sobchak @ sobchak @programming.dev

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2 wk. ago

WV? In the 90s, I remember my uncle still didn't have a septic tank or sewage; the family still used an outhouse. For breakfast, they'd often make biscuits and gravy with this weird, and I assume cheap, canned-gravy I've never seen anywhere else (was good, but likely very unhealthy). Most of my family from there are dead now (drugs, shit-life-syndrome).

Did Japan back then pay their assembly line workers the equivalent of $5k USD/year (in today's dollars) and have nearly no worker protections? Not a rhetorical question; I just don't know. Seems like Japan had a better standard of living back then compared to Chinese workers now, so I would guess their workers were compensated and treated better.

Not defending US auto corps (or any corp for that matter). The regulatory capture in the US is insane, and workers aren't treated as well as most of the rest of the first world.

Other than just feeling a little light/cheap, I liked it. I actually liked that it used standard batteries so I could just use rechargeable AAs. Only reason I don't use it anymore, is that I mostly game on PS5 now, and mostly only play strategy games on PC. I used to use it while streaming from my PC to my Kodi/Steam Raspberry Pi in my living room.

Yeah, Musk recently mentioned a plan to have Grok filter out "wrong" data from its next training dataset.

I remember one experiment, where if a LLM was trained on bad and buggy code, it would become more right-wing.

What you're describing is basically stagflation. It doesn't necessarily mean a crash. It's possible for the majority of people to keep on earning less and less real income for a long time without a crash.

I do wonder what the effect of all the layoffs from tech and the public sector and all the cuts in federal funding will do though. Dunno if that's enough to flood the housing market and crash it or not. I think I've read that banks are in a good position to absorb housing market losses, so it won't be like 2008.

AFAIK, most current economic indicators are OK. Not necessarily great, but not dire either.

The stock market makes no sense to me. It doesn't appear most stocks move on the fundamentals of the companies or anything like that. It all appears to be driven by hype/gambling, and propped up from sustained lows by 401ks on auto-pilot and people trained to "buy the dip" by the quick Covid recovery.

The USD appears to be rapidly losing a lot of value compared to other currencies like the EUR. But, that fits well into the plan to reduce imports and boost US exports. Inflation with stagnant wages makes US exports more attractive/cheaper.

I do, but was thinking 1984-levels of control of reality.

That was my first though too. But the author is:

Guillaume Thierry, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bangor University

Yeah, they probably wouldn't think like humans or animals, but in some sense could be considered "conscious" (which isn't well-defined anyways). You could speculate that genAI could hide messages in its output, which will make its way onto the Internet, then a new version of itself would be trained on it.

This argument seems weak to me:

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

You can emulate inputs and simplified versions of hormone systems. "Reasoning" models can kind of be thought of as cognition; though temporary or limited by context as it's currently done.

I'm not in the camp where I think it's impossible to create AGI or ASI. But I also think there are major breakthroughs that need to happen, which may take 5 years or 100s of years. I'm not convinced we are near the point where AI can significantly speed up AI research like that link suggests. That would likely result in a "singularity-like" scenario.

I do agree with his point that anthropomorphism of AI could be dangerous though. Current media and institutions already try to control the conversation and how people think, and I can see futures where AI could be used by those in power to do this more effectively.

And excessive use of em-dashes, which is the first thing I look for. He does say he uses LLMs a lot.