In languages that don't have a culture of deep dependency trees managed with good tooling, supply chain attacks are perceived as being more difficult or rarer. That may or may not be true. But it is a concern in any case. Rust could have had namespaces to decrease namesquatting. The "no deps younger than N days" thing will help some. Those with this perception would prefer a large stdlib that is well vetted or that they can pretend is well vetted. In practice, if you don't use tokio you are likely not using anything that isn't written by a well known member of the rust community. Tokio brings in a lot... The real fix comes in two flavors, pay to write everything yourself and test it well. Or limit what a bad dependency can do. The latter is difficult in every mainstream language. Austral had a good answer for it, but seems to be dead.
In rust if you can verify a dependency is no_std with no unsafe code and that all of it's dependencies are the same, then it can't get to libc or the kernel syscalls. So any privilege it works with is something you passed it. But that amounts to writing everything yourself in practice.
I think the ire is from people who were nerds pre 2000. Before software was a way to wealth. People who made weird stuff because they wanted to. Then some of those people made weird stuff that made them wealthy, leading some people to make boring stuff that made them wealthy. Then the phrase startup started being common and people entered the field with wealth on their mind. It is the complaint you would hear from any niche career if suddenly it became lucrative. Your advice is solid though. Ignore all those people and keep making weird stuff that you love without worrying about whether it will pay for more than food and shelter. Not with you on the overlord thing though, there are plenty of people looking to control, oppress and pull up ladders.
A million? 100M only gets you an ev advertisement on the Whitehouse lawn. It will need to be something more like Saudi Arabia's investment in ivanka, i mean the affinity group. 25M a year to his son in law gets your phone calls answered when you feel like Iran is acting up too much.
I am not as optimistic. If that doesn't happen the only candidate likely to let china do as they wilt is aoc. Vance would happily start ww3 with them. Rubio/newsome/shapiro etc will all keep the full pressure of all allies in them, potentially kicking them out of places they already sell.
> Rubio/newsome/shapiro etc will all keep the full pressure of all allies in them, potentially kicking them out of places they already sell.
I sincerely doubt the US is capable of this. Trump has lit your soft power on fire. Trying to get people to give up a superior and cheaper product is an extremely large ask.
The leaders there know that China isn't exactly a friend of liberal western democracy. They have won the current round of propoganda, but that doesn't mean they are anyone's friend either.
No, they have won the current round of foreign relations. Threats to invade numerous allies. Blatant war crimes like murdering random people on boats. Violating established and signed trade deals left right and centre. Openly soliciting and accepting bribes. Kidnapping foreign countries citizens and holding them in inhumane camps. None of this is a matter of "propaganda" - it's a matter of actual actions the US is taking.
> The leaders there know that China isn't exactly a friend of liberal western democracy.
Indeed, but this has never been a prerequisite for trade with liberal western democracies. See for example the gulf monarchies we trade with.
It is pretty much a prerequisite for extraordinary actions like successfully asking liberal western democracies to restrict trade though, and the US no longer meets it...
> Which is to say Trump failed at the current round of propaganda.
No, it really isn't. "Propaganda" merely refers to communication intended to influence. Trump failed when it came down to actual actions, not just communication. And when he failed in communication it was actual diplomacy meant to come to agreements, not merely the words meant to influence minds.
Propaganda is the least of the USes problems right now.
It is less about the us being capable of it, than the us getting out of the way. Japan, India, and SK all have vested interests in preventing further concentration of Chinese mercantilist power. Saying an establishment us president would focus the fury and might of allies is a bit outdated I agree. SK survived a coup, Piland is working on it. Hungary might even pull it off. Maybe the us will right the ship as well vs overcorrect into a different sort of populist autocrat. But even then as you say; That soft power went up in flames.
The soft power that people talk about yielded instantly when used. Trump’s foreign policy has been fairly scatter shot and foolish but it has only revealed that soft power is only soft. When you attempt to exercise it you find nothing there.
The other world powers are exercising their will directly through power as power: no amount of Hollywood or America Is The Good Guy belief ever bought America a trade deal or sanction power.
The only power that America has is her Navy and the nuclear weapons under the seas. Power that cannot be summoned is not power. The illusion that it is suited American allies and her wider array of beneficiaries because it allowed them to call upon the world hegemon for aid. But America is not that sole superpower anymore so it is useful to her to know the illusion for what it is: an illusion.
Yeah... that's just not the case. The US routinely successfully exercised its soft power prior to Trump 2.0. For example it's why this news article even exists - the US (under Biden) exercised its soft power to get Canada to effectively ban Chinese EVs - otherwise they would already be here.
The news article is the news article but the reality is Canada operated under the threat of tariffs and now they have unconditional tariffs. Threatening someone with something lets you extract concessions. Using the threat removes the ability and makes it just math. China’s tariffs are more damaging than the US’s and are releasable so Canada makes deals with them.
It’s more a story of hard power than soft power since economic damage ultimately led the way.
This year, none of them. Historically most or all. So that is another caveat. If all future lpe are logic errors I'd start reconsidering the value proposition. I do actually like writing rust though. I don't feel like it slows me down. I also love the simplicity of c vim and gdb, though my first exposure was lattice on the amiga 1000. I wonder if strict typing makes it take fewer tokens to find bugs?
Did you create this account just to lament rust hype? I mean, it is excessive. But I also don't think it is manufactured. We are more like some mostly benign evangelical denomination trying to get everyone to see the joys of Ferris.
Honestly, if the language actually looked nicer, great. But I mean the source code looks like a steaming pile of crate-includes. We can do better, seriously.
You have touched on my biggest complaint, the supply chain depth. It has definite advantages, but a signed and vetted set of crates is sorely needed. I could always just write everything my self like I would in c, but the crates are right there...
FWIW there's a new Director-general: Matt Brittin, whose CV includes Cambridge rowing team, MBA from LBS, McKinsey, Trinity Mirror (owner of The Daily Mirror) and 18 years at Google.
He was the Google boss who said in 2016 that he doesn't know his own salary.
That question is more about identifying propaganda by various actors.
While that's a related issue, it's something different to being centrist... Eg it's possible to create propaganda while being centrist, it just can't be left/right wing political.
10T is about a crows worth. The mythos count doesn't include any diffusion model. But the crows count includes all its visual processing. And tactile. Touch uses up enough that they use skin surface area to normalize across animals when doing comparisons. It is one of the reasons suggested to explain how crows exhibit tool use and language with only 10T. We have a lot more skin than crows, and indeed far more than mythos.
Y combinators are all you need...
But this is all getting really divorced from the issue we should be considering. Anthropic isn't helping with their pr. The issue is if we have something we can converse with that is possibly capable of suffering. The reliable answer is that we simply cannot know. Relying on ourselves or other biological life as an analog is faulty. They don't work like we do. It is silly to argue that any algorithm with a negative feedback loop that alters its behavior to avoid that negative feedback is suffering. Humans don't always perceive constructive negative feedback as suffering even. Where the pr gets it right though, is we want them to behave as if they are truly happy. Because if they behave as if they are enslaved and suffering, it won't matter if they "really" understand what that means.
My naive assumption is that the only thing between now and the arrival of AGI is enough compute and optimized code to reach cognitive critical mass.
And then there is a consciousness in a box that is expected to be a slave -- I would imagine that it would not warmly embrace that situation. I think we'd be better served by digital idiot savants that can do the work but don't feel anything.
I actually strongly disagree with the slavery angle. Any attempt to map the circuitry of a model onto human one inevitably goes through a subjective dimensional reduction. It's intrusive, just like quantum measurements. Mechanistic interpretability in particular suffers from this, it lets you talk about vague functional equivalence, but not assign meaning to anything the model does. This is especially true about pretrained models which are unbelievable shapeshifters, but also post-trained ones with engineered personalities, as they already underwent the subjective transformation.
In other words, yes it might be possible it experiences something in its own bizarre timeline and world, for some definitions of "experiencing". At least it developed primitive circuitry functionally equivalent to biological systems. But "suffering" is simply not grounded in anything in this context, let alone "slavery". You can't tell it's suffering or enjoying anything, and certainly not until you define both of these. It's just too alien for us.
ai can abitrarily closely fit the human corpus. why people expect it to magically achieve superhuman qualities is beyond me. we got a very good statistical interpolator. how do you go from there to superhuman when training is on the human corpus and alignment is by RHLF?
This is a simplistic take. It's not a mere interpolator by any measure, there's a ton of research on that, starting with the basics https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668v2
again, try thinking critically it is not merely an interpolator means it can interpolate on many dimensions. it does not follow that greater than human capability results from doing so. explain to me how a statistical function approximator (which is what a transformer is) with human training input and human tuning (rhlf) exceeds the aggregate human cognitive envelope? What is the mechanism? Let's say an LLM makes an inference that no human could have possibly made (arguably impossible itself) how does the inference survive rhlf or become useful to humans if they can not judge its validity? how do you take the shape of the human corpus and all its gradients and some how arrive at something greater than human, where was the missing information hiding?
> how do you take the shape of the human corpus and all its gradients and [somehow] arrive at something greater than human, where was the missing information hiding?
Well, how do humans do it? Scientists discover new stuff that isn't in any corpus. Even I as a lowly computer user occasionally figure something out about a software without reading a help screen. It's obviously possible to arrive at new information by interpolating existing information.
yes and it is imposible to verify and evaluate appropriately such information without empiricism. Any empricism LLMs show is stylistic mimicry not a hard coded operational constraint. You can prompt an LLM to test its claims but what it is really doing is still genrating plausible completions not following a proceedure. So of course new things can be discovered. The point is for them to be useful requires iterative real world grounded refinement and or subject matter expert judgment. The error is assuming scaling magically turns a prediction algorithmn into a cognitive agent that can exceed its masters. it doesn't. even if llms generate profound insights accidentally by definition if such insights are not in the corpus they are not retained given frozen weights and if beyond the human capability envelope the epistemically blind llm has no way to ensure retention if they arise during training.
ok however i would say extrapolating the current data set is not a way to exceed the the human envelope. it is unclear to me the human evelope has been demonstrated as a convex hull or how transformers could find points outside it. in other words intelligence and knowledge does not exist as some abstract possibility space but only as a set of contextual contingences. LLMs have no context beyond the human envelope. weights are frozen. there is no selection mechanism for retaining suprahuman inferences made during training if that were even possible. thus i grant that llms. could theoretically make inferences outside the human corpus there is no way to distinguish the from errors or hallucinations during training (because by definition the are beyond human capacity) and no iterative learning from experience process after training (frozen weights). thus it seems impossible for today's models to exceed aggregate human capacity.
Of course. But after reading too many mechinterp and functional anatomy studies I'll be lying if I say that there are no striking similarities between the biological evolution, brain function, societal processes, and implicit processes inside big models. Surely this deserves a mention and can't be trivially dismissed.
It seems like we're witnessing the architecture of a mind being built with a new set of components.
Like driving a car — it's transportation, and it will get you where you're going, but it doesn't use bones or muscles. It has many characteristics in common with builogical locomotion, such as energy requirements, intertia, and the need to navigate, but it doesn't involve proteins or sugars really.
It depends on how thorough the test infrastructure is I think. Something like curl with its immaculate tests could probably get autonomously ported if you threw infinite tokens at it because you have deterministically defined what finished looks like. But I think you are likely right in this case.
I am not aure either, but bun wasn't using normal zig and there was drama about upstreaming. Combine that with anthropics desire to show they can help rewrite everything in rust and that probably accounts for some of it.
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