foxglacier

They're reasonable in a self-interested net-negative game-theory kind of way, yes. But that doesn't make it a good idea for society.

Thanks but I've never been able to find much in IPCC. Can you identify what the unimaginable water shortage crisis is? What I find in there is quite confusing. For example:

"Currently, roughly half of the world’s population are experiencing severe water scarcity for at least 1 month yr-1due to climatic and other factors (medium confidence)." Since it's how it already is, we have to be careful reading this that "severe" water scarcity is normal and not a crisis.

Or this https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/figures/technical-summary... which is apparently a map of uncertainty change in water scarcity index (presumably unimportant) and policy challenges.

Perhaps you can somehow describe what this water shortage is predicted to look like in real life? Would all Californians in 2100 turn on the tap and nothing comes out for 6 months of the year and they all just shrivel up an die? You did say unimaginable but you imply that you know what it is. Will we also run out of energy to be able to do desalination?

Nurture does almost nothing for intelligence other than severe abuse reducing it. It's mostly random and inherited. If we knew how to nurture intelligence, don't you think every parent would be doing that?

I used to think that about geniuses but now I think another person would have done what Einstein did, and every other genius. They appear when they environment is ripe for their work.

It sounds like you're not aware of the randomness that comes along with inherited traits.

Don't you ever wonder why you can't quantify those predictions and what they would look like if you did? They're all things that already occur and have always occurred to some extent, what's the difference?

What exactly are you worried about? OpenAI/etc. gaining too much power? If they use it, the government can stop them. If you worry about the government, isn't it better that than rando terrorists? Seems similar to the early days of nuclear and rocket technology. It took stupendous amounts of money and smart people. It was barely accessible to many countries let alone people.

Saying something for years doesn't make it right. Has nobody ever challenged you on that? Our brains prefer to read enjoyable bits, not raw information. If you only got those 300 bits, you aren't going to bother putting them into your LLM to generate 700 bits to make it a more enjoyable read, you're just going to struggle through the 300. Maybe when browsers come with built-in automatic text puff-uppers, then you'll have a case but almost nobody does that now.

Here's a clearer example - would you rather learn a concept from a research paper or a textbook or blog? You say the research paper but they're dense and hard to wade through where-as blogs and textbooks are more wordy but hold your hand, which is something that helps humans learn.

If they're not trying, it's because it would fail due to lack of "faithist" Muslims to support them. Islamist politicians do push for that when they have popular support, and they do have popular support in Muslim majority countries, as well as local areas in other countries. The average Pakistani might not know much about that jurisprudence thing, but the law still prohibits him from having gay sex or insulting Mohammed.

Where are all the secular Muslim countries? Turkey? Why are they so few and so weakly secular?

It's not honest in AGI timelines (only biological ones). It just accidentally supports your unsubstantiated belief. Your belief isn't magically true because you're somehow able to see the future when others can't. You're just arrogant.

It's funny that your kinds of ideas were heresy a decade ago. Back then, we weren't supposed to think there was anything we could do about the effects of global warming in case we started to think mitigation was possible and stopped panicking. I suppose now that's politically permissiable?

It surely resonates if your reason for working is to extract wealth from others (ie. be a parasite) but if it's to improve things for everyone, then it's wonderful. You might still work just as much and get paid just as much but produce a lot more because of technology.

Writing about your Neo-Nazi beliefs, or even being a Neo-Nazi doesn't make you a terrorist, and I'm sure none of those you're talking about are. So no, by his definition, Substack shouldn't be labelled as a terrorist organization and shutdown.

Yes, information is not copyright protected. It's mostly free. The rival company isn't allowed to train on AI output because it didn't buy the AI output, it agreed to a contract where it said "I won't do that".

I'm justifying (via spleen venting) why someone would have the habit of reflexively closing popups without reading them. That that habit carries on even in the rare case where it would help is separate but shows how strong it can be.

By the way, I've seen the exact same thing in a student I was teaching how to use computers. He was asking me what's wrong and demonstrated that an error popped up, which he immediately closed - several times in a row! At the time I thought he wasn't really trying to solve it himself so he didn't bother with the message but now I realize it's just how people have reasonably adapted to the obnoxious way computers keep jumping in front of you screaming for attention.

It's easy to criticize other cultures through the lens of your own. If you're not a moral relativist, then find the best culture as your benchmark, not your own - you're not going to be magically lucky enough to live in the one morally right culture in history. Some of your own beliefs about right and wrong are going to be backwards - if you can't face up to that, stop being a cultural supremacist.

Or accept that every culture does things that look bad to outsiders and that doesn't change the fact that they may have gilded ages - no matter how good social mobility is for black people today, it's still crap for chickens.

Doesn't the term "land of opportunity" imply to you that it's also the "land of risk"? That's certainly how I've always seen lands of opportunity - places where you can fight it out on you own and have a chance to succeed - or fail. Not a comfortable safe zone to relax in.

"you people" means people that always mix up the legal thing with the right thing? It's tautological to say they're always doing that because that's how you defined them! Are you trying to say that you've encountered other people doing that before too and you've built up an annoyance with them?

I think neighborhoods that people see as "authentic" are actually bland and depressing to their initial occupants. Do you want to live in an outdoor museum for the sake of strangers who don't suffer the routine grind of poor-people life to come and oggle your mismatched buildings and blankets hanging over your balconies?

There are some historic districts in my hometown and it's because they have rows of posh but nearly identical houses. That uniformity seems to be part of what makes now gives them "character".

How is it wealth concentration? TFA claims the opposite - distributed ownership as the cause.

I agree with you about planning. Councils keep wanting to control how their neighborhoods look - because people who live there don't want their own stupid neighbors making their own decisions and "ruining" it. So they impose rules that lead to uniformity. Where I live, most new houses look indistinguishable from each other, but they all have the same multi colored offset walls with two different cladding types and alternating angles of their roofs. A style guideline made by the council to force them to look interesting.

I'm talking about cars made for the Chinese domestic market, not made for the Australian market. Remember the point here is that China is super reasonable about safety in its domestic cars compared to the US.

I know that text isn't public domain by default. I'm not talking about pirating IP. I'm talking about reading a website - which is a right that supersedes copyright - even using a computer that learns from it without storing a copy of it or distributing it.

No, you don't need to agree to TOS. I'm sure you never actually agree to them and you're not going to jail for it. If you believe that, I hope you never visited cnn.com, for example. Their Terms of Use is 11,000 words. Are you sure you have agreed to that when you clicked on some random news link? Are you sure you're happy to to surrender your legal defense and its expenses to them if they make a claim against you? You're OK that they have no liability for sharing your PII when they're not authorized to? You won't complain if you pay for a subscription and they don't give you access to the subscription content, don't refund your payment, and don't even tell you why?

If the AI company bought their book, then they didn't give it all away. If the AI company obtained it indirectly like a library or 2nd hand, then the author has already been paid when he first sold it. In either case, he could have refused to be so liberal in sharing it if he didn't want it to be used like that, but he preferred to make some money instead.

Developers should adapt to human behavior not laugh at users for using their precious thing wrong. It's not precious to the user. A probably misremembered quote from Joel Spolsky is users don't love your software, they tolerate your software because it's the least annoying obstacle in the way of doing what they want to do.

That may be an issue for messages from people but almost anything that pops up because the computer wants to tell you is useless and certainly doesn't need to be findable later. If you want to work on the problem, you can do that when you're ready, at your own initiative, not in the middle of what you're actually trying to do. Programmers wouldn't stand for a language that pops up a modal dialog when you type incorrect code but we think users are somehow less deserving of respect and ready to drop everything to deal with some stupid notification telling them they did it wrong or the software is broken like a crying child demanding his mother knows that he hurt his finger.

Reflexively dismissing error message popups is reasonable behavior because they're almost always unhelpful. It is often easier to mindlessly trial-and-error your way around obstacles than waste your attention on them.

Companies that didn't give away all their content for free to anyone have actually denied AI companies from training on all their data without paying a fee. Reddit, Associated Press, etc.

For those who chose to give it all away, the ship has sailed, but they did choose to give it away for free to anyone so they can't complain that they succeeded.

Yes - yours is just some optional text nobody reads or understands and is probably not legally required to adhere to. Theirs is a contract signed by their customer who they know did understand it.

Continuing?? Most Chinese domestic market cars can't be sold in the west because they're to dangerous or polluting. I'm sure they're getting stricter on both fronts but they're still behind developed countries.

Creativity isn't learning, it's the application of learning, and that's not what school is for. There has always been value in somebody showing you how to apply a math technique and practicing using it to solve problems. It's not creative but it gives us the skills to do useful things in the world - including creative things. Even pure rote learning (such as reciting the periodic table) is useful so you can later draw on that knowledge without interrupting your attention on the higher level thinking (such as creativity!) that you're doing.

By that same trickery, Germany didn't exist 40 years ago either. Neither is very different.

> increase GDP of everyone has to hire a worker to fan them with palm leaves

If that's how GDP worked, wouldn't it generally decrease with time as technology automates tasks?

What's funny about these future cost of climate change studies is even this incorrectly-pessimistic one just say that in 2100 we'll be about as rich as we would have been in 2090. 2090 level climate-change-free wealth sounds fantastic! That's not a disaster. There are doomers who're sure it'll be the end of civilization or otherwise a huge disaster but there are no quantified predictions showing that.