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est31 commented on After ruining a treasured water resource, Iran is drying up   e360.yale.edu/features/ir... · Posted by u/YaleE360
Wowfunhappy · a day ago
I feel like machine translation is the unsung hero of the recent AI wave. Gone are the days of just barely being able to discern the meaning of Google Translate. Now I can just read it.

I don't know how useful LLMs will ultimately turn out to be for most things, but a freaking universal translator that allows me to understand any language? Incredible!

est31 · a day ago
Machine translation has certainly become better, and that's amazing and wonderful to see. Definitely an amazing thing that has come out of the AI boom.

However, it has led to many websites to automatically enable it (like reddit), and one has to find a way to opt out for each website, if one speaks the language already. Especially colloquial language that uses lots of idioms gets translated quite weirdly still.

It's a bit sad that websites can't rely on the languages the browser advertises as every browser basically advertises english, so they often auto translate from english anyways if they detect a non-english IP address.

est31 commented on Samsung's 60% DRAM price hike signals a new phase of global memory tightening   buysellram.com/blog/samsu... · Posted by u/redohmy
epistasis · a month ago
It is a weird form of centralized planning. Except there's no election to get on to the central committee, it's like in the Soviet era where you had to run in the right circles and have sway in them.

There's too much group-think in the executive class. Too much forced adoption of AI, too much bandwagon hopping.

The return-to-office fad is similar, a bunch of executives following the mandates of their board, all because there's a few CEOs who were REALLY worked up about it and there was a decision that workers had it too easy. Watching the executive class sacrifice profits for power is pretty fascinating.

Edit: A good way to decentralize the power and have better decision making would be to have less centralized rewards in the capital markets. Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed. Most market economics assumes that there's somewhat equal decision making power amongst the econs. We are quickly trending away from that.

est31 · a month ago
Centralized planning is needed in any civilization. You need some mechanism to decide where to put resources, whether it's to organize the annual school's excursion or to construct the national highway system.

But yeah in the end companies behave in trends, if some companies do it then the other companies have to do it too, even if this makes things less efficient or is even hurtful. We can put that onto the human factor, but I think even if we replaced all CEOs with AIs, those AIs would all see the same information and make similar decisions on those information.

There is pascal's wager arguments to be had: for each individual company, the punishment of not playing the AI game and missing out on something big is bigger than the punishment of wasting resources by allocating them towards AI efforts plus annoying customers with AI features they don't want or need.

> Right now are living through a new gilded age with a few barons running things, because we have made the rewards too extreme and too narrowly distributed.

The usa has rid itself multiple times of its barons. There is mechanisms in place, but I am not sure that people really are going to exercise those means any time soon. If this AI stuff is successful in the real world as well, then increasing amounts of power will shift away from the people to the people controlling the AI, with all the consequences this has.

est31 commented on There has to be a better way to make titanium   orcasciences.com/articles... · Posted by u/paulpauper
est31 · a month ago
This was a really great read. Loved it!
est31 commented on AI is killing privacy. We can't let that happen   fastcompany.com/91435189/... · Posted by u/johnshades
est31 · a month ago
All information technology is killing privacy, deriving from the trend that it's getting easier to collect and copy data.

Of course it doesn't help that people tell their most secret thoughts to an LLM, but before ChatGPT people did that to Google.

The recent AI advancements do make it easier though to process large amounts of data that is already being collected through existing means, and distill them, which has negative consequences on privacy.

But the distillation power of LLMs can also be used for privacy preserving purposes, namely local inference. You don't need to go to recipe websites any more, or go to wikipedia, or stack overflow, but can ask your local model. Sadly though, the non-local ones are still distinguishably better than the locally running ones, and this is probably going to stay.

est31 commented on OpenAI may not use lyrics without license, German court rules   reuters.com/world/german-... · Posted by u/aiz0Houp
est31 · a month ago
Another instance of GEMA fighting an american company. Anyone who was on the german internet in the first half of the last decade remembers the "not available in your country" error messages on youtube because Google didn't make a deal with GEMA.

I don't think that we will end up here with such a scenario: lyrics are pervasive and probably also quoted in a lot of other publications. Furthermore, it's not just about lyrics but one can make a similar argument about any published literary work. GEMA is for music but for literary publications there is VG Wort who in fact already have an AI license.

I rather think that OpenAI will license the works from GEMA instead. Ultimately this will be beneficial for the likes of OpenAI because it can serve as a means to keep out the small players. I'm sure that GEMA won't talk to the smaller startups in the field about licensing.

Is this good for the average musician/author? these organizations will probably distribute most of the money to the most popular ones, even though AI models benefit from quantity of content instead of popularity.

https://www.vgwort.de/veroeffentlichungen/aenderung-der-wahr...

est31 commented on Becoming a compiler engineer   rona.substack.com/p/becom... · Posted by u/lalitkale
phendrenad2 · a month ago
Not many companies are willing to maintain a compiler... but LLMs will change that. An LLM can find bugs in the code if the "compiler guru" is out on vacation that day. And yes, you will still need a "compiler guru" who will use the LLM but do so at a much higher level.
est31 · a month ago
LLMs (or LLM assisted coding), if successful, will more likely make the number of compilers go down, as LLMs are better with mainstream languages compared to niche ones. Same effect as with frameworks. Less languages, less compilers needed.
est31 commented on Evaluating the impact of AI on the labor market: Current state of affairs   budgetlab.yale.edu/resear... · Posted by u/Bender
gfarah · 3 months ago
From an economic standpoint, for these companies to see a return on their investment, won't they need to replace jobs? It will be challenging to recoup investments by charging regular users in a post-DeepSeek era. While I don't support job losses, aren't they the expected outcome?
est31 · 3 months ago
AIs replacing jobs is not the only way those companies can see a return on investment, it's not necessarily zero sum. If the additional productivity given by AI unlocks additional possibilities of endeavor, jobs might stay, just change.

Say idk, we add additional regulatory requirements for apps, so even though developers with an AI are more powerful (let's just assume this for a moment), they might still need to solve more tasks than before.

Kind of how oil prices influence whether it makes sense to extract it from some specific reservoir: if better technology makes it cheaper to extract oil, those reservoirs will be tapped at lower oil prices too, leading to more oil being extracted in total.

When it comes to the valuations of these AI companies, they certainly have valuations that are very high compared to their earnings. It doesn't necessarily mean though that replacement of jobs is priced in.

But yeah, once AI is capable enough to do all tasks humans do in employment, there will be no need to employ any humans at all for any task whatsoever. At that point, many bets are off how it will hit the economy. Modelling that is quite difficult.

est31 commented on EU to block Big Tech from new financial data sharing system   ft.com/content/6596876f-c... · Posted by u/1vuio0pswjnm7
throwaway13337 · 3 months ago
The EU's bank count per capita is tiny compared to the US. Their offers are never competitive if you compare to the US banks (e.g. interest rates, apps that actually work, customer service, etc). They lack competition due to over-regulation, which, if you understand the history of corruption within banking in europe, should not imply good regulation.

Regulating big tech is good. Kill gatekeeping platforms and engagement-driven newsfeeds that are tearing us apart. I wish they could do that. Big tech competition with banking, on the other hand, would be welcome.

It's too bad, too, because overall the EU in most places has a history of better representing their citizens. I wish that mechanism was more functional.

My experience is living in 3 EU countries as an American - the banks are similarly terrible and entrenched in each.

est31 · 3 months ago
Which EU countries have those been?

The EU has recently reduced fees for one of the biggest instant payment systems of the world (SCT inst reaches the Eurozone's 350M residents). Compare the quality of that to a wire or to a ACH transfer.

EU is also ahead with security. PSD2's requirements go further than US requirements, and they are also ahead in the magnetic swipe card phaseout.

Wise and Revolut, two companies which brought a lot of innovation to international money transfer, were founded in the EU as well (since 2020 not EU companies any more).

Of course, all of this doesn't mean that the average EU bank doesn't suck. But I heard worse of the US.

est31 commented on Why is Venus hell and Earth an Eden?   quantamagazine.org/why-is... · Posted by u/pseudolus
westmeal · 3 months ago
What would they want with it?
est31 · 3 months ago
Deuterium might be the oil of the future as one can do fusion with it easily (in comparison).
est31 commented on Aaron Levie: Startups win in the AI era [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=uqc_v... · Posted by u/sandslash
tjs8rj · 3 months ago
AI and technology is already replacing jobs.

The way this manifests isn’t mass layoffs after an AI is implemented, it’s fewer people being hired at any given scale because you can go further with fewer people.

Companies making billions in revenue with under 10k employees, some under 5k or even under 1k.

This is absorbed by there being more and more opportunities because the cost of starting a new company and getting revenue decreases too as labor productivity increases.

Jobs that would otherwise exist get replaced. Jobs at companies that otherwise wouldn’t exist get created.

And in the long run until it’s just unprofitable to employ humans (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers (compared to AI) will still be net productive.

est31 · 3 months ago
> (when the max their productivity is worth relative to AI falls below a living wage), humans will continue working side by side with AGI as even relatively unproductive workers

This assumes that humans will be unwilling to work if their wage is below living. It depends on the social programs of the government, but if there is none, or only very bad ones, people will probably be more desperate and thus be more willing to work in even the cheapest jobs.

So in this overabundance of human labor world, the cost of human labor might be much closer to zero than living wage. It all depends on how desperate to find work government policy will make humans.

u/est31

KarmaCake day16046December 30, 2018
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