Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more narrow. I think that's a bad thing.
NYC people uses it because the alternatives are either slower or much more expensive. I'm sure they'd rather use a waymo if it was as fast and cheap as the subway.
Using Lyft, Uber, or Waymo in San Francisco is slow, especially during peak times. To go across town in NYC by train, it would take 5-10 times as long to go that same distance in SF by car. If you have to cross a bridge or tunnel, it's going to be even longer during peak times.
That's the whole problem. Car transportation simply doesn't scale, so there will never be an option to use waymo that's as fast and cheap as the subway. It's worth calling out that an efficient train system is vital to keeping car traffic moving quickly, because once everyone is in a car, it's gridlock.
This is good advice for your friends and family, but a bad answer to the question. "How can we solve the obesity epidemic? Stop eating so much and get some exercise." Well sure, but this misses the big picture. We built a social infrastructure that encourages a sedentary, solitary life. We shouldn't be confused by physical and emotional health implications. We can expect some people to be proactive about it, but we can't expect that of everyone.
> We built a social infrastructure that encourages a sedentary, solitary life.
No. Pro-exercise propaganda has been extremely strong for longer than you've been alive. Large parts of the economy is focused on exercise and health, and it is accessible to everyone.
But it sure feels better to think that every problem is "society's fault". That's the easiest and cheapest cop-out. Just takes a few seconds to type on the keyboard, instead of doing something.
I’m not sure what you’re advocating for. Is “pro-exercise propaganda” hinting that you’re against exercise? I think it’s cheap and easy to dismiss large scale social problems as the individual’s responsibility. We badgered people to exercise and change their diets while the obesity problem got worse and worse. The first time we saw an improvement was with the introduction of GLP-1s.
If your goal is to feel self righteous, keep believing the problem can be solved if people just get stop being lazy and join a club already. That’ll work for some people, but what I’m saying is it’s not a solution to the problem.
I'm very pro-exercise myself, and there is no denying that exercise, athleticism, sports are celebrated everywhere and anywhere you turn, and has been so for decades. And it's not only the propaganda, everywhere there are gyms, yoga studios, sports halls and fields for a great variety of sports, running tracks, bicycle tracks, promenades.
Athletic clubs and sports clubs are a core ingrained feature of both rich and poor societies, and for all ages and abilities. Whether that is just playing a sport for fun once a week as a social activity, or serious endeavors for top talents aiming for Olympic gold or a pro career.
Any kind of sporting equipment you want or need are available for purchase, whether it's an expensive sport or cheap sport.
Athletes are celebrated and greatly admired, and top athletes can reach superstar celebrity status. As well as a big pay-check.
So I completely disagree that the "social infrastructure" encourages a sedentary and solitary life. The "social infrastructure" is very pro-exercise, pro-sports and pro-health.
> If your goal is to feel self righteous, keep believing the problem can be solved if people just get stop being lazy and join a club already.
As Prince sings: "Do what you want, nobody cares". Finding a physical activity that you enjoy is greatly beneficial for you. Whether it's a social sport, or exercises you do alone. You do it for yourself, not for anybody else. And everybody can find something which they like.
Righteousness has nothing to do with health or exercise.
We're not disagreeing that exercise is good. I also happen to be very pro-exercise. What I'm trying to do here is reckon with the fact that, as you say "exercise, athleticism, sports are celebrated everywhere and anywhere you turn", and yet the obesity epidemic only got worse. And providing the same kinds of answers for the loneliness epidemic will show similar results. It's possible that this disagreement is rooted in differing understandings of what "social infrastructure" means.
I guarantee that once we do know people will start appending the word “just” to the explanation. Complex behaviors emerge from simple components. Knowing that doesn’t make the emergence any more incredible.
Balance is too weak of a word. OpenAI was conceived specifically to prevent Google from getting AGI first. That was its original goal. At the time of its founding Google was the undisputed leader of AI anywhere in the world. Musk was then very worried about AGI being developed behind closed doors particularly Google, which was why he was the driving force behind the founding of OpenAI.
The book Empire of AI describes him as being particularly fixated on Demis as some kind of evil genius. From the book, early OAI employees couldn’t take the entire thing too seriously and just focused on the work.
I thought it was a workaround to Google's complete disinterest in productizing the AI research it was doing and publishing, rather than a way to balance their dominance in a market which didn't meaningfully exist.
That’s how it turned out, but IIRC at the time of OpenAI’s founding, “AI” was search and RL which Google and deep mind were dominating, and self driving, which Waymo was leading. And OpenAI was conceptualized as a research org to compete. A lot has changed and OpenAI has been good at seeing around those corners.
That was actually Character.ai's founding story. Two researchers at Google that were frustrated by a lack of resources and the inability to launch an LLM based chatbot. The founders are now back at Google. OpenAI was founded based on fears that Google would completely own AI in the future.
I think that Google didn't see the business case in that generation of models, and also saw significant safety concerns. If AI had been delayed by... 5 years... would the world really be a worse place?
Elon Musk specifically gave OAI $150M early on because of the risk of Google being the only Corp that has AGI or super-intelligence. These emails were part of the record in the lawsuit.
It’s a common pattern for upstarts to embrace openness as a way to differentiate and gain a foothold then become progressively less open once they get bigger. Android is a great example.
Last I checked, Android is still open source (as AOSP) and people can do whatever-the-f-they-want with the source code. Are we defining open differently?
I think we're defining "less" differently. You're interpreting "less open" to mean "not open at all," which is not what I said.
There's a long history of Google slowly making the experience worse if you want to take advantage of the things that make Android open.
For example, by moving features that were in the AOSP into their proprietary Play Services instead [1].
Or coming soon, preventing sideloading of unverified apps if you're using a Google build of Android [2].
In both cases, it's forcing you to accept tradeoffs between functionality and openness that you didn't have to accept before. You can still use AOSP, but it's a second class experience.
Core is open source but for a device to be "Android compatible" and access the Google Play Store and other Google services, it must meet specific requirements from Google's Android Compatibility Program. These additional proprietary components are what make the final product closed source.
Was "Android" the way you define it ever open? Isnt it similar to chromium vs chrome? chromium is the core, and chrome is the product built on top of it - which is what allows Comet, Atlas, Brave to be built on.
That's the same thing what GrapheneOS, /e/ OS and others are doing - building on top of AOSP.
> Yes. Initially all the core OS components were OSS.
Are you saying they "un-open sourced" things? Because that hasnt happened. Just beacuse a piece of code is open source doesnt mean additional services need to be open source as well.
vscode core is open source, but MS maintains closed-source stuff that builds on top of vscode. That doesnt mean vscode isnt open source anymore.
Maybe someone can help me wrap my head around this. Let's say you have a box of gas in a low entropy state: all the particles are on one side of the box. A moment later, the particles will have spread to the other side of the box, so the entropy is lower. But to say "a moment later", we're assuming a quantity called time. I'm confused how you can see this in reverse: "because the particles spread to the other side of the box, a moment passes".
All moments are equally real, like the movie frames on a film roll. The laws of physics say how a point on one frame relates to the same point on the neighboring frame, just like they say how a point relates to a neighboring point on the same frame. You can cut out all the frames from the film roll and stack them on top of each other, resulting in a “block” of points in space-time.
Einstein’s relativity implies that there isn’t a unique way to slice that block into same-moment-in-time frames; instead there are many different ways. Nevertheless, the laws of physics specify how the points within the block relate to each other (e.g. in terms of electro-magnetic field strength and orientation at each point, and all the other physical fields), independent of the particular slicing.
It happens that these physical relations give rise to a structure/flow/weaving that is different along one direction than along other directions. It also happens that along that particular direction the structure implies an increase in entropy, if entropy is calculated on slices perpendicular to that direction (= the increase is from one slice to the next). And that is what has us perceive that direction as time.
But all that really exists is the four-dimensional space with a-priori no distinguished direction, just physical laws describing how points in that space relate to each other. The laws happen no imply that the points will generally be in a pattern in which some direction looks different from the others, and will have a structure that results in us perceiving that direction as time. But there is no externally flowing time, it’s just a pattern within that immutable block of physical reality.
Note: The currently accepted laws of physics do have time as an a-priori dimension. But the idea is that we will come up with laws that don’t have that presumption, and which instead will have time as an emergent property, connected to directions of entropy increase.
When I was looking for a group in my area to meditate with, it was tough finding one that didn't appear to be a cult. And yet I think Buddhist meditation is the best tool for personal growth humanity has ever devised. Maybe the proliferation of cults is a sign that Yudkowsky was on to something.
None of them are practicing Buddhist meditation though, same for the "personal growth" oriented meditation styles.
Buddhist meditation exists only in the context of the Four Noble Truths and the rest of the Buddha's Dhamma. Throwing them away means it stops being Buddhist.
I disagree, but we'd be arguing semantics. In any case, the point still stands: you can just as easily argue that these rationalist offshoots aren't really Rationalist.
I'm not familiar enough with their definitions to argue about them, but meditations techniques predate Buddhism. In fact, the Buddha himself learned them from two teachers before developing his own path. Also, the style of meditation taught nowadays (accepting non-reactive awareness) is not how it's described in the Pali Canon.
This isn’t just a "must come from the Champagne region of France, otherwise it’s sparkling wine" bickering, but actual widespread misconceptions of what counts as Buddhism. Many ideas floating in Western discourse are basically German Romanticism wrapped in Orientalist packaging, not matching neither Theravada nor Mahayana teachings (for example, see the Fake Buddha Quotes project).
So the semantics are extremely important when it comes to spiritual matters. Flip one or two words and the whole metaphysical model goes in a completely different direction. Even translations add distortions, so there’s no room to be careless.
I think it’s the “just” that they are taking issue with. We are “just” neurons. But we demonstrate interesting emergent behaviors that, in principle, can be reduced to firing neurons but in practice we don’t understand and shouldn’t diminish with the word “just”.
Oh well then. Either spend less on the train (also saving money on gas and maintenance) or stay in suburbia. We pay a premium to live in the city, much more than the $9 so I’m not gonna shed any tears that it’s not much less convenient for someone to not drive
Driving is almost always more convenient on many levels, so it’s not really the best argument start from “it’s just easier”
Or if you’re talking more about everyday engineers working in the field, I suspect the people soldering vacuum tubes to the ENIAC would not necessarily have been the same people with the clearest vision for the future of the computer.
Or the majority of the residents of New York City on their daily commute? I like to think I have sense, and I happily use public transport most days. I prefer it to sitting in traffic, isolated in a car. At least I can read a book. If you work too hard to insulate yourself from the world, the spaces you'll feel comfortable in will get more and more narrow. I think that's a bad thing.
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