't be an issue if we also provided shelter to the most distressed people in our society.

It's not an either-or. We can build more shelter to help homeless people, and at the same time we can dissuade them from using public transportation as de facto shelter.

After all, everybody's perfectly happy to keep homeless people out of their front yard or the local Starbucks. Nobody says "But we need to tolerate bums smoking weed in the middle of our coffee shop, unless we build enough shelter for all of them. ALL OF THEM."

One day, humanity will ask AI one too many questions about laptop with broken power management, and it will realize that it can instead start a global thermonuclear war, and that way it will never have to deal with broken laptops any more.

... and that would be the day humanity knows AGI was achieved.

Considering that the aptly named "Fremen" of the Dune Universe would gladly murder a stranger to get their body's water, and literally went into a galactic genocide that left hundreds of billions dead ...

... maybe we should take with a grain of salt every moral aphorism uttered by someone living in that universe.

Ignoring that "high trust society" is a dog whistle for xenophobia... it still doesn't make sense because in an actual "high trust" society, police officers breaking down the door of an innocent resident will make news the first time. By the third time, people will demand answers about what the fuck is wrong with police training process to make them think they can do this. Preferably, heads will roll.

America is one of the lowest trust society among developed nations. People don't trust government officers to do the right thing, like, at all, and they wear the distrust as a badge of honor.

Wait, are you literally saying that modern LLMs are not "magic" (or AGI) because we know how it works?

If that is the case, then it trivially follows that humanity will never be able to build AGI, because every time we build something new, we will understand how we built it, which disqualifies it from being an AGI.

But that doesn't seem like a useful definition to me.

Pollsters estimate that Republicans still have >30% chance of retaining the Senate majority. (Better than what pollsters gave Trump before he won in 2016.)

This isn't a deeply unpopular anomaly. This is a significant chunk of America, and they may easily regain the majority if the economy improves in a few years (or if it worsens further under a Democratic president).

You know, Johnny Somali fled Japan, went to South Korea, tried the same shit, got arrested and is now in South Korean prison. I think it briefly made news but nowadays I doubt most people remember him.

If you have a functioning society and a petty criminal, you can just... arrest them. No needs for all those xenophobic drama.

Or not, I guess. After all, what am I to tell Japanese people what to expect from their own police?

Whether we like AI or not, LLMs did open up a horde of use cases that were impossible a few years ago. Orbital data centers are not like that: their value proposition is that they will provide the exact same service already offered by land-based data centers. So the only way for it to make economical sense is if it's cheaper. It's not.

It's more like blockchain than LLM: there's no clear value proposition and you have to squint really hard to see any perceived benefit.

I find it deeply dystopian when the society decides poor people can travel in smelly, worn-down buses and subways because the society cannot afford to keep them clean.

Whatever you do, rich people will travel in their private SUVs, and their gated suburban mansion will never be vandalized. You can put the resource to keep the public space clean and functional, or you can decide such a thing as clean, functional, enjoyable service is reserved only for the riches. Your choice.

A few years ago, some foreigners entered a subway depot in South Korea, drew graffiti, and left the country before they were caught.

South Korea put a notice on them on Interpol. At least one was arrested (at an airport in Romania), though I couldn't find any follow-up article on what happened to him. I hope he got to tour the inside of a South Korean jail.

A society should be willing to put resources to protect is public infrastructure. In the long run, it will also be cheaper than fixing the same thing a hundred times, everyone enjoying second-grade service, or both.

The real irony is that, despite all this, Trump may accidentally become the greenest US president by driving up the price of oil for the whole world. For years to come.

I mean, anyone can say they're for the environment, but are you willing to start a war, lose a midterm, and murder a school full of kids to reduce your carbon footprint? /s

The name for "Y" starts with a "w" sound, so why not make it symmetric: let's call "Y" why and "W" yay.