skybrian's recent activity
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Comment on Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI) in ~tech
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Comment on Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI) in ~tech
skybrian (edited )LinkPersonally, I'm retired, so no job worries. I can tinker with AI when I feel like it, and I think it's fascinating. But like many others, I dislike seeing new AI features in software that I...Personally, I'm retired, so no job worries. I can tinker with AI when I feel like it, and I think it's fascinating.
But like many others, I dislike seeing new AI features in software that I already use. After upgrades, I'm often looking for ways to turn new features off. I'd rather that AI appeared only in new websites and apps, so that people could make their own decisions about when to switch to something that's AI-enabled.
Instead, I have to switch products to get away from it! VS Code is a good example of that; I'm probably going to switch to an editor that's just an editor.
More generally, Artificial Intelligence is a major news story and I think it will somehow affect most people everywhere in the world. Maybe not as much as the pandemic, but it's getting there!
During the pandemic, there were a lot of news stories and political issues that were just about aspects of the pandemic. You could discuss various scientific issues, and how the pandemic affected various countries, and the politics of that, and legal issues, and how the pandemic affects markets, and supply shortages, and its effects on education, and its effects on international relations, and already existing political issues that the pandemic somehow aggravated. It just kinda affected everything, and that made discussing it complicated.
Similarly for AI. I'm worried about polarization where people decide they're either pro- or anti- AI and that predetermines what they think about the various things AI affects. I think all of the following are separate questions, which then divide up into smaller sub-questions, and each of them could have a different answer!
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What compensation, if any, should there be for allowing data somehow associated with you to be used to train AI?
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Should AI-generated artifacts be considered to violate copyright or other laws? What is the burden of proof? Do you need to actually demonstrate that something is a copy?
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What effects do data centers have on local water supplies? Water supplies are local or regional, so this is a local question and the answers will vary.
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Similarly, what effects do data centers have on the local power grids? Are the companies that build data centers paying enough for grid improvements? Should they be required to use green energy?
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More generally, how much should local governments be compensated for allowing data centers to be built?
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What are good and bad ways to use AI to learn new things? How do we encourage students to do more of the good things and less of the bad?
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What skills become more or less relevant now that AI can do some tasks?
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Will AI have a big effect on robotics, and over what sort of timeframe? What do we expect these robots to be able to do? How will that affect the job market?
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Should we expect big effects in healthcare due to AI use?
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What changes should we expect from military use of AI?
And so on and so on. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. We are going to need to figure out how to live with high uncertainty for a while.
Along with that uncertainty, I think we should have a wide Overton window. There are many plausible scenarios, some of them quite alarming. I'd like to be able to discuss them without making overconfident claims that one scenario or another is The Future.
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Comment on It breaks a village in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentIf they don’t conflict then you could ask the AI to make a branch applying both of them and then rebuild the software.If they don’t conflict then you could ask the AI to make a branch applying both of them and then rebuild the software.
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Comment on It breaks a village in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentIt’s not common yet, but maintaining a fork can be automated. I made a small customization (changing the favicon) and and did a few upgrades carrying it forward. It’s slower than the regular...It’s not common yet, but maintaining a fork can be automated.
I made a small customization (changing the favicon) and and did a few upgrades carrying it forward. It’s slower than the regular upgrade because the AI pulls the new version using git, rebases the patch onto it, runs tests, and gives the user the opportunity to try it out before replacing the current version.
I sent pull requests with my changes and they accepted them, so after that I went back to regular upgrades.
Agreed, though, that plugins would make it easier. You’d only have to fork the plugin, not the entire project.
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Comment on Software for humans in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentIt’s a bit ironic to complain about “copyright laundering” when free software got it start by reimplementing proprietary software. Stallman wrote copylefted code that reimplemented proprietary...It’s a bit ironic to complain about “copyright laundering” when free software got it start by reimplementing proprietary software. Stallman wrote copylefted code that reimplemented proprietary Unix commands that did the same thing. This was done specifically to evade the licensing requirements of the original software!
And to be clear, I think implementing free alternatives to proprietary software is a good thing, though the software vendor might not like how it undermines their business model. If you’re trying to make a living writing software, competition from free alternatives is a problem. (Free only after they’re implemented of course. Actually building the software still costs time and money, though less than before.)
Sometimes people hoped that free software would become “viral” due to network effects along with copyleft restrictions. But to the extent that it has, it’s mostly not due to the copyright restrictions. Every popular programming language has a huge collection of open source libraries available and copyleft doesn’t play much of a role in that. And now that AI-driven rewrites are feasible, it’s even more dead. It’s too easy to make clones that are free of whatever copyright restrictions you might add.
The remaining “moat” is basically trust, along with inertia. Just because some unknown author published an AI rewrite and it seems to work, would you trust it? How exactly do new projects become trusted? We often depend on network effects - if an open source library has been around for a while and seems to be used a lot, maybe it’s okay? We don’t even know the names of most of the developers whose work we depend on.
When a new version is published under the same name, hopefully upgrading is safe? Nowadays package managers are adding “cooldown” periods so that ordinary developers don’t upgrade immediately. There are organizations that automatically scan new releases for malware, and adding a delay gives them time to sound the alarm. I wonder to what extent these vendors are starting to use AI for their scans?
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Comment on Software for humans in ~tech
skybrian Link ParentWhy would it need to be infallible? Code review isn’t infallible either, but it’s still a good idea.Why would it need to be infallible? Code review isn’t infallible either, but it’s still a good idea.
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Comment on It breaks a village in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentIf AI code review starts being used systematically, maybe all software will go up in quality? At least for software that has security implications, I think it will be considered irresponsible to...If AI code review starts being used systematically, maybe all software will go up in quality?
At least for software that has security implications, I think it will be considered irresponsible to not get an AI code review. The combination of handwritten code and AI review might work well?
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Comment on It breaks a village in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentPlugin API’s are good, but with AI it also becomes easier to maintain your own fork and port your custom patches to a new version when there’s an update. So, you might not need a formal plugin API...Plugin API’s are good, but with AI it also becomes easier to maintain your own fork and port your custom patches to a new version when there’s an update. So, you might not need a formal plugin API if the code is sufficiently modular that the patches people want to make are isolated.
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Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news
skybrian LinkPlease don’t rearrange our shoes when we turn up, paramedics in Japan urge [...] [...]Please don’t rearrange our shoes when we turn up, paramedics in Japan urge
It is customary for anyone entering a Japanese home to shed their footwear, and for homeowners to rearrange the shoes of guests or customers to face the doorway so that they can slip them on easily when they leave.
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Interviewed by TBS News Dig this week, firefighter Daisuke Yamashita said, “Emergency crews decide the direction of their shoes according to their roles, so if someone changes their position out of kindness, it can interfere with putting them back on and delay the transport of the patient. From our experience, it can result in a loss of about 30 seconds.
“We do appreciate the kindness behind straightening the shoes,” added Yamashita in the video. “During an emergency, it is extremely helpful if people instead prepare the patient’s My Number card [a social security number] or another form of identification in advance.”
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Another user attracted more than 800 likes for suggesting that strict etiquette could perhaps be forsaken at such times: “It’s an emergency. I would just tell them: ‘Please step inside with your shoes on!’”
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Comment on It breaks a village in ~comp
skybrian Link ParentI can see how people spamming an open source project with low-effort demos could be a problem. And also, spamming the forums with low-effort memes would also be a problem. Aren't both of those...I can see how people spamming an open source project with low-effort demos could be a problem. And also, spamming the forums with low-effort memes would also be a problem. Aren't both of those solved with better moderation? In neither case is moderation about trying to change how people feel. Instead it's intended to get across what sort of behavior is ok in that forum.
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Comment on It breaks a village in ~comp
skybrian (edited )Link ParentI don't think a "safe space" is the default. When it's ambiguous what the rules are, you will get the more extreme pro- and anti- types getting into arguments with each other, resulting in...I don't think a "safe space" is the default. When it's ambiguous what the rules are, you will get the more extreme pro- and anti- types getting into arguments with each other, resulting in increased polarization.
For example, recently on Bluesky a bunch of anti-AI types were dogpiling an open source developer who put out a new, experimental Linux port, because they used AI to do it. Someone from the Bluesky company had to say that this isn't acceptable.
Bluesky is not a space that has any official policy about AI being good or bad. They did add a way to label posts as AI generated. Also, there is an experimental Bluesky product that uses AI, so clearly there are people who work there who are into it.
I think it ought to be possible to have a "big tent" policy where both pro- and anti- AI opinions are acceptable? We are still figuring this stuff out.
I'm particularly aggravated by the folks who assume that being anti-AI is the only ethical position, that people who agree with them are ethical and people who disagree must be unethical. To me, that’s fighting dirty. Another way of fighting dirty would be assuming that there’s an anti-AI consensus in a community when actually, there is no consensus because they never really talked about it. I don’t know of that’s the case for the Bevy community, but it sort of sounds like it?
But I don't want to let that polarize me, because there are bad takes on both sides, and it doesn't mean people with more nuanced positions don't exist.
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Comment on It breaks a village in ~comp
skybrian LinkThe author makes their disgust with AI very obvious, but disgust is not a good reason for prejudice. Apparently they want a "safe space" for their anti-AI prejudices? They object to a "no dunking"...The author makes their disgust with AI very obvious, but disgust is not a good reason for prejudice.
Apparently they want a "safe space" for their anti-AI prejudices? They object to a "no dunking" rule that would prevent people from freely expressing their anti-AI prejudices using memes?
I wouldn't want to be in that kind of community.
I expect that it's only going to get worse though. Anti-AI populism is on the rise and uncritical boosters don't help either. They're going to feed each other.
Maybe we will need safe spaces for reasonable people who prefer evidence-based discussions?
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Comment on Musk | Official teaser trailer in ~movies
skybrian Link ParentWhat concrete actions does "stop accepting" imply? I expect they'll still be around and people will still use their products. I'm rooting for Bluesky but would be surprised if it were ever bigger...What concrete actions does "stop accepting" imply? I expect they'll still be around and people will still use their products. I'm rooting for Bluesky but would be surprised if it were ever bigger than Twitter/X.
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Comment on Software for humans in ~tech
skybrian LinkI wonder if they will also refuse to use AI to scan for security bugs? Not to worry, someone else will do it for them.I wonder if they will also refuse to use AI to scan for security bugs?
Not to worry, someone else will do it for them.
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Comment on OpenAI solved the Navier–Stokes millennium prize problem in ~science
skybrian Link ParentThey did write this in the blog post:They did write this in the blog post:
We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve this problem. While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models. However, our proofs differ significantly and even the precise results proved are different in the Euler case (forced vs unforced).
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Comment on OpenAI solved the Navier–Stokes millennium prize problem in ~science
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Our system produced an analytical proof and a Lean formalization that an initially smooth fluid at rest can develop a singularity in a finite time. The fluid has a smooth force applied to it, and its energy remains finite through the entire dynamics, from rest to the formation of the singularity. This resolves the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize problem by establishing statement “C” (and also “D”) in the official Millennium Prize formulation.
The solution is a vortex, a spinning swirl of fluid, that spirals inward and gets increasingly elongated, like spaghetti. This central region shrinks while it speeds up in such a way that its energy still stays finite, as required by the laws of physics. The technical challenge is for the equations to develop the breakdown through the motion of the fluid itself, rather than, for example, us putting in an infinite force by hand. More mathematically, the terms in the Navier–Stokes equations that describe the motion—acceleration, pressure gradients, momentum transfer, viscosity—must both become big yet cancel in a precise way. This detailed balance leaves a smooth external force even as the velocity of the fluid grows without bound.
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Since August 28 we have been training a new internal model that has exhibited unprecedented performance in our benchmarks, including mathematics. This model’s training is ongoing and its performance continues to improve.
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On Tuesday, September 1, we heard rumors that two Millennium Prize problems had been resolved. Inspired by these rumors and by the step change in performance of our internal model, we launched an effort to evaluate it on all open Millennium Prize problems and a few other high-impact problems.
We used a system of coordinating agents powered by our internal model. The agents had access to tools such as the ability to read from a cached version of the internet and the ability to run code. Agents were subdivided into groups with the ability to communicate within the group. The groups varied in size, and the group that produced the Navier–Stokes resolution involved on the order of 10,000 concurrent agents. At all times we maintained the same strict safeguards that we apply to all our frontier model evaluations, including monitoring and isolation.
For each problem, we prompted different groups of agents with different variants of the problem statement, covering all variants of the problem. For the Navier–Stokes problem, we suggested versions “A” and “B” (particular forms of the Navier–Stokes problem which would result in a proof) and versions “C” and “D” (which would result in a disproof) to separate groups of agents.
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The agents arrived at their resolution on Saturday, September 5, about 88 hours after the first agents were launched. Lean formalization and verification took an additional 17 hours via GPT‑6 Astra.
Across all attempted problems, the agents sent 4.9 million messages and used about 300 billion output tokens. In the process of resolving the Navier–Stokes problem, the agents sent 2.7 million messages and used approximately 130 billion output tokens.
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Our effort began on September 1st after hearing a rumor which we later realized was related to Levent Alpöge, an Anthropic employee, and Tristan Buckmaster, a math professor at NYU. After the completion of our full project and Lean verification (on September 6th), believing from the rumor they also had a solution of Navier–Stokes, we reached out to them to offer a concurrent release of our result and to recognize their priority in a joint announcement. At that point we found out that they had a resolution of the forced Euler problem. In these discussions we offered them visibility into all of the prompts we used and later to see the proof. We recognize the priority of their work on forced Euler and congratulate them on their remarkable mathematical achievement.
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Our goal in releasing this result is to report on the substantial progress of our AI models. We do not intend to claim the Millennium Prize for this result.
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OpenAI solved the Navier–Stokes millennium prize problem
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Comment on NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: Unveiling hidden exoplanets at the cosmic edge in ~space
skybrian LinkIn case anyone's wondering, there's apparently been no news since the launch on August 30. It will reach its final orbit in December.In case anyone's wondering, there's apparently been no news since the launch on August 30. It will reach its final orbit in December.
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Comment on After work, we’ll have each other in ~humanities.history
skybrian LinkFrom the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]From the article:
Let’s start with 18th-century aristocrats. Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor. More importantly, when they did need to acquire material resources, they did it through leveraging their connections to obtain more land or a lucrative position at court — no drudgery necessary.
They did not work for pay; they certainly did not see work as a source of meaning. It’s certainly true that some of them had real obligations, like governing or killing each other, but court life in the age of absolutism is as close to a purely relational world as anything I can think of.
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I’m no Lilti, but I’ve read a lot of aristocratic memoirs, and all of them are like this. Saint-Simon might be an unusually advanced case, but that’s all he is: The morbid symptoms are universal. Take the memoirs of Catherine the Great. Catherine is everything Saint-Simon is not: open-minded, intellectually voracious, an admirer of Voltaire, and ruthlessly pragmatic in the pursuit of power.
Catherine is a very different kind of observer, but the world she’s observing is essentially the same. St. Petersburg might not hold a candle to Versailles, culturally speaking, but the distinction hardly matters — as in the French court, the only path to advancement was through politics, and all politics was relentlessly personal. Daily life was, again, gossip: who was seen speaking to whom, who’s too religious or not religious enough, who’s having an affair, who’s offended or might offend or could be maneuvered into offending the empress. There was no freedom, no privacy, and almost no conversation that is not ultimately about jockeying for favor with someone closer to the center of power.
It’s difficult for modern readers — at least, for this modern reader — to understand why intelligent, perceptive adults with every material resource would behave like this. It all seems so undignified. But then, aristocrats are not like us. We’re bourgeois: Our idea of dignity involves being diligent, productive, responsible citizens. (That is, it involves working.) Aristocratic dignity comes from honor, which is to say it comes from maintaining distinctions of family and class.
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Susan Ostrander’s Women of the Upper Class is an ethnography of upper-class women in an unnamed Midwestern city in 1984.
Theirs isn’t a pure post-work society. All the women have husbands who have jobs, even if it’s just managing the family money, and one of them (but only one) works herself. Even so, I think this book is about the best modern case study of a relational society as we’re going to find. None of Ostrander’s subjects grew up with the expectation that they would work outside the home, and none of them feel any obligation to do so as adults. And Ostrander is interested in the same questions we are: Why do these women do what they do? What matters to them? What are the structuring assumptions of their lives?
The main structuring assumption, it turns out, is that class matters. Unlike 18th-century aristocrats, they are not especially ambitious (“These are men and women born to privilege, and social striving is not necessary”). Instead, “the women see to it that the social network of ‘congenial’ people is kept in good order.” Much of this work involves socializing and hosting, as well as supporting their husbands and — perhaps most important — ensuring that their children contract socially appropriate marriages. But this isn’t what occupies most of their time. One can only host so much, and by the time the kids are in boarding school they practically raise themselves. Instead of working, politicking, or developing rich and varied hobbies, they volunteer.
Volunteering, for the upper classes, is a very specific kind of activity. It does not involve picking up trash or ladling out soup. All of the women served on the boards of prominent nonprofit institutions — the opera, the symphony, hospitals, and various local philanthropies. Their work on these boards consisted almost entirely of fundraising. They raise funds, they say, because they’re best placed to do it: They’re all very rich, and they know all the other very rich people. They’re all socialized into the appropriate rituals of asking for money — the path to higher-level charity work runs through the Junior League, an exclusive upper-class service organization to which nearly all of them belong.
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Interestingly, while most of the women acknowledge a sense of noblesse oblige, none of them care much if their volunteer work achieves tangible results for the communities they serve. Instead, Ostrander writes,
The volunteer work of upper-class women has an elusive quality about it, and specific accomplishments, in terms of actually improving the life of the community, are difficult to come by. Mrs. Holt is a dedicated and influential community activist. In what appeared to be a slip of the tongue accompanied by a flush of apparent embarrassment, she said, “It’s that illusion of being useful that’s satisfying.” Mrs. Smythe referred to volunteer work as “a demonstration of sincerity.” And Mrs. Harper confessed, “I’m not sure that what I’ve done has really accomplished anything, a lot of it is busy work.”
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It’s not that West Enders liked their dead-end jobs. They just didn’t think much about them. Work was not a central organizing activity of West End life. West Enders worked just enough to support their lifestyle, which revolved around what Gans calls the peer group. The West End, in his words, was a “peer group society.” An adult peer group might include a married couple’s same-age relatives — siblings, cousins, in-laws — and perhaps a few childhood friends, who would probably be “adopted” in as godparents to the couple’s children. These people would spend almost all of their time together, meeting in the apartment of one family or another after work and staying late into the night. The men might gamble at a local corner store — gambling is absolutely omnipresent in this world — but mostly, they talked, and talking mostly meant gossip.
This is where the parallels to old money Midwestern ladies and European aristocrats start to show. While there are any number of things these groups don’t have in common, all of them share certain features.
First, none of them see work as a source of status. West Enders do like to show off, but never about their jobs: Their talent as conversationalists in the peer group setting is much more important. Second, they are exclusive. A West Ender knows all the same people from early childhood. They’re very skeptical of outsiders, including members of other ethnic groups who’ve lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives.
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West End culture was good for many of the people who lived it, but it was limited, and these limitations could have tragic consequences. One of them was the destruction of the West End. The West Enders don’t want their homes to be torn down and turned into luxury condominiums — but they repeatedly fail to organize against it. This is because the West Enders are not good at organizing. The peer group is, of necessity, egalitarian: They don’t trust anyone who tries to set himself up as a leader.
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Relational living comes to us naturally. It’s the most common form of social organization in human history, and millions of people around the world are perfectly happy with it. But when our personal dignity comes from our membership in a group, everything the group does reflects on us — and everything we do reflects, unavoidably, on the group. It’s not a coincidence that Russian princes and Bostonian Italian day laborers spent most of their time gossiping (or, if we want to be technical, constructing and enforcing norms of behavior). They were defending their collective reputations: the thing that mattered most to them in the world.
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After work, we’ll have each other
16 votes
This is glib, but why not both? I expect there to be both malicious use of AI and new kinds of accidents when people didn't take sufficient precautions. And like the HuggingFace incident, I expect some of these accidents to be weird.