In fact, sometimes I screenshot them and use Mac's new built-in OCR to copy them, because Manus gives me three options but they disappear if I click one, and sometimes I really like 2 or even all 3.
I'm sure you're already familiar with the ELIZA effect [0], but you should be a bit skeptical of what you are seeing with your eyes, especially when it comes to language. Humans have an incredible weakness to be tricked by language.
You should be doubly skeptically ever since RLHF has become standard as the model has literally been optimized to give you answers you find most pleasing.
The best way to measure of course is with evaluations, and I have done professional LLM model evaluation work for about 2 years. I've seen (and written) tons of evals and they both impress me and inform my skepticism about the limitations of LLMs. I've also seen countless times where people are convinced "with their eyes" they've found a prompt trick that improves the results, only to be shown that this doesn't pan out when run on a full eval suite.
As an aside: What's fascinating is that it seems our visual system is much more skeptical, an eyeball being slightly off created by a diffusion model will immediately set off alarms where enough clever word play from an LLM will make us drop our guard.
We get around this a bit when using it to write code since we have unit tests and can verify that it's making correct changes and adhering to an architecture. It has truly become much more capable in the last year. This technology is so flexible that it can be used in ways no eval will ever touch and still perform well. You can't just rely on what the labs say about it, you have to USE it.
Interesting observation about the visual system. Truth be told, we get the visual feedback about the world at a much higher data rat AND the visual about the world is usually much higher correlated with reality, whereas the language is a virtual byproduct of cognition and communication.
No one understands how LLMs work. But some people manage to delude themselves into thinking that they do.
One key thing that people prefer not to think about is that LLMs aren't created by humans. They are created by an inhuman optimization algorithm that humans have learned to invoke and feed with data and computation.
Humans have a say in what it does and how, but "a say" is about the extent of it. The rest is a black box - incomprehensible products of a poorly understood mathematical process. The kind of thing you have to research just to get some small glimpses of how it does what it does.
Expecting those humans to understand how LLMs work is a bit like expecting a woman to know how humans work because she made a human once.
a CEO laying off 3% scales in absolute numbers as the company grows
should, therefore, large companies, even ones that succeed largely in a clean way by just being better at delivering what that business niche exists for, be made to never grow too big, in order to avoid impacting very many people? keep in mind that people engage in voluntary business transactions because they want to be impacted (positively—but not every impact can be positive, in any real world)
what if its less efficient substitutes collectively lay off 4%, but the greater layoffs are hidden (simply because it's not a single employer doing it which may be more obvious)?
to an extent, a larger population inevitably means that larger absolute numbers of people will be affected by...anything
I think it's reasonable that bigger companies are under more scrutiny and stricter constraints than smaller companies, yeah.
Keeps actors with more potential for damaging society in check, while not laying a huge burden on small companies which have less resources to spend away from their core business.
The evil parts are hid in property rights which are not voluntary.
> made to never grow too big, in order to avoid impacting very many people
Consolidated property rights have more power against their counterparties, that's why businesses love merging so much.
Look at your tax return. Do you make more money from what you do or what you own? If you make money from what you do, you're a counterparty and you should probably want to tap the brakes on the party.
What are the evil parts, exactly? When property can't be privately owned with strong rights the effectively the government owns everything. That inevitably leads to poverty, often followed by famine and/or genocide.
Plenty of examples on both sides of that, even in the US there’s vast swaths of land that can’t be privately owned for example try and buy a navigable river or land below the ordinary high water mark etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navigable_servitude Similarly eminent domain severely limits the meaning of private land ownership in the US.
The most extreme capitalist societies free from government control of resources like say Kowloon Walled City are generally horrible places to live.
Why is it that property is taxed less than productive work? Someone sitting on their ass doing nothing but sucking resources through dividend payments has that income taxed less than the workers' income who did the work that generated those dividends. Why isn't the reverse the case? Heavily tax passive income, and lightly tax active income. Incentivize productive activity and penalize rent-seeking parasites?
The reason to not tax investment super harshly is that it’s an incentive to not just stuff your money under a mattress. Many people have jobs and careers they wouldn’t otherwise have specifically because 100 rich guys stuck their money in various VC funds (especially in this here audience on HN). If we taxed the idea of investment ruinously, we decrease that incentive. You may think that somehow all those jobs (or more) would somehow materialize without investors investing, but that’s a hypothesis or an argument, not a proven conclusion.
I've heard this argument, but as long as there is some return then people will invest because some is better than none. VC investments have the potential to return insane amounts, so people will still buy those lottery tickets even if the profits are taxed. I know this because actual lottery winnings are taxed and people still buy those tickets in huge numbers. And if you are saying that taxing investments the same as worked income is 'super harshly' and 'ruinously' high, then what does that say about the state of wage taxes?
Sure, but those are the exceptions that prove the rule. Centralized (Marxism and its descendants) societies tend to have those things happens the majority of the time. In decentralized capitalist societies, they happened once a long time ago and we took steps for them to not happen again. Seems like a flaw in those societies is that when these problems happen so infrequently people forget and then you get takes like this.
I think that Marxism is not centralized - Capitalism is centralized and some communist implementations are centralized. Marxism, if anything, is distributed or communal.
It's not "nobody owns anything", it's "everybody owns everything". Maybe those mean the same thing to some people, but that's the idea.
It’s your position that we just don’t get how genius Marxism is and that it just hasn’t been tried? Why did it not work out so well for the USSR? When was that state going to “dissolve” into a utopia where everyone owns everything? Why was China a poor agrarian society when they followed Marxism better, and has become relatively wealthy since abandoning a great deal of those ideas and participating in a form of capitalism?
I think it's not exactly a fair comparison, because capitalism and communism are both very new economic systems. And, in the time communist systems existed, they were existentially threatened by high GDP nations.
I think, it's clear to me, that capitalists feel extremely threatened by the mere concept of Marxism and what it could mean for them. Even if it's happening on the other side of the world. They will deploy bombs, soldiers, develop nukes.
I'm not saying that it works and it's good. But, consider: most capitalist nations are abject failures as well. There's only a handful of capitalist nations that are developed, and they stay developed because they imperialisticly siphon wealth from the global periphery. We don't know if this system is sustainable. Really, we don't.
Since WWII, the US has just been riding the waves of having 50% of the global GDP. It's not that we're doing good - it's that everyone else was bombed to shreds and we weren't. We've sort of been winning by default. I don't think that's enough to just call it quits.
Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though, Marxism is about class struggle and the abolishment of a capital-owning class, distributing the fruits of labour to the labourers.
In that definition it's even more decentralised than capitalism which has inherent incentives for the accumulation of capital into monopolies, since those are the best profit-generating structures, only external forces from capitalism can reign into that like governments enforcing anti-trust/anti-competitive laws to control the natural tendency of monopolisation.
If the means of production were owned by labourers (not through the central government) it could be possible to see much more decentralisation than the current trend from the past 40 years of corporate consolidation.
The centralisation is already happening under capitalism.
Yep, a common US example of Marxism is when Farmer owned co-ops for collecting and distributing crops. That model is well aligned with protecting family farms by avoiding local rent seeking monopolies.
Other parts of the agro sector are far more predatory, but it’s hard do co-op style manufacturing of modern farm equipment etc. Marxism was created in a world where Americans owned other Americans it’s conceptually tied into abolitionist thinking where objecting to the ownership of the more literal means of production IE people was being reconsidered. In that context the idea of owning farmland and underpaying farm labor starts to look questionable.
So you never read what Marx wrote then I take it. His ideas were even more unworkable than what the Communists tried. For example, he didn't understand specialization and thought people could just change jobs each day based upon whim. This is a big reason why the Marxists have never been able to convince the working class and why their support always came from the bureaucracy and not from people who actually did the work.
I don’t agree with it for more fundamental reasons than you describe
Namely that he was trying to apply Hegelian dialectic with political philosophy when the dialectic is an empirical dead end mathematically so could never even theoretically solve the problems he was pressing on
> Centralised planning is not what Marxism is about though
What an incredibly dishonest thing to say. Go to a former Communist country and tell them this. They will either laugh you out of the room, or you will be running out of the room to escape their anger.
They can laugh all they want, I understand their resentment from being oppressed into a failed experiment which misused the "marxist" label to propagandise itself. Still doesn't mean that Marxism is about centralised planning though.
The people in charge are intentionally ignorant of things that _already exist in government_, like the OIG, 18F/USDS, etc. And since their actual goal is to slash and burn the government so that it's literally unable to function, thus justifying its total collapse since it no longer has capacity, they have to take out the people who actually look for corruption, look into social security fraud, improve government technology systems, etc who would see through and call this shit out.
It's never been about making government more effect or efficient-- it's the managerial equivalent of the "starve the beast" mentality.
>This is how people surround themselves with "yes men"
>But this always results in the death of a business
I think you are conflating a "business yes man" with a "newspaper angle yes man". It is fine for a major newspaper to endorse certain values, and distance themselves from others! It's fine because it's a big country with a lot of newspapers!
I think you're conflating a different issue and making mole hills out of mountains.
A paper, or journalism, is much more sensitive to these issues than a typical business btw. Because as you can imagine, once readers distrust a news source it is very hard to repair that reputation.
Op-eds aren't supposed to be that way, though yes many have become that. They are supposed to be experts opining about things related to their expertise. Such as a well known computer scientist opining about the field of computer science. This is useful communication to the general public and plays a valuable role in news.
There's a million shades of grey. The bad actors only want you to see black and white
I don't see how this is remotely incompatible with the parent. What percentage of the 8am-2am grind, do you think said Elon-tweets take? 1%? Less? What the team is doing during the unpublicized 99% is of more interest to me.
The parent is presenting this as a thoughtful exercise by serious, experienced people. It is absolutely not that.
The sudden closure of USAID is probably the best example. You have an organization of thousands of people that operates worldwide. It does a lot of things that save lives - deliver food to starving people, provide HIV medications, etc. If all of a sudden you tell all the grantees that you're shutting everything down, they won't get any more money or support, they need to stop the work they're doing, maybe they can get an exception but nobody is going to be answering the phone when they call to ask how because the staff are all on administrative leave - that has huge consequences. For instance, it meant stopping clinical trials in the middle. So there were women with devices implanted in their bodies with no ability to get support.
There are all sorts of other effects. We provide aid to allies all over the world. All of a sudden, we pull out the rug from under them with no notice. What are the short term and long term consequences of doing that? What would be the consequences to the stability of Jordan of pulling aid - the King has been our ally but it's a tenuous situation. What about Lebanon? Now that Israel has beaten up Hezbollah, we want to use the opportunity to strengthen the Lebanese state. What happens when we suddenly pull funding? There are dozens of different countries that are affected and each of them is a very complicated situation. It's not something that people with no domain expertise are going to figure out in a few days.
The way these guys are acting - it's complete madness.
Uh... no. It's an abandonment of any kind of strategy at all. You can be completely opposed to realpolitik and still believe in what USAID is doing (or the other things the Trump administration is getting rid of, like funding the WHO or other international efforts). For instance, an idealist would support USAID work to promote democratic institutions and conflict resolution.
It's not like they're saying "in the past we've played chess using only king's pawn openings and now we're going to switch to using queen's pawns openings", it's "we don't like this game so we're going to kick over the table and stomp off".
a "no-brainer"? for a one-time reduction? that severely damages America's ability to generate wealth? am I taking crazy pills today? I advise you to compare America's GDP per capita and especially disposable income per capita to any other country. wealth generation matters so much more than distribution.
> that severely damages America's ability to generate wealth?
Why would it damage that ability? The assets those billionaires own aren't going away. The skills of the people working at those businesses aren't going away.
Because dealing with someone who has proven willing to steal is bad for business. We've seen this happen again and again with communists who think they are oh so clever for 'nationalizing' their business to collect all the profits. They inevitably then find their actions effectively self-embargoed as other businesses avoid them like plague-ridden cannibals because that is what they are. Why show up to trade if there is a good chance they'll just seize all of your goods?
Yeah with a "default yes" approach it'll be easily bypassed. With a "default no" it would work, ie you simply don't get an account at all until you prove your age.
I disagree. Defaults matter. “It’s illegal” is a firm line parents can hold. And, you don’t need to deter 100% - just taking a chunk out will reverse network effects and cause population collapse.
Plus, expect more services to verify IDs in an effort to combat AI spam.
In fact, sometimes I screenshot them and use Mac's new built-in OCR to copy them, because Manus gives me three options but they disappear if I click one, and sometimes I really like 2 or even all 3.
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