I’d say that an increasingly more common strand is that the way LLMs work is so wildly different than how we humans operate that it is effectively an alien intelligence pretending to be human. We have never and still don’t fully understand why LLMs work the way they do.
I’m of the opinion that AGI is an anthropomorphizing of digital intelligence.
The irony is that as LLMs improve, they will both become better at “pretending” to be human, and even more alien in the way they work. This will become even more true once we allow LLMs to train themselves.
If that’s the case than I don’t think that human criteria is really applicable here except in an evaluation of how it relates to us. Perhaps your list is applicable in LLM’s relativity to humans but many think we need some new metrics for intelligence.
I still bemoan selling the first couple of years of issues to someone on ebay. I needed to get the stuff out of the basement, but feels like I should have kept them just for the technology history lessons.
I'm still looking for the very early Wired issue that has an ad that goes something like "they laughed at you when you were growing up because you were different. now they wear a uniform with their name on it. and you don't."
More and more these are feeling like they’re written for investors not users:
> Adobe is doubling down on its strategy of using AI to bring more users into its product ecosystem.
> Adobe has shipped many AI-powered features and products this year.
I’m not a professional designer but I use the creative suite enough in my contracting work to pay for it. The AI integrations thus far are laughable, more for a good laugh than practical use. I don’t have a lot of hope for this either.
If all this is a bubble I’m hopeful that it bursts soon. AI is powerful and useful but we’re so far into cramming AI features into products to satiate investment that it’s time to return to user based work.
Similar, but I think it might actually be dumber. When you take a deep dive you're jumping headfirst into things you don't understand, with the outcome largely unknown to you. When you double down on something you're already aware that it isn't working, but you persist anyway under the delusion that doing the same thing more aggressively will make your bad plan succeed.
The real stickler is that just from pure lucky timing, data centers will likely be the direct beneficiaries of the third reactor coming online at the Vogle plant here in Georgia. So taxpayers foot and will foot the bill, and meanwhile our governor and mayor are tripping over themselves giving tax breaks to data centers.
I think you’re mistaking slight natural adaption for domestication, and taking domestication for granted. Go into nature and try and train a wild wolf. Good luck! You can’t.
Domestication, in the way that we see having happened with dogs (and cattle, and chickens) takes a really long time.
We consider cats “domesticated” and yet demonstrably they are not. If they were much bigger, they’d eat us, and if set into wild, nearly all household cats immediately revert to feral.
I owned five ferrets once. Loved them so much, but came to the realization that there are animals that should be pets and animals that maybe shouldn’t (yet). I think we have many, many more generations before raccoons are at the same level as dogs.
Ironic choice: ferrets are a wholly domesticated species of weasel, bred for rat hunting. They are domesticated, by any reasonable standard I'm aware of, as are cats.
I'm sorry your experience with cats hasn't been as pleasant, but I assure you they are much more domesticated than chickens - which you seem to have little experience with. Screw eating us - they'll eat each other.
You’re wrong on several things. There’s a big difference in the kind of domestication of dogs - which we generally think of when we think of domestication - and animals who serve extracurricular domestication, ie ferrets.
I also have 2 cats, having had 2 prior. They’re great. But it’s just science that they are not fully domesticated.
I also lived on a farm as a kid.
So let’s not make assumptions to prove an incorrect point.
The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
It’s a tragedy that our own citizens are not the direct be beneficiaries of that wealth.
I think a lot about the scene in Star Trek IV when McCoy is in a hospital and says “what is this the dark ages?”
Gofundme is like a kafkaesque tragic absurdity that - hopefully - will be looked at as an indictment of the inequitable K shaped economy we’ve built, and hopefully fixed in the future.
> The United States is the wealthiest nation on the planet according to Forbes, richer than the subsequent three nations combined.
This framing by Forbes (any many others really) is insidious because it doesn't take into account the population number and how unevenly wealth is spread.
For instance, Switzerland is not a huge economy - around the 20th in the world, but its citizens enjoy an extremely high quality of life because both income inequality and incomes overall are significantly better that in the US.
Population size is usually included in those calculations. It’s typically GDP per capita.
But I couldn’t agree more that the inequality and social safety net (or lack thereof) make the numbers deeply disconnected from QoL. Which I believe is the whole point.
> As for whether this represents a "kafkaesque tragic absurdity" we would need intimate knowledge of a lifetime of financial decisions. Maybe she was really bad with money, and frittered it away in casinos. Maybe she was amazing with money, and donated to others more than will ever be donated to her.
As someone in a nation with socialised healthcare, no you don't. It's a Kafkaesque tragic absurdity, and this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
The US is maybe the only developed nation where this happens, insurance exists because massively unlikely, massively expensive events are very hard to budget for. It's not the person's fault if they didn't manage that.
The UK has socialized healthcare, and that's not going so well. Societies excel at stuff they prioritize. Pretty much all societies don't prioritize other people's tragedies.
It's definitely going better than the US, where you basically need to beg people for treatment money. I'm not sure what "not going so well" means, in that regard, since virtually every other developed country is doing better than the US on this.
I’ve lived in both Canada and the US. My grandma in Canada had to wait 9 months for a hip replacement. Even though the government provided help with paid aids, it was not a great situation.
My mom here in the states needs a hip replacement and she can’t afford it because she’s maxed Medicare.
You mentioned ambulance. My wife called an ambulance for our kid who tripped on something at a park and a rather hysterical person told her she needed to call an ambulance right away. Pressured, she did so; our kid was fine. But we then owed $3,500 for the ambulance. Though we were paying on a payment plan and never missed a payment, the bill got turned over to collections for some unknown reason. We got it sorted it out but it took about 15 hours of work to resolve and fix our credit.
I’ve found that my Canadian relatives complain often about the system but very few seem to truly understand what is good about that system.
Pick your poison. Like many things here in the US, healthcare in the US is great if you have money, bad if you don’t.
It's not that great even if you have money. Unless you're talking about the type of money needed to pay for all of your treatments out of pocket, and give you access to special private care most people don't even know exists.
My experience has been: if you have an immediate health issue with an obvious solution, you can get pretty good care. Say if you have a broken arm, gun shot wound, heart attack, stroke, etc. Anything uncommon, or that requires ongoing care, is a life sucking nightmare.
I'll give some examples from my own life. I live outside a major metropolitan area. A relative was visiting me and had a stroke in my living room. I called 911, and an ambulance appeared 5 minutes later, in 25 minutes they were in a hospital with a telemedicine link to a stroke expert. The expert said they needed to be brought to a downtown hospital so they were sent there by helicopter. One of the two best neurosurgeons in the city performed an endoscopic removal of the clot and saved their life.
Contrast this with a different relation who struggles with chronic pain and spine problems and has spent the last 20 years bouncing around various doctors, battling insurance companies, pharmacies, waiting to be seen, waiting endlessly for specialists, tests, and having to keep track of all of their information themselves because the system is fragmented and every office wants a complete restatement to their medical history.
Yeah, exactly, I don't know much about the NHS but I wouldn't be surprised if the recent issues are because it's getting defunded so it can be sold off to private owners.
> this sentiment of "maybe she was bad with money" sounds a bit like "maybe she was holding the live hand grenade wrong".
Yes, it does sound like that when taken as an isolated sentence fragment. I'm not sure what your point is though, since no reasonable system of economics could possibly solve for people holding the metaphorical live hand grenade wrong.
I think the sentiment is not that generosity to those in need is bad, but that something bad must be causing so many to be in such desperate need.
It may be relevant that the US has higher health-care costs than every other country in the world except for Switzerland, but not because it's providing better care. Many countries have better outcomes.
The fact that you need intimate knowledge is evidence of the Kafkaesque nature. It describes a world where virtue doesn't exist except for the case of financial planning (which often equates quite well to luck).
Based on my understanding of Kafka, to fit the definition, funerals would be essential goods whose costs should be socially guaranteed. In reality, a funeral is a discretionary event about the deceased and for the living. Crowdfunding for the benefit of the crowd is not an inversion of responsibility, it's simply voluntary collective spending.
You could say it's an inversion of societal norms, but that's not Kafkaesque.
My apologies, I misread the original article and I was left with the impression that the GoFundMe was only for end-of-life and funeral costs. I must have missed the standfirst, which is where it was described as a "cancer fundraiser".
The Churchill line is about democracy, but the adapted version is a common variation. It works as a standalone maxim without need of attribution to some famous person.
I don't know if you've noticed, but internet discussions collectively can't seem to avoid "no true Scotsman"-ing what counts as capitalism, likewise its alternatives.
I've seen some people on HN criticise the "socialist" healthcare of the nordic countries on the basis of what Stalin was like, and others saying that China as is today is each of communist and capitalist depending on the point the poster wants to make.
I also clicked through ten pages of Google search results for "capitalism is the worst economic system, except for all the others", each of which showed the literal quotes in the preview excerpts, at which point I became too bored to continue.
I mean, how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar here?
And isn't single-payer state-funded healthcare the scaled version of a small town passing the plate around anyway?
As I think about it, gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have online social networks strong enough to fundraise. We don't hear about those who aren't able to because in the Jia Tolentino definition of "silence," they are not able to express that need online.
> Maybe she was really bad with money
I guess I fundamentally disagree that a kind of Dave Ramsey level of financial saving is a prequisite for healthcare. Indeed, I'd argue that casinos are a symptom, not a problem, of a system in which the only "viable" way out is gambling - again another tentpole in a complicated kafkaesque system.
I agree that single-payer baseline healthcare is the obviously correct answer. The experiment has been run countless times globally, and there's enough evidence to put this beyond debate. Rebecca's circumstance isn't Kafkaesque, it's merely adding to that mountain of evidence.
> how is "healthcare" from 500 years ago the bar
I agree completely, but it's not Kafkaesque for a person to ask one's own community for voluntarily contributions in their time of need, just because that community happens to be online.
> gofundme is even more kafkaesque in that it gatekeeps fundraising to those who have [strong] online social networks
There's nothing Kafkaesque about a popular person having more opportunities than an unpopular person. And there's nothing inherently capitalist about it either. This is human nature, nothing more. I would be far more concerned about an economic system that sought to "guarantee equality" in a way that reduces the individual's incentive to be kind to others.
Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.
If you look at [1] you can see some derivations from Milkdrop/Project M.
There were a lot of other, good visual plugins and software. VJ software, specifically, but also Libvisual just abstracts input and output, therefore allowing you to use all of these (supported) visualization plugins on any supported media player. It isn't much developed anymore these days, but this is the correct way forward.
Looking at the actors in Livisual [3] G-Force is decent but also a couple may be missing from earlier Libvisual releases. You may also like Lemuria [4]. Winamp's AVS is also FOSS [5].
Agreed. I would love Plex (or PlexAmp and then cast) to have some built in visualizations. And I have no idea why some of those streaming EDM channels on YouTube aren't doing music visualizations rather than ten second loops of video.
There are some visualizers in the Mac App Store. I'm using Ferromagnetic right now and like it well enough. There are still visualizers in Apple Music left over from the iTunes days but they're kind of lame.
I stumbled onto one years ago by accident, maybe an Easter egg or something. I came back to my computer (Mac) after several hours of iTunes playback to see a hitherto unknown visualization running, with fairly primitive-looking graphics by today's standards. It was not any of the visualizations available in iTunes at the time.
I filed a bug on it with Apple and they got back to me asking how the hell I had invoked this, because they'd never seen it before. Never did get to the bottom of it.
>Man, seeing the visualizations here reminded me of how great it was to load up some music in Winamp (downloaded via soulseek), turn on the geiss visualizer, and get stoned.
You can still do that. Winamp runs just fine on Windows 10/11.
This feels like someone in a marathon deciding to quit because they just ran really well for the last 10 minutes, with the assumption that since they were running really fast there’s no reason to think they won’t keep running fast. It’s deeply flawed logic.
The other issue is that while he might be right, the worst and biggest consequences of being wrong will not affect Bill. Or, frankly, anyone reading this comment.
It’s such a complicated problem for us humans because we often struggle to conceptualize beyond our own tribes, let alone humans who won’t exist for decades.
But the problem is that IF climate scientists are right - and other than a few cheery cherry picked stats, Bill has no evidence saying otherwise - then the longer we do nothing the bigger the impact.
Will humanity die? Probably not. But will it drastically affect QoL for nearly all humans on the planet save the 1%? Probably.
Right, but he knows this and he's drawing up his knowledge and solutions. You can point this out, but what solutions do you offer? And I'm sure you can paste some articles with solutions, but I mean actual solutions that people would be willing to change for, not hypotheticals.
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