YHK - yet another hacker news clone

I had to make this conditional promise once, back in the nineties, as a junior person in a related industry. Because in the dot-com era developers like me were often simultaneously a babe-in-arms on a professional career level and also the only person who knew how to do the work that was being sold. I decided that if it came to it, I would not be the person having a hard time in court. The client understood better than my bosses and they changed the product. Took them a few minutes at most, but I have reason to believe that my decision made some ripples.

Nowadays I don’t let those issues surprise me: I believe in establishing specific ethical standards at the beginning of projects, because if you don’t do that, you don’t have a basis to robustly point to actions that put them at risk.

Good people can be in tough position where even when they do not agree they may not have much of an option but to keep going.

Yes, some members of the group don't have that freedom. But that doesn't excuse the ones who do.

> If the answer is the salary, say it louder, and do not force yourself to make excuses.

Its the same playbook, over and over again.

My current read is that ~20-30% of people in America actively delight in hurting others (ICE supporters etc)

Another 30% do not seem to care about anything but their own well-being. (I don’t like to think I fall here but as a big tech peon it doesn’t look good).

The remaining percent seem to care and are trying their best but looking at how things are going it’s not enough

I studied biology in college. I actually did this because I was interested in AI, and already knew a ton of CS and programming. I was already coding in C and using Linux and writing fairly complex stuff. I figured studying the only actual example of a truly intelligent system (especially at the time, early 2000s) was the best way to understand intelligence.

Didn't end up going into AI as my day job, but I've kept up with it all and worked through the math and played with different types (genetic, neural nets, transformers/LLMs, CA / alife, etc.).

I think the root of my skepticism is in what I learned studying biology about how life, adaptation, learning, and evolution actually work in the real world.

I'll try to TL;DR it: I think the doom crowd (and also some of the AI singularity crowd) has a "mystical" view of intelligence. Intelligence is magic pixie dust, and intelligence beyond human is fully unknown and likely has magic superpowers.

The deeper underlying thing seems to be some kind of mathematical mysticism.

Real intelligence is ubiquitous in nature. Trees, grass, bugs, and even bacteria are intelligent. It's also domain specific and limited in capability to what its domain, available training data, and available compute allows.

It's not context-free limit-free magic. It's not special. It's an adaptation like any other.

2. Humans put it in charge of everything, as fast as possible, because it's just so damn useful

3. Is it perfectly aligned to human values for all of future ????

4. Everybody dies as a byproduct of the ASI pursuing some project that humans don't even have a chance to understand, like an ant colony during construction of a hydroelectric dam.

If so, he's the person that's made me lament one loss the progressives took from us. I think there's one phrase that we should be allowed to say regardless of the fact that it is also used to refer to certain groups of people. Because the insult comes from the comparison, not the language itself. Every time we update the language, we just use the new word as the insult. And I don't think we're allowed to use the word here.

But sometimes, you just have to look at someone, cock your head to the side, and say "That's fucking ****".

It brooks no argument, it offers no sympathy, it just tells the other person that they should be ashamed for speaking those thoughts aloud.

That is a fantastic term for something that seems to come up a lot, and I had not heard before.

You can't, because those taxes are coerced from you at literal gunpoint if you refuse (or your property seized at gunpoint to the same effect). It's completely different than choosing to do that of your own free will.

When I was in the US, I did actively attempt to diminish my tax contribution as much as legally possible out of disgust at what it was used for, but nobody is morally tainted for being forced to contribute a small slice to something evil. Maybe there's a threshold where you should be actively laying down your life to resist, eg. if being forced to commit actual murder, but I don't think you can reasonably expect that of paying taxes at all.

---

Edit: rate-limited, attaching a reply to a below comment.

> The problem with avoiding taxes because of expenditures you think are bad is that you also reduce the pool available for things you think are good.

Indeed, but I also chose to contribute money to other good causes instead. In that way, the same sum could be used for 100% good instead of, say, 80% good 20% bad.

Now that I live in a country of my choosing, I am proud to pay taxes because of how they are used. 0% of my tax money goes to killing innocent people overseas, for instance.

Balancing good against bad is not clear, I agree, but that makes it all the more important to think about it when making a big decision such as what job to take.

Its hard and people do not even agree about how to balance it - e.g. whether the ends justify the means.

In the particular case of AI companies, I think a handbrake should be pulled when they start claiming things like "10% chance we're ending humanity."

So, there's an ojective measure of shade of gray?

But there are several workable contextual definitions of bad; it’s your job to know what they are.

For example:

- it would cause a harm to someone who was not made aware of the risk up front.

- it would cause someone to lose a job they didn’t know was under threat.

- the way the harm occurs precludes its only corrective/curative action or has no adequate compensation.

Bad things are almost always contextual but also almost always obvious in that context.

You can’t avoid bad things that you can’t foresee. If you do not attempt to avoid, avert or mitigate bad things that you can foresee, then you are one of the bad things.

Things may not always be black and white but it is wise not to seek the protection of the grey.

I've been wondering what sectors I wouldn't maintain and develop infrastructure for, because I consider it a strength of mine that I don't entirely care about that. I'm not excited about your product, for good or bad.

Defense for example is on an edge there. Supporting the creation of death and suffering in other humans does not sit right with me. Being defenseless doesn't sit right either, as it can create suffering and death for people I know as well.

Online gambling is more on the nope side. Maybe with a decent regulated german company, but if you start working with some eastern-europan online video gambling sites with pretty girls as dealers, you are suddenly very close to human trafficking and many more things connected to it.

So I guess directly causing human suffering and pain is a boundary for me. And yes, if you push that argument to an extreme, if you search long enough, you realize that pure existence causes suffering to other people, animals and the planet and must be ceased.

But then there is that other side - in the current system (and arguably many before) you have to do a job to get money to live, and a lot of people like the person making cars have no choice about that. I guess we are contributing to that suffering as well by existing.

So, minimizing the direct suffering and pain I cause seems to be a sensible directive.

It's harder and harder to make the point that frontier objects are just hype objects though. And, even if they stay where they are today, that's more than enough to make them incredibly...destabilizing, to say the least. It's not only it, but frontier models act like knowledge mixers and percolators. Some people (not necessarily everybody), are adept at the discipline of learning, building things and executing projects, and that's all you need today with LLMs filling many of the gaps such person can have. Now, most of those people are actually engineers. So I'm going to go with the article and say that we must stop selling our souls for money.