Australia doesn't have protected speech. We're starting to see the dam break where rules that were left unexplored because it would go against the US driven view of globalization is starting to wane due to the US's loss (self destruction?) of its soft power.
The security of this list is essentially the motivation of the plot of Mission Impossible (1996). Except that's the just list of undercover agents, not he whole agency.
I ran into this exact issue and had Claude write a test run scheduler to avoid cargo process contention and migrated to nextest within it. I have --release build cycles on my local machine down to about three seconds from what was for the same project 60+ seconds before investing in the changes.
I mean, looking at the release notes for things like say the Linux kernel it is clear that the improvements are there at a massive rate of change. But it's small stuff, it's performance improvements, it's quality of life. If you do things right people will think you've done nothing at all. What did you expect? Businesses to come up with whole new business lines, or is it just that backlogs of work is getting burned down that was going to be gotten to eventually? From what I can tell from the PM forums, the next bottleneck is the Product Org coming up with ideas worth implementing as fast as the developers can deliver them.
Which only changes the title and your new bottleneck is product engineers struggling to come up with new product ideas worth doing month over month. While also half of their job is still the engineering side of the problem with less customer centric time.
This sort of thing makes me thing that we're about to enter an era where software development is going to be where most of the jobs fallout will be. You can't one-shot vibe code your way to this. But for proper Software Engineering, those jobs are safe where more and more problems are going to actually need solving by creatively using math because all the problems individuals deliver are just going to be larger. People are just mourning the loss of the low hanging fruit.
I think you're speaking like a software engineer, which is understandable, and not like a historian or economist. There's no reason to believe math based jobs would survive. The models regularly do well on math problems. You can auto-research loop ways to optimize memory usage for any particular program.
The point isn't that "doing math" is safe. Auto-research solves one target variable in one system, doing it at scale where say one developer is SME for the agentically manged 200 microservices down the line, heh I mean you certainly can, but good luck with that token cost of auto-research when that problem space is O(microservice^2). I point at that example yesterday of that optimized database memory with the comments pointing out that the specific problem fit in memory, over optimized and didn't generalize. The problem isn't the work, but the rework. A historian should know that new solutions to problems doesn't lead to "no problems ever again" but only problems with barriers that the new solution doesn't solve.
The argument is probably that LLMs can find those optimizations cheaper than a human expert. Since LLM cost at fixed capability seems to be going down you either expect humans to be completely replaced or human wages to be lowered by LLMs.
I expect average human wages for programming to get lower and the overall percentage of the developer to move lower wage countries and this probably means away from the US and US salary expectations. Meat proxies and agentic CRUD will be off-shored to low wage Asian or even African countries with AI handling language barriers. Why wouldn't they be? Why pay six figures for a meat proxy? Product Builders should weather the storm the most, but they'll be the high end skilled PMs/engineers that of the overall industry but probably won't break 10% of total global headcount. In a world where knowing the domain will be the key driver of differentiation, as building averages out and knowing the customer and how to market to them becomes the differentiator, being closer to the target market will fragment competition from four global winners with over 10k employees in a space to 100 niche/regionally tailored winners with maybe 500 employees a piece. Not to mention if you thought GDPR was a pain, wait until AI laws that vary by country to country get added in.
I also expect as AI becomes more cost sensitive once the quality plateaus (there's only so many ways to get an answer to 100% right), the data centers are going to chase where the cheap power is, and this long term is likely to be in high-solar locations. So lower latitudes. Doesn't rule out places like Texas of course, but places like India, Mexico, Brazil, Israel or Saudi Arabia will have home field advantages.
Yeah, they are used in space. I don't work directly in this field, but have discussed wax motors with some newspace/smallsat folks, and get the impression they are popular for the same reason nitinol wire actuators are: few moving parts, no rotary bearings, resettable/multi-use unlike pyrotechnic actuators.
The main point of news I heard was that the Iran infrastructure the US destroyed, in a time where they are allowed to repair it and not just get bombed again, will take three years to repair. Oil prices don't get "cheap" again this side of 2030. Not to mention that there is a bunch of Russian infrastructure that is still on the chopping block to be destroyed by Ukraine as that war continues. Which has the same time it takes to rebuild issues.
Iran infrastructure is a non-issue, they have been heavily sanctioned for years. The issue with Iran is they are stopping everybody else in the region from exporting oil.
While they have been under heavy sanctions, they have largely gotten around this, for example by trading with China (who have just said they will not abide by our "unilateral sanctions"). So their oil has still been going to service global needs, and its lack will still have an effect (as will the missing Russian oil products).
Oddly, since the Iranians (and Russians) have been selling their oil products at a discount, they were actually having the effect of holding down the price of petroleum prior to the war. No idea about how much in real terms, but...
There is a global market for energy, a country X that would have bought from Iran but couldn't because of refinery damage has to buy it from someone else, pushing up the price at the margin for everyone.
That's the main issue, yes. But where was all that oil Iran was producing going before their infrastructure was destroyed? Are you claiming they only ever used it domestically and didn't export any of it? That seems unlikely.
All the petrol processed in the world is consumed virtually on the spot, take down any production capacity anywhere and you'll create all kind of nasty side effects, now take down multiple major actors/transport roads and you get the current situation
That's not a source. And it also directly contradicts your assertion.
Petroleum products are refined and consumed near the point of use because they're not very shelf stable. Petrol is not shipped internationally in any significant quantity, neither is diesel for these reasons.
Take down any production capacity anywhere and you'll have shortages locally but crude oil supplies will divert to other refining capacity and fall in price.
It's still a global trade. Russia - India trade is directly affected, so that affects the supply of diesel out of India for those who normally buy from India. So they buy from somebody else. And so on down the line.
Diesel is shelf stable for 6-12 months, which is long enough to ship anywhere in the world.
It does. Oil export is down after repeated attacks on ports and export infrastructure both on Black and Baltic sea and attacks on tankers in Black (and even Mediterranean) sea. Russia exports less oil than it extracts and will start shutting down oil wells soon (may be doing this already).
Attacks on refineries also have impact on worlds petrol/diesel prices - one of biggest exporters turned into an importer at a time when there is world shortage of refining capacity and cracks spread is at or near all time high.
> It also limits their ability to fund the war.
It does but it also makes petrol and diesel more expensive around the world.
> well, except oil executives and shareholders, I guess
They should be sued by governments, they can only make more money if they artificially increase their margin, if they simply passed the cost down to the consumers they shouldn't have record profits
Even if they didn't react to the natural demand/offer dynamic, American refineries are processing 30-40% more volume than before; that means US oil companies are making money that someone else was making before.
When people have an incentive to build that fast and cut corners (which they will). Under normal circumstances dotting the i's and crossing they t's, it's 5 to 7 years. Remember, the US is temporarily running low on missiles because of how much explosives Trump dropped on Iran. They blew up a petrostate level of petroleum infrastructure to the tune of $58B in damages of specialized engineering, about 15% of the country's total GDP. If recreating that in a quarter was possible, everyone with a drop of oil under their toes would do it.
I can't take the alignment people seriously. Because if humanity has shown anything, it's that a lot of people are, euphemistically, are bad individuals. Alignment assumes that the person dictating the outcomes desire healthy outcomes, aren't self serving and don't want any subgroups dead and that morality is held as a universal set of beliefs that unify everyone. And that so long as the AI delivers on exactly what they are tasked with, it will all be fine and nothing bad will ever happen.
It's like these dorks never met humanity. One mans safe pure society, is another mans dead ethnic group.
Every fear about AI, is a veiled fear that a human somewhere now has the tool to enact his desires at scale. Biological warfare, nuclear megadeaths, copyright infringement, job replacement, it's all reflections on what we know humans may do if given the option and lack of societal controls on the problem space. AI just is accelerating the route to delivering on those options.
Some people need to watch Oppenheimer a bit more, the researchers don't get to determine alignment, they just build the tool. The powerful person at the top of the org chart decides where the overall alignment points, whether it's Musk, Trump, Altman or Amodei. Whoever wins out.
And the problem with distillation and local llms, isn't that it's theft or anything hypocritical like that, it's that if you give a million people a million models they fully control and get to align, inevitably, The same percentage of those million as there are shady businessmen, shortcut takers, misandrists, criminals, supremacists and general idiots in the general population, will not seek to wrought outcomes positive for society. And by those personality statistics, we're pretty hosed.
I’ve engaged with some of the alignment people and their writing somewhat and, at least for the subset I was interacting with, I think they’d agree.
The problem that they were pointing at isn’t “how do we align these systems to a person’s goals”.
It is a cluster of problems.
We don’t know how to begin to think about how to align these system’s to a person’s goals.
Aligning it to an individual is fraught with peril, and we don’t know how to begin to think about what to align it to instead.
(You could try for something like virtue ethics, but someone will have to pick and choose, and small biases there could have big impacts.)
And even if you could sort that out - human values drift over time, so you need something that can shift its values in ways that we’d endorse. Assuming we understood the shift.
One example I came across was that if you booted up an AI aligned with something like “upstanding citizen” but anchored on values from a few generations back, it might suggest you use slaves to solve your problems.
And if you had something that used some super intelligent process to reason through it’s own version of virtue ethics in a way not so dependent on the details of the present norms, you might end up with something that pays a lot of attention to moral horrors that aren’t quite visible to us yet.
When I came across the above, there weren’t many concrete suggestions in there.
These were all just illustrative examples of: having these systems grow in power / intelligence / effectiveness in ways that are safe for humans is very hard, and we don’t really know how to think about what solutions would look like.
The actual reasons they believe this - and have done for a long time now - come from some detailed conceptual models that have a good track record of calling things in advance.
But it takes a bit of reading to understand their models of the world.
There were two day workshops at one point that did a good job, and that was about as condensed as those people thought they could get it at the time.
All of this, if it was a human analogy, would fit into discussion on how do we educate people so they grow up to be upstanding. But we don't at all yet have a framework for what is the equivalent of a justice department, where bad actors are tracked, arrested, pursued, jailed and otherwise contained from society. Shutting down an API access on one account is not at all the proportional response to what the people who take alignment seriously, fear has the chance of occurring by the late 2030s. I'm not sure we've done much or any preparation for when the AI "education system" fails and has inevitable edge cases that don't follow the plan, and what the global AI equivalent of the justice department looks like.
I think you and the parent saying the same thing in different terms.
It's very unfortunate that the group who rightly saw AI as a big threat, brought a range of dubious baggage to the discussion. Especially with the "alignment" framework they brought the assumption that AI that does what no one says would be oh so much worse than AI which does what anyone says. But as you say, a fraction of people can be really bad indeed.
”Because if humanity has shown anything, it's that a lot of people are, euphemistically, bad individuals”
In reality most individuals are good people.
Individually, people prefer be kind and compassionate, prefer to help when they find another in trouble.
Our view of the world has become distorted by the relentless focus of social- and mass-media on violence and rage inducing clickbait. Including on the few people in power who are in fact sociopaths (a tiny minority, but they’ll get more focus than reasonable, well-behaved CEOs voicing nuanced opinions).
If you look around yourself you’ll see much more good than bad; if the looking is at your screen it’s easy to become depressed and lose faith.
I do agree with the above mentioned view that corporations can show ‘sociopathic’ behavior. Their incentives are monetary gains, shareholder value; inherently driving them away from social well being.
Here too, companies with a positive, emphatic corporate culture exist, but that takes strong leadership who can see beyond the monotonic view of monetary gains. And again, the media will throw examples of misbehaving companies in our face all day long before paying attention to things that went well on the backside of page 16.
All the good in the world can be 99.9% of the population even, it still doesn't stop the minority enacting a bioweapon mass casualty event. It's the reason we have jails. Jails don't house 50% of the population, not even close, but the grief the minority population enact gets its whole branch of criminal justice and multiple federal departments to counteract for good reason. And now this technology will accelerate what lone wolves can do, which cannot be undone, before they are stopped by the good majority.
But focusing on bioweapons and mass destruction, on the grief other people (‘jailed minorities’) cause, disregards the progress we have made. Over centuries human welfare has massively increased. On average things have never been better for humanity.
I’m not saying there’s no danger of bad things happening - I’m saying our view is distorted, which is a not a good basis for decision making
And I'm no bear on the tech either. I'm not even in the boat of that the tech should be slowed down yet. But in a world where anyone can produce the effort of 300 people trivially, this eventually takes us places. Electricity and industrialization introduced huge benefits upfront, it introduced new problems that needed addressing at the long tail. Lets not pretend there won't be new problems to tackle here or just "hope" it works out.
AI isn't going to create in of itself "new" problems, it's just going to expose what we already know can cause harm, but was just stopped from being bigger problems because scaling issues was a natural barrier and we took the lazy way out until now.
Yes AI may cause job loss, more inequality in the short term.
But if there is anything humanity has shown is that we can deal with disruptive progress.
We may need to resettle but over the longer term every disruptive innovation so far has lead to an increase in wellbeing for the whole of humanity.
(That does not resolve the danger of AI itself ‘going rogue’ or a single lunatic developing a bioweapon, but those things are much less likely to occur than the level of media attention would suggest.)
> Individually, people prefer be kind and compassionate, prefer to help when they find another in trouble.
What are you basing that claim on?
How do you know it's an actual preference and not mainly caused by external factors (e.g. not wanting to be seen doing unkind things, wanting to be seen as upstanding)?
I don't want to do the "check his hard drives" thing, but is that you? Do you only not do things because you don't want to be seen doing "unkind things"?
I'd agree if we are talking about personal interactions. Few hundreds people that we personally know and interact with is the scale we are wired for by evolution, isn't it?
What civilization enabled and continuously rely on, however, is the type of deindividualization of actions and bucketing of people, which, in turn, enables pretty horrible things at scale (from the weapons of mass destruction to objectively psychopathic profit-maximizing corporations). One can even say that not facing the consequences of one's actions is a feature and not a bug of the system.
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