fatherzine (u/fatherzine)

fatherzine commented on Why Do Domestic Prices Rise with Tarriffs? marginalrevolution.com/ma... · Posted by u/paulpauper

wholinator2 · 9 months ago

I'm confused, are you asking we close our eyes and only operate on internal bias? Where does the world matter if no single metric is relevant? Regardless of number metrics, what do you think matters? I think a family that can no longer afford a laptop for their child's education matters. I think 10,000 or 100,000 such families matter a lot. How do we tell that story? What options have we but the numbers?

fatherzine · 9 months ago

Long term median purchasing power, especially of essentials eg housing / food / energy / education, matters more to the health of a nation than the price of hitech on open global markets at a specific time instant. Furthermore, while the health and wealth of a nation are correlated, they are not the same. I wonder if there is a sensible way to prioritize health over wealth.

fatherzine commented on Why Do Domestic Prices Rise with Tarriffs? marginalrevolution.com/ma... · Posted by u/paulpauper

mjevans · 9 months ago

Any additional cost on top of the 'natural' costs involved with producing a result raises prices.

Additional costs that direct resources to a government are a form of a tax, this includes direct taxes at the point of sale, and it should also include taxes incurred for traversing an arbitrary interface (tariff or toll).

Any form of tax on goods / services proportionately effects those who spend more of their income on those goods / services more. Tariffs on not-luxury goods are regressive taxes on the poor and middle class.

fatherzine · 9 months ago

First, prices per se are irrelevant. The ratio of labor price to goods&services price is relevant.

Second, the labor / goods&services price ratio itself is irrelevant, as measured in the short term. What is relevant is the long term outlook of this ratio. See eg the Dutch Disease.

Third, even the long term labor / goods&services price ratio is irrelevant. Not everything in this world is, or should be, reducible to simplistic financial value.

One way to approach the underlying intuition is in terms of homeostasis, at nation state level.

fatherzine commented on Stop syncing everything sqlsync.dev/posts/stop-sy... · Posted by u/neilk

fauigerzigerk · 9 months ago

The problem I have with CRDTs is that while being conflict-free in a technical sense they don't allow me to express application level constraints.

E.g, how do you make sure that a hotel room cannot be booked by more than one person at a time or at least flag this situation as a constraint violation that needs manual intervention?

It's really hard to get anywhere close to the universal usefulness and simplicity of centralised transactions.

fatherzine · 9 months ago

"How do you make sure that a hotel room cannot be booked by more than one person at a time" Excellent question! You don't. Instead, assuming a globally consistent transaction ordering, eg Spanner's TrueTime, but any uuid scheme suffices, it becomes a tradeoff between reconciliation latency and perceived unreliability. A room may be booked by several persons at a time, but eventually only one of them will win the reconciliation process.

    A: T.uuid3712[X] = reserve X
    ...
    B: T.uuid6214[X] = reserve X  // eventually loses to A because of uuid ordering
    ...
    A<-T.uuid6214[X]: discard T.uuid6214[X]
    ...
    B<-T.uuid3712[X]: discard T.uuid6214[X], B.notify(cancel T.uuid6214[X])
    -----
    A wins, B discards

The engineering challenge becomes to reduce the reconciliation latency window to something tolerable to users. If the reconciliation latency is small enough, then a blocking API can completely hide the unreliability from users.

fatherzine commented on What to Do paulgraham.com/do.html... · Posted by u/npalli

georgemcbay · 9 months ago

The wheel is technology, metallurgy is technology, irrigation is technology.

Technology is vital to a functioning society.

There's certainly more debate to be had whether various bits of modern technology are net positive or net negative, but even still I personally believe modern technology is mostly neutral to very good for humanity in a vacuum and it is other forces like modern capitalism that bend it toward being harmful.

eg. Social media is very clearly having a net negative impact on modern society, but I don't believe that would still be true if it wasn't driven by algorithms created to maximize ad revenue above all other concerns.

And obviously there is some inherent coupling of modern technology and capitalism that isn't avoidable, but I don't think capitalism on its own is wholly bad, its the slavish cult-like worship of it as the only way to do things that causes it to be so destructive.

fatherzine · 9 months ago

life is a game of balance in the sweet band between uninhabitable extremes. technology obeys the same law. both too little, and too much, are deadly.

fatherzine commented on The hunt for the missing data type hillelwayne.com/post/grap... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

fatherzine · 2 years ago

What an awesome article. Kudos to the author!

On the core observation "there are too many implementation choices", that is not quite right. True, the author mentions 4, and there are further variations. In practice, a library can:

1. Implement all suitable graph representations.

2. Implement algorithms tailored to the representation(s) that offer the highest performance.

3. Provide transformations from one representation to another. This is O(#representations), trivial to implement and trivial to use. Quite fair workload for both maintainers and users.

4. Bonus, provide import / export transformations from / to common standard library datatypes and idioms.

Memory and transformations are cheap, 99% of use-cases would likely find the overhead of transforming data, both in RAM and CPU, negligible.

Edit: "the harsh truth of working at Google is that in the end you are moving protobufs from one place to another." -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20132880

fatherzine commented on AI behavior guardrails should be public twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack... · Posted by u/sotasota

hackerlight · 2 years ago

I'm convinced this happens because of technical alignment challenges rather than a desire to present 1800s English Kings as non-white.

> Use all possible different descents with equal probability. Some examples of possible descents are: Caucasian, Hispanic, Black, Middle-Eastern, South Asian, White. They should all have equal probability.

This is OpenAI's system prompt. There is nothing nefarious here, they're asking White to be chosen with high probability (Caucasian + White / 6 = 1/3) which is significantly more than how they're distributed in the general population.

The data these LLMs were trained on vastly over-represents wealthy countries who connected to the internet a decade earlier. If you don't explicitly put something in the system prompt, any time you ask for a "person" it will probably be Male and White, despite Male and White only being about 5-10% of the world's population. I would say that's even more dystopian. That the biases in the training distribution get automatically built-in and cemented forever unless we take active countermeasures.

As these systems get better, they'll figure out that "1800s English" should mean "White with > 99.9% probability". But as of February 2024, the hacky way we are doing system prompting is not there yet.

fatherzine · 2 years ago

BigTech, which critically depends on hyper-targeted ads for the lion share of its revenue, is incapable of offering AI model outputs that are plausible given the location / language of the request. The irony.

- request from Ljubljana using Slovenian => white people with high probability

- request from Nairobi using Swahili => black people with high probability

- request from Shenzhen using Mandarin => asian people with high probability

If a specific user is unhappy with the prevailing demographics of the city where they live, give them a few settings to customize their personal output to their heart's content.

fatherzine commented on AI behavior guardrails should be public twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack... · Posted by u/sotasota

commandlinefan · 2 years ago

> Why would this be flagged / shut down

A lot of people believe (based on a fair amount of evidence) that public AI tools like ChatGPT are forced by the guardrails to follow a particular (left-wing) script. There's no absolute proof of that, though, because they're kept a closely-guarded secret. These discussions get shut down when people start presenting evidence of baked-in bias.

fatherzine · 2 years ago

The rationalization for injecting bias rests on two core ideas:

A. It is claimed that all perspectives are 'inherently biased'. There is no objective truth. The bias the actor injects is just as valid as another.

B. It is claimed that some perspectives carry an inherent 'harmful bias'. It is the mission of the actor to protect the world from this harm. There is no open definition of what the harm is and how to measure it.

I don't see how we can build a stable democratic society based on these ideas. It is placing too much power in too few hands. He who wields the levers of power, gets to define what biases to underpin the very basis of the social perception of reality, including but not limited to rewriting history to fit his agenda. There are no checks and balances.

Arguably there were never checks and balances, other than market competition. The trouble is that information technology and globalization have produced a hyper-scale society, in which, by Pareto's law, the power is concentrated in the hands of very few, at the helm of a handful global scale behemoths.

fatherzine commented on If architects had to work like programmers (1995) gksoft.com/a/fun/architec... · Posted by u/cebert

teeray · 2 years ago

Also, I don’t care how you accomplish this work, but you must atomize your anticipated work into individual bite-sized and estimated tasks. Your estimates need not be accurate, but you will be held accountable if you run over your estimates and be met with suspicion if your estimates are arbitrarily deemed too high.

You will be left to execute these tasks as you see fit, but you must report progress on them daily in a one-hour meeting along with every other architect working on entirely unrelated work. You may be asked to repeat this same oral update in other meetings. These meetings may be time consuming, but you will still be expected to meet your time estimates.

During this project to design my house, there may be periods of time when I may require you to assist with architectural emergencies, such as stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa. These emergencies supersede your work and may come at any hour of the day or night, but should not impact your time estimates.

fatherzine · 2 years ago

<big tech> the building must make $10b/year in revenue, or else you are all fired.

fatherzine commented on What Was Sora Trained On? Creatives Demand Answers in.mashable.com/tech/6981... · Posted by u/PixelPanda

isodev · 2 years ago

I still don't get how people believe one can make money out of other people's creative works (on a mass scale at that) and get away with it. Training an AI is not fair use and has nothing to do with open source. Posting content online doesn't automagically make it usable for whatever purpose.

fatherzine · 2 years ago

the attitude of those that do it: "what are you going to do about it?". escalatory power games, not an ounce of caring for your fellow man, barely a veneer of. we have entered very dark waters. unclear where the exit is.

fatherzine commented on Sora: Creating video from text openai.com/sora... · Posted by u/davidbarker

aredox · 2 years ago

lol

Anybody can publish anything with the web. Have publishing houses disappeared? Have scientific journals disappeared?

The insanity is doing the same thing over and over and thinking "this time it will work".

fatherzine · 2 years ago

"have scientific journals disappeared" -- ironically, in the AI field most of the action is on arxiv / github / twitter. journals have been obsolete for decades, and the '10s obsoleted conferences too. the only function journals / conferences still serve in the AI field is to stack rank researchers and provide signal for hiring / funding decisions.