That would set a bad precedent. We're talking about an adult taking his own life. In Canada the government will not only coach you how to do it, they'll provide the poison and give you a hospital bed to carry out the act. A number of other governments do this too.
That's not to equate governments and private internet services, but I think it puts it into perspective, that even governments don't think suicide is the worst choice some of the times. Who are we to day he made the wrong choice, really it was his to make. Nobody was egging him on.
And if you believe people that say LLMs are nothing but stolen content, then would those books / other sources have been culpable if he had happened to read them before taking his own life?
If you think there is ever any other outcome for a democracy, you are part owner in what we built. Corruption and capture are inevitable, and blaming the particular politicians in power today, misses the point. They're only in power because at every step along the way, we the people happily swallowed beautiful lies in exchange for the "freebies" that trickled down to us.
If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
You're putting words in my mouth. I never said anything about unlucky. I said broad strokes were intentional. Does that sound like I view it as something akin to gods will?
Am almost 50. Was in the room being told I had to help offshore others jobs. That's why I claim this was no accident.
I like how you make it a character problem of the masses! How dare they not know things intentionally kept from them! How dare they select the subset of dumb options.
Media intentionally kept people like Chomsky and others off the airwaves to keep control of the narrative, but damn gen pop! They should have known!
You going to sell me on Intelligent Design next?
"Us"? Don't lump me into this. I’ve been mocking tech bros and software startups the whole time. Low skilled, know nothing work. I started in EE. I look forward to AI that organizes machine states without software engineer middle men inserting their preferences on me.
You've just made my case for me. It's why democracy can't work. Because the people who vote in the evil politicians don't (and really can't) know enough to make an informed decision. All those middle men you hate, get a vote too. The problem is not the politicians, it's the system. It's the belief that big brother will take care of us. It's the mistake of thinking you can just vote in "the good guys" and give them extraordinary power, and they won't get a knife in their back and be replaced by bad guys... who inherit all that power we forfeited.
We need to look at ourselves, and the dream we've swallowed. It's not going to get better by voting out the current crop of criminals. There is a never-ending line of equally corrupt applicants, right behind them. The entire system has been subverted. There's no fixing it.
I don't have one, nobody really does. But the blind belief in, and search for, some utopian society is what needs to die. Reduced expectations, less ambitious goals, and a renewed reliance on small local communities.
I'm not hopeful we will actually break out of the spell of modern big-government before we're surrounded by famine and rubble; but the seed needs to be planted now. Trump (and worse) is the logical and inevitable outcome of delusional self-indulgence, treating the state as an endless piggy bank, and knight in shining armour. It's just handing our fate over to the psychopaths, on a silver platter.
For whatever it's worth, working together in small groups ("prepping") is probably the best practical option we have as individuals and families. Building skills and local communities.
> So was the proposed idea be that people would be required to disclose if AI was used to generate code?
Yes. The proposal claimed that there will be too much AI slop, and it will inundate the review process with too much work and bring the entire system to a grinding halt, or worse, end up allowing code that lacks proper review into the kernel.
Linus basically said, "It might become a problem, but the bad guys are never going to admit they used AI, so it's not helpful to demand disclosure".
> ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.
People keep telling me that an LLM is not intelligence, it's simply spitting out statistically relevant tokens. But surely it takes intelligence to understand (and actually execute!) the request to "read adjacent code".
I used to agree with this stance, but lately I'm more in the "LLMs are just fancy autocomplete" camp. They can just autocomplete increasingly more things, and when they can't, they fail in ways that an intelligent being just wouldn't. Rather that just output a wrong or useless autocompletion.
They're not an equivalent intelligence as human's and thus have noticeably different failure modes. But human's fail in ways that they don't (eg. being unable to match llm's breadth and depth of knowledge)
But the question i'm really asking is... isn't it more than a sheer statistical "trick" if an LLM can actually be instructed to "read surrounding code", understand the request, and demonstrably include it in its operation? You can't do that unless you actually understand what "surrounding code" is, and more importantly have a way to comply with the request...
You know that language had to emerge at some point? LLMs can only do anything because they have been fed on human data. Humans actually had to collectively come up with languages /without/ anything to copy since there was a time before language.
I actually don't disagree with this sentiment. The difference is we've optimised for autocompleting our way out of situations we currently don't have enough information to solve, and LLMs have gone the opposite direction of over-indexing on too much "autocomplete the thing based on current knowledge".
At this point I don't doubt that whatever human intelligence is, it's a computable function.
I have heard this a few times now, what is going on? The news hasn't mentioned anything about Neo Nazis, and there is no large organized effort to round up the Jews, let alone exterminate them. This seems like hyperbolic language that is in really poor taste, which undermines the seriousness of what the second world war was fought over.
Okay. But, statistically speaking, America has a Neo Nazi population of 0%. It seems hyperbolic (at best) to saddle all Twitter users with that association, when it is a vanishingly small issue. Not to mention, Nazis actually murdered millions of Jews, so calling your ideological opponent a "Neo-Nazi", cheapens the memory of people who suffered at the hands of actual Nazis, and diminishes the effort that was mounted to defeat them.
Nazis also wore sharp looking outfits, and organized a military, and had youth-movements. WE do not categorize everyone who does those things as Nazis. Because Nazis were an actual thing, that exists in history, and were actually responsible for the extermination of millions of people.
Rounded to a whole number, America has a Neo Nazi population of 0%. Trying to imply otherwise is a cheap emotional manipulation that is shameful.
This is more of the same propaganda that is being discussed that social media creates. I'm surprised that you don't see it. You're making these claims like "vilifying immigrants", which is just virtue signaling that you have "all the Correct Opinions" regarding liberal politics. There are no concentration camps as those from the bad people you are referencing. Regarding immigration, would you refer to Obama as a member of the Third Reich? I doubt that you would, which speaks for itself. It's extremely hyperbolic and I don't think you realize how you implying that enormous amounts of people have no problem or even think it is quite a good thing for the government to be doing things that you are likening to a group that committed actual atrocities. If Mexico was an extremely successful economic powerhouse, or Uganda, whatever, do you think they would have unfettered immigration?
See, your comment is an example of the problem. This is the kind of propaganda that is peddled in these leftist social media channels, influencers, etc. It's not even that subjective, the ADL, who are not known not being sensitive enough, came out to say they did not these gestures were as you describe; of course they did not like Musk's humorous puns regarding the reaction but that is another matter.
Used to take quite high doses of LSD, and often had incredible visual hallucinations. Things like watching a large plant sprout flower buds all over it, which slowly expanded to full bloom and then retreated back to small buds; the whole experience went on like that for 20 minutes. Another time I hallucinated that a neighbor's house was on fire, until my friend said she was hallucinating the same thing. Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
> Fortunately, the fire brigade showed up quickly to quench the very real flames, without us having to ring them.
imagine calling them like "my friend and i are both on lsd and we are both seeing that house on fire so could you check it out please in case it's real"
a trick i use sometimes is to check my phone camera to see if it also sees the same thing
until you hit the generative AI camera mode because, well, you're tripping, and it hears your description of the fire and adds flames to your image. In the words of Neo, "whoa!"
I have the opposite problem: i try to watch scripted entertainment and all I see are actors in makeup on a set. Very hard for me to immerse myself when I keep getting distracted by bad wigs.
This happens to me on any amount of cannabis for some reason. It becomes immediately clear in a way I can not shake. It breaks the illusion. It only happens with live action, I can watch animation etc without issue.
> You don’t need acid for that. Just imagination. That was my first entertainment as a child.
While I'm on LSD it looks like any picture/art/etc is literally alive. I don't really know how to explain it.
> But LSD and related psychedelics are uniquely able to help one reconnect with that part of themselves.
LSD absolutely helps me reconnect with many parts of myself. I have dissociative identity disorder and certain memories or even certain perspectives of memories can only be recalled when I'm on LSD.
I know I shouldn't get my news from Reddit, but the consensus there is that the entire FAA crisis (and both recent crashes in the US), is Trump's fault. I don't know the details, but apparently he "gutted" the FAA last week, on the first day he took office, leaving the FAA unable to protect the flying public.
Reddit comments seem reasonable until they talk about something you're an expert on. Then you realize the "Reddit consensus" is worthless: uninformed at best, actively misleading at worst.
A corollary to this: people who don't have expertise in any field might never realize this, and will believe whatever Reddit (or HN, Twitter, etc) tells them that matches their previous-held beliefs.
I recommend people become technically proficient at at least one thing in their lives. It gives you an anchor to reality (you can easily recognize bullshit), and it will cure you of the illusion that most people know what they're talking about.
Even worse when you run into those folks who a surface level knowledge and sound knowledgeable but somehow come up with the worst possible conclusions.
This sounds like mixed messaging. The head of the FAA was forced to resign because he fined SpaceX for safety violations and President Musk did not like that. However, I've been hearing about ATC problems my entire life so around 40 years.
There's definitely a purposeful political effort to string together true facts -- Musk pushed out the incumbent FAA administrator, they didn't name an acting administrator until after the crash, there's a government-wide hiring freeze, Trump disbanded an aviation safety committee, the controllers like everyone else got the resignation "fork in the road" emails, the new transportation secretary is a guy who got semi-famous being on "The Real World" -- into a narrative that Trump caused the DCA crash.
The reality is that most of this either had no effect or not enough time to have an effect, but whether it has bite politically remains to be seen. My view on it is that it's an explicit attempt to use Trump's own tactics against him.
From what information is currently available, the actual investigation will likely blame pilot error on the part of the helicopter pilot, but also decades-old systemic problems with ATC understaffing, crowded and awkward airspace at DCA squeezed too much by increased traffic and no-fly zones, and years of "accepted practice" that normalized an unnecessarily dangerous situation, all of which are solidly bipartisan problems. (The Philadelphia crash I haven't read much about; I would guess it probably won't have as much in the way of broadly applicable takeaways for the aviation system, but it coming in such quick succession certainly helps build narratives.)
I think it may be unfair to pin each of those factors individually on the crash, but I do believe that collectively when you have an administration reaking havoc and chaos across all federal agencies, things are gonna happen.
To say I'm not a fan of Trump and particularly of his wrecking-ball approach to his new administration would be a severe understatement.
Still I'd have to say the narrative I outlined above is more of an attempt to hang the crash around his neck than something that reflects the truth particularly well. Of course Trump for his part as always immediately tried to hang it around Biden's and Obama's necks (neatly skipping over his own prior administration) with no evidence, so turnabout is fair play. Now, whether the Muskification of the whole government will be the cause of problems going forward, that's another story.
I was writing something here about having great confidence in the NTSB to perform a thorough investigation and account for various factors if they're allowed to remain independent and operate without interference... and then I saw a post from the NTSB today that they'll no longer be sending out email to media and instead only posting updates to their Twitter account... so put a lot of emphasis on that "if."
How well do you function days after the head of your company is unexpectedly pushed out in a hostile take-over, you have zero direction given from above, and you are sent an email from the person behind the hostile takeover, that doesn't work at your company and doesn't fit in the management structure in any way saying you should quit? Would you say you would function better or worse than prior to that occurring?
This "quit or risk getting fired" email was sent to federal employees on January 28, the day before the crash: https://www.opm.gov/fork and that includes air traffic controllers and their supervisors [1]
If you don't think that could have had an impact on morale, and therefore attentiveness, I can only wonder if you've never witnessed large-scale layoffs first-hand. They're pretty common in tech. From what I've seen in our industry, first and second hand, almost nobody gets any real work done for several days after getting such an email. The ATCs don't have such luxury, but instead, they continue their life-and-death job with an elevated level of stress.
And we know that one of the ATCs was dismissed early that day. Was it because undue stress, caused by that email, was impacting their performance? If so, will their supervisor be brave enough to say so in public? We don't know. But this is a substantial reason to suspect that the administration's actions could have had a direct impact on the people in that control tower.
reddit is all rage bait at this point and if the big subreddits aren't over 50% propaganda I'll eat my hat. The recent election shows how out of touch the front page is and you can conclude that the average poster is hopelessly out of touch or that the 'average poster' doesn't really exist or that the 'average poster' is there to make people feel complacent or make people feel indignant or make people feel superior.
You are supposed to be outraged. You are supposed to think that the 'dumb libs' have no legitimate points, that they only believe 'orange man bad' and therefore everything they say can be completely disregarded.
Stop reading, sit back, and figure out what you think without feeling like you have score points over some imaginary opponent.
I'd argue that in our quest to maximize income inequality, we've made many necessary careers non-viable from a living standards perspective.
These non viable careers include pilots, atc, teaching, and a large portion of the skilled trades and more. While a non viable career path will still have some individuals in the field due to sunk cost, passion, or inertia - a shortage is inevitable.
Supply and demand should rationalize this - but if training is long, wage visibility is low, and sunk cost is high, and negotiation power is low - its entirely possible for a employers to collectively push the prevailing wage below the level which makes the job worth it to enough individuals.
There wasn't enough time for Trump to affect his specific incident. But longer term it's certainly not a good idea to send traffic controllers a letter asking them to resign (the letter went to all federal employees) and to interfere with staff for purely political reasons this way.
I don't know about you, but weird emails about a mass voluntary resignation program would take my focus out of any work.
If suddenly I have to worry about my job security and the possibility of losing a bunch of colleagues and becoming overworked there's no way I'd be able to be all there.
Any accident like this is an accident - none of the pilots or ATCs woke up and decided to kill dozens of people. (Including themselves in the pilots case)
That said, conditions in the ATC facility were likely a contributor, and the overall management and control environment of the FAA created those conditions. Frankly, the Elon stuff is insane, and who knows if the people who approve the overtime, etc exist anymore.
Trump deserves blame for the circus and harm created by his administration’s irresponsibility and recklessness. But he didn’t crash a plane.
That's not to equate governments and private internet services, but I think it puts it into perspective, that even governments don't think suicide is the worst choice some of the times. Who are we to day he made the wrong choice, really it was his to make. Nobody was egging him on.
And if you believe people that say LLMs are nothing but stolen content, then would those books / other sources have been culpable if he had happened to read them before taking his own life?
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