I dunno. I’ve written a bit of LaTeX but does it really shine in this context? IMO the real advantage it has is that it can allow the user to express more complicated intents than Markdown (weird phrasing—my natural instinct was to call LaTeX more precise than Markdown, but Markdown is pretty precise for describing the type of file that it is good at…).
Anyway LLMs don’t have underlying intent so maybe it is fine to just let them express what they can in Markdown?
This world where everybody’s very concerned with that “refined form” is annoying and exhausting. It causes discussions to become about speculative guesses about everybody else’s beliefs, not actual facts. In the end it breeds cynicism as “well yes, the belief is wrong, but everybody is stupid and believes it anyway,” becomes a stop-gap argument.
I don’t know how to get away from it because ultimately coordination depends on understanding what everybody believes, but I wish it would go away.
IMO this is a symptom of the falling rate of profit, especially in the developed world. If truly productivity enhancing investment is effectively dead (or, equivalently, there is so much paper wealth chasing a withering set of profitable opportunities for investment), then capital's only game is to chase high valuations backed by future profits, which means playing the Keynesian beauty contest for keeps. This in turn means you must make ever-escalating claims of future profitability. Now, here we are in a world where multiple brand name entrepreneurs are essentially saying that they are building the last investable technology ever, and getting people to believe it because the alternative is to earn less than inflation on Procter and Gamble stock and never getting to retire.
If outsiders could plausibly invest in China, some of this pressure could be dissipated for a while, but ultimately we need to order society on some basis that incentivizes dealing with practical problems instead of pushing paper around.
In a post-industrial economy there are no more economic problems, only liabilities. Surplus is felt as threat, especially when it's surplus human labor.
In today's economy disease and prison camps are increasingly profitable.
How do you think the investor portfolios that hold stocks in deathcare and privatized prison labor camps can further Accelerate their returns?
On the other hand talking about those believes can also lead to real changes. Slavery used to be seen widely a necessary evil, just like for instance war.
I don’t actually know a ton about the rhetoric around abolitionism. Are you saying they tried to convince people that everybody else thought slavery was evil? I guess I assumed they tried to convince people slavery was in-and-of-itself evil.
We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.
Yes we'd have a lot of lawsuits about it, but it would hardly be a bad use of time to litigate whether a politicians statements about the electorate's beliefs are accurate.
The thing is... on both the cited occasions (Nixon in 1968, Morrison in 2019), the politicians claiming the average voter agreed with them actually won that election
So, obviously their claims were at least partially true – because if they'd completely misjudged the average voter, they wouldn't have won
I don’t recall the circumstances under which Morrison ended up Prime Minister.
Like most Australians, I’m in denial any of that episode ever happened.
But, using the current circumstances as an example, Australia has a voting system that enables a party to form government even though 65% of voting Australia’s didn’t vote for that party as their first preference.
If the other party and some of the smaller parties could have got their shit together Australia could have a slightly different flavour of complete fucking disaster of a Government, rather than whatever the fuck Anthony Albanese thinks he’s trying to be.
Then there’s Susan Ley. The least preferred leader of the two major parties in a generation.
When there are only two choices, and infinite issues, voters only have two choices: Vote for someone you don't agree with less, or vote for someone you quite hilariously imagine agrees with you.
EDIT: Not being cynical about voters. But about the centralization of parties, in number and operationally, as a steep barrier for voter choice.
Combined with the quirk in Australia’s preferential voting system that enable a government to form despite 65% of voters having voted 1 for something else.
As a result, Australia tends to end up with governments formed by the runner up, because no one party actually ‘won’ as such.
Two options, not two choices. (Unless you have a proportional representation voting system like ireland, in which case you can vote for as many candidates as you like in descending order of preference)
Anyway, there’s a third option: spoil your vote. In the recent Irish presidential election, 13% of those polled afterwards said they spoiled their votes, due to a poor selection of candidates from which to choose.
That’s much more true for Nixon in 1968 than Morrison in 2019
Because the US has a “hard” two party system - third party candidates have very little hope, especially at the national level; voting for a third party is indistinguishable from staying home, as far as the outcome goes, with some rather occasional exceptions
But Australia is different - Australia has a “soft” two party system - two-and-a-half major parties (I say “and-a-half” because our centre-right is a semipermanent coalition of two parties, one representing rural/regional conservatives, the other more urban in its support base). But third parties and independents are a real political force in our parliament, and sometimes even determine the outcome of national elections
This is largely due to (1) we use what Americans call instant-runoff in our federal House of Representatives, and a variation on single-transferable vote in our federal Senate; (2) the parliamentary system-in which the executive is indirectly elected by the legislature-means the choice of executive is less of a simplistic binary, and coalition negotiations involving third party/independent legislators in the lower house can be decisive in determining that outcome in close elections; (3) twelve senators per a state, six elected at a time in an ordinary election, gives more opportunities for minor parties to get into our Senate - of course, 12 senators per a state is feasible when you only have six states (plus four more to represent our two self-governing territories), with 50 states it would produce 600 Senators
> We really need a rule in politics which bans you (if you're an elected representative) from stating anything about the beliefs of the electorate without reference to a poll of the population of adequate size and quality.
Except that assumes polls are a good and accurate way to learn the "beliefs of the electorate," which is not true. Not everyone takes polls, not every belief can be expressed in a multiple-choice form, little subtleties in phrasing and order can greatly bias the outcome of a poll, etc.
I don't think it's a good idea to require speech be filtered through such an expensive and imperfect technology.
err... how Bitcoin works, or how the speculative bubble around cryptocurrencies circa 2019-2021 worked?
Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example), and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
The Bitcoin bubble, like all bubbles since the Dutch tulip bubble in the 1600s, did follow a somewhat similar "well everyone things this thing is much more valuable than it is worth, if I buy some now the price will keep going on and I can dump it on some sucker" path, however.
> Bitcoin is actually kind of useful for some niche use cases - namely illegal transactions, like buying drugs online (Silk Road, for example),
For the record - the illegal transactions were thought to be advantaged by crypto like BTC because it was assumed to be impossible to trace the people engaged in the transaction, however the opposite is true, public blockchains register every transaction a given wallet has made, which has been used by Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) to prosecute people (and made it easier in some cases).
> and occasionally for international money transfers - my French father once paid an Argentinian architect in Bitcoin, because it was the easiest way to transfer the money due to details about money transfer between those countries which I am completely unaware of.
There are remittance companies that deal in local currencies that tend to make this "easier" - crypto works for this WHEN you can exchange the crypto for the currencies you have and want, which is, in effect, the same.
Mining rigs have a finite lifespan & the places that make them in large enough quantities will stop making new ones if a more profitable product line, e.g. AI accelerators, becomes available. I'm sure making mining rigs will remain profitable for a while longer but the memory shortages are making it obvious that most production capacity is now going towards AI data centers & if that trend continues then hashing capacity will continue diminishing b/c the electricity cost & hardware replenishment will outpace mining rewards.
Bitcoin was always a dead end. It might survive for a while longer but its demise is inevitable.
Just based on this blog post it seems like he wanted the project to be more “professional” in some way that the rest of the developer group didn’t. I wonder if that difference in vision, combined with a (probably justified based on your comment) feeling that he was doing a disproportionate amount of the work lead to an unsustainable situation.
Calling it a post-mortem while others are continuing the project still seems kind of petty, though.
This LLM stuff is a little weird. Previously we had Python which was pretty close to pseudocode but you could run it directly. Now, these LLMs are one step more abstract, but their outputs aren’t runnable directly, they produce possibly incorrect code-like-text. Actually this seems like good news for programmers since you have to read the code in the lower-level language that gets produced.
In the grand scheme of things it wouldn’t actually be that strange: generations and generations of humans were mostly farmers and mostly did the same thing as their parents. Of course technology developed but lots of people did the same job with the same methods their whole lives.
But everybody on this site lived through the first half of a logistic curve so that perspective seems strange to us.
Peter Thiel talks about the difference in progress between bits and atoms. Progress in atoms (physical things) moves incredibly slowly, and has done for centuries. Progress in bits (software) moves astonishingly fast. We all work in software. We should not expect things to remain the same for very long because change is easy.
I think it'd be pretty incredible if we hit on the best way to write software 40 years ago when people had only been doing it seriously for a couple of decades. It's no more surprising that we find better approaches to coding than farming improving when the tractor replaced a horse.
But any prominent app will be pressured to have ID verification in the end, no? Also, Discord's roots are very heavy, people are too invested with historical data and etc. I don't even see an alternative to it right now.
WRT the verification, it is a symptom of the fact that Discord is entering the monetization phase. So, I don’t think it will be the thing that causes people to leave. It is just an interesting road mark along the way.
WRT the stickiness, I just use Discord as a site to chat with my friends. Based on other comments, some folks use it as more like a social-media site. So, maybe I just don’t see the roots. If it is more like a social media site, it might survive in that lingering state that sites like Facebook have.
It seems pretty hard to say at this point—we have people who say they get good results and have high standards. They don’t owe us any proof of course. But we don’t really have any way to validate that. Everybody thinks their code is good, right?
Microsoft might just be having trouble selling copilot because Claude or whatever is better, right?
Moltbook is insecure, but the first couple iterations of any non-trivial web service ends up having some crazy security hole. Also Moltbook seems to be some sort of… intentional statement of recklessness.
I think we’ll only know in retrospect, if there’s a great die-off of the companies that don’t adopt these tools.
That nobody wants to actually do it is already a problem, but some basically true thing is that somebody has to pay those $90k junior engineers for a couple years to turn them into senior engineers.
The seem to be plenty of people willing to pay the AI do that junior engineer level work, so wouldn’t it make sense to defect and just wait until it has gained enough experience to do the senior engineer work?
It might provide cover to lay off more than 5% of us (the LLM can create a work-like text product that, as far as upper management can tell, is indistinguishable from the real thing!), then we will have to go find jobs swinging hammers to build houses. Well, somebody’s got to do it.
The idea that companies need "cover" to perform layoffs (particularly in the US) doesn't make sense to me. Tech companies, all companies lay people off regularly. (To a first order approximation) if a worker is a net positive to a company then the company will want to keep them, and if they are not then the company will want to get rid of them. AI or no AI.
I’ve seen many essential people being laid off for stupid reasons, the gp reason above being part of the story for some. Finance runs the world not tech. Tech is only welcome when it helps finance else it is marginalized.
Seems like the cover might be for investors. If a company is shrinking but you don't want investors to know it's shrinking, you can say you're improving productivity with AI.
It’ll be interesting to see what people come up with to get conventional scientific computing workloads to work on 16 bit or smaller data types. I think there’s some hope but it will require work.
Anyway LLMs don’t have underlying intent so maybe it is fine to just let them express what they can in Markdown?
reply