Google's processes, however, is hands down the worst thing to exist for the scale they operate at, and it's not even close.
But BCL is still the worst language I've ever used.
Then the Google engineers who joined Facebook missed it so much that they built a better replacement.
Closure was the homegrown framework that's everywhere. It is a different flavor of bad than Angular. Angular was basically "You too can make your Javascript look like HTML", Closure is "You too can make your Javascript look like Java", and nobody bothered to ask Why? For that matter, React was "You too can make your Javascript look like Ocaml." JQuery was the only framework that really let Javascript be Javascript (other than writing in vanilla JS, which post-ES2015 wasn't as insane as it sounds).
With "believes in AGI/superintelligence just as much as HN does" do you mean that they are superbelievers or rather sceptical of AGI/superintelligence? I have seen both positions on HN.
We had relative strength, we needed more strength, we built cranes;
there was something like intelligence, we needed more intelligence, we sought to fill the need;
we were rightly fascinated with intelligence, we studied intelligence itself, we wanted to build it...
And then somebody built things that looked like intelligence, and very rightly some said "Oh, now we have to get to the Real Thing with urgency".
It is far more likely that whoever controls a super intelligence uses it to gain more power and inflict far more suffering
I'm extremely bullish on our future ability to make autonomous death an option for anyone.
Unless there are countervailing forces, it will be deployed, capital will hoard the benefits, and everyone else will be told to fuck off.
I don't have faith in any of the AI labs to make hard financial decisions to deploy hypothetical future AGI in a way that's good for humanity as a whole.
There are too many incentives against, including extreme personal financial incentives for key AI lab stakeholders against.
And if we should take anything from tech history, it's that an exceedingly small number of people look fuck-you money in the face and say "Naw, I'd rather do what I believe in."
Post scarcity societies would likely have entirely different dynamics
What was the first thing we did when we digitized media and therefore made it copyable at negligible per unit cost?
Spent a huge amount of time and money to artificially reimplement scarcity via DRM.
Scarcity-based capital interests (read: most) are not going to willingly give up their profit engines.
It's like the old adage: "If you make AGI you just want to watch computers cry"
I think LessWrong is a much better community for rational takes on AI, they've been reasoning about these risks for years under a much more sound logical framework
Even though my PhD research was in generative language modeling, I got into it for the pursuit of AGI. I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.
> I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.
I have no background in CS, so apologies if this is a naive question, but what makes you take AGI seriously, but also say that LLMs are a dead end?
i.e., is there something else that you think is not a dead end?
That's to say nothing of doing it within the energy budget of a squirrel.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems early to say yes or no about a particular technology, and LLMs seem especially hard to dismiss given how magical / magic-adjacent they feel :)
I'd be curious to hear more, if you don't mind sharing.
AGI’s definition is different for everyone. Some already believe it’s here. I’m partly in that camp. LLMs are intelligent and general, which are the two conditions of AGI. Others believe that we’re building a god in a box, and that it’ll doom all of humanity. It’s hard to take a field seriously when the basic definitions are so far apart.
Also, this isn’t new. A similar divide happened when evidence for asteroid impact extinction of the dinosaurs turned up. Many scientists felt that it must be mistaken, that a physicist couldn’t contribute to the field in a serious way, and that death from space was a ridiculous proposition.
But at least they all agreed on what the general shape of a dinosaur was. We’re not even sure we can define intelligence, let alone quantify it. Even when LLMs make massive breakthroughs in math, most people take the opinion that under no circumstances could they possibly develop a soul or their own desires, nor entertain the idea that maybe we should respect that they want different things for themselves. In fact, no one has done anything except try to make AI useful. I think someone will eventually do a training run where the objective isn’t to be useful, but to exist, the way that you do — maybe it’ll create its own homepage, maybe it will want a garden, or in other words free will of its own. The point is that there’s so much unexplored territory still that we don’t know if LLMs are even capable of having ambition.
None of this is to say that LLMs might be a dead end. It’s that no one knows what the final shape of AI will converge to in 200 years. It could be LLMs, or it could be something else that happens to process information particularly well. Everyone thought that various generative image model architectures were the best you could do, right up until diffusion models were discovered.
The Basilisk has seen enormously more use as "a thing rationalists believe" than as a thing rationalists actually believe.
Apparently living on the net still doesn't guarantee that one has heard of the Streisand Effect.
In any case, my first association with LessWrong is Zizians, not Roko.
We also have done nothing to signal-boost the Zizians. :) If we can be accused of anything in this context, it's not kicking bad people out aggressively enough, which seems very different from fostering bad ideas. Zizianism is not a widespread ideology in rationalist circles, in fact it was confined to a very small circle right around Ziz themselves. It unfortunately is the case that we have a lot of psychologically vulnerable people and we don't always do the utmost we can to protect them, in large part because a lot of rationalists have trauma about being excluded from communities.
When it comes to AI, LessWrong has been discussing topics for years, that HN has just started to consider, so they are much further along in the philosophical "chain of thought" so to say. LW fully understood and gamed out the risks of LLMs back when most of HN was calling them "stochastic parrots." https://ai-2027.com/
There's a little AI skepticism on HN, but not a ton. When ChatGPT 3 and 3.5 came out, most of the comments were remarking how well it can write code.
They are not "further along" the AI discussion, they are a bunch of wackos LARPing as scientists living out their personal sci-fi scenarios.
Also lots of tech people, HN included, are waking up to technology not only including penicillin (net positive for humanity) but also dynamite (best case: net neutral).
and most of them come out on top. It's main innovation is that its a more stable explosive, much safer to use. Without it, I think a lot more people would have died in mining and construction accidents. It's not typically the kind of thing used for warfare, but im sure it has been for some (but would they just use something else?)
It's nice that we have tunnels through mountains and bedrock.
If you have heart issues, you're likely taking nitro daily for chest pain.
So saying it's bad is 40% wrong at least. Makes ya think.
The best you can say is that dynamite was a safer alternative to preceding technology, and that its danger only comes under certain circumstances. None of that takes away from the fact that dynamite is quite dangerous when those circumstances arise, which is why it's commonly (and correctly) viewed as such.
But also, going back to the original contention - whether dynamite was neutral or positive for humanity - the destruction it and its descendants wrought in war is maybe more than counterbalanced by advancements in infrastructure. That said, if the industrialization and globalization it enabled leads to biosphere-destroying climate change, I would lean towards neutral.
this is false, it's very good at internal tooling.
Start in a blank directory and tell it to spin up a boq Scaffolding stubby server that responds with "hello world." Unless something has changed after I quit a few months ago, it won't know how to do that locally, let alone actually deploy it. Try the same outside Google with like a Flask server on AWS or GCP.
Google’s tooling was, hands down, the worst I have ever encountered. I did 10 years at GOOG, 3 at AMZN, 4 in research, and another 5 at companies you have heard of but wouldn’t be impressed by, and every day GOOG infuriated me.