LLMs as tools,

Yes, in the same way that buying a CD from the store, ripping to your hard drive, and returning the CD is a tool.

It’s not about hampering proliferation, it’s about breaking the hype bubble. Some of the western AI companies have been pitching to have hundreds of billions in federal dollars devoted to investing in new giant AI models and the gigawatts of power needed to run them. They’ve been pitching a Manhattan Project scale infrastructure build out to facilitate AI, all in the name of national security.

You can only justify that kind of federal intervention if it’s clear there’s no other way. And this story here shows that the existing AI models aren’t operating anywhere near where they could be in terms of efficiency. Before we pour hundreds of billions into giant data center and energy generation, it would behoove us to first extract all the gains we can from increased model efficiency. The big players like OpenAI haven’t even been pushing efficiency hard. They’ve just been vacuuming up ever greater amounts of money to solve the problem the big and stupid way - just build really huge data centers running big inefficient models.

There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.

Westoids? Are you the type of guy I feel like I need to take a shower after talking to?

I love the fact that the same executives who obsess over return to office because WFH ruins their socialization and sexual harassment opportunities think think they’re going to be able to replace all their employees with AI. My brother in Christ. You have already made it clear that you care more about work being your own social club than you do actual output or profitability. You are NOT going to embrace AI. You can’t force an AI to have sex with you in exchange for keeping its job, and that’s the only trick you know!

There are many clear use cases that are solid, so AI is here to stay, that’s for certain. But how far can it go, and what will it require is what the market is gambling on.

I would disagree on that. There are a few niche uses, but OpenAI can’t even make a profit charging $200/month.

The uses seem pretty minimal as far as I’ve seen. Sure, AI has a lot of applications in terms of data processing, but the big generic LLMs propping up companies like OpenAI? Those seems to have no utility beyond slop generation.

Ultimately the market value of any work produced by a generic LLM is going to be zero.

How to address superintelligence, if that is actually something we realistically face:

1. Make creating an unlicensed AI with over a certain threshold to be a capital offense.

2. Regulate the field of artificial intelligence as heavily as we do nuclear science and nuclear weapons development.

3. Have strict international treaties on model size and capability limitations.

4. Have inspection regimes in place to allow international monitoring of any electricity usage over a certain threshold.

5. Use satellites to track anomalous large power use across the globe (monitored via waste heat) and thoroughly investigate any large unexplained energy use.

6. Target the fabs. High powered chips should be licensed and tracked like nuclear materials.

7. Make clear that a nuclear first strike is a perfectly acceptable response to a nation state trying to create AGI.

Anyone who says this technology simply cannot be regulated is a fool. We’re talking models that require hundreds of megawatts or more to run and giant data centers full of millions of dollars worth of chips. There’s only a handful of companies on the planet producing the hardware for these systems. The idea that we can’t regulate such a thing is ridiculous.

I’m sorry, but I put the survival of the human race above your silly science project. If I have to put every person on this planet with a degree in computer science into a hole in the ground to save the human race, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make. Hell, I’ll go full Dune and outlaw computers all together, go back to pen and paper for everything, before I condone AGI.

We can’t control this technology? Balderdash. It’s created by human beings. And human beings can be killed.

So, how do we deal with ASI? You put anyone trying to create it deep in the ground. This is self defense at a species level. Sacrificing a few thousand madmen who think they’re going to summon a benevolent god to serve them is simple self-defense. It’s OK to kill cultists who are trying to summon a demon.

Tim Cook will happily support someone who will stop him from adopting children or getting married if it means apples market share grows by 3%.

Exactly. As you note, rich people can usually buy their way around most anti-LGBT laws. Imagine you’re a billionaire or megacorp CEO. Consider your workarounds for various anti-LGBT laws. Imagine you’re such a person but happen to be gay and/or trans.

Gay marriage ban? Hire a team of lawyers to draft a series of contracts between you and your partner. Marriage imparts hundreds of protections and benefits, but most of those can also be achieved with a mountain of legal paperwork.

Laws criminalizing gay sex? You live on a giant private compound. How will cops even know what you’re doing in there? Even if they could, you can hire the best lawyers money can buy.

Restrictions on gender ID markers? Move your official residence to a state that affirms trans rights. For a passport, get a second or third passport in the form of a golden passport (one where you invest some large sum in a country in exchange for citizenship there.) Now you have a document for international travel with the correct gender marker on it.

Bans on trans medicine? Fly overseas for any medical treatment you need. If they really crack down on it, get treated with those injectable hormone pellets. Fly out of the country a few times a year to have your hormones topped off. Do any surgeries overseas as well.

Bathroom bans? Your limo has a toilet in it. Or you comply, use the restroom of your birth-assigned sex, and have your team of bodyguards guard the door while you do so. Or, more likely, you simply never go places where you would have to use a public restroom in the first place.

The hard truth is that most discriminatory laws can be bypassed or made irrelevant if you have enough cash.

There are simply very few discriminatory laws that can’t be bypassed with enough money. They’re not at risk until people actually start being sent to camps. And, as you note, they can easily jet off to a friendly country in the event of that ever happening.

You have to select “prime eligible” items. Are these penny ebooks included in the minimum purchase total?

Woah. Are we turning matchmakers into realtors with their own dating MLRS system? They could charge for their services not by a monthly fee, but by a commission of 6% of your wedding budget if you do find a match!

What if instead you hid an encrypted signal within an otherwise perfectly legible audio signal? Imagine a song being played. To the ear the song seems perfectly normal. But, unbeknownst to a casual listener, there is an encrypted signal embedded within the audio signal. For example, data could be embedded within a song by ever-so-slightly raising or lowering the pitch of a song multiple times per second. Then if you had a copy of the original file, software could compare the original file to the song transmitted over the radio. The locations where the pitch rose or fell could be noted, and the data could be retrieved. You could send encrypted data without anyone realizing you’re sending encrypted data. To anyone else listening, it would simply sound like a song or other audio track being played.

Past a certain level of wealth, it might make sense to invest in some really expensive jewelry just as an emergency and liquid wealth store.

Consider the US right now with its volatile political situation. Or any other country with volatile and uncertain politics. Or just uncertainty from major national disasters. People sometimes need to flee from disasters on short notice.

For a normal person, carrying around $100k worth of jewelry on your person would be foolish. For most middle class people, that would a substantial portion of your wealth that they’re walking around risking. But imagine your net worth is $50 million. Now that $100k worth of jewelry you wear every day is only 0.5% of your net worth. But if you need to bug out of your city or flee the country for some reason, you now carry around with you the means to do so. International money transfers can take time, and bank accounts can be frozen. But if you have $100k in jewelry just on your person, you have a liquid form of emergency bugout money. You can get on a plane with nothing but the clothes on your back, fly to a far off country, and immediately have access to enough resources to get yourself set up. Even if your accounts or frozen or your nation’s banking system has collapsed, you can pawn some of that jewelry off to obtain essentials like food, shelter, etc.

I think a fair number of rich people like having this amount of jewelry for the same reason that they often like having multiple passports. The odds of having to ever flee the country are low. And for most people, maintaining the means to flee the country at a moment’s notice is simply too much. But when the cost is a tiny portion of your net worth, putting what is the equivalent of pocket change into the ability to quickly flee a country isn’t so unreasonable anymore.

Seriously. Past a certain level of wealth, you don’t even need to buy brand-named items for most everyday things. You don’t buy a suit from an expensive brand. You hire a world-class master tailor to custom make you a suit from scratch. It’s fit exactly to your body, made to your exact tastes and specifications. The same thing should be possible with watches. You don’t buy an expensive brand, you hire a watch maker to make you an entirely custom piece.

You have to be willing to walk away from and ignore corporate media platforms, or else they’ll never be defeated. And content creators need to also learn to not post their stuff to these platforms.

Biden also announced he wasn’t enforcing the law. The TikTok operators saw the writing on the wall and realized they need to bend the knee to Trump.

Don’t get too hung up on specific dates. Laws are not some physical law like gravity that are present and universal. They exist within a fuzzy context of enforcement and interpretation.

Biden made clear he wasn’t going to enforce the law. Trump made clear he was going to make a decision based on how well Tiktok flattered and bribed him. So that’s exactly what they’ve done.

It’s what I call the Rapiscan systems

https://www.rapiscansystems.com/en/

I just call them the rape scanners.

My biggest pet peeve about the TSA is how they get all annoyed if you don’t know what randomly selected procedures they’ll be using today.

The TSA deliberately randomizes its security procedures. Different airports use different procedures, and the same airport uses different procedures at random. Sometimes you need to take your laptop out of your bag; sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you need to take off your shoes; sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you can just use the metal detector, sometimes they want you to use the rape scanner.

Which is fine I suppose; it makes sense to leave potential threats guessing. But the real problem is the attitude of the TSA agents themselves. It’s not just that they randomly select procedures; it’s that they get angry about it. Start taking off your shoes out of habit at a TSA line that today doesn’t require it? A community college dropout will soon be by, screaming at you for daring to take your shoes off in line. Start taking your laptop out when they’ve decided that today is a day for leaving it in? Some guy that couldn’t even meet the low bar of becoming a regular police officer will be in your face about it within seconds.

Due to two facts:

1. The samurai class in Japan officially lasted way later than you probably think

2. The earliest primitive fax machine existed much earlier than you probably think.

It is technically possible for Abraham Lincoln to have received a fax from a samurai.

There’s no evidence it ever happened, but it technically could have happened.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly.

Your conscious mind does not experience reality directly. There is no path going directly from your eyes to your conscious awareness. Rather, the subconscious collects sensory input. It uses that input to create a virtual simulacrum of the world, a big internal 3D model. That internal 3D representation is what you, the conscious part of your mind, actually interacts with and experiences.

You ever wonder how weird it is that people can have intense, debilitating hallucinations? Like schizophrenics seeing and hearing entirely fictional things. Have you ever seen a camera produce anything like that? A flash of light, a distorted image, dead pixels, etc? Sure, those kinds of errors cameras can produce. But a camera will never display a vivid realistic image of a person that wasn’t ever actually in their field of view.

Yet the human mind is capable of this. In the right circumstances, the human brain is capable of spawning entire fictional people into your conscious awareness. This shows that there is an elaborate subconscious processing layer between what our conscious mind observes and direct sensory input. Your conscious mind is basically experiencing a tiny little internal version of The Matrix, entirely generated on its own wetware. And this subconscious processing layer is what makes hallucinations possible. The processes that produce this internal simulation can become corrupted, and thus allows hallucinations.

This architecture is also what makes dreaming possible. If your conscious mind only perceived things upon direct sensory feedback from the eyes, ears, etc., how would dreaming be possible?

You are essentially experiencing reality through an elaborate 3d modeling version of an AI video generator.

Did you know that actual historical alchemy was often banned by various kings and monarchs? They did so not due to superstition, or because alchemy didn’t work. Rather, they banned alchemy because it DID work.

We now know that you cannot use chemical reactions, however complex, to turn base metals like lead or copper into silver or gold. However, you can use alchemy to give these base metals the appearance of silver or gold. Alchemists could coat coins in durable coatings that would appear to be like silver or gold. Dip a copper coin in the right solution and it will take on the appearance of gold. And you can then take that coin out of the solution, clean it thoroughly, and the faux-gold treatment will remain. It’s not just a layer of paint resting on the surface; the upper layers of copper atoms have actually chemically reacted to produce compounds that give the appearance of gold or silver.

So, even though alchemy didn’t work to truly turn lead into gold, from the perspective of a monarch, that didn’t actually matter. Because when it comes to currency debasement, making a fake gold coin so good that it fools people is just as good as making real gold. The alchemists couldn’t turn create real gold coins, but they could create counterfeit gold coins that could be quite convincing in the right circumstances. They didn’t need to create a forgery that could fool a modern PhD chemist with a lab full of equipment; they just needed something that could fool an illiterate 12th century merchant at his shop. The process:

1. Take a mold or press a stamp of one of the king’s official gold coins.

2. Use the mold or stamp to cast, press, or forge coins out of cheap metals like copper or tin.

3. Apply an alchemical process to make the copper or tin coin look like gold.

4. Spend the counterfeit coin as a real coin.

Coins were a better target than bulk gold like bars. With a bar, you would notice that the “gold” has an incorrect density. But a counterfeit coin, mixed in with a larger number of legitimate coins? Easy to pass off as the genuine article.

Kings often banned alchemists from their realms. Practicing alchemy was often a capital offense. In terms of true elemental transfiguration, alchemy failed. In terms of the ability to create spendable wealth from nothing, alchemy absolutely did work. From the perspective of a monarch looking to protect their currency from debasement, alchemy was a very real threat.

Many will say that World War Three cannot happen, that nuclear weapons will prevent it. However, this assumes that World War Three has to be global thermonuclear war, rather than some repeat of the previous world wars.

Cities don’t have to be leveled for nations to fight a world war. The US fought two world wars, and we never had our cities and infrastructure decimated. What I can imagine is a future world war where all the major players fight the war in the same way the US fought the two previous wars. Both sides contribute massive resources, adopt wartime economies, throw their whole populations behind the effort etc, but at no point do the various combatants directly attack the main territory and population centers of the other side. You could have a conflict where both sides lost millions of troops fighting it out in some third party territory, but the nukes never fly as all sides realize that invading the home territory of the others is suicide.