Are we both thinking about the same military? The one which is currently losing a war with Iran for the third time this year?

Yeah, let them try to bomb Chinese data centers honestly. Would probably be pretty funny (if no nukes are involved).

You won’t get to AGI by pumping more money into LLMs or hardware to run LLMs, it’s just not going to get you there.

To achieve true AGI there needs to be years (more likely decades) of research by a diverse variety of teams, but

1. Capitalism doesn’t think in terms of decades, it needs the big shiny toy next quarter or else the bubble pops
2. Research requires higher education and academia, and that’s woke
3. Diversity is banned

So, what you will get is overinvestment in LLMs and threats of military action to prevent competition. Good luck world!

It’s also nonsense to suggest that it’s ok to murder 100s of schoolgirls, or that trump didn’t sexually abuse children, or that the private healthcare system is somehow better than universal, or that flock is not an invasion of privacy.

And yet for some reason only trans people were singled out as unworthy of protection somehow, even though their lives are currently being destroyed in the US.

Bikes cost way less to buy and maintain then than cars, therefore economically disadvantaged people can more likely afford them compared to cars. Building cycling infrastructure is unironically DEI because it promotes Diversity, Equality and Inclusion of road users who otherwise wouldn’t be able to use the road due to systemic injustices.

Nah bribery is illegal whether you actually pay or just promise to pay. However maybe it doesn’t matter, apparently the president can do whatever he wants and it will just be magically legal.

“Democratic Socialists of America” condemning communism is like a “Healthy Puppy Society” condemning adult dogs. What the fuck is the end goal of your project then?

Street safety and bike lanes are not a culture war

Yes they fucking are. The OP was just on the wrong side of the culture war, same as on all other subjects it looks like.

The fact that the culture war itself is bullshit propagated by capital to stop workers organizing is a separate discussion.

The basic explanation is that there are power structures in this world which suck out all the good there is in humans only for some evil rich greedy fucks to get 7% richer this year.

Life is hard, building stable communities is harder, building stable communities that will challenge those power structures is borderline impossible because the power structure will resist any changes to itself. And yet, those communities do exist because there are people who persist and manage to lead them, however flawed they are. If you join one and start working with people there, you’re way more likely to see the world as depressing because you will be fighting for the common good rather than just getting your labor stolen from you.

If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.

Pipe it into root on your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.

Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

The problem with them is two-fold:

1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.

Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about

Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.

way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders

What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner

Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.

five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.

Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation and scams. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil than by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.

I think it’s more about how this doesn’t follow the usual rule for adjective agreement. By that rule it would be le manteau blanc / la veste blance, but that sounds weird and un-French I suppose so “blanche” it is. (I don’t know French very well so take this all with a grain of salt)

Looking from the outside and reflecting a bit, it sounds so weird and lowkey racist that so many people are focusing so much on the epstein files. There’s literally an ongoing genocide where bombs sent on trump’s order have killed tens of thousands of children and brutally maimed tens of thousands more. There’s literally an ongoing illegal war of aggression, started unprompted by trump, continued by trump, where trump’s army has bombed a girl’s elementary school with hundreds of deaths, and has killed a lot more children since. He is obviously a child murderer, in plain sight, nobody in his admin is denying or even questioning that part. There is no need for any blackmail lists which had years to ruminate and be redacted/edited in the bowels of the FBI, his child murder spree is documented in every major news outlet for the last year.

I feel like the main reason people are fixated on the epstein files is because those children were mostly “western” (americans or trafficked from europe). Which in some twisted way might make sense, as I’d think his supporters would be racist and care more about american children being abused and killed than about brown kids on the other side of the world. But, like, at this point I’m not sure that a significant percentage of his base would care if he personally abused their daughters.

Looking forward to Iranian contributions to github.com/nixos/nixpkgs following their investigation & improvements of software on that thing.

I’m half-joking but fuck how much I hate anduril and their invasion of the nix community

The fact it had an attachment point on it is so hilarious to me for some reason. Almost like it was begging to be caught in exactly this way.

It depends on whether this is about retiming existing lights (which is relatively cheap) or building new ones. Retiming existing lights is fine, building new ones just shows that engineers don’t care about the problem and would rather waste millions of $ on a non-solution.

I think a better response is “we don’t need to convince you stop liking oligarch boots, the revolution is coming whether you like it or not”

I don’t want traffic lights. If you design your cities properly (with no personal cars) traffic lights are not needed at all. Outside cities traffic lights don’t make sense anyways, intersections there are better off as roundabouts.