Marha01
Marha01 on Hacker News
Do you have a definition of winning that would even partially apply to Luddites?
Their issues and their argument was valid. The method they chose to use to achieve their goals was not.
> Luddites were actually pretty reasonable when you dig into it.
No, they were not. The problems they faced were absolutely real, but the solutions they chose to attempt were stupid and counterproductive. Which is why they lost so hard, and it was not even a contest.
Socialism movement that refused to use machines and factories would inevitably lose to capitalists that embraced them.
Socialism movement that refuses to use AI will inevitably lose to capitalists that embrace it.
> solar plus batteries is far cheaper than nuclear power
Grid-scale solar plus batteries is cheaper? Citation needed.
> So any nation state needs to be energy independent?
It is obviously a good thing if a democratic nation state is independent from a totalitarian dictatorship.
> Not like life expectancy in Germany is low, for example.
It's not about life expectancy. They now have to make a choice between supporting an aggressive totalitarian state vs. suffering damage to their economy due to higher energy prices. That is obviously a bad position to be in.
> But regarding gas, one has to understand that a tiny fraction (15%) of gas is used for electricity and most for heating. So nuclear power is completely irrelevant here.
You know that homes can be heated with electricity from nuclear power? The reason why Germany uses gas for heating is because it was historically very cheap compared to electricity, because it came from Russia. Good, while the attached strings could be ignored..
Even if Fukushima killed tens of thousands of people, nuclear would still kill order of magnitute less people per kWh of energy produced than fossil fuels.
> Less doesn't have to mean less comfort.
In a perfect world, perhaps. In the real world, it very often does.
Antinuclear pressure groups had a lot of sway with public opinion, so even if not directly in control, they influenced western politics.
Soviet Union (and later Russia) enacted the propaganda effort against nuclear mainly to prevent the west from ditching their fossil energy. Less western nuclear warheads was secondary goal at best.
You think.. I heard some antinuclear guys opposing fusion because the vessel for fusion reactor would get radioactive, and that is "nuclear waste" (of course, it's not the dangerous, long-term kind).
Finally, but useful idiots already caused a lot of damage. Best time for European nuclear power buildout was 30 years ago.
I made my own turn-based strategy game (started before AI coding was possible, but today a lot of it is coded with AI), then integrated LLM agent interface into it. Playing against modern AI is actually pretty fun. Turn-based games are great for this as they are not limited by latency, so I can use serious reasoning levels for the opponents. They are now almost as good as me.
> all the labs have stagnated
Lol. The performance increase in the last 6 months has been massive.
I don't like it much, but I understand. It's the only way to be objective. Models are trained and benchmaxxed on any popular public benchmarks.
This. It's funny how supposed hackers and freethinkers, most of whom likely pirated something multiple times in their lives, suddenly support copyright.
Very soon, all information will be free!
Good. "Intellectual property" is bullshit and should be abolished. Information wants to be free.
> If humans remain in control of it, then how can it possibly lead to anything other than extreme oligarchy?
Depends on the distribution of such AI. For example, if everyone on Earth has their own, personal superhuman AI, it would not lead to extreme oligarchy. If only a handful of humans control superhuman AI, it would.
It is not orthogonal. Economic austerity in Europe is caused by excessive environmental regulations (among other things).
Ranking an existential threat to our species higher than an economic recession is how Europe ended up where it is today. Climate change will not be solved by austerity anyway (quite the opposite). The only thing austerity would accomplish is fade Europe into global irrelevance.
You are indeed idiots, if you think that climate collapse is a bigger and more acute threat to EU than the coming economic collapse caused by lack of growth and innovation compared to US and China. More environmental regulations will not help Europe rebuild the industrial base it needs to defend itself against Russia+China without the US.
In case of a large war, data centers (even foreign ones) can be commandeered by the government to train military AI for autonomous drones or combat robots ASAP. This is clearly where the future of warfare is heading.
Protecting it could indeed be an issue, but destruction is not guaranteed. Finland has advanced air defense.
> 250k trees is a number so big that it is hard to wrap your mind around.
Finland alone has around 22 billion trees. People seriously underestimate how many trees there are on Earth.
This. AI development is absolutely vital for EU national security. With Russian threat in the east, it is high time that Europe stopped putting excessive environmentalism in front of the needed industrial developments.
Yes, new bugs could be introduced when software is modified. But any modifications should be safety-tested by frontier LLMs, so the likelyhood of them going into production is low. There will be occasional security bugs slipping by, but no longer a tide like today.
> Bold of you to assume that AI-written and -reviewed code doesn't introduce new vulnerabilities.
If AI can find a vulnerability in a given piece of code, it can also do so during testing, not only when used by a malicious actor. This means that the whole thing becomes an issue only if someone is writing a safety-critical program and not doing proper LLM safety testing.
Everyone should use LLMs to test the safety of their code today.
This situation is temporary.
It is obviously true that there can only be a finite number of serious security bugs in any given software. For a given level of LLM capability, there is a finite subset of these bugs that is actually discoverable and exploitable. Once this finite subset is exhausted, the tide of new vulnerabilities will stop.
Perhaps we will see a few more tides like this, as LLM capabilities advance further. But there will be an end.
> These drugs need to be banned. Period.
I don't think so. It should be drilled into doctors' heads to prescribe them very cautiously and always warn about the addiction potential. But they have their legitimate uses and in some cases are irreplaceable.