The fine dining scene is doing well despite cheaper alternatives being available (ubiquitous?). So I wouldn't worry about the possibility of experiencing amazing hand crafted pizza disappearing, even if convenient cheap machine made frozen pizzas should become what most people choose experience regularly. And I believe the same goes for other art forms, people enjoy producing and consuming them, and the experience of top notch human productions will be available and no worse regardless of what the masses choose to spend their time and energy on.
Where we might get fucked over is if Bauhaus displaces architecture where some resources are allocated to form instead of all going to function because buyers are cheap. It would be impossible for individuals with taste but little resources to set out with to meaningfully affect the public landscape. But that ship has sailed almost a century ago.
You brought up fine dining and frozen pizza but what about a situation where the automated one is both cheaper and better tasting? We're still functioning on the assumption that that will never happen.
As long as I keep hearing about the need for reducing meat consumption and supply chain slack (food waste), I'm inclined to think Malthus was right despite the limit turning out to be soil capacity rather than labour capacity.
Communication is a means to an end, a tool, not an end in itself, or something with intrinsic/unassigned value. Why would we want more energy wasted on focusing on the packaging (or worse, how the packaging is made) by drawing attention to it, instead of helping directing it towards that which actually matters?
Forgiving is very helpful in enticing those whose content you'd like to parse to start producing content. There's no use in having the worlds greatest pipeline if nothing is being put in and moved through. See the tragedy of the death of flash and "surely someone will come along and make a great frictionless editor for canvas and webgl", only for all the creative energy ending up being sucked up and monetised by roblox, leaving the world worse off.
Until html5 it wasn't forgiving - it was ambiguous. Different browsers could (and did) interpret different malformed html in different ways.
Once there was a standardized interpretation for malformed html, there was a chance that we could have treated that as a transparent conversion layer to xhtml. That isn't how WHATWG went, however.
I see what you are saying, but I don't think catering to sloppy growth over correctness needs to happen at the document level. The unrigorous shouldn't be given access at this level, you can still make php and myspace at other layers and using other abstractions. I think sloppy growth has its place, but it also needs the right level.
Flash dying is a great victory for Open Source browsers. I don't miss a thing about that world; as an authoring tool, it was hugely overused, for things it should never have been used for, like literally anything other than games.
You sound highly optimistic about the capabilities of LLMs, which makes me curious about the path you see to furthering quality of life at scale. What do you see as the main obstacles to LLMs brewing me beer on demand at my home without involving me past the prompt, and when do you foresee we'll overcome them?
Just watch the speed at which robots have been developing in the past few years. It is honestly crazy how much more stable things like bi-pedal robots have become. Coupled with things like multimodal LLMs they can accomplish quite a lot. Again most of it comes down to fine motor control and speed of decoding the world around it.
Officials at the highest levels like MEPs don't really need to have freedom of association available to them though? They need to work the hardest of all the people they are trusted and charged with improving the lives of, under more scrutiny than any subjects the bodies they belong to govern. Personal freedom and agency are small concessions we should expect those who are put to shape the world based on their promises forego
At the same time the mobile operating systems are vulnerable to vendor lock-in due to the absence of this functionality. It is clearly a worse problem that a user can't give their backup system access to the photos stored by other applications (often social media), or for instance reliably capture media streams to use in for instance a remixing application. Bringing custom clients when the software originally used to create the interesting files starts acting against the users by introducing subscriptions or being abandoned is another example of the user dictating what software accesses what files is critical to secure the users operations. Consumers need security against commercial interests infinitely much more than commercial interests need protections against consumers, and it would be unethical to enable commerce at the expense of individuals like the mobile operating systems do.
Sandboxing is great, as long as the user has absolute control of it and final say on what goes in and out of it. No program needs to know what else I run on my system that might go against the program creators interests. Like for instance me running a bot do the grunt work of cancelling a gym membership through their app should not be possible to prevent. Sandboxes where the system, or even worse the application inside, decide that the users wishes aren't worth respecting is an attack (that tragically often succeeds) on the user.
No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well. But this got me thinking. Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is, I also haven't heard a satisfactory definition of what pain would actually be in/for such an entity.
> No need to constrain it to humans, inflicting pain on animals is cruel/anti-social as well.
Are you a vegan?
But certainly, humans deem sentient and grant certain rights and protections to some other animals (at least in some developed countries). I mentioned it in the other comment[0].
Notably, those animals could not produce output even .1% percent as resembling that of a human as an LM, so clearly that is not the metric—they demonstrate human-like enough behaviour in other ways.
> Just as it's hard to pin down what consciousness/sentience of an abstract entity like a set of matrix multiplication operations is
To me, it isn’t. My opinion is irrelevant, though—it seems silly either way: either they take human-like text as proof of human-like sentience, and then ban us being rude to a near-human they are torturing, or they don’t see it as sentient and then what is this ban but a publicity stunt?
> In general, even if you have "aligned" AI: aligned with whom or what?
> Whom are you comfortable with lording as a some demi-god over you, dictating what to believe?
This is why each country needs to educate and maintain their own researchers across as broad a spectrum of disciplines as possible. Also why there needs to be healthy locally financed (through taxes and grants in addition to consumer spending) ecosystem of reporters and media, so that social media (and LLMs) can be easily discarded as sources of social truth and information like other entertainment products in favour of the trusted ones.
As for technical truths, I don't think using informal social media like the stackexchanges or LLMs to explain how camera lenses or checksums work yields materially worse outcomes than consulting Wikipedia or Knuth. For most things, where it doesn't matter, the blind copy/pasters will prevail. Where it does matter, the organization of the work itself has to set out with establishing accountability that encourages the appropriate amount of diligence anyways. And also the point above about having some local expertise.
"This is why each country needs to educate and maintain their own researchers across as broad a spectrum of disciplines as possible. A"
There is no such thing. Countries spend gazillions on Academia, the Academics do waht they want.
There are no real government places or jobs for that kind of thing. It comes at great expense and vague outcome. Or it gets entangled in bureaucracy.
What you're hinting at is a form of 'utopian governance' - like - it perfectly makes sense on paper, and it's actually rational. But it's completely unworkable in the context of how governments and organizations actually work.
It could on work in theory, not particularly well in practice.
Putting any specific string in an "author(s)" or "committer" field is likewise a token gesture that doesn't affect or alter the content. The impact, just like promises of responsibility, would still solely be in biasing the reader, clouding the evaluation.
Unless you believe there is substance in social interactions over time, like trust. But then it would be a socially weird move to dismiss promises of responsibility out of hand instead of picking up the invitation to build trust if that's what's perceived to be lacking.
Where we might get fucked over is if Bauhaus displaces architecture where some resources are allocated to form instead of all going to function because buyers are cheap. It would be impossible for individuals with taste but little resources to set out with to meaningfully affect the public landscape. But that ship has sailed almost a century ago.
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