The failure of self-driving cars has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with regulation. It’s been demonstrated time and again that statistically, self-driving cars are safer than human-driven cars.[1]
Autonomous driving is a solved problem. The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
Your link does not prove your point. It's about ADAS and even shows that it is not universally safer than human driving.
> However, accidents involving Advanced Driving Systems occur more frequently than Human-Driven Vehicle accidents under dawn/dusk or turning conditions, which is 5.25 and 1.98 times higher, respectively.
There’s actually another alternative: Just don’t install surveillance in your home. Approximately nobody had it 20 years ago. Before asking which unreliable, overpriced, invasive gadget to buy, think about whether you really need any of them.
Why? I like to keep an eye on my dogs when we're away, and it's all done securely using HomeKit video. My iCloud is e2e encrypted and the camera doesn't upload anywhere besides there.
What's the invasive part? Not giving my dogs privacy when we're out of the home?
Did your CCTV increase the time you leave the dogs alone, out of interest?
We never needed CCTV in the 90s/00s for dogs. We would have someone take the dogs out for a walk/toilet, or if having to regularly leave them alone beyond what is fair to them, re-home them
And if you need to check they're not causing mischief they're likely not tired enough
We never needed the telephone back when we had smoke signals and carrier pigeons either.
Here are three real scenarios that have happened to us just off the top of my head where I was thankful we had cameras and locally stored footage rather than smoke signals and old timey folklore:
1. We couldn't find our cat last summer. Turns out she was sitting in the living room window and pounced on a fly that landed on the screen. The corner of the screen pushed out and she fell right out the window. She has no interest in going outside so we never looked for her out there, but she was huddled in a bush right where she fell hours later.
2. A train carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in my hometown several years ago, causing an evacuation order while we were out of town (https://www.kcci.com/article/evacuation-order-lifted-followi...). The sheriff wouldn't let us back into town for several hours, but we were at least able to judge that our animals were nervous yet okay.
3. My wife came in from the back yard with the dog, who had suddenly started foaming at the mouth. She's panicking, thinking he ate some kind of poison. I have no idea what's going on, so while she calls the vet I look at the camera feed for our patio and see he had been following a little toad around on the deck while my wife was in the garden before finally scooping it up and giving it a few licks.
Would we have gotten by without a camera in all of these scenarios? Absolutely. But it never hurts to have more data, especially when it's privacy friendly and local, and it's disingenuous to nitpick the very basic human desire for peace of mind as if you don't understand it.
> or if having to regularly leave them alone beyond what is fair to them, re-home them
> And if you need to check they're not causing mischief they're likely not tired enough
Like, its fine that you use it for that, you do you... but I don't understand the actual use case? What are you watching the dogs for? Like are you going to rush home if they shit on the carpet or something?
Approximately nobody was using everything x years ago. That's not really a measure of what's nice to have and what's not, it's a measure of how long the nice to have has been around.
Tons of people had cameras 20 years ago. It was 2006, not 1906. Besides, we've had pets for surveillance for hundreds of thousands of years. Literally nobody in history has thought "nah no need for security".
What a ridiculous way to try and be on a high horse.
I always wonder what the overlap of this economically is. If you can afford all this home surveillance gear aren't you already likely to live in a place that's comically safe? Why are in particular Americans with their gated communities full of soccer moms and Labradors putting cameras on their house as if they're living on a US military base?
We have cameras to watch our dogs and make sure they're not getting into trouble with each other, things in the house, the cats, etc. We're not worried about bad guys or our personal safety.
Now think about this for a moment, and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified, but AGI doesn’t need to be achieved in order for some version of it to happen.
It’s already very difficult to reliably distinguish bots from humans (as demonstrated by the countless false accusations of comments being written by bots everywhere). A swarm of bots like this, even at the stage where most people seem to agree that “they’re just probabilistic parrots”, can absolutely do massive damage to civilization due to the sheer speed and scale at which they operate, even if their capabilities aren’t substantially above the human average.
Yes, but those are directed by humans, and in the interest of those humans. My point is that incidents like this one show that autonomous agents can hurt humans and their infrastructure without being directed to do so.
> and you’ll realize that not only are “AI takeover” fears justified
Its quite the opposite actually, the “AI takeover risk” is manufactured bullshit to make people disregard the actual risks of the technology. That's why Dario Amodei keeps talking about it all the time, it's a red herring to distract people from the real social damage his product is doing right now.
As long as he gets the media (and regulators) obsessed by hypothetical future risks, they don't spend too much time criticizing and regulating his actual business.
This is the answer. The cartels would have to be insane to poke that particular bear. They would get crushed like a bug. IIRC they murdered a single US undercover officer in the 90s and the retaliation was so bad that they themselves handed over the perpetrators.
Much as I despise them, I'm not so sure that would be the case. I seem to remember folks saying the same about the Taliban, and the cartels have a lot more money and high-tech kit, than the Taliban.
I don’t think the technology matters nearly as much as the asymmetry. Iraq had better technology than the Taliban and their military didn’t last a week.
True enough, but the cartels are also experts at running what is basically guerrilla warfare, against each other. Not sure if the Mexican Army has ever tried to take them on. A lot of cartel soldiers come from the army.
* A conventional military war, on a battlefield: Neither Saddam Hussein's military nor the cartels nor the Taliban would last long against the US.
* An unconventional insurgency: The Iraqis quickly turned to this approach and it worked very well for them, as it did for the Taliban. The Taliban won, and the Iraqi insurgency almost drove the US out of Iraq and was eventually co-opted.
The cartels of course would choose the latter. They, the Taliban, etc. are not suicidal.
The US decided to leave because staying was not politically popular, and left. They were not beaten by the Taliban, they were beaten by the political climate at home.
If someone is actively kicking your ass, then they decide that you aren't worth the effort to keep hurting and decide to walk away, that doesn't mean you "won" the fight even if you get what you want afterwards.
The Taliban control what they and the US and allies fought for. That's winning. Your personal requirement of how it must be won is not important - nobody cares how it was done and it doesn't change the outcome. The Taliban don't care and the US and its allies don't care.
It's also a perfectly common, expected way to win a war: First, wars always end with political solutions. The most well known principle of warfare is that it is 'politics conducted by other means' (i.e., by violence rather than by law or diplomacy). If there is no political solution, the war never ends. That's why the US didn't win the war in Afghanistan after decades - they couldn't create a stable political solution because they were unable to impose one on the Taliban, who in the end imposed one on the US and its allies.
Victory by outlasting enemy resources, including political will, is fundamental to warfare; wars end when resources to fight (for the political outcome) run out, but few end in total kinetic destruction of those resources - someone runs out of money or political will. It's also the explicit strategy of insurgencies. Enemies of the US know it very well and have used it for generations - that is how North Vietnam won, for example. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Afghans famously told them, 'you have the clocks (the technology), we have the time'.
Annoying your parents until they give you a cookie is still getting a cookie. Just because you didn't leverage overwhelming military firepower to get the cookie does not mean you aren't holding a cookie
I think the key difference between the Taliban and the cartels is that the Taliban were a bunch of ideologues who actually enjoyed being an insurgency and living under siege in caves, with making money from the drugs trade being a mere means to their real purpose of fighting infidels, whereas the cartel leadership sees wealth and power from controlling the drugs trade as an end, crushing local rivals as a means, and would really rather avoid the sort of conflict that's bad for their medium term business prospects.
I mean, some sort of cartels would bounce back after any "war on drugs" because supply and demand, but the people running them aren't hankering for martyrdom or glory over consolidating their territory and accumulating.
The Taliban was repeatedly crushed. All of the leadership was killed many times over. The problem is the Taliban is an idea that transcends individual human members and it can always be reconstituted. It also benefited from being able to harbor supporters in Pakistan, which is a nuclear power the US was not willing to also invade.
There isn't a real analogy there because cartel leaders have no official state support anywhere, let alone in a bordering nuclear power, but even if they did, it hardly seems reassuring from their perspective to know the drug trade will outlive them after they all get killed. It's different when you're deeply religious and believe what you're doing is worth dying for and the larger arc of history is more important than your own life and wellbeing. I don't think drug lords think that way.
All this is true. Yet the cartels operate like militarized insurgents. Adopting similar tactics seen in Ukraine fighting so it’s interesting to say the least that they might be utilizing drone technology for their purposes.
I didn’t mean to start this giant thread about Mexican Cartels but here we are. Most think it’s just an isolated problem. Others know it’s more widespread. I simply stated that these murderous thugs are out there in full force with technology and armored vehicles. If provoked, they would lash out. It’s ridiculous because of course going up against the US is a losing proposition but each “generation” of cartel leader thinks they can somehow manage it.
How are they not rational? Violence is a tool. They operate an illegal business so they can’t sue other parties for breach of contract. They can't call the police if they are robbed or file an insurance claim for what was taken. Even the over-the-top violence has a rationale. They aren't punishing the victims as much as they are attempting to broadcast that there is a higher price to be paid than any gain from giving information, to reduce their future losses and enforcement efforts. It isn’t moral or ethical, but I wouldn’t say it is irrational.
Lots of organized crime around the world manages to operate without cutting all the limbs off somebody then arranging them like flowers in a "vase" made out of the poor soul's ribcage. The cartels take violence far beyond what is pragmatically necessary. Their system of crime breeds excessive violence and insanity.
This stuff mostly followed after the zetas. It was a very deliberate strategy to compete in a hostile landscape that others eventually copied to survive.
It's notable that a lot of the Zetas came from a military special forces background, making it seem as if their extreme brutality was a strategic choice inculcated during their training.
I would recommend reading the Freakinomics book or listen to their podcasts on drugs.
TL;DR: drug cartels are run like businesses. They are very rational. But, unlike your boss, their boss can also shoot you in the face if you annoy them too much
That morality requires consciousness is a popular belief today, but not universal. Read Konrad Lorenz (Das sogenannte Böse) for an alternative perspective.
That we have consciousness as some kind of special property, and it's not just an artifact of our brain basic lower-level calculations, is also not very convincing to begin with.
In a trivial sense, any special property can be incorporated into a more comprehensive rule set, which one may choose to call "physics" is one so desires; but that's just Hempel's dilemma.
To object more directly, I would say that people who call the hard problem of consciousness hard would disagree with your statement.
People who call "the hard problem of consciousness hard" use circular logic (notice the two "hards" in the phrase).
People who merely call "the problem of consciousness hard" don't have some special mechanism to justify that over what we know, which is as emergent property of meat-algorithmic calcuations.
Except Penrose, who hand-waves some special physics.
About Dry Grasses by Nuri Ceylan. Probably the best film I’ve seen in the past 10 years, which isn’t saying that much because the past 10 years have been among the worst in the history of film, but it’s still a very good movie.
> I can write you an unoptimised C compiler that emits assembly for $20k
You may be willing to sell your work at that price, but that’s not the market rate, to put it very mildly. Even 10 times that would be seriously lowballing in the realm of contract work, regardless of whether it’s “optimised” or not (most software isn’t).
> Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it.
> You must provide the entire git history with small commits.
> I won't be holding my breath.
Sure; I do this often (I operate as a company because I am a contractor) - money to be held in escrow, all the usual contracts, etc.
It's a big risk for you, though - the level of performance isn't stated in the linked article so a parser in Python is probably sufficient.
TCC, which has in the past compiled bootable Linux images, was only around 15k LoC in C!
For reference, for a engraved-in-stone spec, producing a command-line program (i.e. no tech stack other than a programming language with the standard library), a coder could reasonably produce +5000LoC per week.
Adding the necessary extensions to support booting isn't much either, because the 16-bit stuff can be done just the same as CC did it - shell out to GCC (thereby not needing many of the extensions).
Are you *really* sure that a simple C compiler will cost more than 4 weeks f/time to do? It takes 4 weeks or so in C, are you really sure it will take longer if I switch to (for example) Python?
> the level of performance isn't stated in the linked article so a parser in Python is probably sufficient.
No, you'll have to match the performance of the actual code, regardless of what happens to be written in the article. It is a C compiler written in Rust.
Obviously. Your games reveal your malign intent.
EDIT: And good LORD. Who writes a C compiler in python. Do you know any other languages?!?
> No, you'll have to match the performance of the actual code, regardless of what is in the article. It is a C compiler written in Rust.
Look, it's clear that you don't hire s/ware developers very much - your specs are vague and open to interpretation, and it's also clear that I do get hired often, because I pointed out that your spec isn't clear.
As far as "playing games" goes, I'm not allowing you to change your single-sentence spec which, very importantly, has "must match performance", which I shall interpret to as "performance of emitted code" and not "performance of compiler".
> Your games reveal your intent.
It should be obvious to you by know that I've done this sort of thing before. The last C compiler I wrote was 95% compliant with the (at the time, new) C99 standard, and came to around 7000LoC - 8000LoC of C89.
> EDIT: And good LORD. Who writes a C compiler in python. Do you know any other languages?!?
Many. The last language I implemented (in C99) took about two weeks after hours (so, maybe 40 hours total?), was interpreted, and was a dialect of Lisp. It's probably somewhere on Github still, and that was (IIRC) only around 2000LoC.
What you appear to not know (maybe you're new to C) is that C was specifically designed for ease of implementation.
1. It was designed to be quick and easy to implement.
2. The extensions in GCC to allow building bootable Linux images are minimal, TBH.
3. The actual 16-bit emission necessary for booting was not done by CC, but by shelling out to GCC.
4. The 100kLoC does not include the tests; it used the GCC tests.
I mean, this isn't arcane and obscure knowledge, you know. You can search the net right now and find 100s of undergrad CS projects where they implement enough of C to compile many compliant existing programs.
I'm wondering; what languages did you write an implementation for? Any that you designed and then implemented?
So you are not willing to put $20k in escrow for, as per your offer:
>>>> Deal. I'll pay you IF you can achieve the same level of performance. Heck, I'll double it.
I just noticed now that you actually offered double. I will do it. This is my real name, my contact details are not hard to find.
I will do it, with emitted binaries performing as well as or better than the binaries emitted by CC.
Put your $40k into a recognised South African escrow service (I've used a few in the past, but I'd rather you choose one so you don't accuse me of being some sort of African scammer).
Because I am engaged in a 6+ hours/day gig right now, I cannot do it f/time until my current gig is completed (and they are paying me directly, not via escrow, so I am not going to jeopardise that).
I can however do a few hours each day, and collect my payment of $40k only once the kernel image boots in about the same time that the CC kernel image boots.
> Yes, we all took the compilers class in college. Those of us who went to college, that is.
If you knew that, why on earth would you assume that implementing a C compiler is at all a complex task?
> Naw. I got him to reveal himself, which was the whole point.
Reveal myself as ... a contractor agreeing to your bid?
> It's amazing what you can get people to do.
There's a ton of money now floating around in pursuit of "proving" how cost-efficient LLM coding is.
I'm sure they can spare you the $40k to put into escrow?
After all, if I don't deliver, then the AI booster community gets a huge win - highly respected ex-FAANG staff engineer with 30 years of verified dev experience could not match the cost efficiency of Claude Code.
I am taking you up on your original offer: $40k for a C compiler that does exactly what the CCC program in the video does.
No, you're overestimating how complex it is to write an unoptimized C compiler. C is (in the grand scheme of things) a very simple language to implement a compiler for.
The rate probably goes up if you ask for more and more standards (C11, C17, C23...) but it's still a lot easier than compilers for almost any other popular language.
This is very much a John Brown claim that will in the end, kill the OP. I'd rather have the OP using LLM powered code review tools to add their experience to that AI generated compiler.
That feels like Silicon-Valley-centric point of view. Plus who would really spend $20k in building any C compiler today in the actual landscape of software?
All that this is saying is that license laundering of a code-base is now $20k away through automated processes, at least if the original code base is fully available. Well, with current state-of-the-art you’ll actually end up with a code-base which is not as good as the original, but that’s it.
There is no definition of “predatory business model” that isn’t simply a reflection of the majority’s values, so there absolutely is a conflict between the two.
Are churches a predatory business? If the answer is no, then why are sugar manufacturers? If the answer is tradition etc., then that basically proves my point.
the institution that invented Tithes? The institution that if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people? Which will take old women aside and talk about getting into heaven and helping missions in poor countries full of poor little children?
That institution might have a predatory business model?
The threat of hell is certainly very uncoercive yeah
While I don't disagree with the assertion that churches are somewhat "predatory" with the threat of hell etc., this statement isn't really supporting that thesis:
> if you go and put money in every sunday will help you organize weddings and funerals which are very important dates for people
So basically you're paying for a service? Your argument would be much better if they didn't actually help people with important stuff.
Creating a hierarchy in lets say a small town, were people who pay in can have a funeral early/better date/better priest while people who dont pay get a wednesday mid work and no one can attend so the family has to say goodbye to their loved one without people creates the kind of environment where participating is not optional.
That is the kind of situation the funeral thing was highlighting, not the provision of a service, but the creation of a coercive incentive for social hierarchy and emotional support around a very difficult moment.
Its the same reason predatory loans are predatory, not because loans are bad but because you find people at their lowest and provide a service where they are incentivised to make reckless financial choices
I mean, there's a limited number of dates and priests. Are you suggesting there should be a fixed fee for funerals, which dates and priests being allocated randomly? That's certainly analogous to state-funded healthcare as compared to private healthcare, but unless you want the government to interfere in the church, I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd implement that. And I mean, all cultural things are "manipulation" in some sense, take the case of going to see the latest superhero movie on the release day. Of course the tickets would be more pricey, is that also coercive?
> I'm having a hard time seeing how you'd implement that.
Similar to shark loans, creating alternatives will always come with compromises. either we have public lenders that will lend money that will never be returned, or we leave a strata of society without access to capital.
But diagnosing the predatory nature of shark loans does not mean the proposal of an alternative.
I think the church model is coercive, specially when threats are existencial. Hell is beyond any threat you could make to someone who believes in it. Does not mean that I can come up witha. universal, generalisable model for providing adequate funeral rites, emotional support and remove social status from society.
> When someone is a certain amount smarter than you, distinguishing their plausible bullshit from their deep insights is really, really hard.
Insights are “deep” not on their own merit, but because they reveal something profound about reality. Such a revelation is either testable or not. If it’s testable, distinguishing it from bullshit is relatively easy, and if it’s not testable even in principle, a good heuristic is to put it in the bullshit category by default.
This was not my experience studying philosophy. After Kant there was a period where philosophers were basically engaged in a centuries long obfuscated writing competition. The pendulum didn't start to swing back until Neitchze. It reminded me of legal jargon but more pretentious and less concrete.
The issue is the revelation. It's always individual at some level. And don't forget our senses are crude. The best way is to store "insights" as information until we collect enough data that we can test it again (hopefully without a lot of bias). But that can be more than a lifetime work, so sometimes you have to take some insights at face value based on heuristics (parents, teachers, elder, authority,...)
Autonomous driving is a solved problem. The fact that self-driving cars are not permitted on most of the world’s roads is 100% the fault of regulators and those who vote for them.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48526-4
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