tehjoker

North Korea was doing better than South Korea until America panicked and invested huge amounts into South Korea, creating the Chaebol system of enormous companies owned by a few families under a political dictatorship that over time has liberalized somewhat.

The thing though, is that ego is still driving anyone that is making more money than they need to survive. They just do not care about anything that isn't purely transactional, nothing is sacred, nothing is to be done for its own sake. It is capitalism demonstrating a kind of mechanical self-accelerating quality that is increasingly untethered from the human substrate it subsists on.

As Marx wrote: "Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

And of course, that relationship is class war between the vast majority of the population and the owners of the productive forces.

I am not an expert on drugs but my impression is that heroin, fent is just really cheap and easy to transport bc it’s so powerful it is so powerful it mostly knocks you out and causes intense withdrawal. It’s not a fun time its a cheap fix for heroin withdrawal that makes things worse. My understanding is that when heroin prices went up (in part because america stopped subsidizing production in afghanistan after 2021) ppl started switching to fent.

The slaughterbot drones are already pretty bad. In Gaza, Israel used the sounds of crying babies to lure out innocent people and shoot them with drones. They used drones to shoot doctors through a hospital window. A lovely preview for the rest of us.

In the Russia/Ukraine conflict, Ukraine is holding on basically because of drones. They don't have enough guys to populate the front, so the gaps are plugged with drones. So that means the drone technology race is getting supercharged and we'll all get to live with the results of flying killer robots.

In Émile Torres' book, he references how the superweapons of the 21st century were things like nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons. In the 21st century, those risks haven't gone away, but to them we add the "GNR Bundle" (genetic technology, nanotechnology, and robotics technology) which are characterized by their autonomous self-replicating potential (with AI falling under robotics). Of course, in his book, he is also being somewhat critical and descriptive of the "futurological shift" that causes certain people to become obsessed with cataloguing every form of x-risk to the neglect of real people's problems in the present.

god that comic hits so hard. what a horrible world we are building.

The issue in my view isn't that a single tool has become obsolete, it's that there's nothing to retrain to. All the tools have become obsolete and the AI is eating away at the economic value of core human activities. If AI was really good at coding in one language or framework or something I wouldn't give a fuck. It's the difference between a tool and a replacement.

The most powerful people in silicon valley are openly aiming to replace the entire species with robots in space. This is their genocidal aim. The fact that bad things haven't happened yet doesn't mean that directionally, they aren't attempting to replace as much human culture as possible.

It sounds silly! That's because they are completely divorced from the human experience, and they have enough power to really make us all suffer.

You still need to be able to do long division so you can tell when you screwed up on the calculator.

Right, there's a reason students that never dealt with a real problem, even when they get As, aren't as good as professionals. You need to do real work to get really good.

Right, deployed thoughtfully, in a way that improves the human condition (especially aboard a ship far from civilization!) there are uses of course. When everyone is offloading their thinking and writing this is effectively erasing the production of culture.

Only a programmer or a business guy would think just because it becomes capable we would want to see AI produce "content". The effect is the erasure of human culture.

I perceive that it is our national interest to collaborate widely and collegially worldwide, including with Chinese businesses and scientists. This "red scare" is so stupid. I do not give one crap about OpenAI or Anthropic making a killing. I am more likely to personally benefit from cheap, democratically controlled, and internationally regulated AI. It is clear that America is a Nazi country. We're the bad guys!

Claude was already used in offensive operations in Iran and Venezuela. Why on earth would I want America to have a commanding lead on this? So we can drone strike anyone who disagrees with renaming the Pacific the "American Ocean"?

China and Vietnam, left mostly to their own devices, have maintained a positive trajectory and retain control of the commanding heights of the economy. Vietnam and China successfully repulsed Western occupiers which is what gave them a chance at independent development.

Every other attempt at a different path elsewhere was undercut by military coups, invasions, economic blockades. One would hope that communism/socialism would be robust to destabilization efforts, but it was not the case. Capitalism also took time to develop, such as various attempts in the Italian city states before first taking root in Denmark. Hopefully, a new system of peace and cooperation will replace our brutal empire.

"The woman, Alice Huang, also known as Huang Le, is a Chinese citizen who has served as a top executive at Singapore-based Megaspeed, an Nvidia customer and cloud partner that provides AI computing power to Chinese companies including Alibaba, the New York Times reported Thursday."

Do you think that when Jensen talks to Sam Altman or Amodei they don't chat on the phone with Donald Trump?? This is just a smear.

OpenAI really should change the name to something like EgoAI or AltmanAI.

If it is capital intensive and we require the work be done in the public benefit, the only options are international consortia or nationalization. Non-profits will be guided by the interests of the rich and are unaccountable to the public. Worker cooperatives are unlikely to be well capitalized (because what rich person would want to invest and not have control) and will still have private profit incentives.

Peer production processes (like open source) require that the inputs be specialized knowledge and relatively small amounts of capital.

Order for the West, chaos and death for south america and southeast asia and the middle east and parts of africa.

I wonder if you can object to using most AI on religious grounds as Claude, Grok, and ChatGPT are produced by and are made in the image of effectively pro-extinction death cults. Honestly, it makes me feel slimy and uneasy using them when I consider that they are basically cult manufactured artifacts designed to influence society according to their religious beliefs.

They are doing that because they are running into hardware limits with single agents. If one agent made correct decisions and explored spaces efficiently, they would not need hundreds of thousands of agents. It's is the luxury of great wealth that they can produce a large number of possibly defective samples and then select the ones that are not defective.

This is why capitalism must always find new markets or die btw.

These are more claims of the same kind from an aligned institution. There is no evidence offered.

You cannot believe intelligence agencies when they do not offer proof. Their job is to provide (reputationally but not factually) authoritative story lines that protect big business interests from competition overseas. Sometimes they protect US business by bombing their competitors.

Maybe this will provide some historical context. Capitalist automation is an anti-worker, anti-union ideology even though in theory automation is a good thing. When automation is used to reclaim time for workers or to increase pay, it is a good thing. When it is used to dispossess people or enforce work speedups, it is anti-worker.

https://jacobin.com/2023/03/automation-union-busting-product...

I dunno, I think if the hypothesis is "School closing causes poor perforance due to learning loss", shouldn't the strongest explanatory variable be duration of closure? This weird inversion makes me think something else is going on. If gender is a bigger predictor than duration, then it is the fact of the schools closing at all more than the duration, which would point to another variable being dominant (duration was negative, so it is certainly part of the explanation).

One possible alternative explanation is that all the kids were stressed out of their minds because there was a killer virus on the loose and no one could focus in school or outside. If you want to guess at gender differences, one might be that girls care about other people more, and so were more stressed out by the thought of their parents or grandparents dying. I don't really think girls care that much more than boys though. There would need to be some kind of retrospective ethnographic study to figure out what the heck happened.

Another explanation could be that since the kids were used to distribute viruses to reopen the economy, their health suffered. There is ample documentation that women get long covid more frequently than men.

Thanks, I haven't seen this study before. In table 2, it seems like the biggest impacts were on people that didn't speak the test language well, and strangely girls. The duration of school closure was negative, but not as negative as those other factors. I am having trouble explaining that. The non-native speaker element seems quite logical, but the large difference across genders and the relative insensitivity to closure duration is strange.

I am skeptical because while school was disrupted, it didn't last for that long. People are attributing ongoing problems to a cause that lasted about as long as summer vacation.

scores were dropping before

You realize of course that many other countries manage to provide these services for a fraction of the price of America no?

A colleague of mine that went to an Ivy League school in America told me her friends in Poland, not a wealthy country by any means, laughed at her for "buying her degree".

Actually it is a contest and our government frames it in exactly that way. Why would you support the greater evil (America)?

Capitalism is good at driving down prices for consumer goods, also great at extracting rents from essentials (housing, medicine, education, etc). You gain on trinkets and lose on the things that make life worth living.

Of course, competition leading to near-zero profits means most competitors collapse, and the remnants get bought up by monopolists or oligopolists who then become rent extractors.

The technology was fundamentally developed with government grants to universities, or corporate labs like Bell Labs that were funded by a legal mandate on its parent corporation. Capitalists can only develop products that are basically ready for market, their margins are thin and planning horizons can only survive about 5 years usually. Their main power is throwing oodles of money at something ready to go and scaling it.

Edit: I will be slightly more charitable and note that capitalist companies can also do incremental research if there is a gentle and obvious hill to climb. Sometimes people do make crazy bets and they pay off, but that's more the exception, in America the dominant driver of technological innovation is government funded research supplied by capitalist scaled technologies (i.e. you research the next paradigm in the lab and purchase e.g. pre-existing computing resources from a company).

Thank god. I hugely disdain anyone feeding me AI content as communication.