It’s a lesser concern compared to Doom, but I’m thinking about the scenario where programming (my job) or office work in general gets near-fully automated while we don’t have a singularity or total economic transformation for some decades (whether due to a pause or slowdown, economic or technical issues, or whatever else). Is there anything I can do to prepare for this scenario? My family has several years worth of savings, but not enough to live on indefinitely. Being middle aged it would be pretty hard to shift to the trades. I hope I don’t end up having to work at McDonald’s...
ShardPhoenix
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ShardPhoenix’s Shortform
> I currently work as a freelance video games marketer and I really dislike working for my main client @ $2500 USD per month
That doesn’t seem like much money. You could probably get a more pleasant job with better pay elsewhere, especially if you’re willing to leave the games industry.
Personally given your savings situation I’d be wary of quitting to work on the game unless you have some income from it lined up in advance (eg pre-bookings for facilitation).
The problem with shares as a society-wide solution is that a lot of people will sell them and waste the money and you’re back where you’re started. If you’re banned from selling them, you don’t really own them and it’s just a roundabout form of welfare/UBI.
The current vibe on LW seems to be that AI company employees are doing great harm and should quit their jobs, so why would they come here? I wouldn’t go on a socialist forum to post about free markets.
A bit of a nitpick but 78 steps/min for a human seems very fast, that’s more the speed I’d play an RTS at than a turn-based RPG. I guess that makes sense if that’s the speedrun speed, less so for the casual playthrough.
Yeah I finally tried to read this because it got so many upvotes and quit half-way. It feels like an extended chad vs virgin meme with the author far too smug in his implied sense of superiority.
(3 years later, but) I have similar issues and part of the problem is caffeine dependency and (seemingly) issues with caffeine metabolism. Basically if I have too much caffeine several days in a row I start to get stressed and irritable, then I try to cut back and instead feel lethargic and headachey. Unfortunately the last attempt to quit altogether didn’t go well.
Based on the last paragraph it doesn’t sound like OpenAI specifically was asked to do this?
>it appears in Australia the right wing are staunchly antisemitic—which is giving me a bit of conceptual whiplash.
Did you mean pro-?
Feedback: The cover image and choice of font are bizarre and off-putting to me. Bubbly font with a giant HOMO and a weird diseased-looking pink gun give me more vibes of homosexuality than rationality.
In the tradeoff between emphasis on intellectual exploration vs. emphasis on correctness and applicability LW seems to have moved closer to the latter, and I think you’re mourning the former. I do feel this has been driven largely by AI moving from a speculative idea to very much a reality.
Also re: Said Achmiz—to quote The Big Lebowski, “You’re not wrong Walter. You’re just an asshole.”
(I agree with Said on the object level more often than not but his tone can be more abrasive than necessary. But then again too much agreeableness can make it hard to get at the truth. Sometimes the truth hurts.)
Melbourne – ACX Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025
That’s a reasonable suspicion but as a counterpoint there might be more low-hanging fruit in biomedicine than math, precisely because it’s harder to test ideas in the former. Without the need for expensive experiments, math has already been driven much deeper than other fields, and therefore requires a deeper understanding to have any hope of making novel progress.
edit: Also, if I recall correctly, the average IQ of mathematicians is higher than biologists, which is consistent with it being harder to make progress in math.
If there were, we would’ve probably heard about massive shifts in how scientists (and entrepreneurs!) are doing their work.
I have been seeing a bit of this, mostly uses of o1-pro and OpenAI Deep Research in chem/bio/medicine, and mostly via Twitter hype so far. But it might be the start of something.
In principle, distressed sales shouldn’t affect the long term price since they have nothing to do with fundamentals—so it’s really just a discount for non-distressed buyers. However crypto is weird and more like a Keynesian beauty contest than most things, so who knows.
I think they meant that as an analogy to how developed/sophisticated it was (ie they’re saying that it’s still early days for reasoning models and to expect rapid improvement), not that the underlying model size is similar.
That’s a PR friendly way of saying that it failed to reach PMF.
Thanks for fixing this. The ‘A’ thing in particular multiple times caused me to try to edit comments thinking that I’d omitted a space.
OpenAI’s latest blog on alignment improvements for Astra: https://openai.com/index/path-to-astra/
The good news is they’ve implemented better controls including runtime CoT monitoring, and that Astra seems aligned-enough not to attempt to hack in situations resembling the Huggingface incident. The bad news is that this work seems to be narrowly scoped to hacking/cyber and doesn’t really confront alignment-in-general (though I don’t know how they’re talking about that internally).