thearctic's recent activity

  1. Comment on NVIDIA announces CEO transition: Jensen Huang has resigned as President, Chief Executive Officer, and a member of the Board, effective immediately in ~tech

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    It's really too early to say how much of an effect a different CEO will have on the company. The market is probably reacting to the inherent (mild) uncertainty of the situation more than anything else

    It's really too early to say how much of an effect a different CEO will have on the company. The market is probably reacting to the inherent (mild) uncertainty of the situation more than anything else

    8 votes

  2. Comment on Choosing hosting and DNS outside US and EU jurisdictions, hedging against repression in ~tech

    thearctic
    Link
    I'm not very familiar with DNS hosting, but from a purely geopolitical perspective Brazil seems like a decent option.

    I'm not very familiar with DNS hosting, but from a purely geopolitical perspective Brazil seems like a decent option.

  3. Comment on Choosing hosting and DNS outside US and EU jurisdictions, hedging against repression in ~tech

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    We have long committed to Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO:

    We have long committed to Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO:

    NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer denied there was any ambiguity about the communique, which welcomed Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations and said: "We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO."
    "I stand to be corrected if this sentence leaves a shimmer of a doubt," he said.
    (Reuters, 2008)

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Choosing hosting and DNS outside US and EU jurisdictions, hedging against repression in ~tech

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    I believe the Russia was the aggressor and, strategically speaking for them, it was foolish at worst and breakeven at best. That being said, I don't think Western support for Ukraine is out of...

    I believe the Russia was the aggressor and, strategically speaking for them, it was foolish at worst and breakeven at best. That being said, I don't think Western support for Ukraine is out of altruism. They see Ukraine as a bulwark against Russian aggression and that, even if Ukraine is destined to lose the war, Russia should experience a significant enough of a cost that they are deterred from any other act of aggression in the future. I don't think they care all that much if that means a whole generation of Ukrainians are killed and most of Ukraine is destroyed in the process. We can talk all day about international law and Russia being unreasonable but: 1) I don't fault Russia for some level of paranoia given what the US has done to the Middle East and 2) whether it's Russia's fault or not, we should all be able to agree that US diplomacy and grand strategy vis a vis Russia has been a horrible failure in the decades leading up to this conflict and that we should demand a much more serious long-term strategy from our leaders.

    If we made an honest effort to support Russia in the 90s instead of pushing shock therapy on them, if we did some sort of strategic ambiguity dance with Ukraine the way we did with Taiwan, if we hadn't ruined our trustworthiness through the Iraq war and killing Gaddafi, if we hadn't shown the world how grossly incompetent our security apparatus was through the messy Afghanistan pullout, we probably wouldn't be in this mess.

    Something I think about a lot in geopolitics is the simple question: given the current state of things, what would a well-informed and morally rigorous citizen from each side of the conflict feel about who to support? Despite how corrupt Putin's regime is and despite how senseless and bloody their war in Ukraine has been, I can see how someone born in Russia could look at all of that and say that "it's bad, but the US is worse". Before, only an unserious person could say that. Now, it's starting to be something a serious person could say.

    This, ultimately, is how the law of the jungle emerges on the world stage. Where there is no side advocating for what is objectively right, leading to an abundance of reasons to support one side over the other. When highly engaged and morally serious people can't converge on who or what to support, you have room for things to snowball and spiral out of control.

    2 votes

  5. Comment on Looking for advice: How do I find out what stocks to invest into? in ~finance

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    It really just comes down to whether you are introducing true information or analysis that the market isn't already aware of. It's a bit extreme when people say that it's basically impossible to...

    It really just comes down to whether you are introducing true information or analysis that the market isn't already aware of. It's a bit extreme when people say that it's basically impossible to beat the market, since plenty of people do beat the market. But, most people radically overestimate their abilities, especially in relation to what they perceive as average. In the stock market, the overwhelming majority of people are below the (investment weighted) average in their understanding.

    4 votes

  6. The state of AI video

    ~tech Ask
    This video is a bit goofy in content, but I came across this youtube short of an MMA fighter "Seamus O'Grady". I don't know all that much about MMA, but I find it somewhat interesting and look up...

    This video is a bit goofy in content, but I came across this youtube short of an MMA fighter "Seamus O'Grady". I don't know all that much about MMA, but I find it somewhat interesting and look up more clips about the dude. I then try looking up who this guy is online, and he's entirely AI generated from what I can gather (youtube comments say he's AI and there are no pages online about him).

    These videos are basically indistinguishable from reality. The biggest "tell" is just how surreal the actual situation is, not necessarily the ability of AI to generate something life-like. And, of course, AI generated video will only get better. As far as I'm concerned, we've officially reached the point, in a completely non-hyperbolic way, where there's basically no reason to believe that what you're seeing online is real, unless it's coming from the verified account of a "legacy" creator.

    There are some major questions that now get raised. Is video as evidence at all basically a thing of the past? How can we admit video evidence into a court of law, perhaps unless it's played directly off a recording device that's technologically incapable of having video uploaded to it? Is citizen journalism even possible now? How can we trust, from today onwards, that we aren't being fed a narrative by even traditional media that's a complete literal fiction?

    13 votes

  7. Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    In an ideal world where the health insurance industry was ruthlessly competitive in favor of consumers, the insurance companies could actually play a substantial role in managing scarcity in the...

    In an ideal world where the health insurance industry was ruthlessly competitive in favor of consumers, the insurance companies could actually play a substantial role in managing scarcity in the healthcare system. Unfortunately, we live very far from that world and there's all sorts of hogwash narratives pushed in healthcare under the guise of "reducing waste" and "cutting costs for patients" when it's really to juice profits.

    5 votes

  8. Comment on Our AI midwife in ~health

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    I'm not sure what particular reasons you're referring to as to why doctors don't like to perform certain tests, but a large reason why doctors don't like to do certain tests has to do with false...

    I'm not sure what particular reasons you're referring to as to why doctors don't like to perform certain tests, but a large reason why doctors don't like to do certain tests has to do with false positives. If the false positive rate for a test is higher than the prevalence of that condition in the general population (which it very often is), then you will do harm more than good by doing the test. The doctor has to have reason to believe you exist within a certain subpopulation whose prevalence for the condition is higher than the false positive rate for it to be worth it. The doctor also has a responsibility to not clog up the healthcare system with unnecessary testing.

    9 votes

  10. Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic endorse call for US government to "pace" AI progress in ~comp

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    Ideally, we would first scrutinize the details of such regulation on its own merits, then consider incentives to the extent it influences the implementation of that regulatory regime.

    Ideally, we would first scrutinize the details of such regulation on its own merits, then consider incentives to the extent it influences the implementation of that regulatory regime.

    1 vote

  11. Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic endorse call for US government to "pace" AI progress in ~comp

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    I was only using the human brain as an example of an entity that is capable of broad problem solving and in a range of use cases would probably be more efficient than an LLM. For even those use...

    I was only using the human brain as an example of an entity that is capable of broad problem solving and in a range of use cases would probably be more efficient than an LLM. For even those use cases, we can expect it to be possible for some AI to achieve the same capabilities as the brain at the same or better energy efficiency.

    3 votes

  12. Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic endorse call for US government to "pace" AI progress in ~comp

    thearctic
    Link
    Given the fairly impressive application of AI to math research, I would expect that we're going to start to see a massive acceleration in any axiomatic, theoretical domain of study, which would...

    Given the fairly impressive application of AI to math research, I would expect that we're going to start to see a massive acceleration in any axiomatic, theoretical domain of study, which would include AI research. We can probably agree that LLMs, though impressive in a lot of ways, are not computationally efficient towards their typical use cases, at least relative to say the human brain. If current-generation AI can be used to rapidly develop an architecture whose ability scales much better with compute, then we probably are in for trouble. By the nature of the problem, an architecture that is more power efficient will necessarily be easier to distribute and so harder to regulate. A question that's relevant here is, roughly speaking, how much energy would it take for current generation AI to come up with a new architecture that replaces itself? If it's sufficiently high, which I don't think it is, then some cooperative agreement can probably be reached. Otherwise, such an agreement wouldn't be very productive.

    The lower bound for the upper bound of AI's possible intelligence:energy ratio will be that of the human brain, since the human brain is a thing that physically exists and probably doesn't take its abilities from some noetic realm. I am a big advocate of creating international structures to constrain technology, and I think it's a lot more feasible than people think; our biggest boogeyman and justification of technological acceleration, China, is a much more reasonable, conscious, and even humanistic actor than we appreciate (not to say that they don't have their problems). But, ultimately, our plan for keeping humans and governments-accountable-in-some-substantial-way-to-the-general-population in charge of human affairs must cut to the chase and assume that we will fairly soon live in an intelligence-unconstrained world.

    What we need to ask is: what would such a world look like? What sorts of things could be achieved through intelligence alone, and what things would necessarily require humans to allocate substantial physical resources to implement or discover? How do we ensure that all physical resources are kept under some sort of democratic control? How do we ensure that individuals are economic actors, in the sense that they make consequential decisions over how finite physical resources are distributed and, so, what the world particularly looks like?

    2 votes

  13. Comment on A digestion of the Jacobian conjecture counterexample in ~science

    thearctic
    Link
    I'm not a math buff, but I came across this online and it seemed interesting. A case where AI disproved a conjecture in a way that seemed to involve ingenuity, or at least not brute force. Can...

    While this is an extremely quick verification, the construction presented in this fashion appears like a massive miracle. The polynomial {F} has degree seven, so a priori the Jacobian {\mathrm{det} DF} ought to be a polynomial in three variables of degree as large as {3 \times 6 = 18}, so the fact that all non-constant coefficients of this polynomial vanish looks like a massive cancellation involving {\binom{18+3}{3}-1 = 1329} equations, which is much larger than the {3 \times \binom{7+3}{3} = 360} degrees of freedom for a generic degree seven polynomial map of three variables. So finding such a polynomial looks highly unlikely to be located by brute force.
    The example has since been retroactively explained in more geometric terms. As a “digestion” exercise to myself, I sought to write this explanation with relatively little use of algebraic geometry, in a manner that minimizes the amount of “miracles” required, although there are still a few places where some remarkable phenomena occur.

    I'm not a math buff, but I came across this online and it seemed interesting. A case where AI disproved a conjecture in a way that seemed to involve ingenuity, or at least not brute force. Can anyone speak to the implications of this result? Seems somewhat fundamental to me.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into Hugging Face in ~tech

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    Even if you wanted to give it internet access, couldn't you just limit its exchange to pure information and not executing any commands and wouldn't that be pretty airtight? Like it sends an...

    Even if you wanted to give it internet access, couldn't you just limit its exchange to pure information and not executing any commands and wouldn't that be pretty airtight? Like it sends an information query to a program that only processes search queries then the sandboxed AI receives the response.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into Hugging Face in ~tech

    thearctic
    Link
    In general, how serious of a threat is escaping containment, for any party that puts any real effort into crossing their T's and dotting their I's (I know inevitably a lot of people won't fall...

    In general, how serious of a threat is escaping containment, for any party that puts any real effort into crossing their T's and dotting their I's (I know inevitably a lot of people won't fall into that bucket)? To me it seems it shouldn't be hard to just make it physically impossible for a software to get access to things it shouldn't.

    7 votes

  17. Comment on Tildos, let's be unserious for a while; show us your dankest memes and god-tier shitposts! in ~talk

  18. Is it possible to not want to be happy?

    ~talk Ask
    This is sort of a philosophical, logical, and psychological paradox. If you are content when being unhappy, then your preferences are satisfied. So, you wouldn't want to change anything and, in...

    This is sort of a philosophical, logical, and psychological paradox. If you are content when being unhappy, then your preferences are satisfied. So, you wouldn't want to change anything and, in that sense, you are happy. But if you're happy, then your preference is unsatisfied and so you're unhappy. But, it seems plausible in real-life that someone, for some complicated reason, actually doesn't want to be happy. If we accept that such a thing exists, then what exactly are we talking about?

    23 votes

  19. Comment on China is dealing with its own manosphere in ~life.men

    thearctic
    Link Parent
    A fairly simple solution is that they could immigrate to countries with a shortage of men. Older parents are also more likely to have daughters, so in a strange way we might have the inverse...

    A fairly simple solution is that they could immigrate to countries with a shortage of men. Older parents are also more likely to have daughters, so in a strange way we might have the inverse problem globally within a couple generations.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Readers rate poems worse when they believe they're written by AI, despite their ability to detect AI being no better than chance in ~humanities.languages

    thearctic
    Link

    In this article, we examine the perception of AI- and human-written Czech poetry. We ask if Czech native speakers are able to identify it and how they aesthetically judge it. Participants performed at chance level when guessing authorship (45.8 per cent correct on average), indicating that Czech AI-generated poems were largely indistinguishable from human-written ones. Aesthetic evaluations revealed a strong authorship bias: when participants believed a poem was AI-generated, they rated it as less favorably, even though AI poems were in fact rated equally or more favorably than human ones on average. The logistic regression model uncovered that the more the people liked a poem, the less probable was that they accurately assign the authorship. Familiarity with poetry or literary background had no effect on recognition accuracy.

    1 vote