Please don’t be so naive as to think that this administration is above creating a pretext for raiding the home of their real target while claiming it’s about something else. It’s the same thing (minus the raid, plus an indictment) they’re doing to Jerome Powell.
I would gladly be part of a neighborhood battery swap pool if it would help get rid of the near constant running of gas powered lawn equipment every morning. The sound and pollution are such a menace.
I've witness two municipal employees using gas powered blowers on bushes for like an hour right in front of my building. It's completely useless because no one ever goes in the bushes (duh), and it's depleting the ground from nutrients for no reasons.
We really have to stop acting like gas is free and unlimited, burning fossil fuels used for legitimate reasons is bad enough, but burning them for such dumb tasks is an insult to nature.
I don't find gas leaf blowers exceptionally annoying. They aren't really anymore annoying that anything else going on in my area. It's what leaf blowers are used for that bother me. I see people just using them to blow leaves either into the street or into neighbors yards. What is the utility in this? Do they think leaves disappear?
They’re much louder than other common lawn equipment. People also tend to use them more frequently. Most of my neighbors will only run a lawnmower once a week or every 2 weeks. But they’ll be out there every day with a leaf blower during parts of the year.
Agreed, but I'm comparing them to the other stuff that is always going on. During the week you can always hear: roofing nailguns, wood chipper, backup beeper, & someone playing music.
That depends on where you’re at. I live in a neighborhood with 2-5 acre lots. I can’t hear any of those things unless my immediate neighbors are doing them, which they rarely are.
I can hear leaf blowers constantly though because you can hear them in a quarter mile radius.
Also local ordinances in most places ban loud noises without a permit. But lawn maintenance equipment is a specific exception.
I've owned the property I've been referring to for over 6 years. Never seen a street sweeper. Leaves in the street from my neighbors yards are about 1 foot deep at the curb
Those bushes they're fluffing up likely only exist because in order to get the stormwater calculations to code they had to put them there for absorption for rain runoff (i.e. part of a SWPP). Or meet some stupid municipal requirement that precludes too much drab solid frontage on a building.
You paid for half a dozen people to spend a bit of labor on what would have 50yr ago been a simple "sidewalk for walking go here, grass everywhere else" exercise. And then every week you get to pay again to be annoyed by them maintaining it (in perpetuity, as they are required to by law, assuming it's part of a SWPP).
I couldn’t fathom running lawn equipment in the morning. If I try to mow in the morning my clippings are just globs of wet spinach thanks to all the dew. I get much better performance out of the equipment if I wait until the afternoon once everything has had a chance to dry out.
The USA-led coalition conclusively won the Gulf War. We don’t think about it as much precisely because it wasn’t a boondoggle that lasted years and years.
The goal of the First Gulf War was, expressly, to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi control and (to a much smaller degree) to remove Iraq as a possible regional hegemon for the next decade or so. Which it succeeded at. Once you've succeeded at your objectives, and the enemy has capitulated, what value is there to prosecuting the war further?
The USA-led coalition finally managed to overcome ISIS insurrectionists and helped Iran install Iranian sponsored militias in the Iraqi parliament and government.
I am so pleased by ty’s stance that I should not have to add annotations to satisfy the type checker. I ripped out last type checker out because it was constantly nagging us about technicalities, but ty immediately found issues where we annotated that a duct was an acceptable input, but actually doing so would break things.
The problem with descriptive names is that they start descriptive but then become proper nouns. At a former employer in the Fortune 100 outside the software industry, everything started with a descriptive name, that then became an acronym. And as every project and tool inevitably developed its own idiosyncrasies, the descriptive name pretty soon didn't tell you anything useful about the project at all.
It is an unavoidable reality that knowing something's name gives you very, very little information about what that something is. That's what sentences are for.
> But if intelligence really does become too cheap to meter, it will become possible to do a perfect reconstruction and synthesis of everything. LLMs are watching (or humans using them might be). Best to be good.
I cannot believe this is just put out there unexamined of any level of "maybe we shouldn't help this happen". This is complete moral abdication. And to be clear, being "good" is no defense. Being good often means being unaligned with the powerful, so being good is often the very thing that puts you in danger.
I've had the same though as Karpathy over the past couple of months/years. I don't think it's good, exciting, or something to celebrate, but I also have no idea how to prevent it.
I would read his "Best to be good." as a warning or reminder that everything you do or say online will be collected and analyzed by an "intelligence". You can't count on hiding amongst the mass of online noise. Imagine if someone were to collect everything you've written or uploaded to the internet and compiled it into a long document. What sort of story would that tell about who you are? What would a clever person (or LLM) be able to do with that document?
If you have any ideas on how to stop everyone from building the torment nexus, I am willing to listen.
1. Don't build the Torment Nexus yourself. Don't work for them and don't give them your money.
2. When people you know say they're taking a new job to work at Torment Nexus, act like that's super weird, like they said they're going to work for the Sinaloa cartel. Treat rich people working on the Torment Nexus like it's cringe to quote them.
3. Get hostile to bots. Poison the data. Use AdNauseum and Anubis.
4. Give your non-tech friends the vague sense that this stuff is bad. Some might want to listen more, but most just take their sense of what's cool and good from people they trust in the area.
This seems to me like a form of social engineering, or to some extent, being a bit insufferable. And, rest assured it will not result in anything useful. The only result of this is that you will alienate your friends and colleagues if they work for an employer you don't like.
I think we need to stop focusing only on the AI aspect of this. Yes, it's an important component to the sort of mass surveillance system you're describing, but it's not the only component. The internet, advertising, privacy, all of these are integral to this outcome.
While I don't have a general solution, I do believe that the solution will need to be multi-faceted and address multiple aspects of the technologies enabling this. My first step would be for society to re-evaluate and shift its views towards information, both locally and internationally.
For example, if you proposed to get rid of all physical borders between countries, everyone would likely be aghast. Obviously there are too many disagreements and conflicting value sets between countries for this to happen. Yet in the west we think nothing have having no digital information borders, despite the fact that the lack of them in part enables this data collection and other issues such as election interference. Yes, erecting firewalls is extremely unpalatable to people in the west, but is almost certainly part of the solution on the national level. Countries like China long ago realized this, though they also use firewalls as a means of control, not just protection (it doesn't have to be this way).
But within countries we also need to shift away from a default position of "I have the right to say whatever I want so therefore I should" and into one of "I'm not putting anything online unless I'm willing to have my employer, parents, literally everyone, read it." Also, we need to systematically attack and dismantle the advertising industry. That industry is one of the single biggest driving factors behind the extreme systematic collection and correlation of data on people. Advertising needs to switch to a "you come to me" approach not a "I'm coming to you" approach.
It's nice that the LLM-enabled panopticon still cannot find this very recent related media, [0] but my silly mind can. It is actually an interesting commentary from a non-tech point of view. This is how the rest of the world feels:
Anyway, back to work trying to make my millions using Opus and such.
Well the companies that facilitate this have found themselves in a position where if they go down they take the US economy with them, so the maybe this shouldn't happen thing is a moot point. At least we know this stuff is in stable, secure hands though, like how the palantir ceo does recorded interviews while obviously blasted out of his mind on drugs.
To be clear...prior to this recent explosive interest in LLMs, this was already true. Snowden was over 10 years ago.
We can't start clutching our pearls now as if programmatic mass surveillance hasn't been running on all cylinders for over 20 years.
Don't get me wrong, we should absolutely care about this, everyone should. I'm just saying any vague gestures at imminent privacy-doom thanks to LLMs is liable to be doing some big favors of inadvertently sanitizing the history of prior (and still) egregious privacy offenders.
I'm just suggesting more "Yes and" and less "pearl clutching" is all.
I recently learned about Singapore’s seemingly excellent public housing system that is used by over 75% of its population. Singapore being so capitalist about everything else while carving out housing I think provides evidence that capitalism can be made stronger by keeping certain things away from strict market forces.
You can't have a free market if supply (or demand) is constrained.
You either go the liberal+regulated free market way, which will get lobbied, then overregulated, or you go the socialized way, where you allow local government and associations/unions to compete in the market... with the exact same rights as the companies, and no weird rules that prevent them to truly compete.
And if you have a natural monopoly (energy distribution is the worst offender), you have to go the central planning way I guess, until we find something better.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09596... (paywall)
https://about.bnef.com/insights/clean-transport/no-doubt-abo... is a writeup of https://www.bnef.com/insights/33557 which is paywalled.
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