thatnerd (u/thatnerd)

thatnerd commented on What if technology is our weakness? · Posted by u/morpheos137

thatnerd · 21 days ago

Regardless of how fast we use up non-renewable resources, they're all going to be gone at some point. Copper, lithium, and tin are going to be gone. Humanity will need to live off of what we can forage or grow.

Also, the rarity of farming in the animal kingdom makes me worried about the sustainability even of multi-species domestication. A few ants cultivate trees or fungi or aphids, but they seem to specialize in just domesticating just one species at a time. This is telling us something important: I suspect domesticating too many species leads to vulnerabilities to so many parasites/bacteria/viruses/pests that pestilence and famine risk will eventually outweigh any benefits of domestication. If they didn't, ants would be farming lots of species!

In the real long term, then, humans will get one (or zero) domesticated species, and maybe some electricity if we can make self-sustaining solar power operations using common elements like aluminum and silicon from dirt, or sodium, chlorine, oxygen, and hydrogen from water, and that'll be it for technology, Everything else will be foraged animals and plants, in an ecosystem that keeps our population in check through predation.

As for the transition, it's going to suck. And I don't trust any governing body to "ramp down" the population smoothly without committing some major atrocities.

thatnerd commented on How Scientific Empires End theatlantic.com/science/a... · Posted by u/mooreds

strict9 · a month ago

The entire article is comparing modern America to Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR.

The past is a different country. The problems existing now are not the same as those of two empires from 100 years ago.

thatnerd · a month ago

Yes: our politicization of science and theirs will take a somewhat different form. And yes: if our politicization of science is is less complete, or briefer, it may not set us back as much... but RFK Jr. is out there purging scientists from the federal government if they disagree with his preferred theories about vaccines. This is not going to advance medical science in the US.

thatnerd commented on How Scientific Empires End theatlantic.com/science/a... · Posted by u/mooreds

thatnerd · a month ago

The comparison to the present-day US isn't hyperbole. It's not a perfect match but there are parallels.

The article mentions Lysenko, a Soviet "biologist" who set back Soviet biology for a generation. He believed, for example, that plants in the USSR would not compete with each other for resources the way they did in capitalist societies, but would instead share resources. He asserted that crops could therefore be planted closer together in the USSR, yielding more food per acre. Evidence to the contrary was suppressed: Lysenko had Stalin's ear and a zealot's confidence. The rest of the field was either purged or fell in line. Scientists lost their jobs or got sent to Siberia.

The comparison to the present-day US isn't perfect, but it also isn't hyperbole. While scientists in the US mostly aren't in the same type of danger of arrest for speaking out (assuming ICE doesn't start targeting political opponents), but we're looking at a similar era in the US in terms of making theories and data fit ideology. RFK, Jr. has his preferred biological theories about vaccines, autism, and disease. Government scientists are at risk of losing their jobs and their financial security if they reference (or publish) findings that Kennedy objects to. Universities are still (as far as I can tell) safe for natural scientists because the first wave of the crackdown is focused on the humanities and social sciences, so this purge of scientists is limited to federal government employees, but the effect is real, and it isn't a stretch to assume that if the government finds success in the current purge, it will go looking further afield.

The human impact is significant for those affected, but the article is right to point out that this purge of scientists from the government for ideological goals will have a broader impact for society: it will set back American science.

Kennedy doesn't even have to be wrong on the facts for the culture he's creating to be toxic for federal science in his department and beyond. Just the politicization of science pushes our country towards being a scientific backwater.

thatnerd commented on Bot or human? Creating an invisible Turing test for the internet research.roundtable.ai/pr... · Posted by u/timshell

JimDabell · 2 months ago

> So I think we will need a different detection mechanism. Maybe something from the real world, some type of ID, or even micropayments. I'm not sure, but it's clear that bot detection is at the opposite, and currently losing, side of the AI race.

I think the most likely long-term solution is something like DIDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_identifier

A small number of trusted authorities (e.g. governments) issue IDs. Users can identify themselves to third-parties without disclosing their real-world identity to the third-party and without disclosing their interaction with the third-party to the issuing body.

The key part of this is that the identity is persistent. A website might not know who you are, but they know when it’s you returning. So if you get banned, you can’t just register a new account to evade the ban. You’d need to do the equivalent of getting a new passport from your government.

thatnerd · 2 months ago

https://www.wired.com/story/worldcoin-sam-altman-orb/

thatnerd commented on How to cheat at settlers by loading the dice (2017) izbicki.me/blog/how-to-ch... · Posted by u/jxmorris12

ultimafan · 3 months ago

Interesting to think about- would it really matter if the casino was loading their dice? Craps allows you to bet for/against almost every possible bet and you usually have people playing pass/don't pass and come/don't come on the same table. Offering weighted dice to screw some players out of their money is probably going to result in the other players making just as much if not more back. Superstitious players absolutely would notice a "streak" and switch their bets to match it, and the casino isn't going to be able to swap/take away the dice without killing the vibe and making those same players cash out.

Feels like it's in their best interest to have a "fair" game where they skim some percentage of odds off the top.

thatnerd · 3 months ago

For a casino? In practice, yes, fair games are perfectly consistent with greedily skimming a game, and fair games draw gamblers.

That said, when organized crime gets involved, somebody always thinks "if I rig this, I'll do EVEN BETTER!" Maybe they're a corrupt employee skimming from the house, maybe they're a loyal employee skimming for the house, but unless you have something like the Nevada Gaming Control Board forcing fairness on them, you basically never get it. At least, from what I've read on the subject. Source: I've read some books on card counting & otherwise beating the odds in casinos, and this my vague memory.

And it's ironic that the house wants to rig games, because a biased game means a mathematically savvy individual can go in and calculate how results differ from "fair" games, and can then skim some profits for themselves if the bias is larger than the house advantage.

thatnerd commented on The behavior of LLMs in hiring decisions: Systemic biases in candidate selection davidrozado.substack.com/... · Posted by u/hunglee2

aetherson · 3 months ago

It is at least theoretically possible that "women with resume A" is statistically likely to outperform (or underperform) "man with resume A." A model with sufficient world knowledge might take that into consideration and correctly prefer the woman (or man).

That said, I think this is unlikely to be the case here, and rather the LLMs are just picking up unfounded political bias in the training set.

thatnerd · 3 months ago

I think that's an invalid hypothesis here, not just an unlikely one, because that's not my understanding of how LLMs work.

I believe you're suggesting (correctly) that a prediction algorithm trained on a data set where women outperform men with equal resumes would have a bias that would at least be valid when applied to its training data, and possibly (if it's representative data) for other data sets. That's correct for inference models, but not LLMs.

An LLM is a "choose the next word" algorithm trained on (basically) the sum of everything humans have written (including Q&A text), with weights chosen to make it sound credible and personable to some group of decision makers. It's not trained to predict anything except the next word.

Here's (I think) a more reasonable version of your hypothesis for how this bias could have come to be:

If the weight-adjusted training data tended to mention male-coded names fewer times than female-coded names, that could cause the model to bring up the female-coded names in its responses more often.

thatnerd commented on InventWood is about to mass-produce wood that's stronger than steel techcrunch.com/2025/05/12... · Posted by u/LorenDB

Hasz · 3 months ago

IMO, they should be going after the hardwood flooring market. LVP, engineered hardwood and laminate are all OK, but you could sell this as real wood that is just as durable as LVP. Especially given some of the samples look like teak, ipe, walnut etc, and those species make beautiful but expensive floors.

No pricing mentioned though, perhaps it is too expensive.

thatnerd · 3 months ago

Yes, the pricing is what I'm curious about. If they were saying "we can make this for half the price of steel," then the world steel market becomes their growth target.

If they can't get cheaper than steel, if they can't compete with steel, they'll probably never be more than a niche product.

thatnerd commented on Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance arxiv.org/abs/2402.14531... · Posted by u/rbanffy

homeonthemtn · 4 months ago

Here's a thought: What is the psychological impact on users who are instructed to tersely interact with systems built around human dialogue?

thatnerd · 4 months ago

Here's a thought: why don't YOU shut up? /s

Sorry! That was mean, but I hope it came across as funny.

In all seriousness, I like the question, and your implication is intuitive: if we (as individuals) talk to machines rudely, it's likely to (at minimum) lead us to be ruder to other humans, if only by habit. And if they're expecting more politeness than we're showing, they may infer the intent to be rude, and react accordingly. Those who are rude would end up being worse off.

That said, it's the Fallacy of Composition to assume that if everyone gets ruder the collective effect would be the same as the individual effect. We have different requirements for what counts as "polite" in different cultures but everyone seems to get along pretty well. Maybe societies can all get ruder (and just get along worse with each other) but also maybe they can't.

I tried looking in the literature but this book implies we don't even know how to measure politeness differences between languages: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=MPeieAeP1DQC&oi=...

There are even theories that politesse can lead to aggression: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2695863

Deborah Tannen (the linguist) has found many examples where different politeness expectations (particularly across the cultural divide that aligns with gender) can lead to conflict, but it always seems to involve misunderstandings due to expectations: https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YJ-wDp7CJYAC&oi=...

So yeah, bad outcomes feel intuitive but I don't think linguistics or sociology has a theory of what happens if a group collectively gets less polite.

thatnerd commented on Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance arxiv.org/abs/2402.14531... · Posted by u/rbanffy

thatnerd · 4 months ago

Sam Altman doesn't want you to say "please" to ChatGPT.

https://futurism.com/altman-please-thanks-chatgpt

thatnerd commented on Neutrinos' maximum possible mass shrinks further sciencenews.org/article/n... · Posted by u/thunderbong

moi2388 · 4 months ago

TIL you can express mass in volts, and that electrons do not have a mass of 1 electron volt.

thatnerd · 4 months ago

You can't express mass in volts. A volt is energy per unit of charge. To get energy, you need to multiply by a charge.

One Joule of energy is what you get when you move one Coulomb of charge across a 1V potential.

One electronVolt (eV) is the energy you get from moving one electron's worth of charge across 1 volt of potential.

It's an accident of what we chose to be a Joule of energy and what we chose to be a Coulomb of charge, so there should be no expectation that this would turn out to be the mass of an electron (when divided by the square of the speed of light, which is unstated because everyone knows E = m

c^2).