justanotherjoe

Nerds were so good they made themselves obsolete

This is like saying WW2 didnt happen while you were living in a Soviet village in 1940s, and you were doing the same thing, and nothing seemed to change

That's sort of how problems work.

Then ignore them? I dont get these types of mysteries. It's easy enough to find math majors these days to ask them their opinions on things. There're so many of them. You most likely know some from your highschool. They'd probably say the same things though, or even freak out harder.

While it takes a good math person to make breakthroughs it's much easier to find someone who has a feel of whats important/hard and not. Even a mediocre math major/master is far more authoritative than an expert at adjacent fields (CS,physics). Or to listen to webdevs 'ai skeptics' or whatever on the internet.

I generally dont mind if someone is angry at me, if it's something I did poorly. Honestly i enjoy it, shows someone cares abt what i output. However, when people expect to be wronged , and preemptively adopt an agressive posture, before i get a chance to do anything, that's where my desire to cooperate plummets.

How i reason about this is that, there are two types of science works, exploitative and generative. Exploitative science is kinda like what ingen do in jurassic park, finding an use case based on available tensions in the literature.

Funnily enough, 'generative' ai is not good at generative science, of which requires unique human perception that is not purely symbollic manipulation, but requires a form of revelation. That I think is not here yet with ai...

I think it's more than that. I made prediction in earlier 2024 that the main players of AI will stick with transformers while second class players will want to transcend it. The difference is admittedly a bit subtle but ai researchers would get it. I wrote it with mamba in mind back then, but google was still trying to come up with the 'next transformers' and one that can remember using weights and all that stuffs. You can say the same abt lecun's and ilya's now.

My main reasoning was that transformers was the lightning in a bottle and the best work is in extending it instead of transcending it, which requires you to capture another lightning . Which to me appears to miss the assignment. OpenAI, Antrophic, they understand this intimately. Google on the other hand, fell victim to their own ambition.

Probably they wouldn't be. A lot of this is people catastrophizing. Probably already somewhat unhappy even before.

Regarding spirituality i think it's more about math itself than math as a discipline. Math might be divine. Even if math is divine, i think doing math doesnt make you more spiritual.

Something like the plan in the anime Jormungand maybe? (https://jormungand.fandom.com/wiki/Jormungand)

This kind of thinking assumes quantitative changes never result in qualitative change. Which is demonstrably false. Obviously there are thresholds where phase transitions happen.

Take saltwatwer and cell. After some threshold of saltiness is passed, the water flow reverses from into the cell to away from the cell. And the cell frikkin dies.

You tested it, i doubt you authored it. A paternal twin can have one with good impulse control and another who's more instinctual. Even in the same family and upbringing.

I'm reminded of a kid, and there is always such a kid, whose parents put them in front of everyone and asked them, 'what do you want to be when you grow up?'. And when they answered, 'i want to be a president!' Everyone cheered and clapped and remarked how cute they were.

The kid's lying of course, he just said what he knew they wanted to hear. He didn't mean any of it. But i find this disgusting, especially because it's pervasive basically with everyone, me, you probably, in the age of social media, just a little more sophisticated.

Louis CK, in a different way, said that you shouldn't do that. If your bit is 'i want to be a president' then all your thoughts should be of how you want to be a president, not of cheers or of bombing the bit.

Most people don't mean what they say. That's why they don't feel compelling. And it's so sickening to us, that we flee to the media, actors, politicians, who seem to say things, say things they mean. The ultimate irony is that ofc they do, they are performing. They dont mean it either.

So I guess, realize it's all performance. And try to mean what you say.

what's stopping someone to feed it to an llm and say 'make it simpler' and maybe run it twice.

Yeah mathematicians tend to do that. Physicists not so much I think. However, none of what he says about AI is such a strong prediction, unlike the 'crackpots' that are probably on your mind.

Might not be solveable. At some point the effort in finding that someone might be larger than the benefit you get from just using the second, third, fourth best. Or using some flawed approximation hiring mechanism. There's just so much noise now. And it hits the good job seekers too.

Dario is no John hammond though. That'd be altman. He actually has the discipline and background as an ai scientist to tell what the potential failure modes are. You're right, he might still be just hyping things up, but generally i'd give more benefit of doubts to anthropic. Precisely because Dario was a scientist and I'd stand by it. People who get their phd in science already self-select, or proven at least to be made of different stuff.

Likewise, people don't as easily blame ilya for 'hyping things up' when he said these things.

Also talk about incentives, there are also incentives to lower their valuation. If you wanna be vigilant against social engineering i'd be wary of that too.

These are moot anyway though cause the article isnt even making any super strong claim. If you read it it's no big deal

Pain without suffering vs suffering without pain. Now everyone have smartphones but dignity feels like it's getting lower.

Except in growth imperative system we have, to stop growing is not to not grow, it is to spiral into a cascade failure

Gives them the freedom to interpret it 'case by case' which is to mean punishing businesses and states not aligned with Trump with a million inconveniences, while leaving his base unmolested. The most divisive and punitive president ever.

At one point you just have to look at a mirror and ask, what would impress you.

Also why pay anyone, when they can keep up with all the papers that not one man can read them all? That seems to me like wasted money.

Another point is that that's not how AI training works anyway. It's much easier to put it in context rather than re-train them with every bit of random maths you find out. Things at the tail-end of the power law doesn't stick. At least, last I checked...

You find it hard to believe...that Iliad was big? that 400 AD Egyptian medical practices involved quackeries?

Sure if the goal is entertainment and sports, you're right. However, unlike chess or counter strike it's downstream from a real needed utility. Like, is there a point to do it anymore? (ofc there is, but still, it's been devalued from the perspective of the 'real utility')

It's worth mentioning that swiss is a nation of 9 million, whereas Japan has 128 million people. I'm not sure how comparable it is. You probably don't need to pass through a lot of settlements for any public projects in swiss, for example.

To put this more succintly I think, the mind loves learning something new. Something to do with new connections in the brain.

I'm sure. But can you explain more? Share that 16 years of knowledge, even a little bit?

For me the question is just, do you think it's a disorder or not. Would you take a medication for it, if there is such a thing. If yes to both, Then, it's not really you. You are just who you choose to be.

What's so surprising about it? Russia had been smashing their heads against the Ukraine wall for years now.

Defending can be done very efficiently with modern weaponry.

And Taiwan is more powerful than Ukraine potentially and more economically important.

Judging from reason events, this is just another scourge he can (and will) use against democratic cities or entities

It has a lot of good ideas that are probably true, although some are rediscovering things psychology had found out long ago.

Actually you know what can cause big personality change? A good plastic surgery/facial correction. I heard it's actually one of the few things that can do that. And a positive one, too; towards more confidence and extrovertedness (if you think it's 'positive'), a trait most psychologists considered fixed in any other cases. But I can't find the source right now, or if I even heard it. But it makes perfect sense to me. Like a good jaw realignment that fixed your whole face, blaw, suddenly you're this other person.

This is in line with what I've heard a few times before. It's like self induced psychosis sometimes.

Anyway, your whole world being inside your mind is self-evident to me. That is what the superego is, partly. An integrity model/simulacrum of the outside world. We have it so we can run simulations and outcomes without actually being 'reported' and judged in reality.

Anyway, i thought it is interesting. My theory is that psychedelics allow us to update these integrity models which usually maintains its integrity by being outside of our control. Since it's usually lagging behind our developing worldview and needs.