hax0ron3

I think the current state-of-the-art models are already AGI, by the kind of definitions of AGI that people had a couple decades ago. I could be wrong but I kind of feel like people have started using the term "AGI" to mean "artificial superhuman intelligence".

I don't think it's quite that capitalist.

Picard says at one point "A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of 'things'. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions."

At another point he says "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."

To be fair, capitalism is mainly a system of contracts and laws that allow for certain kinds of investment. It does not necessarily have to be done in a way that is obsessed with the accumulation of things or wealth. So those quotes are also not really anti-capitalist. But the quotes are, at least, not friendly to today's common notion of what 'capitalism' means.

In-universe there was a brutal nuclear war that killed a large number of people. And then after the war they developed technology that got rid of a lot of material scarcity and disease.

I find it somewhat plausible that this could actually lead to something like the show depicts. There is precedent for sweeping moral changes in human history. For example, large parts of the world now find practices like torture, slavery, and collective punishment to be repugnant. Those practices still happen to some extent, but they're not viewed as being just normal like they generally were seen back in the day.

Another example is how Europe and Japan after WW2 genuinely became more pacifistic. Not just as a pretense to fool outsiders, but as a genuine change in how the inhabitants see things.

I think Twitter is worth less mainly because Musk removed some kinds of censorship and by doing that, scared advertisers. Not because the layoffs actually caused any significant technical issues. I don't think they did, since from a technical perspective X works just fine right now.

The US system has always been imperfect. In fact, it used to be much more imperfect. It being imperfect doesn't mean that democracy is about to end.

"We are all living inside of an obscure sci-fi film from 1970"

The evidence?

"Imagine that a film was released this year in which the following happened: <... list of things which are vaguely reminiscent of some things that have recently happened, but none of which have actually happened ...>"

It is bad that some US citizens have been wrongly deported, but it does not mean that democracy is dead in general or for some categories of Americans, unless maybe you mean specifically the category of Americans who are US citizens and have been falsely deported. Which is a very small category. I am not claiming that US democracy is perfect. I am claiming that Trump is very unlikely to topple US democracy over.

Has Trump done things that are questionably legal or flat-out illegal? Yes. Has Trump ever managed to come close to overthrowing US democracy? No. None of his partial or full violations of the law have come anywhere close to overthrowing US democracy.

I find that my attention gets drawn to the opposite phenomenon: it is very common for mainstream newspapers to call Trump's election fraud claims false right as they describe those claims. I mean sentences like "Trump falsely claimed that the election...". This always draws my attention because the same newspapers do not usually do this when public figures claim something false, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. I don't think the election was stolen from Trump, but when newspapers do this it makes me feel like they're treating me like an idiot who has to be verbally manipulated into thinking that the election wasn't stolen from Trump. Rather annoying.

>I feel like debating whether he even can run for a third term makes the premise that he got cheated on accepted.

Only if the readers are incapable of understanding hypotheticals. Also, like Jtsummers said, I'm not even debating it.

I don't think anyone here is claiming that he got cheated.

>Well, forced deportation of Jews into camps was "legal" too.

Yes, but Nazi atrocities would not be legal in our system. And Trump does not have enough hard-core supporters to make it legal to send his political opponents to concentration camps.

>If you're not seeing "any sort of danger to democracy", you're either deliberately blind to what's going on, or you're simply supporting the regime, in which case I see no difference.

I see potential dangers to democracy coming from the Trump administration, but no serious ones. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to fight against the potential dangers, it just means that the chance that Trump will actually end democracy in the US is very low.

I'm not a Trump supporter, I just don't believe that the system is at any serious risk from Trump.

I don't like many of those things, but many of those things are not illegal. Many were done by previous Presidents as well (that doesn't mean they're good, but it does mean they're not without President). None of them mean that Trump has escaped checks and balances in a way that seriously endangers the system.

For example, as far as I know the war is not technically illegal. And wars of this nature have been done by many previous Presidents.

I don't know why firing the FBI director would constitute getting past the system. Trump's the head of the executive branch after all.

Executive actions have been widely used by previous Presidents. Should they be more limited? I think so, if it was up to me I'd probably reduce the power of the Presidency in general. But Trump wouldn't be able to, for example, use an executive action to allow himself to run for a third term. If he tried, people would just laugh at him.

National Guard deployment in Los Angeles is within the President's normally agreed-on authority and did not lead to any sort of danger to democracy.

Etc.

Reforming English spelling would make it easier for people to learn English, but it could also theoretically have some negative effects as well. For example, it's possible that the bizarreness and irregularity of English spelling have a stimulating effect on the mind that has grasped them and lead to enhanced creativity in a similar way to how the minor variations between musical instruments of the same general type, or between paintbrushes, can lead to interesting creative results. Also, part of the aesthetic effect of written text comes from the exact sequence of characters.

The system has plenty of checks and balances that are outside of his administration.

I think there are many, many more things people think he can't do that he hasn't actually been able to do. The number of things people think he can't do and that he has done is tiny compared to the number of things people think he can't do and that he actually can't do.

The vast majority of things that Trump does are things that people actually think he can do.

I mean, it is theoretically possible that he becomes an absolute dictator. But so many people would have to change their minds for that to happen that in practice it is very unlikely.

Checks and balances are working. He hasn't been able to achieve nearly close to everything that he would achieve if he was actually unrestrained. For example, the system didn't let him become President in 2021, since the system believed that he had not been elected. There isn't much reason to think that Trump will suddenly figure out how to get past the system.

Nah, lol. The Constitution says "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice". So even if, hypothetically, he got cheated in 2020, the fact remains that he has already been elected twice. If it turns out that he has actually been elected three times and got cheated out of one of those times, he still clearly can't become President again.

Trump himself seems to acknowledge this but seems to be making the argument of "it's not fair I got cheated, they should make it up to me by letting me run again".

Well, no. The Constitution is very clear. If you want to run again you're gonna need a Constitutional amendment.

I was thinking about them fine-tuning the results for marketing purposes. But I just did a bit of research and it seems that would probably actually be illegal. So never mind, maybe?

Google Search is still a large fraction of Alphabet's revenue, and Alphabet needs to be able to deliver AI results for people's searches if it wants to stay relevant in the search game.

I imagine it's much easier to have fine grained control over AI search results if you develop and own the AI yourself.

Google uses Gemini for its AI Overview on Google Search results, though. And it seems to me that this is an area where they really have a big incentive to run their own AI that they completely control. AI Overview sits at the top of the Google Search results first page, so when it comes to marketing it's sitting in the most coveted place on the entire Internet.

Part of it is marketing, but part of it has to do with changes in how Americans think about making money.

Young Americans can see the direction in which the wind is blowing. They believe less and less in the idea of a "comfortable middle class lifestyle with a steady career" and more and more in the idea that you have to be some some kind of entrepreneur or hustler if you want to have hope for a decent living and a decent amount of personal freedom in the current system, given economic trends and trends in AI.

I think this is also part of the reason why socialism has returned as a viable force in American politics. The alternative to becoming an entrepreneur or hustler in the current system is to change the current system.

It's just going to make people go elsewhere for Java discussion.

Similar to how subreddit mods often banned people for saying things that they correctly or incorrectly perceived as being right-wing, being hate speech, etc.

And some of those people just made their own websites. Musk bought X. Etc. The overall level of speech online coming from people who would have been banned by those Reddit mods probably increased rather than decreased.

I am lucky that I am very sensitive to emotionally manipulative music in contexts where I don't want to be emotionally manipulated by music.

In general, it would help anyone to know more about the craft of how filmmakers get people to feel emotions.

Doing coding professionally already stripped nearly all the fun out of coding for me years before AI got good at coding, so when it comes to "how fun is it to be a software engineer", AI didn't have any negative impact for me. Being a professional software engineer was already extremely boring. Cycle after cycle, ticket after ticket, feature after feature, meeting after meeting... constant blur of meaningless shit. Not totally meaningless - it delivers actual value for customers. But meaningless for me.

If anything, AI has made it more fun simply because it means not having to think as much about the drudgery of details: syntax, API schemas, boilerplate code... And by "more fun" I mean "somewhat less unfun". Cause it's still not fun. But AI makes my burnout somewhat more tolerable.

I don't know about Jesus curing depression, but it's certainly true that belief in Jesus has made many people feel better.

>I find it endlessly entertaining watching journalists conduct flimsy but elaborate justifications as to why they still use X (formerly Twitter), a right wing propaganda sewer owned by an overt white supremacist directly responsible for the death of what ultimately may be millions of human beings.

>Quick reminder: Elon Musk is an unremarkable and virulent racist who cosplays as a supergenius engineer. He leveraged the money he lucked into at Paypal to opportunistically glom onto actual innovators and take singular credit for their work while consistently cutting corners in ways that put human lives at risk.

This is one of those cases where hyperbole makes the argument less effective.

As far as I know, Musk is not an overt white supremacist. It's certainly possible that he is a white supremacist, but if he is, he is not an overt one.

Saying that he is directly responsible for the death of people because he supported cuts to USAID is probably technically true, but it would be like saying that if I send a man in Africa $10 a month, then I stop and the person dies as a result, then I am directly responsible for that man's death. I mean yes, technically speaking I would be, but phrasing it like that ignores the context: I was supporting the man's life for a long time then stopped. I did not shoot him with a gun.

Calling Musk unremarkable is silly. Even if his talents are merely those of glomming on to actual innovators, he is clearly pretty exceptional in how good he is at doing that.

I think that an open and free China would still have many of the same geopolitical incentives that authoritarian China does. It would still prefer to dominate global manufacturing, use its resources and manufacturing capabilities for geopolitical leverage, and militarily dominate the seas and islands in its vicinity. It would still be nationalist. It would still want to reverse the "century of humiliation".

Type of government does have an effect on economic and military policy, but being a liberal democracy does not make automatically make a country less interested in pursuing naked self-interest.

The idea that foreign influence campaigns on American voters should be stopped is just a slightly disguised version of the idea that American voters have too much free speech and too much democracy. Which is a defensible position (I don't currently agree with it, but it's defensible), but I wish that the people who call for stopping foreign influence campaigns would just come out and state that this is indeed their position. Then we could have an honest conversation. They could, for example, argue that American voters are on average too ignorant, too stupid, or too prone to vote in destabilizing ways to be trusted to have free access to information. Or they could take it further and just plain say that we should limit who can vote or what can be voted for so that our politics stays within a given "acceptable" window. I would argue that whatever the American voters' tendencies might be, in the current political climate at least, I still prefer free access to information. Would I still value free access to information over keeping voters a certain "safe" way if it meant that some people would get elected who would actually put me in a concentration camp because of my political opinions or ethnicity? No. But we're nowhere close to that, since America has strong norms of civil liberty, so even people who want to put others in concentration camps because of their political opinions or ethnicity have a tough uphill climb if they want to actually do it.

In any case, I just find arguments that are along the lines of "it's not really free speech restriction, your free speech isn't restricted by not being able to see foreign propaganda" to be beneath contempt.

Personally I want to be able to see even foreign propaganda that is false. But attempts to curtail foreign propaganda lead to situations where even foreign propaganda that is true would be curtailed. And that is even worse. If some foreign government hacks the US government and dumps a bunch of compromising information about US politicians online, you'd best believe that I would like to see it.

I think part of why some people "trust" the CCP more is because if you live in the broader Western sphere, you're probably more likely to get hurt by the US government than by the Chinese one. Many of the same people would not trust the CCP more if they lived in China.

I live in the US, so I'd probably rather have the CCP snoop through my data than have the US government do it. If I lived in China, it would be the opposite.

I also wish I could find a situation like that. My tendencies have caused me a lot of problems in my career. It seems that most companies really prefer the 9-5 worker who does predictable, incrementally reviewable amounts of work every day at a steady pace instead of showing up with a big amount of work done once a week or so and doing who knows what the rest of the time.