wpietri

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211.
by wpietri 2y ago
I think everybody has this sort of cognitive dissonance, albeit perhaps in different amounts; we just allocate it differently. And I think society is set up to help that. For example, I like animals and I eat meat. Would I kill a cow? No, b
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by wpietri 2y ago
I wouldn't say that LLMs have "ignited". I think they've gotten steadily better at autocomplete, but I don't think they've crossed any important threshold on the way to the sort of autonomous intelligence that
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by wpietri 2y ago
No. Fraud and theft are concepts that are broader than whatever legal jurisdiction you happen to be in at the time. Imagine that somebody gets one of those libertarian paradises up and going. Or imagine a failed state or a post-apocalyptic
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by wpietri 2y ago
And I think it has to be both. I think the organization has to develop a culture where boundary-setting is normalized and encouraged. There are plenty of people who will burn themselves out without thinking twice about it. (I used to be one
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by wpietri 2y ago
So one, I don't think you know what the word "impostor" means. If somebody faked your wife's identity, I think you could be reasonably upset even if she could "do the job" adequately, and it would be weird inde
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by wpietri 2y ago
If you look at the history of fraud, people are always coming up with new ways to steal from people that are at the margins of legality. Consider the category "wire fraud", for example. It's not like some lawmakers looked at
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by wpietri 2y ago
And I think there are plenty of people who aren't even consciously intending to scam. A while back I interviewed somebody for a 100%-time contracting position that will convert to employment. His LinkedIn listed him involved in a coupl
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by wpietri 2y ago
Yes, but I'm not sure he fully took in the lesson. Did they really build a bunch of separate domain-specific ontologies? Or, given that it's one system, did they build a universal ontology that's just a big mess? The lesson I
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by wpietri 2y ago
What a great shutdown notice. Clear, frank, thoughtful. And it's nice to see software maintainers respecting their own time.
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by wpietri 2y ago
> Another signal for me is the fraction of xooglers in the engineering team. In which direction?
221.
by wpietri 2y ago
I don't think there's anything wrong with exploring a field for decades. There are many scientists who have a mix of successes and failures. But this guy spend his whole life and many years of other people's lives trying one
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by wpietri 2y ago
"Their topmost distinction was between things with souls and things without souls. And large trees were in the former category, whereas small trees were in the latter category…" This reminds me deeply of Borges: https:/&#x2F
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by wpietri 2y ago
You really seem to be having a hard time grasping what I'm saying. I guess I'll take one more swing at it just in case. Energy was not a commodity until the industrial revolution. If you want to say that you have your own personal
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by wpietri 2y ago
I don't think you have much standing to complain about negative posts. I'm also not defending it, although I might be willing to try if you asked nicely. My point is that that your complaint is pretty hollow. "Oh no, somebody
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by wpietri 2y ago
That just sounds like "stubbornly" to me. People are often stubbornly wrong (or right), but in your examples I don't see anything that would make me call it religious in the sense of the comment you're replying to. Which
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by wpietri 2y ago
Again, for most of agricultural history, energy was not used to grow food. The key commodity was land. The concept of energy you're referring to didn't come along until the 1800s, a couple thousand years after people invented the
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by wpietri 2y ago
Could you say more about the hosted service you're using? It's pretty rare I hear from an actual user.
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by wpietri 2y ago
No, in my reading you were conflating the financial trader bucket and the socially positive bucket in a way that minimizes the socially negative bucket. Which is a very common defense of crypto. Your analogy, driving cars, certainly primes
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by wpietri 2y ago
That's one way to look at science although it's a bit religious for my tastes. But it if were fully self-correcting, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Understanding why it isn't and how it fix it are social science
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by wpietri 2y ago
Have you considered politely asking for what you want?
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by wpietri 2y ago
I thought that too, but we're seeing increasing spillover. Molly White points out that the crypto "industry" spent $200m to influence US elections. That we know of.
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by wpietri 2y ago
That also doesn't make much sense to me. Money existed long before energy was a significant commodity. Like, thousands of years before.
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by wpietri 2y ago
Spot on! Funnily, I think this is also true of most traditional religions. I have known a variety of thoughtful and sincere religious people over the years. They have studied extensively and deeply engaged with the human meaning of the word
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by wpietri 2y ago
Agreed, but as I mention elsewhere, my point is more about people react to the sustained high profits before they have the context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42432352
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by wpietri 2y ago
All currencies are built on trust. The reason the wildcat banking era failed was lack of trust. The reason various national currencies failed was never about resources, but lack of trust in the government behind the currency. The USD has be
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by wpietri 2y ago
Sure, although I think it gets easier as time goes on; there a are lot of innovative people out there. But my point here is more about the reaction to it. If people say, "Well they're making lots of money, so they must be great in
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by wpietri 2y ago
And where it's also hard to tell who is doing the work! I'm reminded here of psychics and cold readers. They can easily convince people that they have great mental powers by outputting ambiguous text and letting the consumers of i
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by wpietri 2y ago
My take is that if the LLM outputs text for humans to read, that's not an agent. If it's making API calls and doing things with the results, that's an agent. But given the way "AI" has stretched to become the new &q
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by wpietri 2y ago
It can be helpful to think of the Econ 101/homo economicus view of the world as something more akin to a secular religion. And I don't mean that in a particularly bad way; most religions package a bunch of useful concepts (e.g., t
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by wpietri 2y ago
That's not the right question. There are three buckets. The biggest bucket is going to be purely financial trades. This is true whether you're trading wheat or copper or oil or whatever. Anybody who thinks they can make a dime but

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