> The pole at ts8 isn't when machines become superintelligent. It's when humans lose the ability to make coherent collective decisions about machines. The actual capabilities are almost beside the point. The social fabric frays at the seams of attention and institutional response time, not at the frontier of model performance.
Yeah, it's easy to see the singularity as close when you see it as "when human loose collective control of machines" but any serious look at human society will see that human lost collective control of machines a while back ... to the small number of humans individually owning and controlling the machine.
Even the humans at the top don’t have commanding control of the machines, however. We live in an age where power is determined by the same ineffable force that governs whether a tweet goes viral.
Since Luddites smashed textile machines in England three hundred years ago, it seems technology didn’t care, it kept growing apace due to capitalism. Money and greed fed the process, we never stood a chance of stopping any of it.
It doesn’t help when quite a few Big Tech companies are deliberately operating on the principle that they don’t have to follow the rules, just change at the rate that is faster than the bureaucratic system can respond.
> You’re not allowed to feel things. Emotions make you weak. Just suck it up and power through. Bottle it up.
Yeah, none of that is "real stoicism", but just the hydroponic TikTok version of it, as you say.
This can happen to anything if TikTok is your main source of information; everything becomes life hacks, "tricks", and "did you know that <insert biased misinterpretation of well known thing>" types of knowledge bites. Philosophy is unfortunately not the only victim of short-length "edutainment".
I think that Stoicism might be particularly vulnerable to this because of its built in flexibility, which makes it easy for people to divulge their interpretations of it with little pushback. If you haven't read much of it, and without a clear rirgid "rule set" for what Stoicism is (other than its tenets in the cardinal virtues and dichotomy of control), you might believe me if I tell you that it is a Philosophy that encourages suicide and tells you that being sad because a family member passed is stupid.
I think GP's point was rather the "optimized storage" schtick of apple devices, where they "unload" whatever you have locally on iCloud and use that as "regular" storage. Syncing, even though it also actually stores, is a fairly different use case. Could you implement that some other way? Sure. But I still think it's fair to point it's a different use case than "regular storage".
I use these at night, sleeping with them on. I experienced this screeching intermittently for like a week, and then it went away almost completely. Now, it only happens if I lay down in a very specific way. It's probably related to the strength of the seal in my case, and maybe at higher altitudes and different pressures the seal is affected in a similar way.
The seal might have improved for me the more I used the same eartips
I feel the opposite. I get to sit down and think about problems, expressing them in words as best I can, and then review the code, make sure that I understand it and it works as it should, all in a fraction of the time it used to take me. I like that I don't have to google APIs as much as I did before, and instead I can get a working thing much faster.
I can focus on actually solving problems rather than on writing clever and/or cute-looking code, which ironically also gives me more time later to over-optimize stuff at my leisure.
I feel this way with some of the work I've pushed through an LLM, but part of the time I'm left wondering what kind of Mickey Mouse problems people are working on where they are able to form up tidy English descriptions in complicated domains to capture what they're trying to achieve.
If I have a clear idea of some algorithm I am trying to write, I have a concise method for expressing it already, and it ain't English.
I suppose the other thing I would say is that reading code and understanding is definitely not the same as writing code and understanding it in terms of depth of understanding, and I think this notion that reviewing the outputs ought to be enough fails to capture the depth of understanding that comes with actually crafting it. You may not think this matters, but I'm pretty sure it does.