guitars are real

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There’s a thing I read somewhere – computer science has a way of understating both the long-term potential impact of a new technology, and the timelines required to get there. People are being told about what’s eventually possible, and they look around and see that the top-secret best in category at this moment is ELIZA with a calculator, and they see a mismatch.

Thing is, though, it’s entirely possible to recognize that the technology is in very early stages, yet also recognize it still has long-term potential. Almost as soon as the Internet was invented (late 60’s) people were talking about how one day you could browse a mail-order catalogue from your TV and place orders from the comfort of your couch. But until the late 1990’s, it was a fantasy and probably nobody outside the field had a good reason to take it seriously. Now, we laugh at how limited the imaginations of people in the 1960’s were. Hop in a time machine and tell futurists from that era that our phones would be our TV’s and we’d actually do all our ordering and also product research on them, but by tapping the screen instead of calling in orders, and oh yeah there’s no landline, and they’d probably look at you like you were nuts.

Anyways, considering the amount of interest in AI software even at its current level, I think there’s a clear pathway from “here” to “there.” Just don’t breathlessly follow the hype because it’ll likely follow a similar trajectory to the original computer revolution, which required about 20-30 years of massive investment and constant incremental R&D to create anything worth actually looking at by members of the public, and even further time from there to actually penetrate into every corner of society.

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According to the article, they got an experimental LLM to reliably perform basic arithmetic, which would be a pretty substantial improvement if true. IE instead of stochastically guessing or offloading it to an interpreter, the model itself was able to reliably perform a reasoning task that LLM’s have struggled with so far.

It’s rather exciting, tbh. it kicks open the door to a whole new universe of applications, if true. It’s only technically a step in the direction of AGI, though, since technically if AGI is possible every improvement like this counts as a step towards it. If this development is really what triggered the board coup, though, then it sort of makes the board coup group look even more ridiculous than they did before. This is step 1 to making a model that can be tasked with ingesting spreadsheets and doing useful math on them. And I say that as someone who leans pretty pessimistically in the AI safety debate.

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Well, kind of. It’s a bad look for MS to be so heavily invested in such a dumpster fire of a corporation, so it’s okay for them it got resolved, but they would have won out more if Altman had joined them. It was the other investors, including a number of employees, who would have really lost out if the company had just collapsed in on itself like it immediately started doing. This got resolved sort of against MS’s best interests.

So, sure, investor win. But MS more or less lost this one.

I generally agree that it’s unlikely the non-profit structure is going to do its job here, I’ve seen something like it more or less work on a smaller scale with things that are less intensely of interest to the entire capitalist class, although I have no idea what kind of regulations we’d end up with considering how many oligopolists are involved.

The long and short of it is, they fucked around and found out who was more important to the future of the company.

I’m not sure if I’d call this an investor win. More or less 90% of the company threatened to leave. It made sense on their part to do whatever it took to get him back. Anyways, looks like he stopped for a couple seconds to think about how smart it really was to join Microsoft.

Yeah, but the point is that if you want the real-world equivalent to the habitable worlds opened up by the protomolecule as regards Mars, that’s actually just the entire rest of the outer solar system, especially the moons and asteroid belt. They’re exactly as habitable as Mars will ever be in actual reality. Mars stops mattering except as an orbital pitstop as soon as there are places that are just as good if not better developed farther out, in smaller or non-existent gravity wells.

Mars has no active geology, therefore no Van Allen belts, therefore the only shielding you get is if you bury yourself. And to generate the energy required to artificially generate Van Allen belts that can actually protect us from cosmic rays… first, it’s a preposterous amount, second, it’s energy rent you have to pay in perpetuity to get an inferior environment anyways and zero resources that aren’t available in greater abundance in cheaper gravity wells, because you’re not realistically going to be spinning up the core anytime soon. Then you need to initiate planetary-wide processes to erode the toxic regolith. The numbers just do not add up.

Then there’s the 38% Earth gravity, which A - is likely to be as unhealthy as a spun-up semi-microgravity environment B - isn’t strong enough to retain any atmosphere thick enough to support humans, which means not only do you have to pay a continuous gargantuan energy rent just to one day walk on the surface without being killed by cosmic rays, you also have to import atmosphere which you’re guaranteed to have to replace.

I enjoy the Expanse, but in spite of its hard science reputation it’s honestly about as realistic as Star Trek in a lot of ways. Terraforming Mars is a fun thought experiment but Jules Verne level out of date at this point. Take it as an unrealistic backdrop for a very fun geopolitical space drama, not a realistic exploration of how space development would actually go. They needed a third power to make the politics complicated. Nobody’s ever gonna breathe the free air of Mars, that’s a fantasy, and that’s knowable today, which means it’ll never be invested in seriously.

No, I mean it’s an interesting topic to me and the review makes it come across like a coloring-book level engagement with the subject. They straight up sound like hacks.

Settlers routinely sacrifice their health to be part of the first wave of people to stake a claim on fresh territories, considering how insane that got during more or less every colonization effort in past history I strongly doubt that harming human health will be a barrier to the whole thing, for better or worse. (I think mostly for worse tbqh, but I still see it happening unless climate change ruins everything, or nuclear war, etc)

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Yeah, absolutely they could. It’s a very romantic notion to, I dunno, send thousands of people to fuck rust on Mars until they die for absolutely no reason, but the reality is that they’re not gonna put the money into a colony off Earth until they know they can set up a shipping route and there’ll be something valuable coming back. That means regular trips to said colony.

If they put it on Mars, it’s because they realized all that rust is really valuable or something. More likely it’ll be the asteroid belt. But there will be regular shipping.

I mean, Biosphere 2 failed because it was started by a cult that mismanaged the shit out of it, then Steve Bannon took over and outright killed the company. A lot of the really crazy shit that happened was a result of corporate power struggles. The first Biosphere experiment lasted two years and is considered overall a success, probably because Steve Bannon wasn’t there.

Before it collapsed, they actually did one better over the previous experiment and achieved self-sufficiency in food production. Colonists would need equipment shipped in until a manufacturing supply chain could be set up locally, but mostly Biosphere 2 serves as a cautionary tale of letting Steve Bannon and cults run things.

Even the claims of stir craziness were kind of overblown. They got evaluated, everything they experienced was consistent with everything that was known about long-term isolated group environments. They’re a rough experience.

It was a fine enough experiment in the early 90’s, but there are incorrect assumptions about how it would apply to space travel. For one, the Biosphere project is considered a “failure” because they set themselves the goal of creating a completely self-contained bubble that needed no outside inputs, and yet at various points systems in the sphere needed repair and replacement, which is completely normal and absolutely what would happen in space. No space company worth anything would let a mining colony collapse because a carbon scrubber broke and “hAhA yOu NeEd oUtSiDe InPutS tO kEeP lIviNG JuSt LiKe tErReStRiAl cOloNieS.” No, they’d ship in a new scrubber and keep the line moving.

Once there’s a fully space-based supply chain up and running using materials from the asteroid belt, I strongly question the utility of a Moon colony. Any resource you could find on the Moon that would be necessary to get us out there would also be available in the asteroid belt, and once there’s a pipeline of extraction, processing, and manufacturing in space, there’d be no reason to make an extra stop on the SURFACE of the Moon except to drop off resources for people already living there. It’d be an economic atavism at that point.

Now, using planets and moons for their gravity to park space stations and perform slingshot-type maneuvers, that makes a lot of sense. But we’re all still so stuck in our 20th century imaginations of space colonization being like, idk, settling the Plains but on Mars we can’t think through what a space-based economy would actually look like.

The book’s exploration of what cIty oN mArS would look like is insipid at best. If people settled Mars for some insane reason, it would look like the Expanse – miserable, desperate, nobody lives on the surface, and as soon as the space based economy hits a certain point of development it would be pointless and everyone would realize it. You might have rich people building vacation homes there for the views, that’s it.

Why tf would you figure out how to cope with Lunar and Martian regolith when you could just not?

I know I can, I’m being tongue in cheek. But would that work actually merit book reviews just because it was book length?

Wow, so a couple people who breathlessly believed the hype and would have been at risk of being part of the first wave of settlers if they lived maybe 100 years from now did a shred of research about what colonization literally is and is like, and realized that it’s so much more complicated and worse than the state-sponsored story about what colonization looks like, and that doing that all over again in space would be so much more complicated and in many ways worse than on Earth, and the upshot of the story of the book is that these people only just now learned anything about this subject, and I’m supposed to want to give them THIRTY DOLLARS for the privilege of reading what amounts to a college-level book report that doesn’t offer anything that hasn’t been extensively reported and discussed already?

Can I write entire books about ridiculously uncontroversial things and charge more than thirty bucks for it, too?

I wish more content creators would upload to PeerTube (or something like it). I get it, there’s no instances with good monetization options, it just sucks we’re all stuck in various walled gardens because of how expensive video delivery is.

Microsoft plays these games all the time. They raid startups and accumulate all the IP and talent for themselves. It often involves a leveraged buyout, but if the company has an internal fight and their darling CEO takes most of the top talent with him, and MS owns a 49% stake in the victim company in question, swooping the CEO and all the top talent is a great way to start driving the price down on any leftover IP/talent left at OpenAI they might be interested in. They just sabotage the company until it collapses then they offer a “fair price”

Basically, if you look at MS’s history with founders and startups, you’d have to be either a complete idiot, or really hurting and in a very emotional place (come on, the board stabbed him in the back and tried to get rid of him like he was an incompetent middle manager, they even tried to do it on a Friday like he was some clerk) to think Microsoft’s offer isn’t just a ploy to grab up all your IP and talent, and that once you’ve helped them get all your top researchers, you’ll have any independence or ability to do anything other than be a cog in Microsoft’s machine.

Just because Altman’s a human who is able to be manipulated by a big, evil corporation with an infamous track record for manipulating people like him doesn’t make him an “idiot,” it makes him a human being. What are you, a Vulcan?

Yeah, it was a massive coup for Microsoft. As people are pointing out, MS has been falling behind in consumer spaces for a while now. Investing early and obtaining a substantial edge in AI would help bolster their position in coming years across all markets.

They moved in and invested in OpenAI the way they did because of this. And then all of a sudden Altman and a bunch of top researchers leave all at the same time? The most Microsoft thing they could have done is exactly what they did: swoop him up and promise him the moon (in this case, the promise is clearly that they’ll give him a lot of latitude so he doesn’t feel too much like he lost out by not forming his own company – they even said something around this in their press release) to get him on their side and his name on paperwork before he has a chance to seriously reconsider.

Altman probably thinks he got one over on OpenAI, but really, Microsoft got one over on him and OpenAI.