jmcgough

> Instead they ban plastic straws while the Chinese burn another million tons of coal.

I know it's easier to blame China than look at what we've done, but:

- The US generates more co2 per capita than China does.

- A lot of what China makes is products that we buy from them.

- The US has about twice as many CUMULATIVE co2 emissions than China does (remember, the co2 stays trapped in the atmosphere)

- The feds have gleefully killed as many clean energy initiatives as possible. Meanwhile, China leads the world on clean energy, has driven down renewable and EV batteries by 90% since 2010, is the world's largest renewable energy producer and investor, and is on track to generate half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Most people I worked with in tech cared about things like climate change, but they were making good money and the problem felt so far removed and difficult. What could they do to make a difference? It's always easier to focus on the next sprint, the next title, etc.

I mostly blame greedy billionaires, citizens united, and cowardly politicians, but I have a hard time respecting people making six figures who aren't doing something to improve our broken country, even if it's volunteering at homeless services.

What? This is like a drive by shooting or something. Several PhD students almost certainly lost months of work, and others considering a PhD will have more doubts. Those problems aren't necessarily important because of the solutions, but because mathematicians can make unique contributions to mathematics in the process of solving them. LLM proofs haven't created any new mathematics techniques.

Robots break down. Humans you can pay $15-20/hr and don't even need to pay health insurance. Robots running 24/7 doesn't matter for service jobs either.

> If we believe AI can replace all cognitive labor, then it follows that it'll be able to replace all physical labor with robotics fairly quickly, and we're left with no labor left for humans.

I've heard this so many times, but for most use cases, humans are more adaptable and cheaper than robotics.

Gillis (head writer for the onion) drafted the tone, arguments and jokes. He connected to Novak's lawyer through a friend at the firm. Novak's lawyer then connected Gillis to a former colleague who helped format it and provide relevant legal statute.

I was surprised that they didn't contribute to the jokes, it really does read like it was written by a particularly funny lawyer.

I don't think we can ever go back, and I'm not as convinced of the value of nationalizing Google, but it's clear that the monopolies held by massive tech companies are actively hurting society. Alphabet needs to be broken apart.

Louis is amazing. So cool to see how he's grown this project since starting it.

"Reading a document like this isn’t just difficult—it is punishing."

I can't tell if this essay was written in earnest or as a subtle troll.

Isn't Andon Labs the SF startup that burned a bunch of money having AI run a shop into the ground?

I think the danger of anthropomorphizing is that 99% of people lack the technical background to understand the nuance. People have been primed by pop culture depictions of AI to think of LLMs as intelligent, autonomous beings, which leads to dangerous assumptions.

We should make the distinction between them, because openai and anthropic will not. A magical black box that does the thinking for you is a much more compelling sales pitch.

> There simply aren't any repercussions for this in their training envs.

It's also not like a child or a pet animal where you can try to teach it to learn from the experience. LLMs are not "intelligent", they just use language in a way that appears intelligent. They can't learn or develop ethics in the same way that we do.

The people you know aren't exactly representative of the whole country. Most people I know are on instagram.

This took about eight years of work by a private company (funded by US VC and an ex-SpaceX leader). This wasn't an intentional decision to decouple from the US, if that's what you're implying, but a business decision.

Kind of weird to want to make an essay from 1971 about you. Until 1974, women sometimes weren't allowed to open bank accounts without a husband who could co-sign. There was a massive power imbalance until fairly recently.

Have to wonder where they got the mime. Was it a friend? Someone who worked there? I can't imagine the founder would actually pay a professional mime.

He served his time and hasn't been in trouble since. Do you not believe in rehabilitation?

I honestly feel like letting myself read the LinkedIn feed is an act of self-harm at this point.

Per https://eoconf.com/index.php/icmse/article/view/578, globalization decreases complexity of individual languages through standardization, but increases overall complexity by creating new multilingual and hybrid forms.

Either way, LLMs are an entirely different mechanism for shrinking linguistic diversity than just people watching Disney.

How are LLMs not the cause here? Reading online content is unpleasant these days because it all uses the same vocabulary and style. You can tell that an LLM wrote or edited it and it grates on you.

I'd need to see a study showing that this was already a trend, because globalization should increase linguistic complexity via exposure to other cultures. I certainly didn't use the term chaebol until the rise of Korean pop culture.

This might be appropriate in some cases, but it's important to consider that you have a finite amount of social capital as a new leader. Once people get sick of poorly thought-out changes it can be hard to keep changing things and get buy-in, and talented employees (who almost always have someone asking to hire them) can be the first to leave.

I'm a fan of Chesterton's Fence [1]. Put effort into understanding the organization and why it's architected the way it is before making changes.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/w/chesterton-s-fence

I've been absolutely loving the decomp projects that have been coming out lately. Huge props to the writer for this, Snowboard Kids is a real gem.

I'd also encourage people to check out the Legend of Dragoon recomp [1]. It's a real labor of love that has breathed new life into a largely abandoned game. You can play it fully vanilla, or with improved graphics, fixes to cumbersome design choices, bugfixes, etc.

[1] https://legendofdragoon.org/projects/severed-chains/

It's such a big deal to get a working RAS drug. Pharma companies will be pursuing additional drugs of the same class after this - much easier to be the second than the first. I think over the next few years we may see improvements on this, or better figure out how to use it and manage side effects. Very exciting!

Unlike AI, calculator use has been studied and shown to be useful for math education. Our understanding of these things evolved over time, however the results of this study are concerning.

You need some baseline knowledge to be able to gauge the correctness of answers you get from AI and to be able to ask the right questions. Removing homework and exams seems very short-sighted.

We're seeing a generational loss of young talent that will be hard to reverse. PhD grads who would normally stay in the US after graduation are returning to their home countries. My American post-doc friends have had funding for cancer research, Alzheimer's research, Parkinson's disease; some have left the US, others are making plans to do so.

And for what? Any money we "saved" by killing our research pipeline has already wasted in a pointless, self-destructive war.

Half of people with Alzheimer's carry at least one APOE ε4 allele. However, a full quarter of the population carries that mutation, and most carriers never go on to develop Alzheimer's. Lifestyle matters a lot here.

This kind of misdirection is not helpful for educating people on changes they can make now to reduce their risk, rather than waiting for a silver bullet. Alzheimer's research is well-funded in the US as the octogenarians running our congress are personally invested in it.

Source? There are so many explanations for that beyond just "bike lanes kill businesses".

This is pretty different - in both of those, the officer faced consequences. Unidentified masked ICE officers have killed about a person a month with no consequences, many times over a civil concern (immigration status) or just getting annoyed with protesters who broke no laws. ICE is effectively a lethal extrajudicial force with no means of seeking accountability when they kill.

On top of that, they are acting aggressively and violently in broad daylight solely to terrorize immigrant communities. The chilling effect is very visible in hospital systems right now - I have seen far less Hispanics in the hospital for medical emergencies, and that includes people who are in this country legally.

> This new technique doesn’t just recycle materials; it recovers most of them at an unbelievable rate.

I'm so tired of reading articles written by LLM. There are several sites that just ingest material (like studies) and crap out low-effort LLM articles.