The people who have made that category error aren’t reading this discussion, so literally reaching them isn’t on the table and doesn’t make sense for this discussion. Presumably we’re concerned about people who will soon make that jump? I also don’t think that making this distinction helps them very much.

If I’m already having the ‘this is a person’ reaction, I think the takes in this thread are much too shallow (and, if I squint, patterned after school-yard bullying) to help update in the other way. Almost all of them are themselves lazy metaphors. “An LLM is a person because its an agent” and “An LLM isn’t a person because it repeats things others have said” seem equally shallow and unconvincing to me. If anything, you’ll get folks being defensive about it, downvoted, and then leaving this community of mostly people for a more bot filled one.

I don’t get think this is good strategy. People falling for bots are unlikely to have interactions with people here, and if they are the ugliness is likely to increase bot use imo.

I think this confuses the ‘it’s a person’ metaphor with the ‘it wants something’ metaphor, and the two are meaningfully distinct. The use of agent here in this thread is not in the sense of “it is my friend and deserves a luxury bath”, it’s in the sense of “this is a hard to predict system performing tasks to optimize something”.

It’s the kind of metaphor we’ve allowed in scientific teaching and discourse for centuries (think: “gravity wants all master smashed together”). I think it’s use is correct here.

We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.

Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.

Price raising in response to demand isn’t always a bad thing, it cuts back on hoarding. Recall toilet paper shortages, for eg. Alternative is rationing, which cuts some folks out entirely and incentives a bunch of dumb behavior.

Boo to personalized pricing. But idk how eager I am to get out the tomatoes.

Second the suggestion of just sitting in the car noticing what you can see and getting comfortable. Consider practicing some grounding exercises; you have good reason to be upset in a car and that’s a distraction you don’t need.

Also, many cars are more adjustable than you’d expect. Consider taking awhile to look at everything (mirrors for eg) and play with their positions. You can also sit on a pillow to get some height (though make sure pedals are comfortable).

Seems vaguely weird, but I can’t identify the subtext (if there is some).

When it doesn’t fit their narratives, yes.

And when it does fit their narratives, we can still check who was involved in the work and what incentives they were under.

I agree that the bar seems to have raised; the implicit assumptions were taken from the OPs quotes. That was the intended context, apologies if that was not clear.

Non-selective bodies: food banks that serve all who appear, common greens and parks, public libraries, perhaps some gyms or cellular networks. There were a few intentional communities that took a broad welcoming stance, I think New Harmony Owenites is one I’ve heard about.

Yay more experiments! I’m interested in what you’re modeling the structure and system based on.

Selective: there is either a process which rejects a nontrivial number of applicants (in a way which is not random; the output distribution is different from the applicant population), or there is no open system to join the commune at all (and the initial members are again very much not typical).

Long-standing: a continuous group has existed with the same name for more than, let’s say, 25 years. Ideally in a similar place and with similar policies, but I’m flexible.

Commune/community: a democratically run sharing of resources and container of social connections. They must have things held in common, to which any productive member contributes and any needy member can draw from. The things must be controlled according to the groups intent. Participation in this process should be high. A significant portion of social life of most members should stay within the community.

Successful: a vibe, but not killing too many members and improving the quality of life for members seem like good minimums.

Definitions are meant to be broad here, because I would like to hear about your oranges. Close examples that miss:

Most governments (not communal or not democratic)

Most churches (quite selective, required beliefs for example)

Annoyed to report: successful and long standing communes/communities seem to all be highly selective, at least initially.

If you’ve got good examples that contradict this, please share.

Directionally correct, but it does require self hosted agentic models that can compete with the automation running on corporate side. This is not obvious. It will be a new equilibria; maybe just a few more hours of poorly done work by a handful of consumers is enough to break some monopolies. Or maybe everyone will be attached to OpenAI compute, and we’ve just gained a new middleman for most interactions.

Then you should be able to easily give criticisms.

We haven’t invested sufficiently in them for this too be plausible. They’re incentives haven’t been to get very ahead either.

Major power computations I think are harder. I agree the US is falling, but I don’t think I’ve seen a serious analysis claiming that the US will become merely a power amongst a few dozen others anytime in the next few decades? We’re about to become much poorer and less diplomatically influential, but still nukes, still the huge military spending, still capitalists with hands in other economies?

No organization of scale works their finances like a checking account. Businesses spend money on credit, and make back it + a bit off of the results. This lets them leapfrog a business cycle and do more things now. Credit has allowed big organizations to do some really impressive things.

So, lying a little bit, the government can get credit to do stuff now, and promise a chunk of tax revenue to the people who give it money. The US government does this with treasury bonds. Treasury bonds are sold today, with the promise that the government will pay more money later (from taxes and such). The government does stuff with this money, like maintain roads, build bridges, and improve tax collection - some of these things result in more tax money collected, so the treasury bonds were a good deal for the government. More money now has lead to more tax money later. Because the US government has been extremely good about paying back treasury bonds, treasury bonds are sold at nearly the amount they pay out. (Because of bad policy and covid, they are doing a little worse right now.)

Why do we do this? Many alternatives would have very bad consequences. The government does so many things in the US. If they couldn’t get credit, we would get a shutdown every time the government account emptied. Because the people spending the money (executive branch employees) are not the people deciding what to buy (congress), spending and income often do not match up.

It is also certainly more efficient than having huge organizations hoard money until they can pay for things all at once. If everyone in the market did this, we would get wild swings in the amount of dollars available (sometimes several companies would be hoarding at the same time, other times they might be spending out on new buildings all at once).

And I guess I’m specifically reporting on my circle of american’s, who are both aware that we’ve burned a lot of goodwill and trust (though tbh, I’d hoped the trust was lost already after trump 1…).

The checks and balances held for Trump 1 relatively, and held for previous abuses before that (at least, sufficiently that folks would let the US say such things). I don’t think it’s obvious that they are irrepairable/irreplaceable: we could have a revolution and rebuild from scratch, as an extreme example. It is obvious that systems must change to do so; reorganizing the supreme court, changing campaign finance, etc. If they change, and how much, idk what to expect. But I think ~half the country knows it’ll take serious reforms, and it still wont put the US back where it was. Trust != systems.

While I had similar concerns, I do think about this a fair bit now. A nontrivial math problem was proved by Aristotle (in Lean, a proof assistant, so we’re relatively sure it’s correct). Alpha Evolve then generalized. GPT pro did some writing and visualization work.

It’s basically the quality of work I aspire to. Slightly cheaper, and substantially faster. Not the strongest PhD, but a solid graduate student.

At least in my circles, I think we’re aware? People are looking real hard at ways to leave. We’ve also got a higher than usual chance of reforming/refurbishing some of those broken guard rails. Fingers crossed.

The folks supporting Trump, on the other hand, already believed that these relationships were dead and bad. They’ll scapegoat somebody else for the decay; I do not see the avenue for this to be a learning experience.

It is very interesting to me that we don’t make this requirement for all large power users - factories, big suburbs, etc. Because we give power companies a monopoly (but don’t put them under state control), we often let big building projects force them to expand infrastructure (and then sell access as they do). So this is a whole weird thing with capitalism meeting very regulated monopolies, in a thousand different systems cause every local has different rules.

The thing that’s breaking our systems here isn’t that datacenters are big power users. It is that they can be built so quickly.

I’m surprised we didn’t make ‘bring your own power’ a rule before; I guess it’s infrastructure that generally is useful for many people to timeshare, and often isn’t fully used by just one party? Factories turn off some nights, for eg. And maybe it would be bad to have multiple power providers independently pumping power out?