For me, the best I can do is remind myself of the dangers of expectations and try to be thankful when it works outs.
For people, I remind myself that they don’t owe me anything, and I try to focus on what I have rather than what I might otherwise like.
Ustice
Karma: 291
Even without an A/B comparison, if policies came with measures of success, that would go a long way to steering into better policies. Do school vouchers improve outcomes for students? It seems plausible, but we should be able to track graduation rates, and GPAs. Maybe we can even agree that that is an important goal. If after 5 years, those measures are not showing significant improvement, we can conclude that the voucher program didn’t meet its goals, and at the very least the policy needs to change, if not directly reversed.
It’s not perfect, as there can be confounding effects, but by tying the life of a policy to success metrics (that hopefully would be easier to agree on), we can at least we can show progress, and rule out the worst ideas.
How do you think this applies to paid YouTube accounts? I have one, and I don’t ever see YouTube ads. I still see the in-video ads that the artists insert into their videos, but even then I can skip them easily, and YouTube actually makes that easier, since I can skip forward twice and I get a button to skip the segment.
YouTube is pretty far along the enshitification curve. I don’t see them changing things enough to turn that ship around.
This is just posturing of the like that we’ve seen since I’ve been aware of world politics, in the 80s. Before then too, but I only have read about that.
There is a line, but given nuclear war is unprecedented, I don’t know where that is. That said, if we are talking nuclear weapons, I don’t think anywhere is safe.
Hahaha Brilliant
I hope that as intelligent entities become better at modeling orders, they become more empathic
With regards to the expensive organization, I say embrace the chaos! Just get a few bins so people don’t have to be up on each other, but if you have a lot of fun stickers, people will enjoy the hunt. Heck, you might find people that enjoy sorting and categorizing them. In any case, it’s an activity-focused social event, where the chance of finding what you’re looking for is improved by cooperation. As people pick stickers that they identify with, it will spark conversations. I love it.
I don’t think China is willing to accept yielding. I can’t think of any reason that they would.
This is totally a shower thought, and I don’t trust it, but what about a strategy of semi-cooperation? China has been contributing to open source models. Those models have been keeping up with, and catching up to the capabilities of the closed source models.
I wonder if mutual containment could come through having similar capabilities as we both learn from each other’s research. Then neither side has a gross advantage. Maybe it doesn’t have to be zero-sum.
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Any idea of how it handles context length? I’ve been using VS Code Copilot, and it’s great up until the AI assistant hits its context cap. I know that when it says, “Summarizing conversation,” that the assistant has been lobotomized and replaced with an agent who has all of the confidence of the last assistant, but basically no idea what it’s really doing.
It’s at this point that it’s most likely to screw up the codebase. I can’t imagine how it’s supposed to be autonomous when it suddenly becomes brain dead.
Ustice from the past, I disagree about one point. The preferences you were referring to not being moral questions is wrong. Obviously one could only include humans, or a subset of humans. Including humans in “it’s just nature” is obviously immoral.
The choice of where to draw the line is very much a moral question. At least all humans is a pretty good Schelling point, but after that it there are only a few major points before things get murky, and rational moral minds can disagree.
I don’t believe you meant to be dismissive, but your argument was, and that’s not fair. I apologize on his behalf.
This is really cool analysis, but I think your conclusions are off.
I think this is what happens when you optimize for attention. Especially with user-generated art. I know I’ve watched more “incest” porn in the past few years—because it’s hard to avoid—yet, I’ve contributed to that tend. Gotta give people what they want, right? Bleh. Porn is subject to the same market pressures of enshittification that other businesses on to internet are under. YouTube is a great example, but so is Facebook, Amazon, MySpace, Reddit, and many more.Most of this is fantasy role-play, not real desires. People that like Little kink aren’t pedophiles. Furries don’t want to fuck real animals. Dommes aren’t sadistic assholes.
I’m not saying that there isn’t problematic and porn. There is, and it’s gross. But being squicked out by someone else’s kink doesn’t mean their kink isn’t okay too.
I’m pretty convinced at this point that qualia comes from systems with a certain level of complexity, or maybe it comes from life. I’m very skeptical of the idea that only humans experience things. I think it’s highly likely that ants have inner lives.
Where you lose me is the assumption that all insects are suffering. I expect that, like people, most of them are going about their day to day. Their lives have meaning to them. Yes, there are a lot being injured right now, but the VAST majority are because they were just going about their day. Life is hard.
To me, your argument breaks down when you take it further. What about the single-cell organisms? They also respond to negative stimulus. I don’t know if the question of suffering of single-cell organisms has really been studied, but even multicellular creatures are essentially colonies of cells of multiple types and even species. Wikipedia says there are about 3x10^13 human cells in a human body, with about that many bacterial cells. Should we be horrified at the desiccation and death of skin cells? The countless bacterial cell you are likely murdering every moment of your life as your cells fend off infection, and so too the cells of yours that die in the effort? Of cancer cells, who just want to live?
These things are a part of nature. Intervening is just picking sides out of preference. It’s okay to have preferences, but they aren’t moral questions.
To bring it back around, I’m with you on preserving habitat, and respecting life. When I find insects in my house that I can catch and release outside, I do. I think we need better regulation on wide-scale insecticide use.
When a mosquito bites me, I’m going to kill it. If they’re living in my home, we’re at war.
Hey, thanks for the interesting perspective. 👋
I think it’s easy to lose perspective when you multiply a really big number by a really small number.
Oh man, of people I’ve interviewed, the college graduates are next to useless. There are exceptions, but that’s true of those that have less traditional backgrounds too. There are way more talentless hacks than skilled professionals. Even at the graduate level.
If they’re there because of a paycheck, you can keep them. I want the people on my team that do it because they love it, and they have since they were a kid. They’re the ones that keep up, and improve the fastest—I am certainly biased.
With the new generative AI assistants, we’re going to have way more who are new and dabbling. Hopefully more of them are inspired to go deeper. But you know what, even shitty software that’s e solves a task can be useful.
Assuming AI is aligned, I don’t see how self-replicating machines would be useful. I doubt there’ll be much pressure for that. If AI is malicious, self-replication hardly matters.
The real-world data is likely the real obstacle. With enough, I expect they’ll be able to compensate for manufacturing defects, and have regular maintenance. I assume they’ll be able to self-improve with more experience (and likely pooling experiences)
It’s pure speculation though.
You aren’t looking for professional. That takes systems and time, and frankly, king power. Hackers/Makers are about doing despite not going that route, with a philosophy of learning from failure. Now you may be interested in subjects that are more rare in the community, but your interests will inspire others.
I’m a software engineer by trade. I kind of think of myself as an artificer: taking a boring bit of silicone and enchanting it with special abilities. I always tell people the best way to become a wizard like me is to make shitty software. Make something you know, something small, and that sounds like fun. It’ll be terrible and barely functional, but it’ll be yours, and the next one will be a little less shitty. Keep at that, until you can start thinking at higher levels of abstraction. eventually, your work will be less and less shitty, and before you know it it’ll be good.
Hackers/Makers encourage amateur work, because that’s where most people are, because they’re just starting out. Make no mistake, there are professionals in the community, but no one expects you to be up to their standards. Instead, they’ll help you make things a little less shitty.
Make it. Then make it work. Then make it right.
Failure is your teacher.
he term I tend to think that one of the biggest problems in politics is that words become shibboleths within subcultures, and people in these communities don’t even know it. I recently had that starkly brought to my attention with the word “hacker”. My girlfriend was talking about setting up some home automation idea, and I said, “I can do it. I’m a hacker.”
She was confused. To her hacking means software intrusion through exploitation of security vulnerabilities. To me it means repurposing existing systems to do something not originally intended. I tend to think of her definition as “movie-style hackers”, or the white-hat/black-hat hackers.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I was one of the fortunate kid’s that had access to computers, and the ability to learn from reading manuals, and my own experimentation. I naturally fell into the, what we might now call the Maker culture. To people like us, (e.g. Adam Savage, and Corey Doctorow), “hacking” is a creative and explorative exercise.I use like, “I can hack something together,” meaning “I can make it by repurposing some stuff I have laying around.” Or like, “that’s a clever hack,” meaning, “that’s not how things are supposed to work, but you found a clever work-around.” It’s even bled into mainstream US culture with terms like “life-hack” and “hardware-hacker.”
We in the community would call intrusion “cracking.” As in a “safe-cracker” or a “password cracker”. We use other words differently too, like “autodidact” being a term of pride as someone who learns on their own through exploration and research, rather than through formal instruction, which I’ve learned in the research community is a pejorative, ironically in this instance as a synonym for “a hack,” meaning not of professional quality.
So when my girlfriend and I had this disagreement, we went to several dictionaries. All of them supported her definition, and didn’t even list mine. I didn’t see my usage until I saw the “Hacker Culture” on Wikipedia. That’s when I realized what was going on: I had been using the term as a shibboleth.
Once I realized that, tabooing the word in our discussion got us back on track, but it really highlighted how invisible subtle differences in definitions can make communication difficult and cause disagreements. I think that most political disagreements suffer from this. I’m really trying to keep an eye out for that feeling of confusion that comes from talking with someone using the same words differently, and the hubris that comes from insisting that my definition is right.
Well, this comment is long enough. I’m in the weeds with work, and I really need to hack my way out of. 😉
I don’t think that Bayesian reasoning is very popular outside of this community, useful or not. You’re basically describing a directed weighted graph. I wonder if any mind-mapping software would have those added capabilities.
I’d argue that the second result from the values change comic was a positive result, as the character is expressing concern over the chang [sic]. 😆
This shouldn’t affect your conclusions.
I agree.
I’m not a twin, but I am a parent, and I have a a nephew, and my son has a stepsister who has called me Uncle Jason since she could talk.
I don’t feel closer to my nephew than I am with my “niece.” I normally wouldn’t make a distinction based on genetics, except that it is relevant here. I’m not closer with my sister’s kids than I am with the other two.
Also, I’m not sure closeness is really even a good distinction. I’m not generally responsible for my niece or nephew, but if they or my son needed me to travel across the country to rescue them from some bad situation, I’d do it. I love those kids.
Being responsible for a child may present as being closer to them, So does spending a lot of time with a child. One could argue that these are two aspects of closeness. Neither of those things have anything to do with genetics.
Personality can be a huge factor in closeness too, and there is a huge variation in personality, even amongst identical twins.
Genetics seems only tangentially related to closeness, and mostly because the vast majority of children are genetically related to their parents. Family is complex, and often has more to do with shared history than anything else.
I’d be worried about further disenfranchisement of the poor. I won’t claim that this is a fatal flaw, but I think it should be addressed.
To make it more concrete, a fictional scenario:
To someone who sleeps outside with no income, selling their vote for $1000 to some rich dude sounds like a good deal, especially when that vote has a negligible chance of winning them a better situation.
That’s okay on an individual level of choice, but scaled up it’s a misalignment of incentives.
This does seem like a good idea for small organizations, but at some scale, I expect bad actors to break the system.