danlitt

> if you control an almost omnipotent genie

I think this is the major hole in the argument, and in the "AI maximalism" position you present. There is no such thing as an omnipotent genie, or a magic eight ball that can answer any question. Any technology has limitations, and if you assume as a premise that the technology does not have meaningful limitations (or that the limitations are irrelevant, which is really what you said), the conclusions you draw will also make no sense. This is how you get nonsensical ideas like the singularity.

It's more obnoxious, but less creepy. They're not really bad in the same way.

Do you mean (((x)h)g)f ?

since the order in which things happen is "h first, then g, then f"

Of course that depends on your principle. There are lots of ways of justifying the same behaviour, of course. the principle I had in mind was "A remote server has no right to determine how you consume the data it sends to you", not "everything should be free". This is an anti-DRM position, not an anti-copyright position.

If it's fair enough for Youtube to send me a video full of ads, then it's fair enough for me to run a program that removes the ads. The only way Youtube's business model actually works is either a) people watch the ads voluntarily, or b) they are able to force your computer to not do what you tell it to and instead to show you ads. Because all computers are general purpose computers, option b allows the server to impose arbitrary restrictions on you, not just reasonable ones. You might think watching ads is ok, but future restrictions (like fiat banning you from otherwise public content) might not be. That's the argument.

Of course, if everyone used an ad blocker then Youtube's business model would not work. But businesses are not entitled to a revenue stream.

> it’s not straightforward for the TV and every other device in your house, including your family’s

The principled position behind "you should install something" is that in the scenario you outline, you cannot just install something, and this is a kind of power over you that you are relinquishing to both YouTube and the TV manufacturer. You will not get it back.

> You wouldn't refuse to even look at the code of a colleague who has ever made a coding mistake, would you?

Not sure that is the position you're arguing with. I would refuse to skip code review for any colleague, no matter how trustworthy they were. This is the behaviour we are expected to accept to get productivity gains, when the colleague is an LLM.

Legislation that prevented US companies from using open weight models would have the desired effect. They're the only people paying for AI anyway.

Of course not. The point is that you will not do the research as well without the social activity. If you hate social activity, fine, but if you don't, then you should do it.

"Pacing the frontier" means "implementing regulatory capture". They don't necessarily care about preventing open weight models from existing, just on preventing the people with money from being able to make use of them.

I am parodying the article. Agree to disagree!

What in the slop?

"The data to ink ratio is the ratio of data to ink. The data to ink ratio can be increased by decreasing the amount of ink. Decreasing the ink, while keeping the data constant, will increase the data to ink ratio. Here, we decreased the amount of ink in the diagram, and you can readily see that the data to ink ratio went up. The data to ink ratio should be increased, except when it shouldn't."

> Jesus Christ. I’ve heard that Cambridge University has an open position in their school of education . . . this kind of thing would fit in very well there, no?

What a disgusting, tasteless joke.

> We solved [trivial problem]. We will surely solve [incomparably harder problem].

Based on what? This will not happen!

Not sure about multiplication, but letter counting is still constantly wrong if you can trick the LLM into not calling other tools. Obviously there are lots of mitigations on the server side to try to avoid this happening, but the underlying LLM has not got any better at this type of problem (and probably can't).

Why do you think having a free public competitor would solve the problem? Did you think about the problem at all before posting this?

Because removing public content from the internet for profit is wrong and shouldn't be allowed. One man, or one company, should not be in charge of the free speech of half a billion people.

I jailbroke my kindle and this was what the guide I followed installed. I don't know what else is available!

My experience has been "fine" - I don't use anything fancy like dictionary lookup or OCR, I just put epubs/pdfs on it and browse. I find the menu UI pretty good, it's a little unintuitive but there is a short guide that covers everything I need. There is no easy way to browse your library (there is a file browser but I don't like that). Ditto I don't find browsing through a book particularly intuitive, but it has page seeking and you can scroll through pages.

For casual reading, I think it's just fine.

>>> Hospitals have an operating margin of 2-5%. Medicare pays 50% less than private insurance.

The hospital can be paid less without reducing their margin if they can remove a cost from their balance sheet. It does not make the system cheaper overall, but it means the hospital does not have to bear those costs directly. They may not have to bear them at all, because hospitals are not the only things in the system.

They are already playing as dirty as possible.

Nazi Germany?

Perhaps this is sufficient reason to connect my KOreader to the internet for the first time...

How many leadership meetings have you been in where some profitable approach was refused on an ethical basis? (rather than the basis that behaving ethically is actually more profitable, which is totally different)

By contrast, how many conversations have you personally had with people working at a company believing a profitable action was firmly unethical, but felt forced to behave that way due to "business realities" or some other whitewashing?

Many people have strong morals, and might resist profit-maximising behaviours, but they will be outcompeted and replaced by less scrupulous people. There is actually no sharp difference between a person and a one-person-company, but: to the degree a company is really a company and not just a person, it is amoral. If you disagree, please point to a moral backstop that would prevent any company from taking immoral acts. A few exist, but they are invariably resisted by the most powerful companies. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Which perspective? I said two things.

> ethical approaches to model development, how humans interact with AI and debate over machine consciousness

So, pseudo-philosophical mumbo jumbo. There is of course no-one responsible for the ethical framework of the company's actions, because it is a company, and therefore amoral at best and immoral at worst.

I am implying that they will subsidise the LLM inference product by increasing the prices of other products.

Not sure what you're getting at here. Hetzner has not spent 1 trillion dollars!

Hasn't that already happened?

You can't parse [X]HTML with regex. Because HTML can't be parsed by regex. Regex is not a tool that can be used to correctly parse HTML.

Excited to see the price of every other product they offer triple for no reason.