every one of these things that make the deal "good" for OpenAI is a direct result of negative externalities for everyone else: competitors, consumers, and people who wouldn't care otherwise.
The article even says that they don't have an obvious plan for how to use the wafers they bought, and very clearly suggests that this is purely an anticompetitive tactic to force everyone else to eat a price increase that OpenAI doesn't need to face. It's clever though because if any regulatory agency starts asking questions (not that they would do that in the current USA political climate) then OpenAI can just say it's a strategic reserve, we have plans to do something with it, etc. etc. What are you going to do? Take them to court and force them to auction off some % of the stock? Set an industry-wide limit on wafer inventory? Fine them? You'd need to find some evidence that it was done maliciously, and good luck with that.
There are some negative elements of captialism that we might simply have no reasonable regulatory apparatus to deal with. Preventing indivduals and companies from having so much market power in the first place seems to be the only thing that can work consistently.
Indeed, I find it very hard to take the article seriously given that every one of the notionally decentralised trends it's described has propagated on a very small handful of highly centralised platforms. For that matter, it's very difficult for me to imagine how these trends might have spread in the first place without access to large-audience virality directed by algorithmic recommendations precisely enabled by such severe centralisation.
that is the point of Luddism! the original Luddite movement was not ipso facto opposed to progress, but rather to the societal harm caused by society-scale economic obsolescence. the entire history of technology is also powerful business interests smearing this movement as being intrinsically anti-progress, rather than directly addressing these concerns…
I think we should be careful attributing too much idealism to it. The Luddites were not a unified movement and people had much more urgent concerns than thinking about technological progress from a sociocentric perspective. Considering the time period with the Napoleonic Wars as backdrop I don't think anyone can blame them for simply being angry and wanting to smash the machines that made them lose their job.
And an important note: history is written by the victors. Additionally, just like how today some people have a caricatured understanding of the “other” side (whatever that might be), understanding what Luddites thoughts and motivations were through the lens of their victor opponents will inevitably create a biased, harsh picture of them.
And how well those attempts fare. Data centers aren't exactly fortified, but they have a lot of focus on access control and redundancy, and usually have good fire suppression (except OVH apparently).
Maybe ChatGPT has some ideas on how to best attack data centers /s
The act of destruction is not inherently evil, it is a matter of what it targets. You can burn down the Library of Alexandria or you can bust open a concentration camp. (These are just some extreme examples, some datacenter isn’t morally equal to either).
It means that no one cares about the creations except in terms of money. If an Oracle building burns down and no one is hurt, I wouldn't shed a single tear. If an artistic graffiti mural adorned its wall, I would be more upset.
I get what you mean, but my point is even that Oracle building was designed, built, and maintained by the work of real people. Many of which I assume take pride in their work and may in fact care if it’s burned down.
But why should they? An Oracle data centre is built for one purpose, and one purpose only - to increase the wealth and power of Larry Ellison. Is furthering that goal really something to be proud of?
As a wiser man than me once said, do not anthropomorphise the lawnmower.
Exactly, the luddites werent especially anti technology. Smashing stocking frames for them was a tactic to drive up their wages.
Just as the fallout of the napoleonic war was used as a means of driving down their wages. The only difference is that tactic didnt get employers executed.
It's always been in the interests of capital to nudge the pitchforks away from their hides in the direction of the machines, and to always try and recharacterize anti capitalist movements as anti technology.
In 2010 I remember a particularly stupid example where Forbes declared anti Uber protestors were "anti smartphone".
Sadly most people dont seem to be smart enough to not fall for this.
I think the concern in this case is that, unlike before where machines were built for other people to use, we’re now building machines that may be able to use themselves.
Not that much of a difference tbh. If one traditional machine allows one worker to do the work of twenty in half the time, that's still a big net loss in those jobs, even if it technically creates one.
The real issue is that AI/robotics are machines that can theoretically replace any job -- at a certain point, there's nowhere for people to reskill to. The fact that it's been most disruptive in fields that have always been seen as immune to automation kind of underscores that point.
In the old times, this was a "want" because the only people without work were those unqualified or unable to work. In the new times, it will be a "need" because everyone will be unemployed, and no one will be able to work competitively.
Somehow modern Luddite messaging doesn't communicate that clearly either. Instead of "where's my fair share of AI benefits?" we hear "AI is evil, pls don't replace us".
Yeah, how dare they not want to lose their careers.
Losing a bunch of jobs in a short period is terrible. Losing a bunch of careers in a short period is a catastrophe.
Also, this is dishonest - nobody is confused about why people don't like AI replacing/reducing some jobs and forms of art, no matter what words they use to describe their feelings (or how you choose to paraphrase those words).
That’s false. It’s very easy to become confused about the point, when anti-AI folks in general don’t spend their time attacking companies…
What I typically see is:
- Open source programmers attacking other open source programmers, for any of half a dozen reasons. They rarely sound entirely honest.
- Artists attacking hobbyists who like to generate a couple pictures for memes, because it’s cool, or to illustrate stories. None of the hobbyists would have commissioned an artist for this purpose, even if AI didn’t exist.
- Worries about potential human extinction. That’s the one category I sympathise with.
Speaking for myself, I spent years discussing the potential economic drawbacks for once AI became useful. People generally ignored me.
The moment it started happening, they instead started attacking me for having the temerity to use it myself.
Meanwhile I’ve been instructed I need to start using AI at work. Unspoken: Or be fired. And, fair play: Our workload is only increasing, and I happen to know how to get value from the tools… because I spent years playing with them, since well before they had any.
My colleagues who are anti-AI, I suspect, won’t do so well.
Human extinction is not a potential it’s just a matter of time. The conditions for human life on this planet have already been eroded enough that there is no turning back.
The human race is sleepwalking into nothingness - it’s fine we had a good run and had some great times in between.
I've seen enough anecdotes about business productivity lately that LLMs is not the solution to their workload struggles. You can't lay off people and expect the remainder + LLMs to replace them.
>what kind of careers? scamming call centers? heavy petrochem production? drug smuggling? cigarette marketing?
All careers. All information work, and all physical work.
Yes. It is better for someone to be a criminal than to be unemployed. They will at least have some minimal amount of leverage and power to destroy the system which creates them.
A human soldier or drug dealer or something at least has the ability to consider whether what they are doing is wrong. A robot will be totally obedient and efficient at doing whatever job it's supposed to.
I disagree totally. There are no career paths which would be better off automated. Even if you disagree with what the jobs do, automation would just make them more efficient.
Would we be better off today if the Luddites had prevailed?
No?
Well, what's different this time?
Oh, wait, maybe they did prevail after all. I own my means of production, even though I'm by no means a powerful, filthy-rich capitalist or industrialist. So thanks, Ned -- I guess it all worked out for the best!
The Amish approach to technology is completely different from the Luddites, and it doesn't teach us anything about whether we, as a society, should accept or reject a certain technology.
To be more exact, there is no evidence that historical Luddites were ideologically opposed to machine use in the textile industry. The Luddites seemed to have been primarily concerned with wages and labor conditions, but used machine-breaking as an effective tactic. But to the extent that Luddites did oppose to machines, and the way we did come to understand the term Luddite later, this opposition was markedly different from the way Amish oppose technology.
The Luddites who did oppose the use of industrial textile production machines were opposed to other people using these machines as it hurt their own livelihood. If it was up to them, nobody would have been allowed to use these machines. Alternatively, they would be perfectly happy if their livelihood could have been protected in some other manner, because that was their primary goal, but failing that they took action depriving other people from being able to use machines to affect their livelihood.
The Amish, on the other hand, oppose a much wider breadth of technology for purely ideological reasons. But they only oppose their own use if this technology. The key point here is that the Amish live in a world where everybody around them is using the very technologies they shun, and they do not make any attempt to isolate themselves from this world. The Amish have no qualms about using modern medicines, and although they largely avoid electricity and mechanized transportation, they still make significant use of diesel engine-based machinery, especially for business purposes and they generally don't avoid chemical fertilizers or pesticides either.
So if we want to say Amish are commercially successful and their life is pretty good, we have to keep in mind that they aren't a representation of how our society would look if we've collectively banned all the technologies they've personally avoided. Without mass industrialization, there would be no modern healthcare that would eliminate child mortality and there would be no diesel engines, chemical fertilizers and pesticides that boost crop yields and allow family farm output to shoot way past subsistence level.
In the end, the only lesson that the Amish teach us is that you can selectively avoid certain kinds of technologies and carve yourself a successful niche in an wider technologically advanced community.
I somewhat reference the technicalities on Luddite vs the selective rejection of technology that the Amish represent (although arguably they are the closest we have to neo-Luddites, mentioning obviously Luddites anti-progress for all was too radical a stand, not on ideological grounds, but in its anti-capital stance).
I think the broader point I am trying to push is every critique of these technologies is not necessarily demanding their complete destruction and non-proliferation.
And the lesson of the Amish is that, in capitalist democracy, certain technologies are inevitable once the capital class demands them, and the only alternative to their proliferation and societal impact is complete isolation from the greater culture. That is a tough reality.
Im sorry but - Who do you think, precisely, seems to be doing ‘fine’ among the Amish?
White cishet men?
I cannot imagine what a hell my life might have been like if I were born into an Amish community, the abuse I would have suffered, the escape I would had to make just to get to a point in my life where I could be me without fear of reprisal.
God just think about realizing that your choices are either: die, conform, or a complete exodus from your family and friends and everything you’ve ever known?
I was not super precise in my remark, so I think it suffered from being misconstrued as written. My remark was strictly in the context of the Parent posts remark on Luddites prevailing or not.
In the context of Luddite societies or communities of faith, the Amish have been able to continue to persist for roughly three centuries with Luddite-like way of life as their foundation. In fact, they are not strictly Luddite in the technical sense, but intentional about what technologies are adopted with a community-focused mindset driving all decisions. This is what I meant be "fine" - as in, culture is not always a winner-take-all market. The amish have persisted, and I don't doubt they will continue to persist - and I envision a great eye will be turned to their ways as they continue protected from some of the anti-human technologies we are wrestling with in greater society.
All of this is to say, we have concrete anthropological examples we can study. I do not doubt that in the coming years and decades we will see a surge of neo-Luddite religious movements (and their techno-accelerationist counterparts) that, perhaps three centuries from now, will be looked back upon in the same context as we do the Amish today.
As an aside, if we place pro-technological development philosophy under the religious umbrella of Capitalism, I think your same critiques apply for many of the prior centuries as well. Specifically with regards to the primary benefactors being cis white men. Additionally, I do not think the racial angle is a fair critique of the Amish, which is a religious ethno-racial group in a similar vein of the Jewish community.
> Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men, more respected than either of the classes of workers. These are men who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are idle, and I might, therefore, be expected to praise them. Unfortunately, their idleness is rendered possible only by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is that others should follow their example.
Did you even read the article? Here is the situation in China:
> Here's what's actually happening. As of 2024, there's still no nationwide social credit score in China. Most private scoring systems have been shut down, and local government pilots have largely ended. It’s mainly a fragmented collection of regulatory compliance tools, mostly focused on financial behavior and business oversight. While well over 33 million businesses have been scored under corporate social credit systems, individual scoring remains limited to small pilot cities like Rongcheng. Even there, scoring systems have had "very limited impact" since they've never been elevated to provincial or national levels.
Compare that to the situation with, say, credit scores in the US --- wholly run by an oligopoly of three private companies, but fully ingrained into how personal finances work here. At least a publicly run credit score would be held accountable, however indirectly, to voters and the law; and its safety might be treated as a matter of national security, rather than having Equifax and Experian leaking data like clockwork.
I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
The fact there's a credit system that protects banks from the people makes it painfully obvious who is in charge of Western society - consider this:
You take out a loan to contract the company to build you a house. The company defaults and disappears overnight. The bank is protected automatically but it's up to you have to run after your money yourself.
> I've always told people that social credit as used by China was unsed to track dishonest businesses who scammed people and/or other businesses by breaking agreements and not delivering as promised.
To be fair, that's the outcome. But there has been attempts to make more problematic, more intrusive, darker versions of this. They just never worked out for technical or ethical/legal reasons. And they made a nice picture to frame the competing culture, darker than they are.
It's not the borrowers fault, and in case of banks, it's not even their problem thanks to credit score and extensive guarantees built into the system.
However when I'm paying for some work to be done in the future, I'm essentially lending the contractor money predicate on the work being done by a certain deadline, quality or even at all.
So I'm the lender until the job is done, and if the borrower defaults on this it's not my fault, but certainly my problem.
Anyway my point is that if you become a lender for a nontrivial sum of money it might sense to hedge that risk (insurance, credit risk entrustment, ...)
Overview from 2022. One city really did set up a full social credit system, but that was a pilot project and didn't work out.[1] There are some private "social credit" systems, like the one from Ant, but that's more like a rewards program - buy stuff, get points.
China has had a lot of official social control for centuries, but it was local and managed by local cops.[2] As the population became more mobile, that wasn't enough.
But a single national system never emerged.
There was a work record history, the Dang'an, created by the Party but to some extent pre-dating communism. This, again, was handled locally, by Party officials. This system didn't cope well with employee mobility. But it didn't get built into a comprehensive national system, either.
China is authoritarian, but most of the mechanisms of coercion are local. Local political bullies are a constant low-level problem.
You are conflating "social credit score", which hasn't been built out in China (although blacklisting, imprisonment, and torture for wrongthink has been built out), with "financial credit score" which exists in USA via private companies working togther, and "credit reports" which exist in both USA and China. China's is run by the unelected, dictatorial government.
perhaps read the actual first paragraph of the article? the whole point of it is that, whether we call it that or not, our privately run reputation scores (including but not limited to credit scores) functionally are social credit scores --- except we've been boiled frogs, and should take some time for self-reflection before engaging in knee-jerk reactions to China's other failings (which I'm not denying btw) whenever social credit is brought up.
Your credit score in America will never be used to deny your freedom of movement within America or go against you or any of your family members when applying for higher education.
It will, however, be used to determine whether you can rent or buy a home or increasingly even get a job. Freedom: same outcomes, but modulated through the market!
It absolutely works the same way. There are would be doctors everywhere who never got the chance because of their parent's mistakes, or misfortunes, because we've made higher education a privilege in the country.
At this point of extrapolating from second-order/third-order effects, what dosen't count as "social credit" to you? It seems that if society dosen't give everything you want, that's seen as coercion.
The actual distinction here is between positive/negative rights. In OP's case, it's if even if you do have the money to do X thing, you are artifically not allowed to do so. That's a violation of negative rights.
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back. That's an appeal to positive rights, that people have a active obligation to you, and it's not even from the government but from private lenders. That's a far more contentious assumption that ironically isn't held by the Chinese or the CCP or most of the world for that matter outside of a spoilt corner of the West. And it's a critique that dosen't even land in reality when the Fed does provide easy student loans at a far greater scale than the Chinese Government. A policy that has worked out swimmingly well!
In your case, you're positing that if you couldn't afford it anyways, it's "social credit" if private lenders don't give you help because you have a history of not paying loans back.
Please read it again. It was hypothesized that you could have a hard time getting a college loan if your parents had bad credit. Now, you could construct an argument for why that policy makes sense for credit issuers, such as 'statistics show that 87% of debtors' children go on to become debtors themselves'. But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
>But the underlying objection was that you shouldn't need to go into debt to get access to higher education in the first place, ie college should not be insanely expensive and you should be able to manage the academic and financial demands with a part time job.
But we're conflating social credit with credit scores are we? A highly contentious normative claim has little to do with OP's argument and is obviously not a basis for a rebuttal for distinctiying the two systems. Which I would imagine there is a certain intentionality in reaching for highly contrived arguments based on literal hypotheticals rather than accurate description of reality.
That's what I'm saying here. You're the one who's making strange tangents here to try to rebutt OP.
>but it's really not that different.
No it's not. Because others are explaining why the premise is wrong. You using the normative assumption that "university should accessible" to conflate credit scores with the descriptive reality of social credit.
That first assumption is just an opinion that far from everyone holds, and you can effectively construct hypothetical that credit scores would fail to reach to justify your point. That's not good debate, and I'd be be curious to see what dosent count as "social credit" here.
So you believe there is no difference between what Trump is doing today and what Kamala/Biden might have been doing?
Democracy is about balancing different interests. So yeah, it is hard when the change you want isn't neccessairly what others believe in. You do need to compromise with other groups. Which means that large, coaliation parties that emerge will naturally regress to the mean. But ironically, that also is the suremost sign of plurality that things very much are different from authoritarianism where it pretty is just one interest group trampling over all the others. Well, some here might prefer that, but they are almost definetly not going to be the ones in charge.
I think we're so far down the discussion thread, that we've forgotten that we're skeptical about whether Apple will be held accountable to their American investment promises...
As an intermediate alternative between a hardware keyboard and a graphical symbol picker, I use an .XCompose file with contents that look like this:
# GREEK
<Multi_key> <g> <A> : "Α" U0391 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA
<Multi_key> <g> <a> : "α" U03B1 # GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA
<Multi_key> <g> <B> : "Β" U0392 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER BETA
<Multi_key> <g> <b> : "β" U03B2 # GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA
<Multi_key> <g> <D> : "Δ" U0394 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA
<Multi_key> <g> <d> : "δ" U03B4 # GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA
<Multi_key> <g> <E> : "Ε" U0395 # GREEK CAPITAL LETTER EPSILON
<Multi_key> <g> <e> : "ε" U03B5 # GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON
...
# Math Symbols
<Multi_key> <i> <n> : "∈" U2208 # IN
<Multi_key> <f> <a> : "∀" U2200 # FOR ALL
<Multi_key> <t> <e> : "∃" U2203 # THERE EXISTS
<Multi_key> <a> <n> <d> : "∧" U2227 # AND
<Multi_key> <o> <r> : "∨" U2228 # OR
<Multi_key> <less> <parenleft> : "⟨" U27E8 # MATHEMATICAL LEFT ANGLE BRACKET
<Multi_key> <greater> <parenright>: "⟩" U27E9 # MATHEMATICAL RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET
<Multi_key> <d> <d> : "∂" U8706 # DEL
<Multi_key> <n> <b> : "∇" U8711 # NABLA
I've used this for perhaps the last 10 years now and I don't think I could go back to working on a machine without configurable compose key functionality at this point.
This. Using a Compose key [0] covers a vast range of input use cases and is eminently customizable. For Windows there is WinCompose [1]. For macOS there is [2].
Compose functionality is absolutely awesome. I don't understand why it's not more widespread. I use it for all sorts of stuff, from emojis, to symbols, to diacretics. It's great!
why is this downvoted? the specific cities (notably in Arizona) that have taken deliberate action on this are exceptions proving the general rule that light pollution is demonstrably less of a policy concern even compared to the notorious American disdain for walkable infrastructure.
Because the goods made will be sold to American consumers directly and indirectly and are priced to reflect all kinds of costs including EPA compliance in domestic markets.
European markets also demand European norms to labour and health and environment are met, even if tokenistically. To some it is a form of protectionism.
It's also the "why can't we make it here" reasoning. If you tried to make it in the US it would be white anted out by lawfare. That's what happened to BHP when they proposed metals and minerals processing plants on the Californian coast.
Ammonia and hydrogen are essentially energy export mechanisms. They'll be exported to energy poor places, aka Asia, not America. they can and are made in America without fanfare. You wouldn't have states fighting to exlude green hydrogen or ammonia plants, you'd have states competing on how many subsidies they could give them.
Arguably, very likely true. But the fertiliser (the other ammonia product, the one we do mostly now the others being somewhat futurological) will I am sure sell worldwide. I'm personally sceptical about the hydrogen economy I can't see it working. It's biggish in some Australian circles, both because of IPR around the processes and people in related fields looking at uses for surplus solar power. Twiggy Forrest was big in it, wanted the sun cable proposal to pivot over, its partly why the JV with Cannon Brookes fell apart.
My comment was to the more general "why can't we have nice things" about industrial placement. I spent time in Culpeper and the number of "no more Datacentre" signs were amazing. Old folks who retired to the country don't want them build nearby. It's a large federal and private investment in tech services. And growing.
I know the crowd here (mostly from USA) hates this kind of comment, but as a SOUTH AMERICAN, can I point out the absurdity of this kind of sentence? Chile is a South American country, in the American continent, and is 8000 miles south of America somehow. I know the why's and the meaning intented, no need to explain. Wont stop pointing this out though, as it will always feel to me as a example of the general disregard USA has for its neighbours.
I think it's worth pointing out that "the American continent" is not how geography is taught in the US. There's seven continents, one of which is North America and one of which is South America.
So you're making a point which only makes sense in Spanish, in the context of your own education. There's no ambiguity in the US since the only thing "America" can refer to is the USA.
I'm curious how it's taught for you about Europe and Asia. We learn those as separate continents, too, even though it's one land mass. For that matter, Africa is as connected to Asia as South America is to North America, but I'm almost certain you consider Africa its own continent, right?
Despite not asking for an explanation, I’ll give one anyway since you seem not to have resolved your grievance.
“American” is the correct adjective in English to describe the United States’ people and government. There is simply no equivalent to the Spanish “estadounidense.”
Furthermore, North America and South America are considered to be separate continents, and if you want to refer to them both together, you say “the Americas”, plural.
this is not a conclusion that he jumps to! all that is stated is that there is a mapping from every pair of points on a curve to a set of 3D coordinates specified by their midpoints and distances. there is no requirement for uniqueness here. in fact, the whole point of this is to turn the search for an inscribed rectangle into the search for two pairs of points on the curve that have the same midpoint and distance --- this is stated just 1 min 15 seconds after the timestamp that you point out.
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