Why is it the web seems to be the one outlier environment that we care about echo chambers? Almost everywhere else seems to have some definition of relevance and propriety, also, it seems like your argument is not that diversity of thought is good, but that large echo chambers themselves are bad? I.e. you’re saying you’d rather not have a big diverse website because it risks a big echo chamber?
I think diversity of thought can just as easily be created with smaller, individual websites. For example, one person can say something and then I can quote them on my website. Only the process is slower and invites less knee-jerk reacting and commenting that seems to live on our dopamine reactions. A natural speed limit created by a lack of quick-reply mechanisms would probably make everyone more thoughtful, and a friction point to responding wouldn't create crowding effects like mass upvoting/downvoting.
The internet is different I think because of it doesn't have the physical limiations of scale. In real life, a small group can get together, yes it can be a sort of "echo chamber", but they are limited by the size of their group which is usually small.
Not really, because thinking by myself can easily be modified with challenging comments. It's much easier for a person to change their mind or ideas (at least if they're open minded) without a million people egging them on. The danger is when a person becomes hyped on their ideas because of mass support for them.
> This is a hobby project and intended for learning purposes only. I do not condone cheating in any regard.
> If you are using Unibot to cheat, please take a moment to reflect on why. Cheating ruins competitive integrity, undermines genuine achievement, and leaves you feeling just as empty as before.
It is absolutely contradictory to make something like this and then say you don't condone cheating. All intellectual activity comes with responsibility, a duty that is lacking in today's society. And part of that responsibility is to evaluate whether your creation will cause good or harm and then decide to release it based on that evaluation. Because there will always be bad actors, it's important not to create or release things like this.
It's the same reason why most countries restrict the sale of automatic weapons to civilians: they don't do much good but cause much harm. There is really no good contribution to any part of society from releasing this code.
Obviously, it's just for games, but many people enjoy games and with the single action of not releasing this bot, you could improve the experience many people have by not making this available.
For a lot of people, AI is a fun journey where they create things that are amazing. And I agree, the results are quite amazing. But it's also a sad thing that the world works this way because scientists like this never think of the larger social consequences of their work. They are insulated and elevated to lofty social positions while their creations fundamentally alter the social fabric. AI is one of those things that is quite dangerous and the fact that large corporations attract people by glorifying their intellect is a recipe for disaster.
I'm not sure what this means exactly, because AI is a wide field that covers so much and angers a great many people for many different reasons.
But IMO it's pointless to hope for something else. AI at its core turns out to be pretty simple. No matter what the best intentioned scientist did, somebody else would think differently.
For example, Stable Diffusion was originally released with a filter that refused to generate porn. There's your scientist thinking of social consequences. But does anyone even still remember that was a thing? Because I'm pretty sure every SD UI in existence at this point has it disabled by default.
> For example, Stable Diffusion was originally released with a filter that refused to generate porn. There's your scientist thinking of social consequences
We would have to know their internal conversations to know whether that filter was being driven by scientific concern over social consequences or any number of business goals/concerns. We can't assume the reasoning behind it when we only have the end result.
That doesn't matter for the point I'm making: which is that this attempt (and any other) are trivially nullified by those that come next. The SD devs couldn't have created a state of affairs in which AI never ever would generate porn.
And transformer architecture is too low level to care about things like that, there was no way for the people who made the guts of the modern AI systems to make it so that they only can ever make cute fluffy kittens or give accurate advice.
So what I'm saying is that there's no timeline in which socially conscious scientists would have succeeded in ensuring the the current gen AI landscape with its porn, deepfakes and propaganda didn't come to exist.
> No matter what the best intentioned scientist did, somebody else would think differently.
This is exactly an argument that supports technological determinism. We simply can't decide -- we have no ability for oversight to stop technology from evolving. That's precisely why I think AI is so dangerous.
IMO, the dangers of AI are mostly overrated. AI is just a new fancy way of generating pictures and text. It does those things better in some regards, but the danger is the same we already had.
We're only just starting to get to the point that AI, if unconstrained, is capable enough to be dangerous. The danger is getting to the point where the not-so-bright malevolent actor can tap into AI to get detailed instructions to do something highly destructive, or have it do it on their behalf (e.g. hack into some system), that they wouldn't previously have been able to figure out just by Googling for information and trying to piece it together themself.
Of course not all malevolent actors are dimwits, but there are also many things that even a highly intelligent individual couldn't do on their own, such as a Stuxnet level attack, that AI will eventually (how soon?) be able to facilitate.
This is actually where the AI concern arguments seem to get misunderstood in my opinion.
I've never heard anyone raise serious concerns over fancier ML and generative algorithms - maybe concerns over job loss but I don't think that's what you had in mind (correct me if I'm wrong).
The more serious concerns I hear are related to actual artificial intelligence, something much smarter than humans acting on a time scale drastically different than humans.
I'm not vouching for those concerns here, but I would say its more fair to keep them in the context of AI rather than ML, LLMs, and generative tools.
It's also a way of mechanizing even further large amounts of human labor and reducing the importance of art. I guess it depends on what you value: for you, apparently a world with AI is not so bad. For me, it's disgusting.
I honestly don't see it fundamentally different from most other code. I generated images and music (PLAY instruction) with GWBASIC back when I was a teenager. I generated text with Perl.
This is just the continuation of the same old, just a bit fancier.
I don't think it is. One could say that getting hit by a car is the continuation of getting hit by a person, but one is much more powerful than another. AI allows mass creation of much more complicated works at a speed much greater than before. the PLAY instruction might create some music, but it won't be the sort of music that can compete with human-made music. AI music is very close to it.
Speed is important, strength is important. There is no obvious qualitative difference, but qualitative differences emerge due to a massive increase in complexity, just like consciousness emerges in us but (probably) not in a bacteria due to the massive difference in complexity, even though we are just a scaling of the former.
Your text generation with Perl wouldn't be able to write an article, but ChatGPT can, and the magnitude difference is precisely what we cannot handle, just like I can't be hit by a speeding car at 100km/h and survive but I'd probably walk away from being hit at 2km/h (and once this actually happened to me, without injury). Would you say there's not much difference between the two?
What I would like to see here is a discussion of whether this is a bad thing or not. I mean, I went to college (got a PhD) and I eventually quit and did something different in life that didn't even require a degree... I mean, is this a bad thing or not?
Note: I'm not saying that it ISN'T a bad thing. Just thinking that any discussion about boys not applying to college also needs to answer whether it's really a bad thing for them. I'm just genuinely curious if this shift has ALSO implied a shift of worse economic outcomes for men.
(And we need to be subtle and careful here, too. Because technically I make much less money than before I quit my "degree job" but I'm also a lot happier, too.)
A college credential is a gatekeeping device for access to "good" jobs, those considered high status.
Young women looking for partners are complaining that there are no "good" men, those with (among other attributes) high-paying jobs that can support them while they take time off for motherhood, and that men in general lack motivation. This (they say) largely explains why young people are not getting married[1] and therefore not having children.[2]
If Davis is right, male college enrolment collapses, then this will be seen as making a bad situation worse.
2. The female dilemma: women want equal pay with men, but each woman wants a man who earns more than she does.
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Edit: downvoted? parent says he would like to see a debate, and I make remarks in hope of having that debate, but someone prefers to just downvote rather than marshal their thoughts and contribute. That's disappointing.
> Edit: downvoted? parent says he would like to see a debate, and I make remarks in hope of having that debate, but someone prefers to just downvote rather than marshal their thoughts and contribute. That's disappointing.
It's sad that you got a downvote (I didn't do it) but there is a definite bias in these forums towards even sound arguments if they cause too much cognitive dissonance...
I upvoted, I'm just one person though, and I have no doubt the malign people or more likely bots, will do the same to this response as well.
Personally, I would be in favor of a public listing of who downvoted what with an ability to flag accounts that do so abusively, in a way that prevents them from voting for a time in a non-transparent way. They need to have cost imposed on their actions.
I find an aberrant amount of downvotes in specific subjects like this one, where instead of seeking actual discussion, calls for discussion are used as a prop to induce response so they can then use the karma system structure as torture through Maoist forms. The majority displayed sentiment that isn't downvoted conveniently seems to follows socialist/leftist/communist sentiment (and I'm sure the silent majority of rational people out there would never follow destructive delusions like that).
Lower your karma to make what you say disappear to distort the sentiment, once invisible, have bots respond caustically, they squelch you to by extension isolate (a required component). Make you fear posting anything that is not deemed the collective narrative since downvotes and negative karma ban your account at a point.
Its all quite surreal, and at the same time vile, since it actively promotes the delusional overriding reasoning and critical thinking. Very destructive towards society as a whole since it drives people to go off the rails based on what they see.
There are many problems with the gatekeeping going on. As for your comment about young women, torture induces maladaptive behavior, and the definition of torture today does not require physical duress. Without a doubt the issues women face today are a result of their own psychology working against them that is very gender specific. I could go deep on this (as I've researched quite a bit), but needless to say its fairly obvious that the brittle coercive systems we have to interact with today have burnt bridges, and destroyed the subtle environment needed for us to propagate. There is benefit in national adversaries targeting children of the following generation so they destroy themselves.
Men lack motivation because the world today is not objectively driven. They have been lied to repeatedly throughout their life, and deprived of the tools a real education provides which are needed to discern rational truth and take action. They lack agency, and means and are hopelessly dependent on systems that have been failing to ruin progressively.
Boys are being taught maladaptive behavior through media, Girls too. Behaviors that cause friction, interference, disunity, and failure (learned helplessness); poisoning the generational water hole.
There are also malign entities engaging in making these things worse, to make their business model work, while dually performing the same methods that the USDA uses to eradicate certain parasites through sterility and eugenics (without informed consent). This is what the two monopolies that own all the brands of dating apps are doing, they don't match people up based on long-term compatibility; its often the opposite. A forever customer is a customer whose biological clock was run out through false perception.
You need to be able to economically support children. You need to be married to have children. You need to be compatible and pair bond to get married. Anything in this pipeline fails, birthrate drops; for reference a birthrate of 2 is replacement, we are at 1.6 and its dropping significantly.
There are also subtle gender differences in psychology that are being targeted. Men as a demographic trend towards promiscuity in mate selection relative to the amount of options available, women trend the opposite way choosing less partners overall based on the perceived pool of prospective mates. An entire county vs. a Bar, which do you think results in more matches?
The more prospective candidates, the less selections they make. They also don't date down, so everyone chases the 1% they never have a chance at.
They have in effect by becoming degreed, and through other manipulations done on them, eliminated the candidate pools of prospective mates where most will be childless and alone (as happens when the ratio exceeds the other with this as a requirement). Pipelines follow fairly predictable outcomes.
Its sad because its so subtle, and unbelievable as a result of lacking the necessary tools to recognize.
Most women don't even realize its happening in a conscious way. Its just where have all the good men gone, and through deficits in gender psychology; they've mostly all been filtered out, and the prospects worsened on the Men's side.
Its why many end up being involuntarily celibate living alone with their companion animals. Old maids.
Its a silent destruction that naturally accompanies breaches of certain economic truths. Adam Smith wrote about the requirements for producers and consumers (in purchasing power). The first pillar broke in the 1970s, that was wages purchasing power being suppressed so jobs could no longer support a wife, and three children (to risk manage 1 surviving to have children themselves). The second is expected to break between 2025-2030 collapsing the economy to non-market socialism through currency debasement (money printing).
The old as a cohort (those 55+) are and have in a very real way hoarding the resources needed to propagate us forward, and through false belief, and changes they've made towards that first purpose stripping agency (over their lives), ensured the environment for the young is so disadvantaged that there will be a great dying when age finally takes them. This is evident in the political power transition not taking place.
At any one time, 3 generations live side-by-side. Every 20 years political power was transferred, but that didn't happen after the baby boomers took hold of the majority in the 90s with political power, and they still hold the majority (thanks to modern medicine), but are dying in office. Front-of-line blocking any action to course correct driving the ship onto the reef in a storm.
At least in my local sphere, cringe still has meaning, and I've not heard of the uses in the article although admittedly I live under a bit of a rock. The same goes for era.
I've never heard of skibidi, sorry not sorry, dropped, or IYKYK. But I do agree that "game-changer" is overused.
The article sounds like someone complaining about words that they don't like to hear, but framed in a way to try to get others to stop saying them. It makes me cringe bigly
I gladly buy lots of used things but laptops aren't one of them. The reason is that, at least from my experience, laptops only last between 5-8 years before they become more trouble than they are worth (either they become too slow as was the case with my previous Macbook or they stop working for some unknown reason, or the battery life sucks). I've also noticed laptops get beat up easily -- the vast majority of used Macbooks have dings.
What I do instead is buy a moderately powerful new one and just use it until it dies -- I don't upgrade before the laptop is truly dead.
Hm, odd that, the newest laptop I have here is from 2016 and with that just past your threshold. It works just fine, performance is no problem, the battery holds for around 5-6 hours. Maybe it helps to say I a) don't buy Apple products and b) only use Linux? Nearly all my laptops are Thinkpads, all of them run Debian in some form or other. From the ancient (T23) through the old (T42p) to the relatively modern (P50), all of them work for their intended purposes. They are built to last, if something breaks it is easy to fix but things rarely break. The batteries are easily replaceable, the same goes for the keyboards.
In other words it is more than possible to use laptops beyond those 8 years as long as you buy the right ones. Performance is fine as long as you run the right software, i.e. not software made by a hardware vendor who depends on a regular replacement cycle.
Well, I haven't always bought Apple Products. My first laptop was a Toshiba and it lasted five years. Then I bought a used Thinkpad, I can't remember the model now but it only lasted about three years. My next computer was a thinkpad, I think a T203 or something like that, and it died after five years also (just stopped booting).
I also installed Linux on them too and the battery life was not great either. I could be an outlier but I've not had good experience with Thinkpads even though I liked them. My older Macbook actually lasted the longest.
I never bought any Apple products but did get two items gifted over the years due to seemingly standard defects which render them inoperable: a 'late 2009' 27" iMac with an inoperable video card (a standard defect in these things) which I made operable again by toasting it for 5 minutes and a 2011 Macbook Air with a broken keyboard (qwertyuio keys dead, again a standard defect in these things). To fix the latter I'll have to get an new keyboard, rip out the old one - which Apple in all its financial wisdom riveted down with some 30-odd tiny rivets so as to make it more difficult to economically replace the thing - and screw in a new one. I'm not yet clear on whether I'll go so far to revive the thing but the level of planned obsolescence in Apple products is quite disgusting to me, seasoned user of previously owned hardware.
it depends on how you use them. for my kids which are not as careful, i get more mileage out of a used laptop, because they would break a new one just as fast as a used one. (current x270 which i got used for $150 lasted about 2 years. a new one would have cost 2-3 times as much but in the hands of the kids it would not have lasted 2-3 times as long)
buying used hardware is also hit or miss. i got another used laptop for $250 which is decent, but it has some strange hardware issues that i can't pinpoint. unfortunately the choices for used hardware are limited and i could not find any comparable devices in the same price range. (any alternatives would have cost more than twice as much)
so generally, when i can afford it, i do the same as you. get something new with a good price/performance ratio and use that as long as i can.
Awesome. But the world would be even better if copyright expired after 60 years. That should be enough time for a 30-year old to get their share's worth of royalties until they're 90.
I find it bewildering that it wouldn’t, actually. I would have expected one of the earliest things in the review process happening would be to black out the submitters name and university, only to be revealed after the review is closed.
Well, the editor still sees the name of the submitter, and can also push the reviewers for an easy publication by downplaying the requirements of the journal.
I interpret it as saying that at least the system hasn't just degraded into a rubber stamp (where someone like Tao can publish anything on name alone).
I think it’s that a paper submitted by one of the most famous authors in the math field is not auto approved by the journals. That even he has to go through the normal process and gets rejected at times.
