nednobbins
@nednobbins@lemmy.zip
- Comment on The news is sugarcoating how revolting the Epstein files are 3 days ago:
I’m willing to give the news some benefit of the doubt here because there actually are rational and non-evil reasons to do this.
Socially, we have at least two related, but distinct forms of sexual atrocity.
One is sex with children. There’s extensive evidence that sex before puberty leads to all kinds of long term negative effects for the victim.
The other is non-consent. No matter what the age of the people involved, non-consent has serious negative consequences for the victim.
The Epstein victims all seem to be extremely young post-adolescents. We generally wouldn’t care at all if they were getting it on with their high-school sweethearts.
The problem with the Epstein victims was primarily one of consent. There was a vast human trafficking network and many of our leaders were active participants. The whole thing was so horrible that normal people are sickened by it happening to anyone, not just children.
The reason we may want to be sticklers on this point is that this form of abuse is extremely common and really needs a spotlight on it. We don’t want people to come out the other end of this thing and think, “Sure pedophilia is bad but this guy is just pressuring his 18 year old secretary into sex and then making money passing her around to his buddies.”
- Comment on YSK that everything the New York Times about Donald Trump actually happened 4 days ago:
The current stance of the president of the Heritage Foundation seems to be that if the left does not take up arms, MAGA will take over everything, permanently.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 4 days ago:
There’s simple and there’s oversimplified. The element your missing is “trust”. The reason gamers go to Steam is because we trust their reviews and return policies.
The other storefronts haven’t built that trust. Most gamers have the experience of trying other storefronts, hating them, and going back to Steam.
People don’t trust Gabe because he’s a billionaire, they trust him because he consistently makes decisions that gamers benefit from. No other game store CEO can claim that with a straight face.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 4 days ago:
That would be how monopolies work. You realize that Steam doesn’t require exclusivity, right? You can get BG3 all over the place. When customers have choice between vendors it’s not a monopoly, even if they tend to make the same choice.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 4 days ago:
Do you think Larian’s management is also stupid?
Any halfway decent GTM executive would have checked their distribution channel options and chosen the mix that makes them the most money, net of fees.
Why would they pay for a service that harms them?
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 4 days ago:
Are you actually confused about the information asymmetry in video game purchases? Given your weird movie references I assumed you were just trying to change the topic.
I’ll try to use small words. Before you play a game, you don’t know if it’s goo;, just as used car buyers don’t know if the used car is a lemon. Without a buyer protections that drags the price of good games down just as lemons drag down the price of used cars. Akerlof goes into the proof for the car part of this in his paper.
“Lemon laws” mostly solve that problem for cars. Steam mostly solves that problem for video games. That requires trust. You may not trust Steam but millions of people do. They’ve repeatedly made decisions that benefit gamers so gamers flock to them. Thats why they buy so many games from Steam even when they’re available elsewhere. If they broke that trust they’d probably never get it back but, until then, their net effect is to increase revenue for studios by providing a market where people are comfortable enough to spend more money.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 4 days ago:
So you don’t care that Larian isn’t harmed, you don’t care that the dev’s aren’t harmed, you don’t care that the consumer isn’t harmed.
You just feel bad for Epic?
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 4 days ago:
You’re the one claiming to be the economics expert. I’m simply correcting the record.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 4 days ago:
I haven’t studied “capitalism” but my Masters degree is in Financial Engineering. Since you seem to care about formal economics, how do you propose solving Akelof’s Market for Lemons?
Valve solves the information asymmetry. That’s a net gain for both buyers and sellers. But you’ve studied economics, so you probably know that already.
So let’s skip to the meat of the question. How do you propose determining the intrinsic value of resolved information asymmetry.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 5 days ago:
You seem to be operating under some notion that particular work deserves a particular amount of pay. That’s backwards. People pay for what they get, not for what the seller’s cost of goods.
We know that Larian is doing very well financially. Their devs are happy and well paid.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 5 days ago:
That’s a completely irrelevant number.
I have no idea how many devs worked on BG3 and that number has 0 impact on my enjoyment of the game. Given the number of hours I spent playing BG3, the price made it one of the cheapest forms of entertainment available.
And, as a developer, I really don’t care how much companies pay to marketing vendors. Developer pay is generally negotiated when you’re hired. I haven’t worked in B2C but, as I understand it, they usually pay bonuses on sales volume rather than profits.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 5 days ago:
“overcharge” is entirely in the eye of the purchaser not the devs. Given the difference in user experience between Steam and any other launcher (sadly even/especially GOG), Steam charges less than I’d be willing to pay.
- Comment on Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney supports the $900 million lawsuit against Valve, arguing Steam is "the only major store still holding onto payment ties and 30% junk fee" 6 days ago:
Valve doesn’t overcharge me.
They provide an excellent user experience. They have one of the few stores where you can actually get reliable user reviews. Their return policies are generous. I’ve never had any problems with fraud or scams. Their search and recommendation functions are pretty good.
To me, that’s a great deal and they’ve earned every penny of their markup.
- Comment on Mamdani to kill the NYC AI chatbot caught telling businesses to break the law— New York mayor says terminating the ‘unusable’ bot will help close a budget gap 1 week ago:
I just headed over to .ml and did a local search for “mamdani”
I see a bunch of the more conservatives Democrats and their supporters complaining about him and conservatives of all stripes are really hoping he’ll fail.
I’ve been called a tankie several times and I rather like Mamdani. I see him, AOC, and Sanders as the best hope for the future of the US.
Where are these tankies that hate Mamdani so much? What do they hate him for?
- Comment on It's barely a science. 1 week ago:
Sort of. They won’t say that 2+2=5. The errors are in the isomorphism they claim and the empirical assumptions they make.
Two of my favorites:
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Almost all of economics assumes normal distributions. We have good reason to believe that almost no economic variables are normally distributed. That means we routinely underestimate tail risk. We do it anyway because that’s the only way we can get the math to work.
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Almost all of modern economics assumes utility functions with transitive preferences. Testing shows that even the economists who published those theories don’t have transit preferences.
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- Comment on It's barely a science. 1 week ago:
Economists’ math is as good as anyone else’.
The main problem is that economies are incredibly chaotic systems and all the math that humans can actually read described them poorly.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
We certainly haven’t ruled out the possibility that the human brain is capable of some sort of “super Turing” calculations. That would lead me to 2 questions;
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Can we devise some test to show this? If we expand our definition of “test” to include anything we can measure, directly or indirectly, through our senses?
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What do we think is the “magic” ingredient that allows humans to engage in “super turing” activities, that a computer doesn’t have? eg Are carbon compounds inherently more suited to intelligence than silicon compounds?
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- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
There’s a real vs theoretical distinction. Turing machines are defined as having infinite memory. Running out of memory is a big issue that prevents computers from solving problems that Turing machines should be able to solve.
The halting problem, a bunch of problems involving prime numbers, a bunch of other weird math problems are all things that can’t be solved with Turing machines. They can all sort of be solved in some circumstances (eg A TM can correctly classify many programs as either halting or not halting but there are a bunch of edge cases it can’t figure out, even with infinite memory).
From what I remember, most researchers believe that human brains are Turing Complete. I’m not aware of any class of problem that humans can solve that we don’t think are solvable by sufficiently large computers.
You’re right that Quantum Computers are Turing Complete. They’re just the closest practical thing I could think of to something beyond it. They often let you knock down the Big Oh relative to regular computers. That was my point though. We can describe something that goes beyond TC (like “it can solve the halting lemma”) but there don’t seem to be any examples of them.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
Most modern languages are theoretically Turing complete but they all have finite memory. That also keeps human brains from being Turing complete. I’ve read a little about theories beyond Turing completeness, like quantum computers, but I’m not aware of anyone claiming that human brains are capable of that.
A game of Magic could theoretically do any task a Turing machine could do but it would be really slow. Even if it could “think” it would likely take years to decide to do something as simple as farting.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
Feelings are certainly real. That doesn’t mean that they provide any evidence beyond the existence of the feeling. The standard thought experiment around that is to think about dreams. In a dream, everything I feel can be completely convincing and I have no way to know it’s a hallucination. Once I wake up that reality becomes clear and I know that the feelings I was 100% certain of a few moments ago, were false. That suggests that even complete certainty in our feelings is not indicative of underlying truth.
The extra dimension thing is a bit tricky. The standard 3+1 are widely accepted. There are several conjectures that involve more dimensions but we haven’t found evidence to support them. All of those are still physical dimensions. They generally fall into 2 categories; testable and not testable.
The non-testability is why everyone looks down on string theorists. Their models “explain” everything by piling on more and more dimensions but non of it is testable.
Since none of the dimensions above 4 are measurable, I’m much more comfortable believing they don’t exist than that they do. I don’t see why it would make sense to fill a void of non-knowledge with arbitrary guesses. I don’t see a problem in not knowing if it’s possible for AIs (or humans) to be conscious.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
I can understand a desire to find something beyond ourselves but I’m not driven by it.
That’s exactly where Descartes lost me. I was with him on the whole “cogito ergo sum” thing but his insistence that his feelings of a higher being meant that it must exist in real form somewhere made no sense to me.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
I’m not talking about a precise definition of consciousness, I’m talking about a consistent one. Without a definition, you can’t argue that an AI, a human, a dog, or a squid has consciousness. You can proclaim, it but you can’t back it up.
The problem is that I have more than a basic understanding of how an LLM works. I’ve written NNs from scratch and I know that we model perceptrons after neurons.
Researchers know that there are differences between the two. We can generally eliminate any of those differences (and many research do exactly that). No researcher, scientist, or philosopher can tell you what critical property neurons may have that enable consciousness. Nobody actually knows and people who claim to know are just making stuff up.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
I think this is likely an unsurmountable point of difference.
The problem is that once we eliminate measurability we can’t differentiate between reality and fantasy. We can imagine anything we want and believe in it.
The Philosophy of Balance has “believe in the universal God” as its first core tenant. That makes it more like a religion than a philosophy.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
I don’t know if we’ll ever define consciousness or if we’ll ever discover what it is.
My central claim is that if we don’t do that we can’t convincingly claim that an AI is or is not conscious. We can conjecture about it either way and either guess may be right, but we won’t be able to move past guesses.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
This definition of consciousness essentially says that humans have souls and machines don’t. It’s unsatisfying because it just kicks the definition question down the road.
Saying that consciousness exists outside the realm of physics and science is a very strong statement. It claims that none of our normal analysis and measurement tools apply to it. That may be true, but if it is, how can anyone defend the claim that an AI does or does not have it?
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
Defining “consciousness” requires much more handwaving and many more assumptions than any of the other three. It requires so much that I claim it’s essentially an undefined term.
With such a vague definition of what “consciousness” is, there’s no logical way to argue that an AI does or does not have it.
- Comment on Expecting a LLM to become conscious, is like expecting a painting to become alive 2 months ago:
I can define “LLM”, “a painting”, and “alive”. Those definitions don’t require assumptions or gut feelings. We could easily come up with a set of questions and an answer key that will tell you if a particular thing is an LLM or a painting and whether or not it’s alive.
I’m not aware of any such definition of conscious, nor am I aware of any universal tests of consciousness. Without that definition, it’s like Ebert claiming that, “Video games can never be art”.
- Comment on So much... 2 months ago:
Kurt Gödel wrote a whole paper on it.
He used math to show that all statements, in any language, can be expressed as math statements. He then proved that it’s impossible to create any cpnsistent set of math statements that completely describes everything.
- Comment on true love is rare 3 months ago:
Are there any lab scientists that don’t hate their pipettes? My wife used to complain constantly about getting cramps from those things, especially those multi-drop dispensers.
Her explanation was always that biotechs can afford robots to do the pipetting but academia is budget constrained and grad students are (were) cheaper than robots.
- Comment on If it works it works 3 months ago:
<puts on nerd hat> Normal people rarely see the above image. When you look at Jupiter with the naked eye, you see a slightly brighter dot. The only way to tell it’s not a star is that it changes position relative to them from day to day.
If you look at it with a good pair of binoculars, you can see that the dot seems to be slightly bigger than other dots. You still can’t see the red spot.
If you look at it through a telescope with a 10" objective and 100x magnification, you can definitely make out the red spot and you can make out that the rest of the planet has some texture.An image that clear and crisp takes some very expensive equipment.