If you want to split up Europe to make the comparison favorable, split up the US to make it less favorable again. How many US states are below the per capita level of homelessness in the US?
Now you're characterizing what you've done as progress, to defend characterizing it as opposed to modern parenting, and you anticipated attacks from other people. I'll tell you why I think you anticipated attacks after I tell you a reason why I disagree.
I agree that it has been a generational thing. It was called the "Me Generation." Me, me, me. In the animal kingdom, parents abandoning their children to be completely independent is mostly common among insects, lizards, and amphibians, and is associated with large litters and a massive death rate among them. It's not modern, it's a feature of creatures that are lower than mammals.
What's triggering is the fact that you've decided to brag about your superior parenting in public, and claim the evidence of that is that you have told your children that you're done with them. Nobody asked you, and you're aware that normal people don't do that to people that they are close to (hence the need to lecture.) Everybody raises their children to have the ability to be completely independent and self-sufficient. You just think you're uniquely successful at that, and that it somehow would be the child's fault if you've failed.
Your kids didn't ask to be born, and if you don't rescue them from their failure (at least initially), it will be a reflection on you. If we are in the same social circles, and I know about this, I will judge you. Even hearing you explain it, and your feigned confusion (I guarantee you have this conversation all the time), would make me wary of hiring you into a management position.
I'm not a lizard. I want everybody I care about to be self-sufficient, and I also don't want them to try to be unless they actually have to be. They have resources available to them that are not always being fully utilized, and when those resources can give them an advantage in any context, I would be angry if they weren't used.
There are always limits to self-sufficiency, because there are massive advantages to abandoning it: that's what we call civilization.
Very good points. Thanks for the insight and critique. There is a reason I don't wade into social topics and usually only comment on technical things I have worked on and this is helping me understand why!
You don't want to talk about it because either 1) you don't know it, or 2) you were downplaying it at the time, too.
The only time we talk about Henry Ford, unless it's about his anti-Semitism, is about decisions he made in 1906. If we go by your arbitrary standard, why would we talk about Henry Ford at all when we could talk about this year's Tesla model?
> See also Netscape v2.0 and 3.0, which were badass browsers back in 1996, but are similarly irrelevant today.
Why are you talking about Netscape? What does that have to do with anything happening right now?
Why it's weird? Seems obvious. Because it doesn't behave any differently than any other process that we don't think of as conscious. We don't think of a valve as conscious; and if we make a Rube Goldberg machine valve, we don't think of it as more conscious. It's just a series of valves that do a predictable thing.
I don't think it's defensible to say
1) that a transistor isn't conscious,
2) that a bunch of transistors that I've wired together aren't conscious, because I know how I've wired them together and therefore I know when I give them a particular input I will get a particular output, just like the single transistor, then go to
3) that I have a bunch of transistors that I've wired together, but I put in so much input that I can't remember exactly what I've put in, plus I've wired some of the transistors to output random numbers that would be difficult to guess and fed them in also, therefore I don't know what will come out, are conscious.
Even if I do accept this, if I take away the random number generator, and I can literally predict what can come out (by running a test in advance), and I still considered that consciousness, that would be odd. The only reason why I ever suspected consciousness was because I couldn't predict the output. I shouldn't even have accepted that, because I didn't think of the random number generator as conscious. [edit: of course, with the same seed the random number generator would have the same oddness.]
It seems a bit like an argument from ignorance, a theological argument. Not understanding how something moves makes it alive (animated by spirits.) But it's even weirder to assign it metaphysical qualities when you built every single element of it with the goal to do the thing that it does, and it does it totally predictably and deterministically.
Take a car apart. So now I have a pile on the floor with an engine, some wheels, a tire, and some chairs.
Can you point to the part that makes it cruise at 130 km/h on the autobahn? I bet you can't. You need to assemble all the parts back into a car before they work again.
Or take your transistors. We can put them together to make a pocket calculator. Can any small bunch of transistors add 1+1? Trivially I can think of a few conformations that can actually, if that's all you want to do. But you will need all of them together if you add 12345678+87654321.
So all of biology so far has been take things apart all the way and you end up with your hands full of a bunch of molecules. Are those molecules alive? No. You need to put them together into organelles and the organelles into cells before we call them alive.
How about consciousness? Well, we haven't solved that one yet, but we figure that -since it's a biological function - we should be able to pull it apart in the same way. That's biology's best guess anyway, and there's several sub-disciplines of biology working on it, from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology to ethology.
I'm wondering how many groups are doing really unethical animal genetic modifications of the genes around language and intelligence in hidden places. It really seems we're at the edge of technology that will allow us to do things previous generations wrote about in horror.
> 2. those who need done a small set of narrowly defined tasks with existing clear guardrails: repetitive physical labor in a controlled environment, call center and customer service chat work, etc.
The problem with this angle is that it is still absolutely terrible at doing call center/customer service work, and the profitability story is that the price is going to go up rather than go down.
For repetitive physical labor in a controlled environment I'm slightly more bullish, but if you control the environment, you mostly don't need AI. You just use traditional deterministic methods, and send a person in when things get stuck or things are by nature irregular.
> 1. those who can accept failure cheaply: firms that would otherwise hire interns, firms involved in rapid prototyping work, etc.
Those who can accept failure cheaply can't necessarily detect failure cheaply. A ton of insane attempts will have to be picked through carefully to find the candidates for success, because the lack of a thought process makes AI bad in random, inhuman ways. This is basically a version of 3) that wishes away tests. It will be (and is) certainly helpful to replace interns and aid in rapid prototyping, but not because failure can be accepted, but because those are things that are tightly supervised. According to the world thus far, that is resulting in anything from -15% to +25% productivity gains. I'm not seeing it as a game changer simply because if it was, I'd expect to have seen a lot more useful, original software products by now and I haven't. I've just seen old ones get buggier or rewritten in Rust.
I'm only buying 3): when you just want a machine to randomly enumerate through a search space looking for things that make the carefully constructed tests pass. That's a very good thing, though. But as you say, it's not a game changer because you still have to write the tests.
but
> 5. navier-stokes and statements in pure mathematics like it are the absolute best case scenario for agentic work against rigorous specification. the theorem statement itself is already a rigorous specification. it has undergone decades of auditing by the mathematical community and its rendering in lean is a straightforward translation defined in terms of battle-tested mathematical objects from mathlib. the verifier, the lean theorem prover, has been extensively audited and specifically designed to avoid the types of unsoundness that would make it vulnerable to reward hacks. even lean and theorem provers like it are not invulnerable: soundness bugs have allowed LLMs to launder bogus proofs through the proof kernel before and it is not improbable that more such bugs exist. this is the rosiest setup; the vast majority of human knowledge work does not look like this. i'll comment below on the few areas of knowledge work that do resemble pure mathematics in this respect.
This is the real deep point, and one I've been repeating since I heard Navier-Stokes was a fraud.
This is exactly where I expected that LLMs would do well, and they are not.
It shows that I have a basic misunderstanding of LLMs, and that misunderstanding is causing me to think that they have more potential than they have actually shown.
Maybe the nature of the architecture, where it picks out features, intrinsically limits its ability to search a solution space?
Maybe the fact that they modally predict what someone might say, and nobody has said a thing as of yet (when many people were knowledgeable enough to have, if it is correct), means that the LLM is not going to say it either?
Maybe the fact that it consumes all information and blends it in a structured way, instead of synthesizing an entire space from a relatively very small amount of input like a human does, means that it won't ever accidentally synthesize something that can't be pieced together from things that have already been said? Is its accuracy its flaw, where a human's "mistaken" synthesis might ultimately correct everyone's understanding?
Really not beating the charge of being a stochastic parrot. It might just be that we were underestimating stochastic parrots; if a million monkeys on a million typewriters were all getting treats when they satisfied a trainer who wanted to see a new work of Shakespeare; they could look at his published work, and they could watch each other type and when each other got treats; whenever they successfully spelled a word or put words into an intelligible phrase, that was made into a keyboard key for a group of sentence monkeys, and the successes of the sentence monkeys were made into keys for the paragraph monkeys, etc... could you get something that passed for mediocre, drunken Shakespeare in a thousand years? Or maybe even 10?
All I ask is 12 monkeys, a library of Shakespeare, and an AI lab full of typewriters. We may not produce a mediocre play, but will IPO as a social media marketing agency.
The part that they generally leave out is that Shada is mostly terrible (although Christopher Neame's delivery as Skagra is very funny and over the top), and Douglas Adams's run on Who was mostly terrible. Adams himself was embarrassed by it, and a remember reading a quote somewhere with him saying that he dodged a bullet by Shada never getting out there.
The fan-animated remake is better than the commercially released animated remake, and the guy who did it also redid part of it with early gen AI and that's pretty great, too.
The best part of Shada is how awesome Victoria Burgoyne looked in it. Her career went nowhere, but at least she's here.
There is. By default it tries to obey your query. But if that query returns no results, only then it makes a best-effort attempt to return something vaguely related.
Literally had nothing to do with "NIMBYism." That's anachronistic bullshit. It had to do with the desire to remake the country into Garden Cities with lawn-based neighborhoods filling the spaces between shopping malls.
The people in the places where these neighborhoods were built didn't get a say, they were removed and new middle-class "YIMBYs" were moved in to be little lords on their little lots.
> if this company were from China, Russia or Iran, it would not be the no 1 story on Hacker News?
You're insane. It would not only be the number one story on hacker news, we would be ordering airstrikes and passing emergency bills to send billions more to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan.
reply