EA-3167

In the narrow case of your profession perhaps. Beyond the slipshod world of most software is a universe of standards, licenses and liability.

The lawyers and judges who trusted an ML system to be up to snuff are currently pounding sand.

Unfortunately that’s the nature of the mobile marketplace, it’s mostly trash. The same is rapidly taking over PC and to a lesser extent console games, but fortunately the review/visibility systems in place are far more developed.

Well and the consumer is usually a bit more developed as well.

Don't worry, it's far from the majority viewpoint, it's largely an 'AI' industry viewpoint that's being screamed at peak volume to drown out the ongoing economic reality that this period of insane overinvestment is drawing to a close. Who knows what the future holds for this tech, but I suspect in a year or two with the money no longer blinding everyone, we'll have much more realistic conversations.

For now unfortunately we're doomed to an endless retread of "AI boosters vs AI haters" with very little humility and thought on either side.

I don’t think I’d judge someone offering a prediction the same way I’d judge an observation of what’s already happened. It’s implied that guesses about the future are uncertain in a way that statistics about the present are not.

That would be a lot more compelling if we didn’t already know how that story ended. I also think framing this as US-EU competition rather than the EU running its economic engine on cheap Russian fuel is misleading.

The EU kept at it with plans to expand until the war started for the second time and “someone” took it upon themselves to violently sever that link.

> This is why I laugh every time somebody seriously suggests there's going to be a war with China because the West would collapse without Chinese exports. It's just not going to happen.

This is almost the exact same argument that was used to justify economic cooperation with Russia, they’d never start a war in Europe because their economy would collapse!

Ooos.

Speaking personally and on behalf of everyone using Ad Blockers: No. That bridge was burned ages ago.

Archive Link: https://archive.ph/Om3jA

As the article clearly states it was the farmer himself who made the initial ID of the grain based on a bible passage he heard at church. It’s not a quote the Smithsonian added for the hell of it.

If a straightforward account of a story offends your sensibilities, rather than complaining, simply move on.

This seems somewhat mean-spirited and light on the sort of facts that would justify the tone. It’s also bizarre to read this as the markets begin to plummet as investors begin to realize there’s no there there.

Whatever you feel about the tech, the economics are stupid right now and seemingly entering at least correction territory.

In fact we're talking about claims that Anthropic is making to juice their IPO prospects, there's precisely zero indication that ML is capable of doing what you're suggesting. Generally speaking an enormous claim requires commensurate support, not "I figure it'll just work out down the road."

Yes exactly. It isn’t a surprise that the industry with no professional standards worth discussing is also the one having the biggest field day with ML. My point is that in many other professional arenas acting like a software “engineer” is called malpractice.

That’s utopian thinking unburdened by reality or the need to explain how this will work. I have no interest in that.

We aren’t talking about the new version of SV spiritualism here, we’re talking about systems people actually care about.

The major difference is that people routinely ship shoddy, broken products in the world of software with few consequences, beyond needing to patch it later. Try the same thing with a court filing and you’re out on your ass.

There’s no indication of ML systems expediting the clinical trial process, only the “brainstorming” part.

We have clinical trials for that. I’d also suggest that the first step in offering fixes for a complex problem should be educating yourself about the nature of that problem.

Exactly. The reality is that spitting out drug candidates is already the “easy” part… the harder part is getting that candidate through clinical trials, which is where 90% of such journeys end.

As always Anthropic is saying literally anything if it gets them closer to the giant bucket of money that is the IPO.

The only thing server owners control is whether the server is public or not. They can’t set this particular aspect of it on or off, only individual users can.

As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.

I live in a world where Signal is free, anything can be encrypted, and the major barrier to any of that is human laziness and a lack of interest.

We don't need conspiracies, people stink at this to begin with and most DO NOT CARE. The tech world is a bubble, we are less than 1% of 1%.

Those sounds like largely unrelated concepts that just happen to overlap somewhat in practice, and are also very individual. As a private person I don't lose anything at all by not using social media, but if I owned a local pizza shop I'd be losing a ton of business by shunning hat avenue of advertisement.

Personally I think the most useful definition for censorship in the context discussed here is *government* censorship. A company offering a product isn't forcing you to engage with it, even if it is a benefit to do so. You cannot in any way evade the oversight of your government without risking criminal penalties. Amazon can deny you their services. The government can deny you your life and freedom.

It's why the 1st Amendment protects us again government control of speech and assembly, but not the censure and pressure of our peers.

It's worth remembering that for all of its strengths, this place is also first and foremost a forum for people chasing VC money and support. Name aside that is the essential draw, and that's why it's so much bigger and more active than alternative sites or more specialized technical communities. In my experience those smaller, more... well places with higher standards for actual technical knowledge tend to be a lot less tolerant of the MBA poseurs and the LessWrong/SlateStar/EA/etc cults.

You can rationalize anything if you ignore your responsibilities to other people. Ultimately that’s just a long way around to being a crappy person.

For those who won't act ethically or at least reasonably, regulation is the answer. We're not too far away from flipping the congress into something far more willing to do just that, especially with anything connected to Elon Musk.

I think people talk a lot about intelligence without having a mutually agreed-upon definition for it. Now that hundreds of billions are on the line, trillions even, there's so much silt in the water than you can hardly see. Personally I'm on the "I have no idea" bandwagon, I think people are grossly overeager to express confident opinions no should be comfortable with.

BUT what I can tell you without any hesitation is what we have in ML systems, whatever you choose to refer to them as, are grossly misunderstood by most here and elsewhere. Most people lack an intuition for statistics, for what happens when you have really large numbers to work with. When you pair our natural arrogance and self-love to the mix it's a disaster. "It looks a little like us" is enough to make us love something, from cute little animals with neonate features to people who look more like our families. "It talks like us so it's like us under the hood," is another easy trap to fall into.

But this is all irrelevant, because we're literally watching the early stages of the air leaving this bubble. The tech will survive, most of these companies and business models, planned data center, will not. The Overton Window will snap shut on people who talk about AI like they live in a sci-fi novel. I for one look forward to seeing it happen, just as I did with the fall from grace of Elon Musk years after he should have fallen, or the fall of Crypto, or NFT's, or a dozen other fads that take this place and others like it by storm.

Controversial implies something other than near universal revulsion at the notion. What you’re experiencing is the consequence of being in a very small, very intense bubble that believes increasingly unhinged things because doing so correlates with a profit.

I wouldn’t dignify the notion of a stochastic dictator with the title of controversy anymore than I would any other religious or personal delusion.

It’s fascinating to watch the depth of True Belief increase as the obvious signs of impending financial doom increase as well. Reminds me of Festinger’s work with the comet cult, although I suppose the “getting paid to believe” aspect is stronger here.

That’s not how this works, maybe you should learn more about how plea deals and testimony work in practice.