athrowaway12
"Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."
https://italygreenpass.com/how-do-i-get-a-green-pass-for-tra...
>Italian citizens and permanent residents can get a super green pass when they get vaccinated or recover from Covid. The green pass is the equivalent of the EU Digital COVID Certificate, issued to EU citizens and residents as digital proof that a person has either:
- been vaccinated against COVID-19
- recovered from COVID-19
- received a negative test result
I don't disagree that governments have imposed restrictive COVID measures, especially in Europe. I just am pointing out some limitations and caveats in your examples that makes them less damning than they seem as supposed "abuses of power". At a high level, I agree with you.
Edit: the shift from "use of power" to talking about "abuse of power" was itself a strawman by marcosdumay. We all got baited.
From "What makes Germans so orderly?" https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200531-what-makes-germa...
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?”
As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her finger pressed against her lips. She pointed to a sign of a mobile phone with a cross through it, indicating that we were in the Ruhebereich, the quiet carriage of the train.
“You must be quiet,” she said, before returning to her seat.
“That,” I said to the man sitting next to me. “That’s different.”
From "The lines a German won't cross" https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/weekinreview/05KULISH.htm...
As their eyes alight on the small sign that goes with it, which reads “barefoot zone” in German, grown men freeze as though they have hit a force field, or had an electric shock administered for being foolish enough to try to pass it still shod. But I can not say what the repercussions would be. This being Germany, I have never seen anyone wearing shoes on the far side of the line and certainly would not risk it myself.
These are articles published in respectable, mainstream, western news. I'm not alone in thinking that German society is somewhat stricter than most other western societies.
>[Scott #119] Where I agree with you is this: I think that, for the vast majority of entangled states one cares about in physics, a dual description in terms of wormholes simply isn’t useful, even in those cases where it meaningfully exists (which is far from all of them).
Seems like at a high level this is indeed his position iiuc.
Will Says: Comment #9 December 2nd, 2022 at 7:26 pm Hi Scott,
I think I must be missing something in your argument.
If “A foofs B” has a dual description “C blebs D”, and we establish that A does indeed foof B, would you agree that it is equally true to say that C blebs D?
If so, wouldn’t it be correct to say that this experiment has created a wormhole? It’s not a wormhole in our regular universe’s spacetime, but perhaps it’s a wormhole in some… where (? not exactly clear on this).
And from this, perhaps it follows why an equally-precise simulation on the classical computer wouldn’t create a wormhole in the same way? (This part seems dubious to me–I want to say that A foofing B is different from a simulation of A foofing B–after all, no matter how well you simulate a hurricane, nobody gets wet. But I’m wondering if this instinct is in conflict with my early claim that “A foofs B” is equally true as “C blebs D”. Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”)
Scott Says: Comment #21 December 3rd, 2022 at 9:12 am Will #9:
> Hmm.. now that I think about it, maybe this is actually what you meant by “bring a wormhole into actual physical existence every time you sketch one with pen and paper.”
Yup!
So Aaronson's position seems like, even if a system is "real", it doesn't mean its holographic dual is "real". I get that it's in his interest to steer QC as far away from this voodoo AdS/CFT stuff as possible, but his statement feels weird somehow. I agree it always makes sense to shut up and calculate, but as a lay person the holography stuff seems more significant than a classical simulation or a philosophical thought experiment, in that there are certain objects like black holes where the promising way to look at them is from the holographic viewpoint.
Not the U.S. though right? I guess Europeans had a much stricter lockdown.
You're right though, I genuinely didn't know it was so strict in Europe and Australia.
>Surprisingly, despite the skeletal simplicity of their wormhole, the researchers detected a second signature of wormhole dynamics, a delicate pattern in the way information spread and un-spread among the qubits known as “size-winding.” They hadn’t trained their neural network to preserve this signal as it sparsified the SYK model, so the fact that size-winding shows up anyway is an experimental discovery about holography. “We didn’t demand anything about this size-winding property, but we found that it just popped out,” Jafferis said. This “confirmed the robustness” of the holographic duality, he said. “Make one [property] appear, then you get all the rest, which is a kind of evidence that this gravitational picture is the correct one.”
Seems like their argument is that because they didn't train for the size-winding, but observed it, that some gravitational interaction is probably happening, despite there only being finitely many cubits unlike true SYK.
>Most comments say it's simulated. I think it's not even that... The fact they ran it on a real device is irrelevant.
I don't fully understand the theory around holography but I'm not convinced by the commenters saying that it's "simulated". IIUC, the certain quantum system that is equivalent to gravity is "another view of" the wormhole transport in AdS space and that in some sense it did indeed happen "in reality". Although it's not so clear what reality means anymore if these theories are true for real dS spacetime and everything can be described via a bunch of degrees of freedom on a boundary surface.
As an aside, I wish the article was written in plainer English. I laughed when they wrote that the physicist was "a gifted programmer" because they could use pytorch or whatever. What a puff piece.
#1-#7 are all bad. I don't think saying "some aspects of [bad thing] aren't so bad" is an effective argument against surveillance tech. Better just to call bullshit on the surveillance tech itself.
Mostly money launderers, I've heard.
>we won't be killed off by AGI because humans don't have malicious intent
I wouldn't say malice is necessary. It's just economics. Humans are lazy, inefficient GI that farts. The only reason the global economy feeds 8 billion of us is that we are the best, cheapest (and only) GI.
The transition to a bipolar world with a U.S. sphere and a Chinese sphere would be a huge shock to both sides. I don't know if it would be a fairer world or not; regardless, we all seem intent on doing this.
This article is another in a long line of very scary news about the U.S.-China tensions. I hope diplomacy and peace will prevail eventually.
I agree if there's a high social cost to a breach then the government should punish those involved. Also, the security of your software depends on your threat model and which threats are in scope and you're willing to invest in protecting against. The tradeoff is ease of development and velocity. So maybe such laws will incentive this process differently, and maybe it's a worthwhile change.
I look at computing as a big experiment. Personally, I am very careful to use trustworthy services and don't depend on software for anything critical (besides banking, but luckily FDIC). Most people don't take the same precautions and rely very heavily. It's obviously critical infrastructure at this point. Maybe it's time to stop thinking of it as an experiment, and maybe these laws make sense.
I don't like the concept for emotional reasons; to me it's sad and signals another step towards the end of the golden age of the internet.
I think whether there "should" be a law making you liable could depend on the details of the exploit.
If you get exploited via rowhammer, I don't think anyone would blame you. It would be unreasonable if every small business running a website could be sued if they didn't defend against electromagnetic interference within the RAM.
However, if you're Apple and say -- you could get pwned because someone clicked a button to register version 9000 on the public npm/pypi registry (https://medium.com/@alex.birsan/dependency-confusion-4a5d60f...) -- maybe I agree there's an argument for some accountability there :)
Also, I'm not so sure that language models like SD, Imagen, GPT-3, PaLM are purely copycats. And I'm not so sure that most human artists are not mostly copycats either.
I agree that these specific models are not going to be useful outside of board games. But in the future when there is the opportunity for AIs to interact with the world for real, the this kind of research will allow AIs to dramatically outperform humans on these tasks.
(Edit: removed my opinions)
Thank you for your service.
I wish the university calculus changed the curriculum. I didn't find it particularly useful to learn how to integrate e.g. inverse trig given that WolframAlpha exists. There are lots of other examples of teaching memorization of silly tricks like that. I guess they probably do it because it's easy to test.
These grants are valued at the market price at time of hire (or refresh).
So maybe pre-2022 the comp was 700k...
I'm less worried about artists' livelihoods at this point; after this problem is solved we'd all become obsolete and just be killed off.
My point is that Napster-to-SD is not a fair comparison. Napster didn't eliminate or replace human artists, while SD certainly did. Therefore, it's not fair to assume the government can regulate themselves out of this one like they did with Napster. Because even though Napster enabled widespread piracy, the human musicians still had leverage in that they were needed to create new music.
So my answer to the question posed by parent comment of "will SD play out the same way that Napster did?" is "no" because there are fundamentally different economics at play.
Obviously, if a good generative model comes out, the music industry will be in a similar boat to the art industry right now. Google was working on it in 2017 (https://magenta.tensorflow.org/performance-rnn) but I don't know if they've made any progress since.
I'm surprised here; I thought it only cost like $600k to train SDv1.4. Plenty of wall street folks and programmers have that much money to burn.
However, if models to freely generate good music become ubiquitous like SD did, then there'd be no incentive to pay for music, and these arguments would become less valid.
In order for these models to end up being solely controlled by a couple of big corporations as in your scenario (ex: Google, OpenAI) they have to either be prohibitively expensive to train or to run.
The former is more likely, although in the case of SD, it wasn't the case. It will be interesting to see if music generation ends up being more complex (in terms of model size) than image generation.
The latter is much less likely because it's difficult to stop people from just using AWS. I doubt that a cluster of BFGPUs couldn't generate enough music for a month in a couple of hours.
And although I'm just an dumb anon on the internet spewing these ideas, I think this is harsh but true. Because the reality is that now, everybody's downloaded the SDv1.4 weights onto their hard drives, and so the cat's out of the bag permanently.
When I think of the value and interestingness of art, there's a lot of intention and meaning in choosing what to draw, the form, etc. For example look at the OG The Death of Socrates and then compare it with the three other paintings of the same scene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates. Obviously the one by David is superior; it's much more interesting to look at, you can see the emotions of the characters, and overall the composition underscores the significance of the philosopher's death, especially in the context of the enlightenment/romantic period. (This is my opinion as a pleb; I'm not an art critic.) These concepts are still beyond what a model can encode in an image as of today.
So although humans are no longer superior in the mechanics of producing images, I think in the higher-level/psychological aspects of "art", there's room for optimism that humans will be able to hang on, for now.
1. They are very smart because they work on ML compilers (what are those?), but for some reason decided to work on public speaking now.
2. Something about presentations and delivery. "The medium is the message"
(Skipped ahead)
3. Here are some PowerPoint templates that are good
(Skipped ahead)
4. The end.
(Skipped back)
5. Here are some cool code editor templates, carbon, etc. They even have the MacOS 3 dots.
(Skipped forward)
6. Color palette of slides, where to get slides
(Gave up)
Where was the section about how to convey valuable information to the audience? And make arguments and how to reason?
I'm just curious: to them, what is the value in a presentation? Why is their job valuable and worth doing? These were the burning questions I had and must have skipped over the answers to.