I understand why some people might not weight the probability and risk of AGI as highly as others, but to deny the risk entirely, or to act as if it's ridiculous to be concerned about such things in my opinion is just an intellectually ignorant position to hold.
Obviously near-term AGI and climate change present us with near zero risk, and therefore certain groups will dismiss both. This is despite clear trends plotting towards very clear risks, but because these individuals are yet to see any negative impact with their own eyes it's all too easy for them to dismiss the risk as some kind of hysteria. But these risks are real and rational because the trends are real and clear. We should take both seriously.
The nuclear risk is real too, but unlike AGI and climate change the risk isn't exponentially increasing with time. I think other weapons like bioweapons and drone weapons potentially fit that risk profile, however.
> deny the risk entirely, or to act as if it's ridiculous to be concerned about such things in my opinion is just an intellectually ignorant position to hold.
This would take someone actually articulating what this risk you refer to is. All I have to go off of is Terminator, which is patently ridiculous. People in power would never relinquish this power to a computer without being able to dictate whom it benefits.
For example, Zelda (both of them) load segments of code from the cartridge at runtime. The recompiler needs to know which areas contain code, and the original relocation-applying code for MIPS instructions obviously won't work on x64 instructions either, so it needs to know how the relocations work.
In the South SF Bay Area, our pickup truck gets 13 mpg mixed freeway/city.
Doing 75-80 on flat land, or 65-70 over the Sierra Nevadas, it gets 24 mpg. With city traffic in other cities it gets 18 mpg.
The reason it is so bad here is that the environmental activists passed traffic quiescence laws that try to discourage people to drive by making the roads worse.
Of course, they don’t make obvious fixes to improve public transit, and the bike lane “improvements” they put in are mostly textbook “how to kill bicyclists” designs that European countries phased out decades ago.
Here are two classic favorites: concrete barriers that are too close to the curb to allow street sweeping, and adding bike lanes between parallel parking spots and the sidewalks.
They must have realized people started re-routing their trips to avoid stoplights unless they were making right turns, since they’ve also started erecting barriers or adding red arrows to make it impossible to make right turns on red.
Anyway, this wastes time, but it also costs us at least $100 a month on gasoline. Our primary car is an EV.
Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
> Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
sure, but I'd rather just lobby against cars at that point. Especially in a place like the Bay Area that should be mostly served by public transit and dense housing. Lobbying to micromanage idling just feels like a waste of effort for such a negligible benefit.
TBH I never thought to even call the speech processing in my a head a "little voice" until someone accused me of not having an inner monologue. I don't perceive it as audio at all unless I put effort into it.
Meanwhile music plays in my head constantly, so I don't think they're related.
Characters are not the semantic components of words—these are syllables. Generally speaking, anyway. I've got to imagine this approach would yield higher quality results than the roman alphabet. I'm curious if this could be tested by just looking at how LLMs handle English vs Chinese.
The minimal semantic parts of words are morphemes. Syllables are phonological units (roughly: the minimal unit for rhythmic purposes such as stress, etc)
Only in languages that have morphemes! This is hardly a universal attribute of language so much as an attribute of those that use an alphabet to encode sounds. It makes more sense to just bypass the encoding and directly consider the speech.
Besides, considering morphemes as semantic often results in a completely different meaning than we actually intend. We aren't trying to train a chatbot to speak in prefixes and suffixes, we're trying to train a chatbot to speak in natural language, even if it is encoded to latin script before output.
That's technically wrong. Every language has morphemes for the simple reason that every word is at least one morpheme. `cat` is a morpheme. `cats` is two morphemes (cat-s).
(The point about semantics is also technically wrong. You would first need to specify your view of semantic compositionality before such a point can be evaluated, but the usual views of semantics don't have any such consequence.)
> Every language has morphemes for the simple reason that every word is at least one morpheme.
Sure, if you define "morpheme" as a collection of syllables that's meaningful to people using alphabetic script. I don't see any benefit to this compared to working with syllables directly, which is a meaningful concept regardless of the script used to encode them.
> Sure, if you define “morpheme” as a collection of syllables
Cats, as noted, has two morphemes, despite having only one syllable. Syllables and morphemes are largely orthogonal, morphemes can be less than, equal to, or more than a syllable (and even when more than, may or may not start or end on a syllable boundary.)
(Also, syllables aren’t the minimal semantic units even of spoken speech, those are phonemes – a syllable consists of at least one phoneme, potentially more. But morphemes, even an alphabetic script if it isn’t perfectly phonetic, still don’t necessarily map to one or more phonemes, since is textual semantic unit may have no effect on pronunciation.)
If you like physics and you haven't watched Sabine, you're missing out. She discusses recently published research in an entertaining and accessible manner while also doing a good job of touching on more advanced aspects pertinent to the topic at hand. She's great at covering the skeptic's perspective (she usually takes that perspective herself) and playing Devil's advocate, especially when it comes to anything adjacent to her life's work in particle physics.
Ironically, the video is a skeptic's attempt at a balanced review of a published paper, and the paper, which makes its argument in text, is way more bullshit than the video's verbal discussion of it.
you are confusing your needs with the use case of the Kindle which is heavily focused on linear reading of text, mostly fiction. Graphics and PDFs are much lower on the priority scale.
PDFs and comics are not a small use case at all - the push to larger screens is mostly driven by people who want to read scientific papers, business documents, etc which come in pdf form, or manga and other graphical works (the drive for color ereaders seems to come almost entirely from this segment). The smaller "ebook only" readers are much cheaper and marketed less aggressively.
Even optimized e-ink devices are not particularly suitable for those kinds of materials and most of the e-ink reader manufacturers have not tried to address that market. It is generally better served by LCD tablets.
To be clear, LLMs are not capable of reasoning.
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