sfn42

At the end of the day your work is your work. If you tell Claude or whatever to do a thing it will do that thing however you tell it to do the thing.

You can choose to ignore the fine details and just tell it what to build, or you can spend more time and effort and tell it how to do things, you can ask it to create a plan, review the plan and ask for changes etc, you can review the implementation and ask for changes there. You can simply tell it you don't like how a feature is implemented and ask it for suggestions on how to improve it, include what you don't like about it so it has direction.

It's all about the effort you put in. LLMs are able to write clean beautiful and efficient code, they just can't necessarily do exactly what you want on the first try without any direction. That's why you should figure out what you want, ask for what you want and make sure it's actually building what you want.

You're just not understanding my point. I never said pedestrians are more at fault. I said they can avoid trusting their life to strangers in cars. It's still the driver's fault if they hit a pedestrian, but that does not change the fact that the pedestrian chose to walk out into the road in front of a moving car. You don't have to make that choice. You don't have to trust drivers.

You choose whether you trust a driver or not. Personally I choose to never trust them, and that's why I'm much less likely to be hit by a car. Because I do not put drivers in that position where they have to notice me and react in time in order to not hit me. I simply wait by the side of the road until I am sure that they have noticed me and are reacting in time.

When I said cars are predictable I meant cars are almost exclusively on the road. If you are not in the road you are generally safe from cars, if you walk into a road you need to watch out for cars. If a car is moving towards you at 30mph you can assume it will continue to do so, and so you should not walk in front of it until you see it slow down.

You can not assume it will always stop for you if you do walk in front of it. This is not unpredictability, this is you putting your trust in a stranger. It is predictable that the driver might not have seen you. It is predictable what happens if the driver does not see you.

You can't know whether a driver will see you and react in time. That's why I'm saying you should not trust that they will. You should assume that they're idiots and act accordingly, because a huge amount of drivers are idiots. Don't trust them. Make sure you are safe. Take responsibility for your own safety, don't put it in their hands.

And just for the record, even the best drivers may have accidents. Nobody's perfect. Shit happens.

I literally made the opposite claim:

> I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.

My claims are self-evident. Anyone with any common sense can tell this is just a description of reality.

Cars don't just appear out of nowhere. They are for the most part highly predictable.

I should add the caveat that I am specifically talking about Western countries where traffic is quite orderly. In Thailand we had to cross multi-lane roads by just walking into traffic while traffic weaved around us, they wouldn't stop for us even at crossings unless there were lights. In this situation you don't have much of a choice. Here in Norway, cars will stop for you so there is no need to walk out until you are sure the car is stopping. Some times if I'm crossing a multi-lane road I'll walk across one lane then stop and make sure the car coming in the next lane is also stopping for me. Some times they don't. I look both ways even on one way streets.

I've had many situations where drivers clearly don't notice me, and since I didn't walk in front of them I'm fine. Also had a few situations where someone I'm with walks out and I pull them back just in time to watch a car/bus pass right in front of them.

That's not really fair though. Almost all pedestrians who get hit by cars could have avoided the accident if they were observant and took responsibility for their own safety. People just walk out in front of cars, assuming they will stop, buried in their phone with earplugs in.

I'm not saying it's not the drivers' fault, of course it is and it should continue to be the driver's responsibility to avoid hitting pedestrians. But the roads are full of idiots, scrolling TikTok while driving, driving drunk, high, looking more at their passenger than the road etc. If you routinely put your safety in their hands then you're likely to end up in an accident eventually.

If you take responsibility for your own safety, look both ways before(and during) crossing a road, make sure the driver has seen you and is stopping before walking in front of a car etc then you are almost entirely safe from these kinds of accidents. Very few people get hit by cars without first walking out in front of a moving car.

You can't take responsibility for your own safety in a train. At least not beyond choosing the car you're in.

Good point!

No, it's perfectly coherent. You just struggle with reading comprehension. The choice is how you pay the tax. The owner can choose to sell stocks or they can take dividends. Or they can take up a loan or pay themselves a salary or whatever.

I'm not attached to the random figure I threw out. Put it at $10M then.

That said, if you have $5M invested in a business that makes you $65k a year you're being stupid. Sell the farm, put the money in some safe 5%ish interest vessel like a CD, now you're making $250k doing nothing.

I agree it should be progressive. But to me, the point is not to tax normal people who have worked hard and saved up some money. Many, if not most people will save up $500k over the course of their lives. That's not wealth, thats just a financially responsible person, it's one paid off modest house. These people already pay half their salary in tax every year, they are already severely taxed we don't need to tax them more. In fact I think normal people should be taxed less, even relatively high earners like medical doctors for example.

The point of wealth tax, to me, is to tax the obscenely wealthy people. Those few who are worth more than the entire rest of the population combined, while also basically not paying any tax at all despite their fortunes growing by millions or billions every year.

I actually think it would be reasonable to essentially put a "soft cap" on wealth. Like if you're worth several hundred million dollars you literally can't grow your fortune any more because you're just gaining as much as you pay in tax. Instead of one guy owning multiple companies worth billions of dollars he would have to sell shares to pay his taxes, and now many people own the companies instead. This prevents one person from amassing too much wealth and power.

They get punished by wealth tax because the crooks who implement wealth tax put the limit at some ridiculous point that ends up impacting "normal people". The whole point of wealth tax is to tax the ultra rich, so you could put the limit extremely high like $5M or even $20M and it wouldn't affect anyone except those who can easily afford it. But they don't do that, I assume because they want people to hate it so they can remove it later.

It's not confiscating a fraction of Tesla, it's forcing Elon to give up some of his share of Tesla. He doesn't give it to the government, he sells it. To whoever wants to buy.

Could also take dividends, that would be more of a tax on the company itself which is what people usually object to in this discussion. Now the company basically can't grow as fast because it has to satisfy the tax burden for the owner. But that's a choice the owner makes.

We already do work for them. They're the ones who own all the corporations.

Yeah but every time anyone actually does implement a wealth tax they start it at like $500k or some similarly stupidly low amount and then everyone starts (somewhat rightfully) complaining that granny has to sell her house because she can't afford the tax.

It seems to obvious to me, like just start it at something like $5M. Nobody will be affected who can't afford it. It's like they're trying to implement it in a way that makes people hate it.

> The "tiny" problem is that it is still one of the 3 possible faint solutions to overheating and we WILL need at least one of them operational in the next 50-200 years

We need them now. We currently don't have any time left to play around. In 50 years the global average temperature will be somewhere in the 3-5C range, which is apocalyptic. We'll be too busy fighting wars over water and arable land etc, to do anything meaningful about global warming. My view is that capturing CO2 is hopeless, what we need to do instead is simply not emit the CO2 in the first place. But we aren't doing that, we're just building new coal/gas plants every year instead like a bunch of idiots. Because that's what we are. Bunch of morons who are dooming ourselves. Whatever money is earned burning a ton of coal/gas, it will cost multiple times that amount to sequester the resulting CO2.

> where exactly did you get a notion that CO2 capture = "let's just continue destroying the world"?

I view it as an excuse to continue burning fossil fuels. It's not actually a solution to the problem at all, but it's presented as a solution when the reality is that it simply will never make a dent in the actual problem. There is no money in CO2 sequestration. We have a huge amount of investment in fossil fuel extraction and power generation etc because it makes money. CO2 is worthless, the only way anyone could possibly make money capturing CO2 and pumping it into the ground is if states paid them to do it. So a much simpler solution would be to pay them to generate clean power instead. "But where would the money come from" I don't know, where will the money for CO2 sequestration come from? We can't afford to pay a little extra for clean energy but somehow magically future us will be able to pay way way way way more for CO2 sequestration? It's not going to happen.

> Third - nuclear generation at scale is as fantastical as DACs. Please read about actual issues with real life construction of plants and about actual emissions attributed to each plant cumulatively, without greenwashing like selectively ignoring whole parts of supply chain and maintenance and decommission.

Google AI: Nuclear power plants produce zero direct carbon dioxide emissions during operation. Across their full lifecycle—including uranium mining, enrichment, plant construction, and decommissioning—nuclear energy averages about 12 to 50 grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour (g CO2e/kWh), making it one of the lowest-carbon electricity sources available.

Solar PV: ~85 g CO2e/kWh Wind: ~26 g CO2e/kWh Hydroelectric: ~26 g CO2e/kWh Natural Gas: ~499 g CO2e/kWh Coal / Lignite: ~888 to 1,054 g CO2e/kWh

There are over 400 operational nuclear power plants in the world, the technology clearly works. Yes Chernobyl was terrible, it was caused by the dysfunctional Soviet Union political environment, it's not a fault of the technology itself. The state withheld information about a critical flaw in the reactor design. Coal kills more people in a week, than nuclear has through its entire history.

> So let's say renewables reduce energy emissions by 50% or maybe even 75%.

As you can see from the numbers I shared above, renewables cut emissions by over 95% compared to coal, 90% compared to gas.

I'm not saying we could be entirely carbon-neutral. I'm saying emissions from electricity generation specifically, which according to Google represents over 40% of CO2 emissions, could be almost entirely eliminated. Instead of 40% it could be less than 5%. From there we could work on other things such as shipping, farming etc. Maybe we'd just stop farming cows. I love beef but I'd be okay with that. Aviation could go as far as I'm concerned. I love vacationing but I'd rather have a planet that's going to continue being habitable. I could still go pretty far using trains, electric buses, my own electric car etc. Shipping could be electrified - nuclear submarines and warships already exists, that could be an option. And yes, I know all these solutions don't eliminate 100% of emissions. But they eliminate a large amount of them. EVs, over their lifespan, cause 60-70% less emissions than a comparable fossil fueled car. Yeah it's not 100% but it's a whole lot better than 0%.

All the "solutions" to global warming are entirely fictional. Yet we keep barreling headfirst into it, because the world is full of idiots who aren't taking the problem seriously. Any rational person who really understands what's at stake would happily sacrifice some comforts, but most people aren't rational, they don't trust science because they don't understand it, and the rich control the propaganda machines that fill their feeble minds with bullshit instead.

The bonkers crazy stance is yours. Carbon capture cannot work. We would need to build at the very least tens of thousands of carbon capture plants, way more than we currently have power plants.

So to me, the bonkers crazy stance is "let's just continue destroying the world, and hope magic future tech will save it". Especially when the tech you're talking about it just completely obviously entirely infeasible. Add to that the fact that we are destroying the world now. The ship is currently sinking. A solution in 50 years is a solution 100 years too late.

The actual solution that we do have is nuclear power. We could have replaced all fossil fueled power production decades ago if we wanted to. That would have reduced our emissions by nearly 50% and we would have been able to put all our efforts into solving the remaining half of the problem.

As it stands right now I fully expect the world to end quite soon. Maybe within my lifetime. Unless I die early I'll definitely see +3C in like 20 years or so, and probably +4 and +5 as well if not even more than that. I'm not having children because I don't want to put someone into this world just to suffer through the end of it. I have absolutely no faith in our ability to solve climate change. I believe we could have, if the world wasn't full of corrupt rich people and stupid people voting for them. But it is what it is. We've doomed ourselves and we're watching the end unfold before our eyes while everyones like that meme with the dog in the burning house saying "this is fine".

We could have just built nuclear power plants. Invested into the technology, built breeder reactors and all that. We wouldn't have had to sacrifice anything, except of course for the astronomical profits of oil and gas companies.

And sure this wouldn't have solved the entire problem, electricity generation only accounts for like 40-50% of CO2 emissions or so? But it would have made a huge difference, and allowed us to focus entirely on the other half of the problem.

And it's not "slight warming". 20,000 years ago the global average temperature was about 3 degrees celsius lower than the reference point. That was the last ice age. Today we are 1.5 degrees above the reference point, 4,5 above the ice age. In a few decades we'll be at 3 degrees above reference, 6 degrees above ice age.

The transition from ice age (-3) to the temperate climate that allowed humanity to thrive, took place over about 12,000 years. The transition from reference to +3 is taking place over about a century. And we won't stop at +3, it'll keep going. Already at 1.5 it's having huge profound effects.

Look at this chart, this should help you understand the severity of the situation. https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...

This is literally the end of the world as we know it. It's already well on its way. We are already seeing widespread crop failures, water scarcity, blistering heat waves, extreme weather etc. It will get much worse, this is just the beginning.

It always puzzles me when people think fusion is just infinite free energy. You're not just gonna have one fusion plant producing a billion zetawatts of electricity. Each fusion plant will likely produce roughly the same as a large nuclear plant. So we would need to build hundreds/thousands of them, it would take many decades to build them. Fusion reactors are extremely complicated machines.

And even if we did this, we would also need tens of thousands of carbon capture facilities, and the infrastructure to actually store the CO2 somewhere.

Carbon capture (from air) is just completely infeasible. It's not even remotely realistic. There is absolutely no way it will ever make a significant difference.

It's not just heat, it's ocean acidification. As the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, CO2 in the water increases as well. When CO2 dissolves into water, it forms carbonic acid. This is the same stuff that makes fizzy drinks like soda taste sour.

So more CO2 in air = more CO2 in the water = lower PH in the ocean. I don't know the details but the more acidic water messes with the chemical processes that corals and other aquatic life depend on.

And hitting a microscopic speck of space dust would be like a nuclear explosion.

Because it's irrelevant. The thing would not exist without me. Specifying that I used AI does nothing except invite criticism and crap from luddites.

Plenty of people will boicott a thing just because AI is involved. If I'm talking to a colleague or friend I might do exactly what you suggest, I might say things like "I had Claude do x". I don't mind that at all. But if I'm publishing a website or app or something I'm not gonna put a big "AI Generated" sticker on it simply because there's no benefit, and might have drawbacks.

Oh yeah that might be the iffy thing that made me stop the signups, it probably required a steam login.

Google is a multi trillion dollar company. I could not care less about their finances, they're fine. Certainly doing better than me.

I've used AdBlock and sponsorblock for years, and certainly saved both days/weeks/months in ads and hundreds of dollars in subscription fees

Yeah, "everyone" knows that. Except the world har an incredible amount of people who fall for these kinds of scams. And there are less obvious scams around.

I almost fell for a strange scam a while ago. A Steam user by the same name as one of my existing steam friends added me. I assumed it was his second account and accepted. A few days later, he messages me, asking me to participate in a DOTA2 tournament. I had previously played DOTA2 with this person, he spoke to me in our shared native language which is not English and everything seemed in order. I said I haven't played DOTA2 in years so I'm beyond rusty, he said I don't have to play, they just need me to register so they have a full team for the signups and then they'll find someone else to play before the tournament starts. Sent me a link to a website requiring a signup and I can't remember what it was now but there was something about the signup that irked me. Maybe it was just creating a account, maybe it required a credit card or something I can't remember but I ended up looking at my steam friends list and noticed both the accounts were online. So I sent a message to the other account asking if this is them, he said no and then I noticed the same scammer had added another mutual friend so I messaged them too warning them about it.

That's the closest I've been to getting scammed that I can recall. I'm not sure what the scammer would gain from my signing up but I'm sure they had some kind of profit angle.

I also don't really care whether they're conscious, but I do think it's worth challenging the claim that they are.

LLMs are programs processing data. Lots of programs exhibit emergent behavior. A simple example is Conway's game of life. It can be programmed in less than an hour, exhibits lots of interesting behavior. In fact you could run LLMs inside of it if you wanted to.

I'm not denying that LLMs are unbelievably cool and useful. It still blows my mind when I send a half-assed complex screenshot and a vague description and it just gets it and fixes the issue in seconds. It's like magic. But it isn't magic, it's just some relatively simple algorithms processing a crapload of data, and I think it's useful to understand and remember that.

Not really sure what you mean, I have the view I presented and I'm able to use LLMs effectively. The understanding that they're not human allows me to treat them as such - I don't say please or sorry or thanks or other pleasantries, I just instruct them in the simplest most efficient way I can. Humans would find me rude, be annoyed if I give them lots of work for little benefit, and say the same things over and over etc.

I definitely agree that consciousness is mysterious. But I think the assumption that AI is conscious begs the question "then why isn't 7zip conscious?".

Is a simple calculator conscious? How about a mechanical calculator? Is an abacus conscious? Are they only conscious when executing a sufficiently sophisticated program? What if I hypothetically had infinite time and patience, and performed the inference on paper with a pencil. Would it then be conscious?

> we teach machines to learn

I feel like this statement is too anthropomorphizing. We don't teach a computer anything. We write normal computer programs that can process data(training), turning it into what is essentially a configuration file(weights/parameters) for another normal computer program(inference engine). Upon receiving a request, the inference engine is invoked and passed the input, then it processes that input and its configuration(weights), producing an output. "Thinking" is just feeding the output back in as an input, allowing the model to revise it and refine it before it's returned to the user.

There is no teaching, nor learning. There is just data processing. There is nothing happening between requests to the inference engine. It's a relatively simple system altogether, but when the training data set is large enough it produces unbelievably good outputs.

With this in mind I really don't understand how people think these programs can be conscious. They're not doing anything fundamentally different than any other computer program. It's just crunching numbers. You might as well argue that a computer game or 7zip or a chess bot or whatever is conscious.

I know you specifically didn't claim they're conscious, I just thought it was worth mentioning because I think it's ridiculous how many people will seriously argue this as if there is any difference between "ai" and other programs. There isn't. It's just a set of instructions for doing computation, as computers have always done.

3D rendering is actually quite similar. There is a bunch of files (input/configuration) describing 3D meshes, textures, lighting etc which are fed into a rendering engine which processes all that data and turns it into a 2D image. Similarly to AI, once the input files are sophisticated enough, this can produce mindblowingly realistic and beautiful images, and you can run it in a loop to make video or make it interactive, moving the camera around in real time etc. But at the core of it all is just a bunch of files containing a bunch of numbers, and a program that reads those files and does computation with them.

It's good because it's a victory for Ukraine. They thought it was worth spending resources on this so clearly they think it's good for them too.

As far as I'm concerned, Ukraine can do no wrong in this conflict (within reason obviously). Russia has been hitting civilian targets, specifically trying to take civilian lives, since day one.

The more damage Ukraine does to them the better. Maybe then these Russians who allegedly don't like Putin will get their shit together and do something about him. He's their responsibility. They are, like it or not, supporting his war simply by existing in the Russian economy. If the entire country really wanted him gone they could get him gone.