Nearly everyone I know puts sunscreen on their hands. Here in Australia, the world melanoma capital, sun safety is drilled into you as a kid, to the extent that "no hat no play" used to be official policy in most schools.
In my experience, US citizens are completely blind to how much stuff like this makes citizens of other countries hate their government (which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens; not that I condone hating any group of people based on the actions of their state)
The US has spent the last 12ish years betting that they're the only country that matters, but the end of result of that is that somehow when I talk to Australians in my age group the average person has a more positive opinion towards China even than the US.
If you go outside, you’ll find the vast majority of Americans thought Trump would make an acceptable president. Either they voted for him or didn’t vote against him.
It’s because their definition of “acceptable” mostly involves screwing over the other team.
I go outside daily in red rural America and this is simply not true. People voted, like they always have and always will, on their wallet and expectations on who will make it a little heavier. The exact same will happen as it swings wildly back the other way if gas doesn’t come back to normal.
That's an unfair way of looking at things. Many people don't vote because they don't think they can change anything. Furthermore, the way the U.S. voting system works, if you are in a deep blue or deep red state, your vote will have no effect, since all the states electorates will go towards whoever won the popular vote in that state. So it's really a waste of time unless you live in a swing state.
I agree with you that restricting access to Fable is stupid, but I'm in favor of e.g. GPU export controls. It's certainly annoying, but—well, I don't know where you live, but you don't want to make it easier for China and Russia to build weapons they can use attack to attack Taiwan and Ukraine, right?
And the nice thing about the GPU restrictions is that even if they don't work completely, just making the hardware more difficult and expensive to access is useful.
The default orientation of Americans toward government is already skepticism and distrust. The average person is questioning "why did you ever like the government in the first place?"
If you're referring to voters staying home, staying home is a vote for their state's majority. There's no sense in which the average citizen in a democracy is not responsible for the outcome of a democratic vote.
What do you think "voting age" means? The first sentence on the linked page is "The overall turnout of eligible voters in the 2024 general election was 63.7%"
This is categorically wrong, but even then - those that do not vote at all bear even more responsibility, and are traitors to democracy itself. By not participating in shaping it, you're dishonouring everyone that fought and died for your freedom.
I'm a US citizen and though I don't think you should hate people due to their government, I do think you can attribute some responsibility for the government actions to the people.
If we live in a democracy, then we are responsible for the actions of our government.
You do not live in a democracy or anything close to it. It's a constitutional republic, but the representatives are bought and paid for by people who do not have the public's best interest in mind. I do not accept responsibility for things I not only have no control over whatsoever, are governed and controlled by forces much more powerful than I could ever realistically be, even if I wanted to.
It's frankly a delusion many americans still hold that they can somehow vote their way out of this situation. I don't know how at all it is salvageable, I think best case for Americans and probably the world is that we slowly lose all relevance until the powers that be get bored and go prey elsewhere.
> which often, unfortunately, bleeds over to hate for US citizens
err... you guys voted for the administration that fucks over the rest of the world. Twice. So tell me, why would you expect the rest of humanity to show any kindness to the populace entirely responsible for what is happening right now?
You do know not all of us voted for him, not even a majority. You could argue the non-voters allowed this outcome. Should we discard the whole democracy thing because we don't like a result?
I lament that there wasn't a stronger candidate running against him, but the Democrats didn't have a primary, and even if they did, I'm an independent and do not vote in primaries ( this has changed in Colorado thankfully). A different, stronger candidate could have likely beaten Trump
Way back before instruct models it was pretty difficult, but for the last couple of years I haven't needed anything more complex than the type of text that I might send in a detailed email to a colleague.
I agree with you on that point. It seems to me that people who read Blindsight and get all existential are not thinking things through all the way.
Blindsight poses the question, in essence, "What if consciousness is a competitive disadvantage, in which case non-consciousness would be Better™?"
I can't make a conclusive case one way or the other w/r/t the premise—it may perhaps be the case that consciousness is a competitive disadvantage. I don't know how we could test that without something to compare ourselves against (which is why the book resorts to introducing vampires and aliens—this question is untestable otherwise). But the conclusion, that non-consciousness is somehow "Better™," falls absolutely flat for me. "Better™" is a value judgement. Values and Judgements are both features of consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no such thing as "better" or "worse", there is only "is" and "is not."
So: speaking as a conscious being (you'll have to take my word for that), I'm quite comfortable saying that I like being conscious. And with unconscious living organisms—like, I don't know, coral reefs or whatever?—it's not so much that they like being unconscious as that they don't "like" anything at all.
So I think I'm quite comfortable continuing on being a "competitively disadvantaged" thing (supposing that's even the case, which it just as plausibly is not), that is at least able to conceive of questions like this one and make value assessments of its own, rather than despair over the alleged competitive disadvantage inherent in the fact that I experience myself and the world.
A computer can beat me at chess, sure, but it cannot care that it has done so.
How do you know that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious? A machine can act like it has values and judgements and we wouldn't attribute any consciousness to it. Or if you've seen a dog tear up a garbage can every time it's owner leaves, I wonder if you're watching an expression of dog values. Is the dog conscious?
> How do you know that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious?
The terms "value" and "judgement" have a broad semantic range. I mean to use them here in a sense that presupposes an exercise of subjective preference.
Machines, amoebas, programs, etc. can make choices, yes, and they can weigh alternatives, sometimes by assigning scores (aka "values") to differing outcomes. When I say that "Making value judgements is something that, by definition, conscious beings do and that non-conscious beings do not do," I'm trying to establish a narrower, more restricted definition than the broadest possible meaning of "value" or "judge."
So it's not that I "know" that values and judgements have anything to do with being conscious; I'm using these terms in such a way that by definition they do, because that's the set of things I want to talk about. The question then is not whether I'm right or wrong yet, but rather once we restrict the set of all things that could be called a "value" or a "judgement" to only the ones that I'm trying to make qualified assertions about, whether that set is empty (in which case everything I'm saying still evaluates to True, but vacuously and therefore uselessly so!).
I'm arguing this way because I think that narrower set a) exists and b) is relevant to the argument I'm making.
> Is the dog conscious?
I think dogs are unquestionably sentient (i.e. they are able to detect and respond to outside stimuli), and seem to display, in some minimal degree, at least an approximation of sapience (i.e. they are able to understand themselves and the world around them; hold and express preferences; form relationships and make decisions based on them).
I don't have a way to test whether a dog is conscious or not, and the dog has no means of trying to persuade me one way or the other; so I have to remain frustratingly agnostic on that point (frustrating to myself as much as I'm sure to you).
What? Of course... of course the dog is conscious.
Did you mean dogs don't have values and judgements? I suspect they do, and those might be much more different than dog consciousness vs human. And one judgement might be "human gone; i do wtf i WANT bro" or, you know, something vaguely like that.
It wasn't a competition though just mutual incompatibility: aliens so alien that we can barely comprehend their motives and are implicitly regarded as hostile by our manner of existence.
I'd say the case it was making has only become more relevant with the chatbot age.
There's something interesting here, where the very thing that prompted the LLM boom (transformer networks) was the thing that introduced a higher level of information integration into neural networks; under the somewhat mainstream theory (not to say uncontroversial, though) that consciousness is a function of Integrative Information (IIT), it could be said that transformers are in a real way more conscious than previous architectures.
I have no conscious awareness of what I wrote, I just tried to be Peter Wattsy, haha
(kidding!
It's oversold, or beautiful artistic expression of something. Bleak, yes; Stark; Also beautiful.
The thing it expresses is… a thing. We're not at all as conscious as… we think?, as we portray ourselves?, to others and/or ourselves? And it's magical to view people as… partially unconscious to a significant degree while also loving them and with respect.)
And knowing that another person sees you clearly and still loves you, that is magical. As well as useful since you can have discussions and make decisions based on the realities of your self without having to achieve some mythical self awareness.
The thing I've never understood about the ai investment model is the upside. What's the point of valuations that only make sense if you've built a digital god, when at that point you've literally got a digital god. I can't imagine the tangible value of money being high in that scenario
Money is imaginary, it's just a placeholder, doesn't need to be tangible. In the case of AI it's the promise that you can replace humans with cheap fast robots, to do more things and cheaper. That's valuable. But the wealthy aren't considering that our economy depends on people (replacing all the people too fast would tank the economy from unemployment, and cause a revolt). So you might wonder, why don't they just move at a slower, sustainable pace? The answer is greed. Make as much as you can, as fast as you can, before the next guy does.
All this investment is completely driven by the companies leading the pack. OpenAI and Anthropic have been telling everyone they need to spend hundreds of billions in a few years. Of course they don't, they could do this over 10-15 years and still be profitable. But they're terrified they won't be able to dominate the market. So to dominate the market, they've estimated they need this growth to beat China (and each other). And the US technically has the capital to make this happen, but there's only so much money available to spend. By growing too fast, they spend money faster than they can make it, and the bills are so big that the investors go bankrupt.
That's what happened in the panic of 1873 (railroads instead of AI). That's what's going to happen here in the next 2-4 years.
I find that a lot of arguments against emergent consciousness seem to just come out of an atheist rephrasing of abrhamic priors about the existence of a "soul". In personal chats, I've found people from East Asian countries (minus Korea, which makes sense) to be much more open to the idea of machine consciousness.
I don't really get the value proposition of groq as a user, the performance is really poor for the token price. Data centres on the other hand are becoming a commodity, and I don't see any reason a priori to invest in groq specifically for something like that.
Groq is considerably faster and better at inference, they have a totally superior product to Nvidia for inference based tasks, which will be the dominant concern in the future.
Plausibly, take all the Nvidia hype and multiply that by a factor and that's what 'Groq' could be worth.
And there is no real commodification - there's Nvidia, Cerebras, Groq ... not many otheres.
Google has been releasing a new TPU generation every year since 2023 and the eight generation consists of a training and an inference optimized design.
Google's eight generation TPU inference chip has 384 MB of on-chip SRAM vs 500 MB for Groq's third generation LPU.
I love Groq, but across every single line break in your post there is a glaring issue that is easy to refute with in 15 seconds, even without 300t/s of throughput.
You wasted all of your commentary on snark and sadly unfunny humour, and yet still managed to add nothing.
Groq is more performant for the growing categories of inference-based tasks, wherein Nvidia's advantage in inference depends bulk/batch processing which will make up a smaller category over time, in relative terms.
The future of AI Silicon is inference, and the cost structure of AI data centres is constrained around the current necessity to have 'high GPU utilization' otherwise, the cost / amortization of the chips doesn't work out.
That cost structure is a limitation of Nvidia architecture.
Groq serves a lot faster, and without the limiting batching requirement, which opens hosting arrangements common in most classical hosting scenarios aka without necessarily the high utilization requirements.
Groq has bespoke hardware, lack of CUDA, much lower memory desnsity obviously and they don't have the deep distribution networks and leverage over TSMC that Nvidia has - but pound for pound, were we to be able to 'fire up a server' for our inference needs, it would be Groq, not Nvidia that we'd turn to.
Were they not a later market entrant and didn't have those barriers to entry, they'd be gigantic.
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