Sex is not like other subjects, it is peculiarly liable to harm, obsess, distract us. Sexual content is uniquely powerful in its ability to reduce human beings to objects for use, and having the ability to generate endless amounts of it completely privately is a very dangerous power to have. I worry about what it will do to us to have this technology, and I worry that OpenAI is treating this subject with too little concern.
> Sexual content is uniquely powerful in its ability to reduce human beings to objects for use
Incorrect. The modern industrial revolution and most wartime militaries demonstrate far more ability to do this.
> and having the ability to generate endless amounts of it completely privately is a very dangerous power to have.
I mean, anyone can pick up some artistic skill and do this without a computer. Everyone really can have this "very dangerous power" if they want to. Your statement is only valid if sex or pictures/text of sex is intrinsically harmful, which is untrue.
I've recently read the great moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre's book "After Virtue", and in it he defines a "practice" as:
> "any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. Tic-tac- toe is not an example of a practice in this sense, nor is throwing a football with skill; but the game of football is, and so is chess. Bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is. Planting turnips is not a practice; farming is. So are the
enquiries of physics, chemistry and biology, and so is the work of the historian, and so are painting and music. In the ancient and medieval worlds the creation and sustaining of human communities-of households, cities, nations-is generally taken to be a practice in the sense in which I have defined it. Thus the range of practices is wide: arts, sciences, games, politics in the Aristotelian sense, the making and sustaining of family life, all fall under the concept."
Programming is a practice (especially during the golden era of open source software), with its own "internal goods" such as described by this article: the pleasure of optimizing an algorithm, the "ah-ha" of finding a great root cause, the beauty of a well-written function, the fun of it.
MacIntyre also says that practices can only be incubated and cultivated within "institutions" - organizations which specifically exist to protect the development of a practice from the intrusion of external goods, by careful management of external goods. But institutions can become corrupted and degrade the practices within them. And indeed recently programming has been degraded into a simple skill used to obtain external goods, namely wealth and fame, and the institutions where programming tends to be cultivated tend to have deeply corrupted themselves. One can still recognize people in tech companies that fight against this tendency, but it's a remarkable confirmation of his thesis in my opinion.
Wait — isn't that exactly what good investors do? They look for what stocks are going to beat expectations and invest in them. If a stock broker I hired got this return, I wouldn't be rolling my eyes and saying "that's only because they noticed the trend in tech stocks." That's exactly what I'm paying them to do.
The standard argument here is that the maintainers of the core technology are likely to do a better job of hosting it because they have deeper understanding of how it all works.
Hosting is a commodity. Runtimes are too. In this case, the strategy is to make a better runtime, attract developers, and eventually give them a super easy way to run their project in the cloud. Eg: bun deploy, which is a reserved no op command. I really like Buns DX.
It once again completely fails on an extremely simple test: look at a screenshot of sheet music, and tell me what the notes are. Producing a MIDI file for it (unsurprisingly) was far beyond its capabilities.
Interpreting sheet music images is very complex, and I’m not surprised general-purpose LLMs totally fail at it. It’s orders of magnitude harder than text OCR, due to the two-dimensional-ness.
I agree with you. Is it perhaps because of his religious background (he was a Catholic priest)? For much of the last couple decades, there has been an anti-religious streak in the educational mainstream universities.
The last couple of millennia, really. Who lynched Hypatia? Who burned the Timbuktu Manuscripts? Who burned Giordano Bruno alive? Who burned the Maya codices?
At the same time, religious institutions have always contained many intellectual traditions, perhaps most of them. When the Christians extirpated knowledge of the hieroglyphs, it was the Egyptian priests they scattered. We don't know what was in the Maya codices, but large parts of the surviving Maya inscriptions are religious in nature. European universities began as seminaries; al-Azhar University is over 1000 years old and initially taught only sharia, fiqh, and the Quran. And everyone knows how Irish monks saved civilization.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed.
Bruno’s execution was of course evil and wrong but it’s also wrong to depict him as some kind of martyr for science and that the Catholics were setting back intellectual progress. Bruno was not a scientist, he was a mystic. He did not carry out experiments to try to prove his beliefs nor even believe in the ability of math to explain nature. The conflict that lead to his death was between two different religious/mystical traditions and not between “intellectualism” and religion. If he were alive today he would be more comparable with Deepak Chopra than a real scientist
Christians simply did not “extirpate” knowledge of the hieroglyphs or “scatter Egyptian priests.” Hieroglyphs were already falling into disuse since they were the writing system of a tiny elite of priests. There was no abolition or persecution of the hieroglyphic using class. The fading of hieroglyphs has its roots in the Hellenization of Egypt centuries before Christianity began. As Egyptians became Christian, the Coptic script came to be dominant for writing the Egyptian language. In the same way very few people bother to learn how to write JCL anymore, very few people were interested in retaining knowledge of hieroglyphs.
There’s an implicit idea here too that Christians were some kind of foreign interloper in Egypt instead of being themselves Egyptian — this is simply not the case. Egypt was one of the early hotbeds of Christianity and the modern-day Copts are essentially the people most closely culturally and genetically related to the ancient Egyptians.
This is a combination of nonsense and non sequiturs. Why didn't you mention my non-Christian example of flagrant anti-intellectualism at all, or any of my examples of Christians promoting intellectualism? Are you trying to argue that Christians are somehow different from other religious people?
My central point, as I said, was, "Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that religious people are usually the ones who care about intellectualism, whether in favor or opposed." Are you implicitly claiming that Christians don't care about intellectualism?
My best hypothesis is that you just did some kind of keyword search and then recited a couple of marginally relevant polemical talking points you'd previously memorized, without any regard to the actual conversation you were injecting them into.
Nothing I said was nonsense or a non-sequitor. You’re citing a bunch of historical myths to support your point, so I am pointing those out.
As for your point itself, I don’t think “religion” is a meaningful category. It’s unclear to me Christianity and say — Shinto have some common trait that holds them together. Even Christianity and Islam have vastly different goals and ideas about what the purpose of “religion” is. So I don’t think it’s meaningful to say “religious people tend to care about intellectualism.”
Communist Russia cared a lot about intellectualism — they promoted and persecuted many intellectuals and academics, just like the Catholic Church. The common denominator between the Soviet Union and the Catholic Church is surely not that they were both religious. To assert that communism is a religion would only further prove my point above.
The Catholic Church during the counter-reformation, its most highly censorious and intolerant period, was, like the Soviet Union, a society experiencing intense paranoia and saw itself under siege by foreign and internal enemies and needing to protect itself. This was an attitude that lead to atrocities, but it’s difficult for me to see how this has anything to do with religion as such given that the same pattern happens in secular culture all the time. Politically powerful people (or those with political ambition) tend to care about these things is the real thing going on here, especially if they perceive potential threats from the intellectuals. Intellectuals are not unique targets in this respect.
Many “religions” promote having a literate class to be educated in both their scriptures and in wider philosophy because it’s necessary to socially reproduce their own teachings. In that sense they care about intellectualism but we do the same thing to reproduce American, French, British, etc. secular culture, and good luck to public school teachers who want to buck the curriculum (I don’t particularly think they should, but they’ll have issues).
Seems to me that the focus should be on institutions as power centers, rather than beliefs or loosely defined "religious people".
Illich himself also noted how institutionalization of an initially revolutionary idea reverses its meaning, switching, say, liberation into oppression.
Power grabbers will always attempt power grabs, and will eventually distort an initial good idea. They will pretend to Embrace it, then attempt to Extend it with their own input, to finally Extinguish the original idea.
It's also noteable that most of the history of Western civilization has been dominated by religiousness, primarily owing to the militancy of religious institutions. Secularization is still a relatively new phenomenon, and has yet to outstrip religiosity as a dominant societal force. Considering that the absolute boom in intellectual achievements seems to be both highly correlated to and fueled by secularism, I don't think this is a very convincing line of reasoning. While Catholic theologians navel-gaze over the precise nature of their God or hunt pagan heresies within their corpus, the secular activity of science advanced. Science and empirical methods are, at best, secondary motivations in the history of our religious society, and usually only to the degree they are instrumental towards coming to knowledge about their sky daddy.
I agree, but with a caveat about ice cream trucks specifically. If they park in one spot and play the same jingle very loudly for hours on end (say, three to four hours in one location outside of your home), it is in fact insanely maddening.
Have you heard the ice cream trucks with a random "Hello?" thrown into songs? I don't understand the purpose. Googling brought up some people saying it goes back to the 90s, or that it's specifically a Southern California thing. Strangely enough the movie A Different Man (2024) played that exact sound during an emotional scene. That movie takes place in NYC.
Definitely a thing in NYC—had an ice cream truck that would sit down the block from my place playing music all day long and many years later that "hello" is like nails on a chalkboard.
I may be more sound sensitive than most, but if I could hear it loudly for even 5-10 minutes I'd be annoyed. 3-4 hours? While I'm at home? Absolutely no way; I'd complain too.
In the UK stationary ice cream trucks don't play music, only those travelling around, so you hear it for a couple of minutes at most as it winds around the neighborhood. I'd also be complaining if it was going on for hours :-)
At my old house, we had the best ice cream truck. Rather than playing music, it just had like a train bell. Sounded like the ice cream engine was rolling through. Ding.... ding .... ding ....
for the entire time the ice cream truck is stopped, it's engine is still running and generating toxic fumes. Had one parking strategically right next to a playground.
The deep-ocean vent south of Antarctica is real but small, on the order of a few-tenths Pg C yr⁻¹. The claim that it could double atmospheric CO₂ exaggerates the flux by three orders of magnitude relative to observed values and known physical limits.
The most optimistic estimate of deep-water outgassing south of 60 ° S is 0.36 Pg C yr⁻¹. Even if that rate tripled and persisted unabated, it would take more than 800 years to add 895 Pg C (which would be what it would require to justify the press release’s claims of “doubling”)
I believe the deep-ocean vents you mention are beside the point. The article is discussing the upwelling of cold, CO2-rich water in the Southern Ocean - not emissions from vents.
Also, it’s worth noting that the PNAS article does not mention CO2 per se, only upwelling. The article summary of the press release does draw the CO2 connection.
Besides the connections you mention, the PNAS article points out that this result illustrates that current models of ice/ocean interaction are not producing these observational trends.
Just to confirm, Does "Pg C yr⁻¹" mean "Peta grams Carbon per Year"?
It's the mass of only "C" or the mass of "CO2"? (There is like a x3 difference, 12 vs 44. Probably not very relevant, but I'd like to understand the meaning correctly.)
(This was originally a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44461309, but we downweighted that subthread. Since this is a fine comment, I detached it so it wouldn't share the same fate.)
Thanks for the clarification, these click-bait titles pop up again and again around very interesting technical climate science, causing not only pointless panic but allowing denialists to drive doubt by pointing out the BS.
Its doubly frustrating because these studies invariably indicate that climate change is happening, getting worse, and triggering feedback loops that amplify CO2.
I won't put words in your mouth but given what you say - doesn't this imply calamity? So how do we explain why Net Zero is essentially collapsing? Why do a number of countries say one thing and do another? There's certainly no consensus that survival is at stake.
Your personal test for someone making a technical claim on one matter is to ask them a technical question on another thing that they have not claimed any expertise in. If they guess and guess wrong you ignore their claims on the thing they supposedly know something about because.. points I guess.
Hey, I do a lot of crazy stuff myself, so not exactly blaming you but I don't think your "flooding == really sad" claim holds up here, because of the crazy.
It’s not how the discussion generally happens. If they are adamant that this is truth, then they are bad scientists; if they say they don’t know, of course they’re good scientists.
But it goes together: Global warming, wage gap, and the 3 other topics that shall not be named, they’re wrong on all five together for the same scientific reasons with any ability to open the discussion to being wrong.
Which makes that, global warming is, to my knowledge, only a statement by people who believe other scientific falsehoods.
Floating ice will displace exactly as much water as it does when it melts to water. Ice that melts on a land mess such as Greenland and Antarctica will raise the ocean level when it melts.
Floating ice will actually increase the ocean a tiny bit as it melts into water because the ice has lower salinity than the ocean. Its comparable to around 3% of ice that melts on a land.
