@OldCavalry @NidaKirmani Or have starved to death, or have watched at least one of your children starve to death.
English
AmatureTraitor
667 posts
@NidaKirmani Without 'corporate farming' you'd be a serf/slave.
English
A more apt analogy would be comparing those who refuse AI with those who resist corporate farming methods, which have decimated our food systems, displaced poor farmers, damaged our health, & destroyed our planet.
Stijn Noorman@stijnnoorman
People who refuse to use AI are like farmers who refused to use tractors.
English
@CryptoUB This isn’t new information. They tried this and it didn’t work. It has nothing to do with crackpot losers who believe in chem trails or whatever.
English
@KelseyTuoc @esterdiol @brazen__head My grandfather spent two years of his childhood bedridden with polio. He was lucky to survive, and we’re all lucky to have vaccines and modern medicine.
English
My ancestors buried half their children. All mine are alive. My ancestors' house had a dirt floor. Mine is wood. I have indoor plumbing, I have hot water, I have never in my life hauled a full bucket half a mile and I probably never will. Do you know how rare it is, in human history, for small children to wear shoes? Mine have multiple pairs. I can speak to my relatives who live thousands of miles away, for free, at any time. Video, if we want video. With machine translation, if we speak different languages.
The original Library of Congress had 740 books in it. I have more than that. If I run out of books in my home my local public library has 350,000. If I want to take a hundred books with me on vacation, they all fit on a device that fits in my purse.
I have heat in the winter and AC in the summer and a washing machine and I have never, ever, ever had to scrub a dress clean by hand in the stream. I can look up recipes from more than a hundred different countries and I've tried dozens of them. I ride a clean and modern train across my city for $4, or take a robot taxi if I'm out too late for the train. I donate $40,000 every year to the cause of getting healthcare to the world's poorest people and even after the donations I never have to think about whether I can afford a book, or a pair of shoes, or a cup of coffee.
There is a great deal more to fight for, of course. I hope that our descendants will look back on our lives and list a thousand ways they're richer. Maybe we ourselves will do that, if some of the crazier stuff comes true.
But the abundance is all around you and to a significant degree you aren't feeling it only because fish don't notice water.
English
I doubt that anyone I know steals from Whole Foods, but the milieu that the article depicted, where it's normal for perfectly well-off people to steal things because why not, was really upsetting to read about, so I actually want to try to earnestly explain why you shouldn't do this just in case there's someone out there who has never had it explained to them.
When a business opens - or really, as soon as a business starts making plans to open - a defining question for the business is how it will collect payment for the goods or services it provides. If you trust the people you sell to, you can be pretty relaxed about this; send people an invoice, most of them will pay it on time, any who don't will pay it a bit late. You have to think about convenience and mistakes but not about people trying to cheat you. This saves you so, so much defensive planning to make sure you get paid. It's so much easier.
But if you're selling to the general public, you do have to think about people trying to cheat you. You have to structure the physical store so that it's hard for them to steal. You have to not carry some items that you'd like to sell, because they'd also be attractive targets to steal. If people swap price tags between items, you can't use stickers. If people put things on in the dressing room and wear them out, you need to pay someone a full time salary to monitor the dressing room.
The world that we all live in is much poorer than the world we'd live in if people didn't steal. The stores don't carry things that they could carry if people didn't steal. They don't use pricing and inventory systems that would be way easier and more convenient if people didn't steal.
But it could be much worse! If I walk down to my local Whole Foods today, items on the shelves won't be locked behind sheafs of plastic - that is only worth it when the background rate of stealing is much higher than it is at my local Whole Foods. When more people steal, businesses have to further intensify security, or go out of business.
When you shoplift, you directly and unambiguously impoverish your community. You make prices higher for everybody else, you make stores less usable for everybody else, or you make businesses not viable that would otherwise be viable. The direct impact each time is small, but it's a lot larger than the direct impact of taking some trash out of the trash can to throw on the ground, or pouring just a tiny bit of poison into your local river, and most people have a deep, instinctive abhorrence of antisocially wrecking your community like that.
So don't steal.
The other thing that it seems possible some people might not understand is that while you might have a social circle that is incredibly nihilistic and cynical and thinks that everybody steals, in fact this is not true. Most people do not steal. Most people, if they learn that you steal, will lose more respect for you than you had to lose. I don't know anyone who has shoplifted except 'as a kid/teenager'. It is not always the case that virtue is rewarded and vice is punished but even before you bring the legal system into it, the risk-reward tradeoff of having everybody you know know that you steal things sometimes is absolutely terrible. Who would hire someone who steals things? Who would trust them around a vulnerable person? Who would want to live in a society with someone who will delightedly and routinely wreck it for the slightest personal benefit?
I hope that "Gina" turns her life around. I hope that Gina realizes that she needs to. And if you have been told that it's just a corporation or that having ethics is lame or that if you think about it, other bad things happen too, like wage theft, so that means stealing is okay, I hope you really, actually, think about whether you'd accept any of those as excuses for anything else.
Josh Barro@jbarro
People hate the tone of this piece, but my view is you don't need a journalist to tell you wrong things are wrong. (She does also call her thieving friends nihilists.) It's weird to be surrounded by thieves though -- if people I know steal from Whole Foods, they don't admit it.
English
@DouthatNYT So basically as long as the administration says it’s legal, OpenAI will allow them to do whatever they want. Cool. This admin is known for its upstanding moral code and commitment to truth.
English
The admin's explanation of what we're doing here, FTR:
x.com/UnderSecretary…
Senior Official Jeremy Lewin@UnderSecretaryF
For the avoidance of doubt, the OpenAI - @DeptofWar contract flows from the touchstone of “all lawful use” that DoW has rightfully insisted upon & xAI agreed to. But as Sam explained, it references certain existing legal authorities and includes certain mutually agreed upon safety mechanisms. This, again, is a compromise that Anthropic was offered, and rejected. Even if the substantive issues are the same there is a huge difference between (1) memorializing specific safety concerns by reference to particular legal and policy authorities, which are products of our constitutional and political system, and (2) insisting upon a set of prudential constraints subject to the interpretation of a private company and CEO. As we have been saying, the question is fundamental—who decides these weighty questions? Approach (1), accepted by OAI, references laws and thus appropriately vests those questions in our democratic system. Approach (2) unacceptably vests those questions in a single unaccountable CEO who would usurp sovereign control of our most sensitive systems. It is a great day for both America’s national security and AI leadership that two of our leading labs, OAI and xAI have reached the patriotic and correct answer here 🇺🇸
English
What are we even doing here?
x.com/sama/status/20…
Sam Altman@sama
Tonight, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DoW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems. The DoW agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DoW also wanted. We will deploy FDEs to help with our models and to ensure their safety, we will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.
English
@TrungTPhan Ezra Klein talks about that a lot. AI gives you a damn good rough draft, but when you write your own rough draft, that’s when you get some of your best ideas. Skipping the work means you miss what was rewarding about it often times.
English
More from this Atlantic interview including this line: “AI tools are like taking a helicopter to drop you off at the site. You miss all the benefits of the journey itself.”
Link: theatlantic.com/technology/202…
English
In 2023, Terrence Tao predicted that AI would be good enough as a trusted junior co-author on technical math papers.
He believes it has hit that benchmark.
Now, he hopes for these two improvements in coming years:
▫️AI to “rate their confidence” in an answer instead of presenting it as “I’m completely certain that this is true”
▫️More interactivity and conversation for difficult problems instead of “push-of-a-button, completely autonomous workflows where you give your task to AI…and you come back and the problem is solved”
English
@benryanwriter This reminds me, I believe I have you to thank for posting something about Lonesome Dove being an amazing novel. Probably the best thing I’ve read since … maybe ever. And now I’m gonna have to watch the mini series because I heard it’s pretty damn solid. So, thank you!
English
@KelseyTuoc @johnvmcdonnell @teachthemx3 I love your work, but I’ve see you make this claim before and it strikes me as impossible. Little Women is just under 500 pages long. How is a 3rd grader reading that in a week, while doing other class work, if they are only “working” 2 hours/day?
English
@johnvmcdonnell @teachthemx3 we started a microschool in Oakland. I teach a couple of classes there. Our advanced third grade history/literature course reads a historical novel a week including Little Women and Tom Sawyer. it's not nose to the grindstone though, I think the kids do ~2 hrs a day of work.
English
If you look at the vertical alignment of mathematics, it’s easy to see how all of K-5 could be compressed into 2-3 years. For example, 2nd grade (in Texas) should compare and order numbers up to 1,200. Why stop there, then go to 100,000 in 3rd grade?
When my son was 3, he was very interested in place value. I didn’t say, “We’re only going to learn to 1,200 this year.” He understood that you can always add 1, so we went all the way to a hundred decillion.
Niels Hoven 🐮@NielsHoven
The worst part of K-12 mediocrity isn't 6th-8th grade math, it's K-5. eg: The main Common Core goals for 2nd grade math are: 1) Read numbers up to 1000 2) Add and subtract within 20 3) Count money 4) Tell time The worst part is that these goals have become a ceiling rather than floor
English
@KelseyTuoc @teachthemx3 Curious what qualifies as doing geometry? Finding the area of a rectangle? What qualifies as algebra? One sided variable equations with one step? My 3rd grader does those basics in a relatively low income NY (not NYC) public school.
English
@teachthemx3 we let kids do math at their own pace and the fastest kid was ready for prealgebra by the end of second grade and took algebra in third and is now doing geometry. people really underestimate how often their kids are being told to tread water
English
@asymmetricinfo This dude is the epitome of a pseudo intellectual. His entire post boils down to the fact that he was happier as a kid than as a middle aged man who posts too much on Twitter.
English
Almost 20 percent of GDP is healthcare and you would be very, very upset to be denied the medical innovations of the last 30 years if you needed them. I had two teachers in high school who had heart attacks in their 30s. Both died before 50, because statins hadn't been invented.
wanye@xwanyex
I just completely reject that we are wealthier than we were 20 or 30 years ago in any way that matters. Whatever data seems to show that we are is very clearly not measuring what you want to measure. I don’t think burrito taxis matter. I think the phones have made us miserable. I don’t think the advancements in communication are important. I don’t care that the cars have more features. I don’t think any of this stuff matters like even a little bit. And I certainly wouldn’t trade my country for more of it. I think we long ago reached a level of comfort that’s sufficient. We aren’t hungry. We aren’t cold. We aren’t worked to death in fields. I wouldn’t trade my family for more stuff. I wouldn’t trade my country for more stuff. The people who see all this so-called material wealth and think that the opportunity costs are just too large to have children or that we need to give away the country to foreigners to keep the train rolling are in my view demented, deranged, lost. And their addiction to antidepressants and other mood-altering pills seems to confirm it.
English
@benryanwriter Hard agree. I thought the first half was great and it really took a nosedive during the second.
English
@benryanwriter How could any literate person read that piece and call it “a glowing profile”? I guess literacy and comprehension are two different skills.
English
Remember when Graydon Carter said that irony was dead? Well, since then, we’ve also seen a complete collapse in people’s capacity for inference and to digest subtext. If a profile of a bad person doesn’t open with “Clavicular is bad” then people are lost.
Sam Jeske@Sam_Jeske
the New York Times wrote this guy a glowing profile 2 days ago btw
English
@Stoiiic Great read. The sad thing is, Kahneman himself said in an interview with Sam Harris that he falls victim to all of the biases constantly. These are bugs in our software. Knowing them helps, but still…we is what we is.
English
If you're seeing this on your timeline, haven't read this book
and you're a trader, investor, founder, aspiring leader, in the field of data science, economics, marketing, business or want to be able to think clearly:
This is your reminder to grab a copy, audiobook, pdf etc.
READ IT.
English
@asymmetricinfo Agreed. Anytime I talk with someone who thinks AI is overblown/hype, they’ve never used a paid tier, never used codex or CC, and stopped using ChatGPT before “thinking” was released. It’s really a lack of imagination in where this all goes given the major leaps in two years.
English
I may quibble with the timeline, which I think underweights institutional and regulatory constraints, but I think it is directionally correct, and while I’m open to being talked out of that view, it needs to be by someone who has put significant time into using frontier models.
English
If “AI-generated word salad” can convince a bunch of folks that AI will be the biggest disruption since man tamed fire … well, you should update your priors in favor of AI being incredibly disruptive.
Jeffrey Bilbro@jeff_bilbro
It's depressing how widely shared and read this is. It's AI-generated word salad posted by someone with a vested interest in spreading AI hype. AI is "big," I guess, but its effects will be much more complicated and variegated than this "essay" implies.
English
@CryptoUB Doesn’t Saylor buy billions of dollars of BTC every week and it barely moves the needle? So this is like 1/50th that…not sure it’s huge news.
English
Huge news.
It’s wild that headlines like this don’t even show up on the chart anymore.
It's just... normal now.
zoomer@zoomerfied
[ ZOOMER ] GOLDMAN SACHS DISCLOSES $1.1B IN BTC, $1B IN ETH, $153M IN XRP AND $108M IN SOL - REPRESENTING A 0.33% CRYPTO ALLOCATION: FILING
English
@settingthetempo @Trader_XO I’ve never hit a token limit on codex. Hit them constantly on Claude. Claude is better at design imho but codex is just as good at everything else
English
@Zepp1978 Dune. Anything by Villenueve is > anything Peter Jackson ever did.
English
I certainly didn’t think I’d still be chasing that high 25 years later to no avail.
Susana Imaginário - Authoress@Chronodendron
I was fortunate to see the LOTR trilogy in the cinema when it first came out. Back then, we knew how amazing these movies were, but we figured this was just the beginning, not the end. It's bittersweet to think we witnessed peak cinema during those years... The future looked so bright precisely because we were at the top. Everything has gone downhill since then.
English
@PermabullNino For sure. I have a feeling there’s gonna be a few fake outs before we get easy mode green lit. Either way, sitting on my hands and wishing I sold when we lost the range in November
English
@RyanSchooner Def factors to consider. Which is why I’m fine waiting for the trend to change first
English
if $BTC reclaims this recent range breakdown i agree with this
even if you dont snipe bottom, there will be ample time and opportunity
Cæsar 🏦@PARABOLIT
The crazy thing right now Is that we are entering EASY mode 2026 will be the easiest year of all time, almost identical to 2017 It doesn’t look like it now, that’s because it’s always darkest before dawn We are all going to make it bros
English
@_Checkmatey_ lol. Bro, you were telling people to buy the dip all the way down and charging them to do so. I remember you chastising Will Clemente for being bearish at sub 50k before it nuked to sub 20.
English
The fear is becoming palpable.
The excuse narratives are in full form.
Closer than you think.
English
@bearlyai I mean. It looks really good. But it’s a shit ad. Maybe they should have let AI come up with the concept as well?
English