Do you refuse to use a calculator or spreadsheet, because doing long hand division helps you exercise your mental muscle? Do you refuse to use a database, because it will make your memory weaker? Or, do you refuse to use a car, because it makes you less able to walk when the car is unavailable? No. Because the car empowers you to do something that, at the very least, takes a lot longer on foot.
People have worried with every single new technology that it will enfeeble the masses, rather than empower them, and yet in the end, we usually find ourselves better off.
Social action has a price, both in effort, attention, and goodwill; there is
no free lunch. If you are blind to the COST of social action you will fail
to realize how you are hurting our chances of fighting climate change.
If you honestly believe that it is an existential crisis, then you must accept
that NOTHING WILL EXIST if we fail to address climate change. So any social gain
we make fighting fires will be wiped out anyway if we fail to deal with
climate change. That you don't see this, and that you are willing for all
these other issues to share the stage with climate change, is a big problem.
You want to blame the media, and the right-wing, and perhaps other things for
the lack of progress, without fully comprehending your own part.
I didn't ignore any of your points. If your house is on fire, then put it out. But DON'T start a social movement that distracts from climate change.
Don't distract everyone by claiming that fire is the most important thing, worthy of gathering during a pandemic about.
This isn't about propaganda, well not in the sense you're using it. The argument, which you seem to disagree with, is the importance of focusing on
a single existential issue, and ignoring everything else. To actually prove to people that are doubters, that WE actually BELIEVE what we're saying.
That this really is the key thing to be worried about.
Everything else you're saying all amounts to the same argument, that climate change isn't important enough to take focus away from these other
important issues. We just fundamentally disagree. And I contend your attitude is exactly why we have had so much trouble convincing the
doubters that we're serious about climate change... when we're so willing to give just as much (if not more) energy to these other "distractions"
No, i am not. It's the exact same issue. If you honestly believe that climate change is an existential crisis, then ALL other issues are by definition less important. That might be difficult to accept, because it feels like saying other issues aren't important. But that's not what i'm saying at all.
What i'm saying is, if something is about to destroy the entire world, then every other concern is a distraction. What does it matter what bathrooms we use, or if the police are using violence too much, etc?
Our actions speak to people who don't believe that climate change is real. Every time we take to the streets for ANY OTHER ISSUE, we re-affirm their belief that climate change isn't something to worry about.
You are showing exactly why we have been less effective at convincing people than we could have been. Because even you are diminishing the importance of climate change. Why should "they" give up any freedom, or luxury, in the name of climate change, if we give ourselves permission to assemble in public during a pandemic for a BLM protest, that let's face it, accomplished little.
> climate change is a bigger issue - so why can't we focus on it?
What it needed was for strong left-wing people to stand up and denounce the distraction. To claim loud and proudly that transgender issues were not important when compared to climate change. To refocus the public on climate change and take the wind out of the fringe issue.
Instead, we took to the street for BLM, when it wasn't an important issue, when compared to climate change. You can't blame the right-wing for the number of people who filled the streets for BLM... during a pandemic where we were supposed to socially distance. It cost us doubly. And not one important left-wing voice stood up and said so.
> It feels like this collective insanity will never end
They simply do not believe that the consequences will be as bad as the models predict. And a lot of trust and good will has been expended on social issues, for example the fight to allow transgender people to use whatever bathroom they choose, or to promote childhood reassignment surgery, etc. As a strategic decision, we have taken our eye off the ball, climate change is actually an existential threat, bathroom choice never was. You can argue that we can do two things at once, but there is a cost for dividing our focus and effort; even if it didn't raise the hackles of those already less predisposed to worry about the environment.
That would set a bad precedent. We're talking about an adult taking his own life. In Canada the government will not only coach you how to do it, they'll provide the poison and give you a hospital bed to carry out the act. A number of other governments do this too.
That's not to equate governments and private internet services, but I think it puts it into perspective, that even governments don't think suicide is the worst choice some of the times. Who are we to day he made the wrong choice, really it was his to make. Nobody was egging him on.
And if you believe people that say LLMs are nothing but stolen content, then would those books / other sources have been culpable if he had happened to read them before taking his own life?
I don't have one, nobody really does. But the blind belief in, and search for, some utopian society is what needs to die. Reduced expectations, less ambitious goals, and a renewed reliance on small local communities.
I'm not hopeful we will actually break out of the spell of modern big-government before we're surrounded by famine and rubble; but the seed needs to be planted now. Trump (and worse) is the logical and inevitable outcome of delusional self-indulgence, treating the state as an endless piggy bank, and knight in shining armour. It's just handing our fate over to the psychopaths, on a silver platter.
For whatever it's worth, working together in small groups ("prepping") is probably the best practical option we have as individuals and families. Building skills and local communities.
You've just made my case for me. It's why democracy can't work. Because the people who vote in the evil politicians don't (and really can't) know enough to make an informed decision. All those middle men you hate, get a vote too. The problem is not the politicians, it's the system. It's the belief that big brother will take care of us. It's the mistake of thinking you can just vote in "the good guys" and give them extraordinary power, and they won't get a knife in their back and be replaced by bad guys... who inherit all that power we forfeited.
We need to look at ourselves, and the dream we've swallowed. It's not going to get better by voting out the current crop of criminals. There is a never-ending line of equally corrupt applicants, right behind them. The entire system has been subverted. There's no fixing it.
If you think there is ever any other outcome for a democracy, you are part owner in what we built. Corruption and capture are inevitable, and blaming the particular politicians in power today, misses the point. They're only in power because at every step along the way, we the people happily swallowed beautiful lies in exchange for the "freebies" that trickled down to us.
If you imagine we just got unlucky with the _wrong_ people in power, you haven't yet learned the real lesson, and are doomed to support the entire thing continuing, or being reborn in new form.
Then everyone should embrace blacklisting, and master-slave system architecture. But they don't, and it's time to extend that sentiment all the way. We need to stamp out all hint of racism, lest we all be bigots.
> So was the proposed idea be that people would be required to disclose if AI was used to generate code?
Yes. The proposal claimed that there will be too much AI slop, and it will inundate the review process with too much work and bring the entire system to a grinding halt, or worse, end up allowing code that lacks proper review into the kernel.
Linus basically said, "It might become a problem, but the bad guys are never going to admit they used AI, so it's not helpful to demand disclosure".
They're not an equivalent intelligence as human's and thus have noticeably different failure modes. But human's fail in ways that they don't (eg. being unable to match llm's breadth and depth of knowledge)
But the question i'm really asking is... isn't it more than a sheer statistical "trick" if an LLM can actually be instructed to "read surrounding code", understand the request, and demonstrably include it in its operation? You can't do that unless you actually understand what "surrounding code" is, and more importantly have a way to comply with the request...
> ask Opus 4.5 to read adjacent code which is perhaps why it does it so well. All it takes is a sentence or two, though.
People keep telling me that an LLM is not intelligence, it's simply spitting out statistically relevant tokens. But surely it takes intelligence to understand (and actually execute!) the request to "read adjacent code".
You joined the conversation too late. Go up one parent level and see that the ONLY thing I was talking about, was explaining the apparent hypocrisy the OP had identified. The rest of this thread has been unnecessary and irrelevant objections to that point.
The point that started my original response. Explaining a new, apparently hypocritical, propensity to trust such government actions. Whether any of us agree with it or not, is irrelevant to the explanation of why it has happened.
People have worried with every single new technology that it will enfeeble the masses, rather than empower them, and yet in the end, we usually find ourselves better off.