Barbarian

Barbarian , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

What is an example of something that is not self-regulated that was worked out well?

EU food industry works pretty well. Incidences of food-borne disease, contaminated food, etc are very rare, and you can generally trust the label says exactly what's in the food with confidence.

The regulations themselves are very complex, change depending on new evidence, and include all sorts of rule changes for events that impact the food industry.

Barbarian , 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

The Romania link is kinda misleading. That isn't a big government problem: that's a profit crushing laypeople problem. Both the communist Romanian government and the capitalist government that followed wanted to profit from many different mines even though it would destroy nearby villages.

Rosia Montana is still very controversial today. A different mine, but the same core reasoning and issues.

Barbarian , 2 days ago (edited 1 day ago)

How do you ever solve a problem if you don't acknowledge it exists?

I'm not from the US, but live in a country that is a US ally with a lot of military bases. The US election effects us. The fact the DNC is fielding an old age pensioner who should be sitting comfortably in a retirement home complaining about the birds obstructing his view against an equally old fascist is deeply worrying.

Barbarian , 7 days ago

Wait... could Just Stop Oil have done some 5D chess move here? Force Sunak to publicly claim he cares about Stonehenge just before the UNESCO report comes out?

Barbarian , 14 days ago

This is not true. At least here in Romania, the issue with colleges under communism was that there were VERY limited slots, so you had to either be the best of the best or have a high up party member in the family or as a close personal friend.

Barbarian , 13 days ago

No, I'm disagreeing. You could study anything you wanted, not what the state wanted. It was just hard to get a slot.

I guess it's similar to how it's incredibly hard to get a scholarship at a great university today. You'd hardly say that the modern scholarship system "forces you to study what the state wants".

Barbarian , 13 days ago

Yeah, that does sound very comparable to what I was talking about. Your example and mine both do not have the state deciding what university you apply to though, which is what I understood from "the state decides what you'll study".

Barbarian , 21 days ago

I'm happy with the Oxford definition: "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills".

LLMs don't have knowledge as they don't actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

If asked to answer 10*5, they can't reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren't in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.

Barbarian , 20 days ago

This is why I strictly refer to these things as LLMs. That's what they are.

Barbarian , 20 days ago

That's a strong claim. Got an academic paper to back that up?

Barbarian , 19 days ago (edited 19 days ago)

So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are "simply" more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn't cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

There's many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as "the force that pushes you downwards".

To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito's brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I'm not saying we'll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I'm just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.

Barbarian , 19 days ago

Even the question of "who" is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the "who" doing the thinking in the first place :))

Barbarian , 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

Are the concepts of freedom and working towards collective good so mutually exclusive?

Not necessarily, and I also disagree with the commenter above that without the USA suddenly the world would be singing kumbaya.

The problem was dictators seizing power in turbulent times. In Russia, Stalin abolished the soviets (A.K.A worker's councils, kinda like mega unions) in the Soviet union. I think that says a lot.

In Romania (I'm a bit better equipped to talk about this one), things were a bit different.

The original communist government (1945) was essentially a Russian puppet state that drained the wealth of Romania via war reparations. Stalinist purges happened often during this period.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Romania got a degree of independence and things were actually looking up. Society in general (infant mortality, gender equality, literacy, standard of living, etc) were all improving rapidly without Russia draining us and making decisions for us, and we didn't have a surveilance state of the scale that would come later. This was a period marked by political battles between the liberal communists and the Stalinist communists for control, with Stalinists commiting some pretty horrible atrocities (if you want nightmare fuel for some reason, look up the Pitesti experiment).

Then, 1965, Ceacescu took power. During his early years, he actually looked like a liberal (EDIT: Just to be clear: I mean a liberal communist. This means more individual freedom for citizens in a communist economy). He allowed some emigration, some free speech, and even spoke out about the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. This, at the start, did not look like a typical authoritarian communist state. Unfortunately, Inspired by the "amazing" society of North Korea in 1971, he started to make changes in the structure of society to be more like it, which included an expanded Securitate. 2 years later, harsh austerity policies to repay foreign loans led to a massive drop in living conditions, which led to riots, which led to crackdowns. Things rapidly spiralled, and the Securitate were given more and more power to keep control.

This then became the police state that everybody thinks of when they think of communism. A combination of too much power in 1 person's hands, an authoritarian imperialist overlord (Russia), and rising backlash against dropping living conditions.

Barbarian , 22 days ago

No, I'm not talking about the 1936 constitution. I meant specifically the disempowerment of local and union soviets.

I'm no expert on Russian history, so I may be misinformed about this, but as far as I understand it he put in place a series of reforms that stripped power from the local level and empowered the central committee.

Barbarian , 22 days ago

Thankfully it's not unrecoverable. They got a few more seats, but are still a relatively fringe party.

I'm heavily considering signing up as a member of Volt Romania. They weren't big enough to be on the ballot this year, but a lot can happen in 5 years.

Barbarian , 24 days ago

Linux from Scratch and Gentoo are also pathways to abilities some would call... unnatural

Barbarian , 24 days ago

Honest question: isn't OSx considered the OS of choice for video and music editing?

Barbarian , 28 days ago

It was near impossible to have an opinion contrary to the popular one

You're wrong, and you should feel dumb and embarrassed for having a wrong opinion! Come on everyone, dogpile him! /s

Barbarian , 28 days ago

It's a well known fact that advertising never works and is a waste of money. That's why the entire industry died 80 years ago, and nobody ever published an ad ever again.

Barbarian , 28 days ago

Considering Ronald McDonald was a character primarily aimed at young children, I don't think they were mentally capable of having personal responsibility at that age.

As for the parents who were pestered to buy happy meals by their children, there's like 50 ways to answer this question. I personally think that in a mentally healthy adult, personal responsibility is a factor, but it's not the only one and is balanced by social conditioning, genetic predispositions, mood in the moment, and a ton more factors.

The children who for one reason or another were brought up eating fast food are conditioned both socially and biologically to eat fast food, and breaking out of that addiction (as with any other addiction) can be very difficult, and is more complex than doing the equivalent of saying "git gud scrub".

Wow, that turned into a wall of text, sorry.

Tl;dr: it's way more complex than just "personal responsibility".

Barbarian , 1 month ago

There's an upper ceiling on capability though, and we're pretty close to it with LLMs. True artificial intelligence would change the world drastically, but LLMs aren't the path to it.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Ah, I misunderstood then, sorry. But still, even with all the investment in the world, LLM is a bubble waiting to burst. I have a hunch we will see truly world-altering technology in the next ~20 years (the kind that'd put huge swathes of people out of work, as you describe), but this ain't it.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

It's kinda funny that the whole Vanya - Viktor trans thing in S3 Umbrella Academy had his siblings behaving pretty similarly. The vibe was pretty wholesome. Basically "I don't really understand it, but you're my bro and we're trying to save the world. On with the plot!"

Barbarian , 1 month ago

I thought Umbrella Academy would be the obvious comparison due to the fact Elliot plays him

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Given how powerful and effective the strategy of cooperation and trust seem to be in humans, I find it extremely likely to be a common strategy.

I also don't think aliens lacking empathy would generally be capable of forming civilizations, so they'd be stuck at the hunter gatherer stage. It is almost a truism that amongst us humans, as empathy and trust in eachother breaks down, civilization stops functioning.

Barbarian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Gonna throw my hat into the ring here and say this kind of self-reflection and improvement is exactly how communities of any kind improve.

People have problems, stress and issues. This shit happens. The ability to say "I fucked up", then fix the fuckup and prevent similar fuckups happening in future is how we as a global society improve and become better people.

In short: everyone should attempt to be better, that's all anyone can ask.

Barbarian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

Just googled their latest 2 releases to compare. Sims 4: For Rent, a cash-grab low-effort Sims DLC, doesn't have microtransactions while Counterstrike 2 does.

EDIT: Neither does their last full game release, EA Sports WRC. Their upcoming game, F1 24 looks like it's absolutely riddled with mtx though.

Barbarian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

EA has released way more games with no games-as-service stuff in them than Valve in the past decade.

To be fair, EA has released way more games, period. This is across every category. Valve is primarily a digital marketplace company that sometimes makes a game, and has been for a long time.

Also, I didn't include EA as publisher, because it would drastically change the conversation. It's not part of Valve's overall business strategy (again, because they're primarily a marketplace company now) so it's not apples to apples. They simply don't publish externally developed games, because why would they when they run Steam?

Barbarian , 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago)

by any reasonable metric you choose Valve is at best as deeply invested in MTX

Completely agree with this. I honestly believe the best apples-to-apples metric is to look at their most popular games and compare the mtx across them, in which case Valve doesn't exactly come across as good in the comparison.

In terms of publishing, with the exception of Aperture Hand Lab (basically a little tech demo), they haven't published any third party developer's game since 2010. For the purposes of this conversation, I think it's fair to count EA subsidiaries as EA.

When you make no games you make no MTX

Absolutely, this was the counterpoint I was trying to make about the raw "number of games" argument.

EDIT: Oh, I see the misunderstanding! I mean "published" as "financially backed the development, advertising and releasing of the game", not "published to their storefront". Same word with multiple meanings can be a major source of misunderstandings.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

That's actually the name of it. Stands for World Rally Championship.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

As someone who tried and failed to make sauerkraut recently and therefore went deep down the fermentation rabbit hole, this is pretty damn hilarious.

Getting the exact right parameters (salinity, PH, temperature, etc) to encourage the exact strains of bacteria that you want is actually harder than it sounds.

Or it could be that I'm dumb, that's also a distinct possibility.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

Every software project, without exception, has a testing environment.

Some even have a separate production environment too.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/6eb244b5-8f00-4121-9399-8ffe148c08e1.jpeg

Barbarian , 1 month ago

I agree with everything you say here, but I thought the setup-payoff joke structure and the fact I intentionally swapped testing and production for comedic effect made it obvious enough. I guess Poe's law strikes again.

Barbarian , 1 month ago

The original game that Monopoly is based on (The Landlord's Game) was a tool for teaching how bad landlords and owning land privately and permanently is. Monopoly is still a great tool to show how an early advantage leads to an ever-growing monopoly that will inevitably crush all the other players with no modifications necessary.

Barbarian , 2 months ago

At least here in Romania, it's the job of the accountant(s) to do the company's taxes. If you're self-employed or run a very small business (less than 10 employees) there are self-employed accountants who specialize in that and typically have 20-40 clients.

Barbarian , 2 months ago

Not true. First of all, Europe is not a monolith. Romania is extremely different from the Netherlands. Romania is, by some metrics, more car-centric than the US.

Secondly, even in countries that are trying to make progress towards a less car-centric environment, different cities are moving at different speeds.

Finally, even in cities moving faster away from it, you still have planning, funding and political issues that need to be ironed out.

Barbarian , 2 months ago

Of course, we have pigs running the police and government. Super standard :))

Barbarian , 2 months ago

Actually, that's not the real reason patents are public. The reason is to allow everyone to freely use the patent after the expiry.

The tradeoff is supposed to be the inventor gets exclusive use for a decade in exchange for detailing exactly how the thing works for everyone else.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

It can reliably copy the simple things in it's training data from stackoverflow.

But at that point, why not just go to stackoverflow instead?

Barbarian , 3 months ago

It seems pretty clear that queer people would be persecuted a hell of a lot more under Trump than Biden.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

people like you

I'm not even American. I don't think I was "shouting" or "pushing" anything. Was just commenting my opinion, for as little as that's worth.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

• Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

Barbarian , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

"It takes a village to raise a child" is an old expression for a reason. Historically (EDIT: And today in most of the world), parents wouldn't take care of their kids 24/7. They would have parents, siblings, neighbours and friends to help share the load.

The idea that parents and parents alone do 100% of everything to raise a child is a very modern western thing.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

For the families who can afford it, daycare is the replacement.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

I don't know the details of this app, but if it's specifically US streets and notes on households there, then GDPR does not apply, as they're not mapping EU households. GDPR is only invoked if the personal information of Europeans is at risk.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

That was a loophole to the original GDPR. That's now against the law in the EU, but bringing cases against all these sites is time consuming.

Barbarian , 3 months ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrcbH0ge2WE&t=825s

So... beans and jeans are the way forward for humanity?