• 5 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • but if we look at the countries on this planet that are the most successful in terms of economics, equality, personal freedom, human rights, etc. then we find countries that made it work through regulation and strong government institutions

    Yeah that’s socialism. The best societies were all degrees of socialist, this includes western Europe and the USA at its mid-century peak. These societies all had aggressive, borderline confiscatory progressive taxation, large scale government intervention in the economy (in the US especially aggressive anti-trust), a generous social welfare state, and a large and professionalized civil service.

    They also had large and well-organized labor unions capable of wielding power on behalf of their members and disrupting plans of the elites.

    Remove those things and you quickly slide into a dystopian fascist nightmare state as the US and parts of Europe like the UK are discovering.





  • Every time there’s an AI hype cycle the charlatans start accusing the naysayers of moving goalposts. Heck that exact same thing was happing constantly during the Watson hype. Remember that? Or before that the Alpha Go hype. Remember that?

    I was editing my comment down to the core argument when you responded. But fundamentally you can’t make a machine think without understanding thought. While I believe it is easy to test that Watson or ChatGPT are not thinking, because you can prove it through counterexample, the reality is that charlatans can always “but actually” those counterexamples aside by saying “it’s a different kind of thought.”

    What we do know because this at least the 6th time this has happened is that the wow factor of the demo will wear off, most promised use cases won’t materialize, everyone will realize it’s still just an expensive stochastic parrot and, well, see you again for the next hype cycle a decade from now.