Except that may have been a fluke:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11109-019-09528-x

I try too, but it’s frustrating. I just wish I knew of a good technique that didn’t involve out-and-out lying. Because it’s hard to compete when someone’s being spoon-fed misinformation and disinformation that’s carefully crafted to bypass all their filters, and you have to try to fight for the truth by being honest and using facts.

Ok, you’re both psychos.

4 minutes isn’t going to turn a normal hot dog into something cold. It’s going to take at least a minute or two just to be cool enough not to burn your mouth if it just came off a grill, frying pan or out of boiling water.

But, if you’re eating a hotdog that has been sitting around for an hour and it’s still warm, it most likely contains unacceptably high levels of plutonium.

It’s bizarre that our society expects us to work 9-5, but also expects us to somehow get every necessary appointment done within that same time frame.

Sure, but anything offered outside the 9-5 window is someone who has to adjust their hours so that it’s more convenient to people who work the standard 9-5. That’s why the places that tend to be open outside the 9-5 window are the ones that tend to employ the lowest-paid people. Gas stations, convenience stores, etc.

The best paid 9-5 jobs also offer employees the freedom to visit the doctor, dentist, kid’s school, etc. whenever they need to, no questions asked. It’s basically a perk that you only get if your skills are rare enough that employers have to offer it or the talent will go elsewhere. If we wanted more people to have those perks, the way to achieve it would be the same way that the 9-5 workday was created: powerful unions and violent strikes.

Wow, my comment was removed for just a mild hint that Chinese communism isn’t free from corruption?

It can happen, but often you can predict when someone will be utterly unwilling to change their mind, despite mountains of evidence.

If it’s something that someone doesn’t really have a stake in, they’re likely to follow the evidence.

But, it’s different when something is a big part of someone’s identity. Take an American gun nut: Someone who spends a lot of free time on gun-related forums. Someone who goes shooting sometimes with buddies. Someone who listens to podcasts about guns, and has a gun safe filled with favourites. That’s the kind of person who is never going to be swayed by rational arguments about guns.

Too much of their self-identity and too many of their social connections are gun-related. Changing their mind wouldn’t just mean adopting a new set of facts, it would mean potential conflicts with all their friends. It would mean leaving a social group where they spend a lot of their free time. They’d not only have to accept that they’re wrong, but that all their friends are wrong too.

Of course, there are ways to change the minds of people who are in a situation like that. Unfortunately, it mostly happens due to tragedy. Like, a gun nut will change their mind, but only when a family member kills themselves with a gun, either on purpose or accidentally. That new, and incredibly personal data point is enough to compensate for all the social difficulties related to changing your mind.

For some of them it’s “if you don’t want to risk your life in the armed forces, but really, really want other people to go and murder children and steal land so you can benefit, go study the Talmud”.

The Tragedy of the Commons was popularized by a man who was anti-immigrant and pro-eugenics, and it’s not good science. The good science on it was done by Elinor Ostrom who won a Nobel-ish prize for fieldwork showing that various societies around the world had solved the issues of the governance of commons.

The thing is, Ostrom didn’t disprove it as a concept. She just proved that with the right norms and rules in place it doesn’t inevitably lead to collapse. IMO it’s not about capitalism or communism, it’s about population. A small number of people who all know each-other can negotiate an arrangement that everyone can agree to. But, once you have thousands or millions of people, and each user of the commons knows almost none of the other users, it’s different. At that point you need a government to set rules, and law enforcement to enforce those rules. That, of course, fails when the commons is something like the world’s atmosphere and there’s no worldwide government that can set and enforce rules.

Chinese: “Or better yet, arrest and punish the bad actors in your society who support rivals to your powerbase, while not arresting the bad actors who support you.”

Americans: “Too complicated!”

It’s about as narrowly targeted a chant as you can get.

It’s not about jews. It’s not about israelis. It’s specifically the army of israel. If that’s not narrowly targeted enough, what’s acceptable? “Down with the members of the IDF who intentionally target civilians but not those members of the IDF who are willing to risk a court martial to make sure that they only attack valid military targets?” Doesn’t make a very good chant.

AFAIK you can also not join the IDF by simply being extremely religious.

The other thing that most people don’t focus on is how we train LLMs.

We’re basically building something like a spider tailed viper. A spider tailed viper is a kind of snake that has a growth on its tail that looks a lot like a spider. It wiggles it around so it looks like a spider, convincing birds they’ve found a snack, and when the bird gets close enough the snake strikes and eats the bird.

Now, I’m not saying we’re building something that is designed to kill us. But, I am saying that we’re putting enormous effort into building something that can fool us into thinking it’s intelligent. We’re not trying to build something that can do something intelligent. We’re instead trying to build something that mimics intelligence.

What we’re effectively doing is looking at this thing that mimics a spider, and trying harder and harder to tweak its design so that it looks more and more realistic. What’s crazy about that is that we’re not building this to fool a predator so that we’re not in danger. We’re not doing it to fool prey, so we can catch and eat them more easily. We’re doing it so we can fool ourselves.

It’s like if, instead of a spider-tailed snake, a snake evolved a bird-like tail, and evolution kept tweaking the design so that the tail was more and more likely to fool the snake so it would bite its own tail. Except, evolution doesn’t work like that because a snake that ignored actual prey and instead insisted on attacking its own tail would be an evolutionary dead end. Only a truly stupid species like humans would intentionally design something that wasn’t intelligent but mimicked intelligence well enough that other humans preferred it to actual information and knowledge.

And if he does step down as CEO and sell his shares, the stock will tank anyhow. The only reason it’s currently about 100x over its realistic value is that people bought into the idea that Elon was this genius who was going to… well who knows. Nothing he could have done would have justified that valuation.

Yeah, even an established creator is going to have a hard time moving their audience.

If YouTube weren’t a near monopoly it would be different. Then other companies would be competing for creators.

Making it worse is section 1201 of the DMCA. It makes it a crime to circumvent access controls. In the past, Facebook was able to grow by providing tools to interface with MySpace. People didn’t have to abandon their MySpace friends, they could communicate with them through Facebook, and Facebook could ensure that messages sent on its platform arrived to people still on MySpace. But, if you tried that today Facebook has access controls in place that make that a crime. The same applies to YouTube. Nobody can build a seamless “migrate away from YouTube” experience because YouTube will use the DMCA to block them.

The governments of the world need to bring back antitrust with teeth and force interoperability.

I’m not even convinced that an “AI tutor” is better than nothing.

Probably better than sitting in a room staring at a blank wall. But, is it even as good as playing with lego? Playing tag with friends? Drawing with crayons? Taking a pet for a walk?

We should’ve gotten a 4-day work week decades ago

Then you should have burned down Chicago decades ago.

The 5 day work week didn’t just happen because workers deserved it. It happened because they went to war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

12.2% of US workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In Europe the lowest rate is Greece at 14.2%, but most other countries are much, much higher. Right-wing Hungary is at 21.8%. Bend-over-backwards-for-US-tech-companies Ireland is at 34%. The home of the bankers, Switzerland, is at 45%. No other European country is below 50%, and the biggest economies France is at 98%, Germany is at 80% and Italy is at 100%.

Europeans may not be fully satisfied with the balance of power between corporations and workers. But, it is doing so much better than the US.

with how much productivity has gone up

How has productivity gone up?

We should already be on a fucking 3 day

Are you aware how the 5-day work week happened? It wasn’t something that workers just got when it started to make sense. There were literal street battles between striking unionized workers and cops. People were hanged by the government. It took decades.

If you want that change to happen, you need to form or join a union. Right now in the US only 12.2% of workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. That’s the 4th lowest in the OECD, with only Mexico, Costa Rica and Turkey lower. Canada is at 31%. Switzerland, one of the most right-wing countries in Europe is at 45%. Spain is at 80%, France is at 98% and Italy is at 100%.

Once people are covered by CBAs, the unions need to flex their power and go on strike.

Complaining on the Internet is not going to cause the situation to change.

All other things being equal, it would save a lot of lives to replace every human driver with a Waymo car right now. They’re already significantly better than the average driver.

But, there are a few caveats. One is that so far they’ve only ever driven under relatively easy conditions. They don’t do any highway driving, and they’ve never driven in snow. Another one is that because they all share one “mind”, we don’t know if there are failure modes that would affect every car. Every human driver is different, but every human is more or less the same. If a human sees a 100 km/h or 60 mph speed limit on a narrow, twisty, suburban street with poor visibility, most of them are probably going to assume it was a mistake and won’t actually try to drive 100 km/h. We don’t know if a robo-vehicle will do that. AFAIK they haven’t found any way to emulate “common sense”. They might also freak out during an eclipse because they’ve never been trained for that kind of lighting. Or they might try to drive at normal speeds when visibility is obscured by forest fire smoke.

There’s also the side effects of replacing millions of drivers with robo-cars. What will it do to people who drive for a living? Should Google/Waymo be paying most of the cost of retraining them? Paying their bills until they can find a new job? What will it do to cities? Will it mean that we no longer need parking lots because cars come and drop people off and then head off to take care of someone else? Or will it mean empty cars roaming the city causing gridlock and making it hell for pedestrians and bikers? Will people now want to live in the city because they don’t need to pay for parking and can get a car easily whenever they need one? Or will people now want to live even farther out into the suburbs / rural areas because they don’t need to drive and can work in the car on the way into the city?

Personally, I’m hopeful. I think they could make cities better. But, who knows. We should move slowly until we figure things out.

a silicon valley AI project to put transit workers out of work

Silicon valley doesn’t have objectives like “putting transit workers out of work”. They only care about growth and profit.

In this case, the potential for growth is replacing every driver, not merely targeting transit workers. If they can do that, it would mean millions fewer cars on the road, and millions fewer cars being produced. Great for the environment, but yeah, some people might lose their jobs. But, other new jobs might be created.

The original car boom also destroyed all kinds of jobs. Farriers, stable hands, grooms, riding instructors, equine veterinarians, horse trainers, etc. But, should we have held back technology so those jobs were all around today? We’d still have streets absolutely covered in horse poop, and horses regularly dying in the street, along with all the resulting disease. Would that be a better world? I don’t think so.

It’s another project to get AI money and destroy labor rights.

Waymo obviously uses a form of AI, but they’ve been around a lot longer than the current AI / LLM boom. It’s 16 years old as a Google project, 21 years old if you consider the original Stanford team. As for destroying labour rights, sure, every capitalist company wants weaker labour rights. But, that includes the car companies making normal human-driven cars, it includes the companies manufacturing city buses and trains. There’s nothing special about Waymo / Google in that regard.

Sure, strengthening labour rights would be a good idea, but I don’t think it really has anything to do with Waymo. But, sure, we should organize and unionize Google if that’s at all possible.

Transit is incredibly underfunded and misregulated in California/the USA

Sure. That has nothing to do with Waymo though.

robotaxis are a criminal misinvestment in resources.

Misinvestment by whom? Google? What should Google be investing in instead?