> Binary search beats SQLite... For a pure ID lookup, you're paying for machinery you're not using.
You'll likely end up quite a chump if you follow this logic.
sqlite has pretty strong durability and consistency mechanism that their toy disk binary search doesn't have.
(And it is just a toy. It waves away the maintenance of the index, for god's sake, which is almost the entire issue with indexes!)
Typically, people need to change things over time as well, without losing all their data, so backwards compatibility and other aspects of flexibility that sqlite has are likely to matter too.
I think once you move beyond a single file read/written atomically, you might as well go straight to sqlite (or other db) rather than write your own really crappy db.
People are basing their entire world view on not understanding the nature of exponential phenomena.
Exponential phenomena only begin in a medium that holds the potential for that phenomena, and necessarily consume that medium.
That is, exponential phenomena are inherently self-limiting. The bateria reaches the edge of the petri dish. When the all the nitroglycerin is broken up the dynamite is done exploding.
That doesn't mean exponential phenomena aren't dangerous -- of course they can be. I mentioned dynamite, after all. And there are nukes.
But it's really far from "AI is improving exponentially now" to "AI will destroy everyone".
I see AI companies consuming cash at unsustainable rates. Since their motive is profit, this is necessarily limiting. Cash, meanwhile is a proxy for actual resources, which have their own, non-exponential limitations -- employees, data centers, electricity, venture capitalist with capital, etc.
AI isn't going to keep improving exponentially -- it can't. Like every other exponential phenomenon, it will consume the medium of potential that supports it (and rather quickly).
Agreed. But, many said the same thing about Moore's Law or its equivalents in 1985, 1995, 2005, 2015, and yet the pace of core hardware development has been relentlessly exponential. I keep thinking we must be approaching some kind of limit (and surely we must be!) but I've learned not to bet on it.
It's often constructive to consider the edges and corners of the space of possible positions, to understand the weaknesses of the various arguments.
For this case, imagine that you're an accelerationist, and you want the AI to take over, kill everyone, and usher in a new AI-only age for the planet, and later the universe.
How disappointed are you as this person? It's bottlenecks everywhere. Communities don't want to allow datacenters to be built. You literally want to bring nuclear power plants online just to run a few DCs, and those historically take 10+ years to permit and build. There's not enough AC switchgear and transformers to send power into the DCs, even if you have the power. Chip prices are skyrocketing, and you have to sign a 3-4 year contract to get RAM now.
And meanwhile, the AI doesn't have many robot bodies. Tesla might put some feeble robots into mass production in a few years, but humans can knock those over with a stick into a puddle of water and it's over for that robot. The nuclear arsenals are all still in bunkers and submarines requiring two guys to physically turn keys, and the computers down there are so old they use 8" floppies.
Sure, there's some good progress on autonomous weapons, but a few million self-destructing AI drones built by human hands isn't going to cut it.
So as a hypothetical person hoping that AI destroys everything, you'd be rather impatient, I think, unless you think the AI can trick humanity into destroying itself relatively soon.
> People are basing their entire world view [on things getting worse because their leadership is abandoning them or actively working against their interests]
We understand hard times and are willing to work together to solve problems, but not when leadership is actively harmful.
Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.
It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.
>casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.
I think the majority of the population at large either doesn't care about what happened or wish that the guy had actually managed to kill Altman. Not even necessarily because Altman is involved with AI, but just because he is extremely rich. I don't imagine any increased resistance from the population at large - the population at large either doesn't mind when rich people are killed or loves it. The exceptions would be people like entertainers who develop a parasocial relationship with the public and provide direct joy to people, but AI company leaders don't fall into that category.
That said, it is true that killing Altman would almost certainly achieve nothing. See my other post in this thread.
That's exactly the point every prominent member of the "Doomer" community is making: Violence isn't an effective action; it is a counterproductive action. It is actively destructive.
Lenin called this kind of individualistic, unorganized violence "revolutionary adventurism", and strongly condemned it. The lesson is not that violence isn't effective, it's that unorganized violence isn't effective. Sufficiently organized violence can be very effective indeed.
Well what other tools do we have? Waiting for the market to fix things is also destructive and harms orders of magnitude more people than violent direct action does; democracy is wildly ineffective compared to violence even at its most optimistic; what else remains? Fleeing the planet?
Giving this a less glib response: https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/article/2043601524815716866 goes in to some detail, but Eliezer has always had a fairly clear call for action, which is international regulation. And in particular, he makes the point that random acts of violence are actively counterproductive to his goal.
We walked out of the Cold War alive. Humanity has faced extinction before, and despite it all, we walked away alive last time. It's not unreasonable to think we can do it again.
I'll answer with a quote from the founder of the Rationalist movement, Eliezer:
"How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer."
The point is that violence isn't actually a tool, just like killing puppies isn't an actual solution.
I can know "this doesn't work" without knowing exactly what does work. "Violence is the only tool we have, so we have to use it" is the sort of logic that leads to the Holocaust.
If you want my own personal observations: Over the past few centuries, we've managed women's suffrage, black suffrage, gay marriage, etc. largely without violence, so clearly there are processes out there for progress. We fixed the Ozone Hole without killing people. I don't think murder was involved at all in finding recent AIDS medication, or GLP-1.
There are tons of examples of successful social progress in the past few decades that don't involve violence. Conversely, I struggle to name any terrorists that accomplished their goals by bombing scientists.
If nothing else, we can make violence a lot more legible by embodying it in a legal process, and bringing society onto the same page about it's necessity.
I'm not advocating for that, I'm just saying the whole thing is performative and gets taken at face value in a way that it should not be.
If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something.
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If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people.
For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS)
In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"
But that is the kicker. As the sister comment said it matters a great deal what others do.
At some point a broken system enacts soft violence on people. So it isnt surprising people act out when they think survival is at stake. With healthcare, it really can be. But where is the line? When someone you know dies? 10 people?
RadioLab did a phenomenal series on illegal immigration years ago. One thing that stuck out to me and has stayed with me ever since was an interview they did with a woman who had been deported multiple times, risked her life multiple times, denied a visa and asylum multiple times. They asked her why she kept trying to get across the border and she said that the alternative was death for her and her family.
Whether or not she was being honest I don't know. But it did make me realize that the broken system has created an all-or-nothing choice for so many people. No punishment or policy could ever outweigh the alternative for them, so you'll never be able to stop immigration, illegal or not.
I'm sure I'm not doing the argument justice, but your comment reminded me of it.
I don’t know why you dismiss it. There is plenty of astroturfing here, bots and otherwise.
I believe the rule around here is to not assume everyone who disagrees with you or has opinions you don’t understand is a shill. Perhaps there’s a bit of that in the post you replied to, but to me seems mostly about mourning the loss of quality conversations online.
Gotta say, I agree. Not that things were ever great, but it’s really in the crapper now.
I saw one recently where the cyclist shouted out something like, "ON YOUR LEFT!" and all it did was startle the crap out of a jogger who spun around into the path of the bicycle. Luckily just a close call. That cyclist's "warnings", with no time for pedestrians to react properly, were really just a game of Russian roulette. (And really rude, as you say).
Shouting that while traveling too fast is indeed incorrect, but a polite "on your left" or bell while traveling an appropriate speed is considered good behavior to avoid surprising pedestrians.
This again depends on the jurisdiction and kind of path you're on. Where I grew up, if it's not separated into bicyclist & pedestrian lanes, bikes yield to pedestrians.
On US forest trails, the general rule is bikes yield to pedestrians and everyone yields to horses.
(Obviously pedestrians walking in bicycle lanes are doing it wrong.)
Outside of some stage actors and drill sergeants, there are probably few people who can project their voices well enough that a vocal warning is useful.
You're either traveling slow enough that it's not necessary (and why yell at people if you have to?), or are too far away for someone to understand and get a bearing on who isn't already looking at you.
A bell is still rude in a shared space but used correctly, a decent one can at least be effective.
I just don't think that is even a little bit true, or at least it's something that is very culturally specific and thus not generally applicable.
I have a friendly sounding bell I use from an appropriate distance (and I can modulate the volume), and I routinely have people give a light wave to show they heard. In addition, the biggest complaint about cyclists in local social media is about them passing without notice.
If you just bell once or twice, and don't aggressively keep ringing, I'd never consider a bicycle bell in a shared space rude. I even consider it good manners, though as others have said, that varies between cultures.
Being visually impaired, though, I'm grateful for cyclists who use their bell. It's immediately clear. For some reason, my brain takes slightly longer to process someone yelling "on your left!" or similar, than just a quick "ring ring".
Can you list some examples? When I lived in Chicago it was quite common for cyclists to shout this on the long lakefront trail, I wonder if that's the case there too.
> § 11-1512. Bicycles on sidewalks. (a) A person propelling a bicycle upon and along a sidewalk, or across a roadway upon and along a crosswalk, shall yield the right of way to any pedestrian and shall give audible signal before overtaking and passing such pedestrian.
No idea if the lakefront trail is classified as a sidewalk but there are at least some cases in Illinois where either a bell or a "on your left" are legally mandatory.
You'll likely end up quite a chump if you follow this logic.
sqlite has pretty strong durability and consistency mechanism that their toy disk binary search doesn't have.
(And it is just a toy. It waves away the maintenance of the index, for god's sake, which is almost the entire issue with indexes!)
Typically, people need to change things over time as well, without losing all their data, so backwards compatibility and other aspects of flexibility that sqlite has are likely to matter too.
I think once you move beyond a single file read/written atomically, you might as well go straight to sqlite (or other db) rather than write your own really crappy db.
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