I think both political extremes have their own angles: liberals might be concerned that conservative censors will censor kids from learning about LGBT people and minorities, conservatives will be concerned that liberals will force too much LGBT and minority content onto kids. Or whatever issue, they want to control what your kids read!

This will almost certainly be used to censor adults too, the only reason we aren’t doing that is because it hasn’t been possible to consistently identify people before. Considering who is pushing for this, they’re absolutely going to tie this into advertising, and if they know who you are so do all of the spooky upper echelons who could implement a true censorship regime.

“The only way they can do this is by controlling what you read, shouldn’t that be the parent’s choice?”

Now I’m trying to convince people that identifying adults won’t work either, because kids will still get around it. All the while, we adults live with the negative externality of no longer having anonymous communication. Woe betide us all should this come to pass, but I guess desperate people are how bad things like this tend to happen.

I picked it up from trying to teach myself that SLAM stuff. The papers are very short, but highly information dense and at the time there was no ChatGPT to help me. I got through them by just creeping my way through the math with a whiteboard, and something about drawing it out and having it there in my office made it all click. Trying to watch piecemeal lectures on YouTube or grind through foundational books like MVG just didn’t work for me, I used them instead as references for my drawings.

Same happened when I tried learning this GPT stuff. karpathy’s videos were out at the time, but I couldn’t really stay focused on them or connect the math with the code. Most other descriptions I could find were focused on getting you to use their inference library or harness. Assembling the picture together on my whiteboard by focusing on drawing out the block diagram continues to be my personal favorite method for deep understanding of complex systems.

I have no idea about careers at this point, I’m still doing fancy IT work as my day job I and look away from the future with dread. I also haven’t been looking for new roles on the open job market, so who knows maybe there’s multimillion pay packages for anyone who can articulate how attention works in an interview.

This is to say: the autoregressive decoder-only transformer llm architecture as pioneered by openai is wildly simple for how revolutionary its results are. I was reading about non-learned classical SLAM systems (uses video + handcrafted math to produce 3d mappings of physical spaces while also locating the camera in those spaces) at the time, and comparatively speaking I’d say the math is about as complicated as ONE of the components in those complex formulations. The only reason frontier LLMs need 6-figure computers to run is because the model designers made the middle bit in those models REALLY BIG, dimensionally speaking. They just took the steam engine, made a few gargantuan versions of it, and are selling them as the ultimate source of power.

This was openai’s entire breakthrough. Making this particular model architecture larger leads to emergent capabilities like being able to pick the best ending to a story/set of instructions or answer questions about broad factual knowledge. I’ve been meanwhile watching these AI companies attempt, successfully, to sell this capability as some sort of robot consciousness hand-crafted by supergeniuses. The fact that they are getting away with it is almost as shocking to me as the discovery itself.

Otherwise, what’s to stop them from just telling you video evidence isn’t enough, because jurors have become accustom to thinking that video evidence can be faked by vindictive cops?

I think SWGEmu (cool project, just learned of it from you!) do represent some optimism though. Maybe these sorts of passion projects will take over the space?

I can’t describe how disturbing it was to realize that my voice suddenly no longer mattered, and that I was speaking to something that would never get tired of creatively dismissing my ideas without ever really addressing them. This behavior compounded and was unaddressed by anyone, no one I talked to seemed willing to try actually pushing back against it. Best solution they had was to have physical meetings w/ n>1 people on each side in the room. Trust plummeted, and eventually all meetings with that team were recorded and transcripted, and people started talking like they were on stage vs trying to solve shared problems. Work ground to a halt on even basic things, and I ended up leaving. This was on a pretty major project that has a name people here would know, but don’t ask me what!

I don't understand what you're trying to say here, is it that "cyberspace" couldn't exist as anything "real" because governments can just shut down servers? That's why you can't buy drugs and credit card numbers online anymore, right? Sarcasm aside, you seem to be using the fallibility of the current-popular physical layer to dismiss the otherwise separate tangible "space" that does seem to exist when lots of people can communicate fluidly with each other across vast distances. Or is your critique centered on the ability of "cyberspace" to go beyond just communication and serve as a space one can actually "live" in?

> The legal pretense of ownership and copyright is all we have. If you want to abandon the idea of "ownership" altogether, then the wealthiest and most powerful still wind up controlling everything by virtue of their wealth and power.

Limiting abandonment of "ownership" to only "copyright" and IP generally, what do you propose the wealthy would control that would allow them to replicate present circumstances in "cyberspace"? The best I can think of would be communications infrastructure, and they didn't build that by themselves (at least in the US) to begin with.

For example, why would TikTok continue to be usable as a brainrot generator & propaganda tool when content is necessarily separate from the algorithm and presentation layers? Current bastards exploit their centralized control based on this house of cards ownership structure. Nothing is practically stopping users from cloning the contents from the cdn and writing a new frontend besides legal threats. This is true of almost every tech business that exists, and many of them themselves exploited this asymmetry during their founding. They exist because billionaires use the legal system to scare individual upstarts from threatening their business model.