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.

I’ve been through at least 5 different kinds of phone chargers over the years. Starting with the olde-fashioned coaxial power connector, then going to various versions of USB, and at least 2 kinds of Apple proprietary connectors. Standardizing on USB-C is great. I just hope that they’re able to update it in 10-20 years when USB-C is fully out of date.

What a weird looking guy.

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.

You missed on one detail: he was a full on MAGA, sharing posts about enforcing US immigration laws and the unstoppable Trump Train.

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?

I mostly agree with you, it’s just that historically governments have been really bad at producing some necessities of life.

I really wouldn’t want anybody other than a government providing clean drinking water. I think they’ve proven they’re great at that, and private industries just mess it up in various ways. OTOH, governments historically haven’t been very good at producing crops. It seems like every time a government wants to fully take over farming, the result is a famine. Having said that, farming subsidies, and programs where governments are guaranteed buyers of farmed stuff is pretty great.

It really pisses me off that some of the most right-wing, most anti-government people in the US are farmers, and farmers are absolutely supported by the government. There are certainly some flaws in the system. The corn subsidy being so high is ridiculous, and results in things like high fructose corn syrup being available nearly free, and so it’s in everything. OTOH, it’s thanks to government intervention that the US is absolutely secure when it comes to price shocks for food items. Almost everything is made domestically. And, while there can be quirks like egg prices being high (which again is due to unregulated / badly regulated monopolies) the overall system is very stable.

Housing is another thing that is iffy if it’s 100% government made. The awful apartment blocks of former soviet republics are an example of that. But, unregulated housing construction is even worse. This is one where you need to find some balance between fully capitalist and fully government run.

Mostly though, right now, the governments of the world just need to start cracking down on capitalist businesses that are harming the public. The EU is at least trying, but the results have been mixed. The US was starting to do something under Biden and then Trump took over and… wowza. I think the recent NYC election shows that the population is well to the left of the democratic party establishment, and that cracking down on big business could be a huge win in future elections.

Capitalism only works if it’s regulated. Unregulated capitalism just becomes feudalism again. In your example, the owner of the bakery chain no longer has to innovate or compete. They simply own something and wait for money to be delivered to them.

Of course, for the government to be able to regulate things, it needs to be bigger and more powerful than the businesses it’s regulating. You can’t have Amazon being worth 2.3 trillion because it can easily make itself immune from competition and immune from regulators.

A mixed capitalist / socialist economy is the best solution we’ve come up with so far that actually seems to work in the real world. Only the most insane would want things like fire services to be fully privatized, or for every road to be a privately owned toll road. But, a fully state owned economy didn’t really work either. Trying that caused the USSR to collapse, and it caused China to switch to a different version of a capitalist / communist / socialist setup. The real issue is where to draw the boundaries. Most countries have decided that healthcare is something that the government should either fully control, or at least have a very strong control over. Meanwhile, the US pays more and receives less with its for-profit system. In England, they privatized water, and it seems to have been a disaster, meanwhile the socialist utopia of USA mostly has cities providing water services.

Where do you draw the line? Personally, I think Northern Europe seems to have the best results. Strong labour protections, a lot of essential things owned by / provided by the government, but with space for for-profit private enterprise too.

However, this is ultimately a matter of subjectivity, and I don’t think I’ve referred to LotR as the greatest fantasy story.

No, I don’t think you have. I just think that some people do. I think the hype around LotR makes kids go into reading it expecting it will be the best thing they ever read, and some come out of that disappointed.

I agree that Harry Potter is also massively overrated. If you ignore Rowling and her current issues, Harry Potter is a decent fantasy book for kids. But, it became this international phenomenon. I don’t know why.

As for A Song of Ice and Fire, I get that one more. He did things that most other fantasy authors didn’t. For example, he was willing to kill off characters in a way that almost nobody else does. That really raised the stakes because you could no longer assume the main character was untouchable. He also did something really interesting in the early books in that they were fantasy books, and there was all this talk about magic and gods and dragons… but for a long time there was nothing in the books that proved that magic really did exist. The dragons were all dead. The stark children had “dire wolves” but they weren’t magical wolves, they were just really big. People believed in magic and all these interesting gods, but there was no proof that anything supernatural was happening. I was actually disappointed when the later books revealed that magic was real, and that the gods seemed to exist (or at least there was supernatural stuff associated with worshipping / believing in gods). It would have been really interesting to have a full book series that was “fantasy” without the supernatural element.

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.

Classical music is a bit different because it’s effectively frozen in time. They’re not introducing new instruments. They’re not using amplification for the most part. It’s like doing the same Shakespeare plays over and over again.

If there were a Beethoven today, he probably wouldn’t be composing classical music. He’d be doing popular music of some kind. In fact, the historical record suggests he would have been a keyboardist in a rock band.

For music, a better example might be Jimi Hendrix. He was an amazing musician and his approach completely shaped modern rock music. But, while his music was influential, are his songs the best rock songs of all time? I don’t think so, because other people have built on what he did and have taken it further.

Tom Bombadil is such a minor portion of the Shire, is that even something relevant to the narrative as a whole?

No, and that’s why a better author (or their editor) would have removed it.

Fantasy, specifically, has evolved over time through the introduction of power systems sure — does that make them inherently better than LotR?

Yes. Not just because of their “power systems”, but because the authors have used some of the ideas that Tolkien introduced, and told better stories with them, or introduced better characters. Or, because they lack some of Tolkien’s key weaknesses, like they’re able to write interesting 3-dimensional female characters. IMO the heavy lifting that Tolkien did is to introduce a world filled with all these various kinds of creatures that we all take for granted now: elves, dwarves, ents, orcs, etc.

He was probably the greatest fantasy writer of his time. But, he’s “of his time”. He unconsciously brings all kinds of biases and baggage into his writing that a reader in the 1950s wouldn’t even notice, but that become more apparent 75ish years later.

You simply cannot deny the level of effort that went into creating LotR on Tolkien’s part

Nor can you deny the amount of effort that went into The Room but that doesn’t mean it’s a great movie. LotR is a great book, but it’s not because Tolkien put a certain amount of effort into it.

But, is it overrated? There are 2 ways something can be overrated. Something can be bad and rated as being ok, and so it’s overrated. Or something can be good but rated as being the best in the world and so it’s overrated. I think LotR is in the second category as a fantasy story. As a foundation for fantasy literature, I don’t think it’s overrated because it introduced so many things that we just take for granted today. But merely as a book, looking at it through modern eyes, it is probably overrated. I think it’s great, but it’s no longer the best fantasy book ever written.

Yeah, there are some amazing episodes. TOS also has some amazing episodes. Offhand, I can’t think of anything since DS9 / Voyager that was that good. There were definitely some fun episodes, but nothing that I kept thinking about for a long time after they aired, like say Picard’s living an entire life in The Inner Light.

((Also funny about The Inner Light, is that I can’t think of that episode without thinking of the really awkward way that they had Patrick Stewart pretend to play the flute by having someone lie on the floor out of camera and pretend that his arms were Patrick Stewart’s arms.))

Robot Wars.

I don’t see what’s disturbing about that. As long as the bodies come from a legal, reputable source, what’s the big deal?

Star Trek is a difficult one. The oldest stuff is very dated, even TNG has some things that are very weird for a modern audience. But, some of the modern stuff is basically unwatchable.

Modern fantasy owners might be standing on the shoulders of giants, but to extend the metaphor, it means their heads are higher than those giants.

LOTR could be overrated as a piece of fantasy writing for a modern audience, even if it is absolutely key to establishing the modern fantasy genre. For me, LOTR was good, but it was unsatisfying in some ways. Like, Gandalf and Saruman were obviously powerful “wizards”, but what is it that they could do? How did their powers work? And there were characters like Tom Bombadil who were confusing and had me flipping pages.

I greatly respect Tolkien’s work. But, unlike some more modern authors, I don’t devour everything he wrote. For example, I absolutely couldn’t read the Silmarillion.

So, yeah, I can see how someone would say that LOTR is overrated, even if it was key to establishing an entire genre.

Man, Connections was such a good show. I gotta rewatch that sometime.

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?

AFAIK they’re as safe as SawStop table saws. There has only ever been one collision involving a Waymo car that resulted in a serious injury. It was when a driver in another car, who was fleeing from police, sideswiped two cars, went onto the sidewalk and hit 2 pedestrians. One of the cars that was hit was a Waymo car, and the passenger was injured. Obviously, this wasn’t the fault of Waymo, but it was included in their list of 25 crashes with injuries, and was the only one involving a serious injury.

Of the rest, 17 involved the Waymo car being rear-ended. 3 involved another car running a red light and hitting the Waymo car. 2 were sideswipes caused by the other driver. 2 were vehicles turning left across the path of the Waymo car, one a bike, one a car. One was a Waymo car turning left and being hit on the passenger side. It’s possible that a few of these cases involving a collision between a vehicle turning and a vehicle going straight could be at least partially blamed on the Waymo car. But, based on the descriptions of the crashes it certainly wasn’t making an obvious error.

IMO it would be hard to argue that the cars aren’t already significantly safer than the average driver. There are still plenty of bugs to be ironed out, but for the most part they don’t seem to be safety-related bugs.

If the math were simple and every Waymo car on the road meant one human driver off the road with no other consequences or costs, it would be a no-brainer to start replacing human drivers with Waymo’s tech. But, of course, nothing is ever that simple.

Source: https://www.understandingai.org/p/human-drivers-are-to-blame-for-most

Waymo times than Teslas?