We were flabbergasted. Asked the tech what was optional or what was required as part of our visit and he said, oh, just the top line item for the exam. $95.

It has to be illegal to do that. I feel like next time I go in there they are going to give me the ol' Clark Stanley runaround.

What's interesting to me is that this can be completely true (I believe it is), but why can seemingly nobody see the value and prioritize saving it. Opera is beautiful, it's one of the many things that make life worth living.

More efficiently allocating capital ought to be just a way to generate more resources for producing opera. And yet...

Metabolism: The chemical processes inside a body that turn food or nutrients into energy. LLM's do not spontaneously do this, they are powered by plugging them into the wall.

Growth: The ability to get larger and develop over time. LLMs are fixed in size (and in fact don't really have a size, because it's a computer program) and do not grow or change over time.

Reproduction: The ability to create new organisms. LLM's do not reproduce themselves.

Response to Stimuli: The ability to react to changes in the environment. LLM's do not have an environment. Their environment is a man-made, theoretical structure of logical operations implemented in silicon.

Evolution: The capacity of a genetic system to change and adapt across generations. LLMs do not change or evolve over time.

So... 0/5! Big fat goose egg for LLM's.

Like, it ought to be enough to say that the problem with AI is that it’s not human. Unfortunately, we live in a world where many (most?) people have willingly put away the childish things, so as to achieve some goal.

The problem is that the point of life is to explore and have fun and have human to human experiences. I think math is probably fun because you’re working on hard problems with your collaborators.

It should be obvious to everyone, as it is to children, that the point of life isn’t the goal, the point is the experience one has of living. They say that when you die the only thing you lose is the current moment. The problem with AI is that it doesn’t have a current moment to live in or to lose, it’s an inanimate thing. So, it should be obvious to everyone that the problem with the AI is that it’s not human. Alas.

It’s just silly talk. My dad works for Nintendo and he can give me a gold foil pikachu any time he wants, also, he can delete your Pokémon any time he wants because he has admin access on the Nintendo server. And also he can beat up your dad because he has a black belt. Oh your dad has a black belt? Well actually I lied, he has a rainbow belt which means he can beat up your dad still.

Like this is silly right? It’s insulting. We both know that there are live nuclear weapons whose coordinates point at my city and at your city and the only thing that stops them is two keys and a button. Nuclear weapons, you know those things that have killed hundreds of thousands of living men women and children? There is no room for speculation in that regard: my city has a navy base and there is a live nuclear weapon pointed at it, myself and my entire family will die if it goes off. Now contrast: ahem.

Oh sorry my dad also has like a super secret rainbow STEALTH powers that could actually totally insulate my house from nukes. If you think about it, I actually have no reason to be concerned.

If that is true then this seems to be, again, a case of AI producing an interpolation over data it has seen before. Everything about openAI's behavior indicates that they were using the transcripts as input. Why not have the AGI choose a different Millenium prize problem?

Funny how that works.

It’s not that the robots are surveilling and that would be morally wrong… it’s that people are upset by it and that impacts the bottom line.

“I’m sorry that you chose to feel that way”

The relationship between the West and Asia in its current form (Asia as a manufacturing powerhouse, the West as hub of global finance, outsourcing all over the world, JIT manufacturing) all this stuff is totally dependent on instant communication over the internet.

We would not be able to coordinate the world's production activity from Manhattan without the internet. Capital would be far less accumulated and allocated in a way less granular way. Demand signal would be completely different, based way more on brick and mortar. Feedback loops between capital and demand would be constrained to different geographic areas which would make basically all markets way more segregated...

So it changes labor, production, demand, markets, culture, media... I think that's basically everything!

I'll tell you. I would have a different job, my city would have a different population, I would spend my time after work differently, I would shop differently, I would watch different movies and listen to different music.

>Anxiety as an emotion does not require someone to blame.

I know this isn't the "hacker mindset" or whatever. But my anger is well placed and justified. It is pointed at a very specific set of people who are actively doing everything in their power to turn the world into a surveillance spam slop hellscape while massively enriching themselves and destroying the biosphere.

They are using this technology TODAY to build a surveillance state. They are using this technology TODAY to spam the ever loving shit out of every place on the internet with a comment box. They are using this technology TODAY to fool people and to distance people from one another. They are using this technology TODAY to bomb schools and designate people terrorists and fly drones into gas stations. And they are doing all of this TODAY, right now, while literally stealing and burning books, cooking the biosphere, and making everyone's electricity more expensive. It is not a "bet" or something they are unsure of. It is something that they are doing, today.

Sorry, I am going to be unsure, curious, and anxious about this technology when the people in charge of it cease using their basically unchecked authoritarian power to immiserate myself and everyone else, literally billions of people, who are in my social class.

I am not curious or uncertain about any of this, I know exactly what is happening and I hate it and I hate the people who are responsible for it. They have names and I'm confident that when this is all over, they will burn in hell.

Why the humanoid form, with all of its engineering inefficiencies and difficulties? Because it is a thing which can be dominated.

The whole purpose is domination. Ever seen Apocalypse now or read Heart of Darkness? They are little colonel Kurtzes. The will to dominate for these people goes to the depths of their soul.

i want the code to do this --> write the code to do this

i want the code to do this --> write the tests to specify this

the hard part is not the code or the tests. it's knowing what 'this' is supposed to be, exactly.

if you have the code, it is trivial to write the tests that will perfectly test the code. if you have the tests, it is trivial to write the code that will perfectly pass the tests.

however, none of this has anything to do with whether the code or the tests are good, and having a bad version of one will not help you write a good version of the other.