@LouisIngenthron i could be grasping for straws, for sure. but there could be a shift too! he’s been so egregious these last few months, maybe i’m projecting, but i can’t help but think it’s had an impact.
@LouisIngenthron i’m not sure we’re disagreeing? at the presidential, R primary level, sure, that base’ll lap it up if they don’t like someone better. (which they probably will, i think.)
but here in FL, i think he misinterpreted his success in November as a mandate for his radicalism. but i think persuadable voters went for him because he seemed competent and they bought his COVID story, but his behavior since has persuaded a preponderance of them from him.
@DetroitDan @paul So, "puțin" means "little", "mai puțin" means "less", in Romanian, so there's that!
"Pay electricity at two times less" is the repeated E-Energy subject…
@LaLa_Lyds truly an act of generosity then!
@curtosis they'll hire different ones soon enough, as soon as they understand what profit centers they need blessed.
the wonderful thing about intellectual pluralism is that, except in the most cut and dry technical sciences, there are always well credentialed people on the side of the argument you need them to be.
So much of US politics is an anticontest over which side are tyrants. COVID restrictions, along with "woke" sensibilities that made people feel they had to put caution before candor, helped Republicans make a case Democrats are tyrants.
But then DeSantis—failing to understand the basis for his own success, wanting to tack right for Presidential primaries—started ostentatiously curtailing liberties: reproductive rights, academic freedom, much more.
Chickens coming home
@elbowspeak (for good or ill, i still do a fair amount of it.)
@curtosis @dpp my view is risks and harms aren’t going to be prevented internally by wisdom. google hires lots of ethicists over the years, they still manipulate + surveil us. risks and harms are going to be managed by a mix of rules and incentives on operators and new institutions more resilient to those harms. lucrative oligopoly creates a situation in which it becomes harder in practice, not easier, to regulate harms compared to a competitive, low margin world.
maybe flying private is “morally wrong” when everybody who does everything for you fly coach if they fly at all.
or perhaps there are certain people that morality binds but does not serve, and others morality serves but does not bind (to paraphrase Wilhoit’s Law).
@dpp (the most optimistic bit of the AI explosion, as far as i’m concerned!)
@paul so delicious.
@paul my inbox filtered on subject:biden. try it at home! (if your inbox hygiene, like mine, is horrible.)
dark brandon?
Filtering an e-mail inbox on "subject:Biden" reveals a lot of dark and scary teasers. e.g. "Is Biden's Executive Order the End of America as..." (I haven't read the rest.)
@zorinlynx it’s hard to live here. we moved here 9 months ago, would not have if we’d known how sharp and hard the politics would turn.
@wizzwizz4 (darn!) 🙂
i don’t really understand how unicode in DNS domain names works. would it be possible to set up a `rm -rf /` tld? https://mastodon.social/@dangillmor/110380125837980409
@djc (i think it’s a problem domain like a lot of problem domains where there are tradeoffs surrounding centralized control, and the different weights you put on those trade-offs will lead to quite opposite styles of solutions.)
@djc i agree that, at the margin, recent advances make the AI catastrophist story less implausible than it seemed five years ago!
but i don’t think it’s been enough to alter what was true then, that this story describes a set of risks much lower priority to address than a lot of quite immediately plausible deeply terrible uses and abuses of AI that don’t involve any kind of diabolical autonomy.
@djc i agree it has been surprising! but the question of a capacity for accuracy rather than mere verisimilitude is essential to evaluating apocalypse scenarios. you can’t plot to take over the world as a mere exuberant brainstormer often indifferent between a superficially plausible model of the world and an accurate one. 1/
@djc the AI community itself suffers from this. it is disproportionately populated by “g” (general intelligence) / IQ enthusiasts (who perceive themselves as blessed in this dimension). 2/
@djc but in terms of accomplishing real things in the real world, many capabilities are necessary, some of which don’t correlate or might correlate inversely to IQ test proficiencies. MENSA braggarts notoriously don’t cure cancer. only institutions that may include them among others do. 3/
@djc i think the “foom” story starts with a very scalar model of capability. a thing is “smart” enough to develop a smarter thing, recurse, voila the singularity. 4/
@djc but i think that gets you more to synthetic VanGoghs cutting off their silicon ears than, say, the ecosystem of capabilities that makes a WWII-style war effort (even a physics heavy Manhattan Project) possible. 5/
@djc and “judgment”, being able to calibrate the accuracy of superficially plausible conjectures, being able to choose in which direction its best to err given uncertainties and fallibilities and where you’s start again post-failure is about the most basic capability. 6/
@djc systems that include LLMs certainly will include this. they already do: the apocalyptic AI is the profit-seeking joint stock firm as it has been for centuries. i’m not sure how much exuberant LLMs much alter that ling-running apocalypse. /fin
@elbowspeak i think a lot of us are suffering from, grieving, how exceptional the postwar period was, how difficult it will be to restore anything like how many of us experienced that period, when during the period we could just extrapolate to stability and greater affluence.