I agree, chronological feeds of people you’ve explicitly chosen to follow are fine, but AIs looking to optimize engagement have caused untold damage to society. Future generations will study it as an example of unintended consequences in AI systems. The sooner we shutdown this disastrous technology the better.
I think they’re on to something, but the solution needs more work. Sometimes it’s not just individual engineers who are playing defence, it’s whole departments or whole companies that are set up around “don’t change anything, you might break it”. Then the company creates special “labs” teams to innovate.
To borrow a football term, sometimes company structure seems like it’s playing the “long ball” game. Everyone sitting back in defence, then the occasional hail mary long pass up to the opposite end. I would love to see a more well developed understanding within companies that certain teams, and the processes that they have are defensive, others are attacking, and others are “mid field”, i.e. they’re responsible for developing the foundations on which an attacking team can operate (e.g. longer term refactors, API design, filling in gaps in features that were built to a deadline). To win a game you need a good proportion of defence, mid field and attack, and a good interface between those three groups.
I suppose that really depends on what the subject of the simulation is. If it’s you personally, it only needs to simulate other scientists telling you about quarks, the solar system and the latest JWST images. If it’s humanity in general then other civilisations are not required. Of course it might be that this is a giant quark simulation and things like gravity, planets, life and humanity are an interesting quirk that’s arisen recently.
Soon everyone exists in a social bubble thats 1000 times worse than any present day social media bubble. It becomes impossible to interact with another actual human because there’s no common frame of reference. Micro languages emerge. AIs seamlessly translate everything into your micro language.
Any IRL interaction between two humans becomes almost impossible. It’s like travelling from the US to Japan today (assuming you don’t speak Japanese), you’re reduced to pointing and google translate.
Because you just never interact with other real people, and real people often seem like pale shadows of the hyper real AIs we talk to, the concept of fellow human beings having a “soul” or deserving rights or dignity is eroded. Policy (and life in general) becomes more ruthlessly utilitarian. Eg climate change has screwed the people in Yemen. Meh. I probably don’t even hear about it. If I do I don’t register those people as important humans because most of the “people” I intact with every day are artificial. I regularly delete the ones I don’t like and generate more. The idea that I should care about how they _feel_ is a strange and alien concept to me.
Some time ago I asked myself: why did gambling become so addictive? You always loose, but it’s so powerfully addictive the behaviour must be beneficial in some way. It occurred to me that you always loose when doing “artificial gambling” (casinos, horse races etc) but “natural gambling” is different. Should we explore this coastline, should we try and cultivate this plant, should we run this scientific experiment? These bets may not pay off individually, but for the overall population over time they always pay off. The natural world has ergodicity.
One of the first things that some reading on psychology gives you is the realisation that the “real self” is an illusion. You’re a bundle of competing drives and narratives. Even you don’t know why you do stuff most of the time, and you make up justifications after the fact. So if one way of looking at things makes you stay home and cry, while another leads to going out and making the world a better place, maybe training yourself to pick the latter interpretation is a good thing.
If he stopped the legislature doing something, there would be a “constitutional crisis” but whether or not he then lost the power to do that again would really depend on public opinion and how well judged his move was. I can imagine a scenario in which a corrupt and unpopular government is holding onto power by twisting the rules somehow, and the king says no. It would be chaos, but if the king had public opinion on his side it could work out well.
For me this is a strength of a constitutional monarchy over an appointed or elected but mostly ceremonial head of state. The people have a relationship with the king, they’ve grown up together and there’s a connection there that’s hard to define. In times of crisis that connection could play a key role.
Convert “$x” into “something Alice wants”. Alice doesn’t really want $x, she wants a new car, a house, a vacation, a new machine for her factory.
Now “They want to (add, prevent from decay) as many edges as possible” becomes “They want to encourage different parties to lend each other things they want”.
I see so many similarities with the freelance web/mobile developer space. And having run a small dev shop (3-6 people) for 7 years I agree that the _only_ way forward is to hold your nerve, fire the shitty clients and only ever do work you can feel proud of. Yes, there will be tens of thousands of people on (the VFX equivalent of) upwork who charge 1/3 your price, and clients will put immense pressure on you because of it. But if you’re know for honesty and quality, the work will come.
As governmental systems go, having an unelected head of state is actually kind of smart. Their lack of democratic legitimacy means they don’t try to exercise any real power, leaving that to the parliamentary parties. But they represent the nation and the military swears loyalty to them, so they effectively have a one use “sorry, but they’ve gone too far, I’m dismissing this government” card they can play in case of absolute dire tyranny. There’s no way to fire them, it’s very hard to bribe them, they’re trained for the job from birth and there are backups in place in case they die. The system avoids many of the problems found with elected presidents (whether US or parliamentary style) while preserving all the benefits of democratic government. My only complaint is that the system for choosing the next one could be a bit more representative than “firstborn child of the current monarch”. But changing only that part of the system now without ruining it would be pretty hard.
A pay as you go model seems reasonable in principle, but the devil will be in the detail. In theory the information being gathered is public already. I could follow someone round the public highways if I wanted to. But having everyone’s movements in one big database obviously presents huge problems.
The UK has no written constitution, which has its advantages sometimes, but could be a problem here. What we have instead is institutions. So we must hope that one of them steps in and puts limits on how this can be used.
In the same way that swapping steam engines for electric motors didn’t yield much benefit. Just swapping real meetings for zoom meetings feels like a backwards step. But the real benefits come when you _reorganise_ your production processes around the new technology. Sadly for many middle managers, their role is disappearing and their income is dependent on them not understanding this.
I’m a 42 year old male and have found it very hard, my whole life, to establish meaningful friendships with other men.
I have many acquaintances, I’m not shy or socially awkward. E.g. When I was running a business I would often go to business networking events alone, start conversations with people, establish a rapport and spend hours chatting, but all those interactions have essentially left me with one good friend.
I’ve often found it easier to establish friendships with women, but (being straight) they get complicated. Either I develop feelings, or they do, or there’s a suspicion from someone’s parter about the real nature of our relationship. It’s just too problematic.
I think the female “model” of friendships outlined in the abstract just makes more sense to me. “emotional support, intimacy, and useful social information” is what I want from a friendship.
I suspect there are other men in this position and that the dominant male “model” of friendship that we have (and which is outlined in this article) is more cultural than biological. But I have no proof. What do you think?
A simpler system might be to have dedicated upward and downward shafts, with change over points in the roof and basement. The cars all queue up to go up or down depending on which shaft they’re in.
The elevator cars couldn’t have cables of course, but they could be driven by electric motors on the cars themselves (powered by induction), driving a gear wheel that runs on a fixed track on the side of the shaft.
I've also had the occasional issue with serverless platforms. Not to do with Google indexing, but I had a similar sensation: "well now we're just completely stuck". When something doesn't work the way it should, the whole premise of "you don't have to think about servers" quickly becomes "no, you're not allowed to see the servers" and its horrible.
These days I try to make the case at work for targeting containers and using the cloud platforms' container hosting tools instead.
The awe and wonder I get from an old building comes from 3 things:
1. This building is beautiful.
2. How did they build this all that time ago? For example, the Great Pyramids, Stonehenge, or a large stone cathedral built 800 years ago.
3. The sense of unbroken continuous activity in this building from the time it was built until now. Which connects me to history and a sense that by being in this place I am a part of something bigger than myself. This is stronger if the type of activity in the building has stayed the same for all that time. E.g. Attending a service in an 800 year old Cathedral makes you feel awe.
#1 Is still relevant if the building is restored, but #2 isn't.
#3 is interesting. If a building was damaged but restored immediately then the sense of continuity might remain intact. But if a building was left unoccupied, or it's use has changed then this effect is lessened. For example, visiting a 500 year old pub is better than visiting a 500 year old building that was recently turned into a pub. Visiting a royal palace in England has some quality to it that visiting Versailles doesn't have because there is no longer a French monarchy. Stonehenge is very impressive (because of #2) and even though some groups have started using it for rituals, there is no real connection to the original builders so it lacks awe on the #3 dimension.