Portugal was the first to find a direct sea route to India and had a 100 year head start with the trade route but they still got mogged by the Dutch East India Co in terms of cargo tonnage shipped.
We should aim for the long game. An insanely expensive one-time mission using disposable rockets to analyze rocks that we've already analyzed with rovers is probably not the best path.
>By extracting rents and taxes, in return for protection and certain services, perhaps plowing fields.
Why use the term extract rather than trade? Protection was quite valuable. Those peasants could have tried their luck planting a field in the middle of nowhere, far from any village. There was plenty of unused land.
They didn't because the peasant and their family would not last long.
This idea that civilization is somehow oppressive rather than a great achievement just doesn't make sense. Force is the natural way of things. Alone those peasants would likely have 100% of the harvest taken by force, whether it be by wild animals, roving bandits, even locusts. It's a far better deal to have some percentage of it taken in return for having it protected.
Yes, protection does matter, but it’s not a voluntary arrangement when armed men decide the terms.
> The irony of all of this extraction is that while it is often nasty and predatory, it can have some positive long-term effects, because the extra food that the farmers are being effectively forced to produce moves through either state-redistribution or market mechanisms to an increasing population of specialist non-farmers who in turn provide benefits for the broader society, sometimes including the farmers.
> Metal tools, improved plows, large mills and bakeries would all be impossible without specialist smiths, wood-workers, architects, millers and bakers, for instance. And those merchants, moving food around from where it is common to where it is scarce can – if there are enough of them and trade is sufficiently unrestricted by things like wars – serve a valuable stabilizing role on the otherwise wildly destructive volatility of prices for things like food and other essentials. Moreover, specialization and trade encouraged distance travel, which might bring foreign disease, but might also bring new agricultural technologies.
I do think there are also great achievements to admire, but it’s also true that a main lesson of reading history is that most of human history was terrible for most people.
And we haven’t even talked about what happened during wars and the slavery.
> Those peasants could have tried their luck planting a field in the middle of nowhere, far from any village.
Except not really. Peasants were considered the property of their lords. If they decided to go and “try their luck” at a neutral location and that was reported to their lord, armed men on horseback would be very likely to show up not long after, to return them back to the lord’s land, but not without a solid beating and/or maiming first.
Sometimes, certain forms of civilization just are oppressive, rather than collaborative. They tend to be out-competed by forms that are less oppressive, true, but it’s not guaranteed and not always fast and not always permanent.
There’s not even a need for armed men on horseback. The lord/patron is your protector against overly draconian laws where just about everything is punishable by death. Lose the patron and next time you e.g. look at the neighbors’ wife, you get to be shorter by a head for entertainment of the folks with a patron. Some of these patron’d folk might have killed somebody last week for which they get to spent time with a priest working on the salvation of their soul and no further punishment.
Typically that was not the case as far as I'm aware. It's why the black plague gave them so much leverage. They could go to a different lord.
But often the land belonged to the lords or at least they could take it within their region at their pleasing. There were not that much "neutral locations".
That wilderness was common land or hunting grounds belonging to someone.
It's entirely other humans that the lords offered protection from; peasants were near universally left to fend for themselves when it came to "animals and locusts". And they could handle nature just fine (for the technology level) and could very much move to more land "in the middle of nowhere", if local lords didn't complicate that issue.
The idea of the old farmer-peasants as single-task specialists in the same vein as us city-dwellers is an anachronism.
For sure and that doesn't decrease the value of the protection. There seems to be this somewhat quaint idea that the crops belong to the peasant because he/she planted and grew them.
That's a very modern concept. In the natural world they belong to whatever entity is able to take them.
Life has always been about grabbing as many macronutrients as you can by whatever means possible.
You know, the first time you navigate somewhere (if you don't already have perfect directions) will probably be the longest route you'll ever take to get there
For Earth, the proof presented for NS is just our first attempt navigating from our previously known facts to the proof.
I expect we will be able to shorten it dramatically (most likely with human and AI insights), but I don't think we should read too much into the length. If you want a similar point of comparison, see the original proof (by humans) of Fermat's last theorem. It has been shortened significantly. This is normal.
Deep commentary on an unverified proof of this level requires extreme expertise. So the existence of some shallow commentary is uninteresting; it doesn't actually imply pettiness or deflection or anything like that because it's so hard to make your commentary any deeper at this time. And no we shouldn't expect people to say nothing.
My observation isn't that solving a Millennium prize problem is not impressive.
It is the mechanism the LLMs use to do it. They seem to accel right now at quantity of work over quality of work. I'd be willing to wager there is a much simpler way to achieve the proof.
I've also seen this with code, LLMs do get the job done, but they tend to write 10-100x more code than humans to get the same job done. Still a massive value gain because they can write that much code extremely quickly.
>I'm somewhat surprised at how poorly the cutting edge models do with being concise.
because they're not intelligent in the sense you're hinting at (conceptual integrity or generalization) but they are as the name suggests, large. Like comparing a forklift to a human. It's easier to bulldoze through a lot of things than tie your shoes.
If we weren't quite as impoverished conceptually and still had the vocabulary of the Catholics we'd recognize this as ratio (discursive knowledge) vs Intellectus (apprehending knowledge)
>You state a conclusion as fact without any supportive reasoning/evidence.
No, it's the other way around, it's a reductive view on intelligence that mistakes its own methodology for ontology.
It's obvious to see that there's no intellect in an LLM as defined above because of how they work. LLMs put one token in front of the other, they don't work towards formal ends, there's no intentionality in them. They don't synthesize the information they process into a unified experience. Thinking an LLM can apprehend what it does because it can process large amounts of text is like thinking your TI-83 understands math because it can multiply large numbers.
That's also why the failure modes of LLMs are what they are. They can churn out tens of thousands of lines of code but also just as easily go in circles like a roomba. They can process an entire encyclopedia but not solve problems a 10 year old can solve.
yeah you know, that concept we've never been able to define using language, making heavy use of the human experience which can also not be captured in language (proof: how bad LLMs are at poetry)
the question is, when comparing a human and a large language model, whether the intellect (that cannot be captured in language) is different from anything the language model can actually do (e.g. language)
the answer to this seems quite obvious to me, and I would actually posit that the onus is on the other side, to prove they are even remotely similar
maybe people think that the voice in their heads is what is doing the thinking? is that the confusion here?
Do you think the LLM is the Chain of Thought? Did you also get confused by the name? Because, much like humans, the CoT is a tool to narrativize and maintain internal coherence. The actual thinking happens invisibly, in the forward pass. Just like...
Note that their statement could also be true if they record 99% of the time. We need to start calling companies out for meaningless weasel statements like "We don't record continuously".
The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record. Putting a remote control listening hardware on a device that runs a plethora of 3rd party apps and with full connection to the internet means that even if LG isn't controlling that mic, someone else will be.
Enough with the knee jerk reactions. They have to record in some cases. You don't have to like those features, but plenty of people want those features.
- The television has voice control.
- The television has a manually triggered speech-to-text feature so you don't have to type with tv remote.
You simply do not say something like “we don’t record continuously” if the reality is that you only record when voice control or speech to text is active. Given the entire industry’s track record, the only sane thing to do when confronted with weasel wording is to assume the truth is the worst possible interpretation that isn’t a blatant lie, and even then, sometimes it is just a blatant lie.
Here’s some examples:
- We don’t record continuously -> We record nearly all the time, only stopping to upload the recording.
- We do not sell your data -> But we do “share” it.
- All your data is protected from unauthorized LLM scraping -> But we define all the big tech companies as authorized scraping.
But they did say that? "LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as 'Hi LG' is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature."
Find one person who when asked if you they want the useful feature of LG always recording everything they watch on their TVs and selling that data to third parties without giving anything in return would answer yes.
I get the voice commands but it shouldn't be possible for them to always record everything anyone in the vicinity says without explicitly activating the command (and it should be impossible to hack it, i.e. it should be implemented in hardware not buggy software)
There are lots of good reasons that are used to paper over the abuse cases.
Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature when they enable voice commands for the user, and allow them to be used as voice assistants.
They also enable tvs with a camera and microphone to be used as video calling or audio calling interfaces. Used well we get star Trek view screens, used poorly we get little brother monitoring.
For those interested, it turns the tv into an interactive terminal for voice and camera powered video games, which are becoming more popular.
Unfortunately advertising and tracking incentives drive the abuse cases to the top and will crush the positive use cases :(
You'd be looking for what's now called a "dumb tv". But those are getting rare, because TVs that can't sell your watch data have to be more expensive to make up for that, and that doesn't sell. Commercial screens are an option, as are computer monitors. Or getting a smart tv and never connecting it to the internet. So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know. Unlike cars.
The problem is when a helpful friend or family member decides to connect the TV to the Internet for you, they have good intentions and think they are helping but have in fact screwed up your carefully considered plan. Same thing goes when someone agrees to all terms and conditions on a nag screen that pops up (as in the video only a subset of T&C were required to function but agree to all was the default behaviour), or when they go and apply that automatic update/upgrade that you didn't want on a device you own (i.e. from Windows 10 to Windows 11).
There's too many dark patterns and bad behaviour from big corporations these days trying to wear you down and trick you into relinquishing your rights and letting them "get away with murder".
There are plans to build these networks at various stages. Putatively to enable connectivity, but in practice the tech creates a device to device mesh network that enables side channel communication over a secure mechanism that is not necessarily subject to use control.
> So far nobody has started shipping TVs with a mobile connection to exfiltrate data, as far as we know
Yeah, I suspect that it either isn't a big enough segment of the market to make the costs worth it, or they just haven't been caught. Given that it's pretty easy to add amazon sidewalk connectivity to devices with bluetooth radios (which most of these TVs have to support external wireless speakers), I'd be shocked if they hadn't at least experimented and estimated payoff on doing that.
"…as long as you're satisfied with the factory installed firmware version."
Why wouldn't one be? Not that long ago 'dumb' TVs never even had firmware (and that was the situation throughout most of television history). Allowing a manufacturer to update TV firmware online is dangerous and foolhardy. (Same reasons why I never let any of my printers go anywhere near the internet—any driver software is always blocked by a firewall.)
There's no practical reason for most people. Spying is the primary function. Edge cases like accessibility or conferencing can be easily enabled with an add on USB mic. You'd need a USB webcam with mic for conferencing anyway.
People use voice commands on TV remotes all the time if they're using streaming apps. At this point it's the default way to interact with the UI for many people.
Typing out the show you're searching for with an awkward onscreen keyboard is a huge pain compared to just clicking a button and speaking.
HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising to learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV.
Whilst most around me do expect voice control to exist... Most expect it not to function. "Hey Siri/Google" was always more of an exercise in frustration than success.
It seems the Australian accent still befuddles most STT with about 1/8 words confused (said as someone who uses STT to use their computer at all).
It would not shock me, if outside of North America and Great Britain, these systems are as effective as the original autocorrect algo.
"HN users are very much in a bubble if it's surprising if it's learn consumers expect voice control functionality on a new TV."
Perhaps a few are unaware but most know. As I said in my post, some (like me) only want traditional FTA — and with it comes anonymity by default.
Smart TVs undermine and subvert the virtues of FDA services. It should be mandated that it's possible for modern smart TVs to switch to FTA-only mode if viewers so desire. Similarly, regulation should ensure that dumb TVs always be available for those who want them.
Accessibility is not an edge case. Every single human being who lives long enough will experience some form of accessibity challenge, either for themselves or for others around them.
You can dismiss the lives experience of most humans over the history of humanity, but it won't win you any arguments.
Like I do with laptops, just snip wires (or pull out header/connector) to microphone and camera. Problem partly solved.
Fully solve it by disconnecting network cable/Wi-Fi so there's no internet.
For me a TV set only receives FTA signals and has connectors for local media/AV input. It ceases to be a TV set when it starts doing what my PCs and laptops do.
(Anonymity is the reason why FTA broadcasting is still so very important, by design it's only one-way — broadcaster to listener/viewer. Unfortunately smart TVs and the internet subvert anonymity by design.)
Voice recognition is really useful when searching. It's annoying to type with a TV remote. Also you can just say what you want like "play breaking bad on Netflix" and it'll just do it.
Edit: also the mic in the remote has a function to calibrate the speakers to the room (correcting for the impulse response of the room basically) which can make the audio much better.
Since you're using it for Netflix, etc I assume it has unrestricted Internet access. With that and microphone access, you're giving tacit permission to capture and upload basically whatever it wants, to whoever it wants.
That seems unwise, no matter how helpful the features are.
Many common SOC's MediaTek, Realtek, and Broadcom SOC's quite often used modern audio capable devices analog pins can be software defined either input or output.
IIRC I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room. Audio quality wasn't perfect, but it making sense what was spoken was good enough.
"…I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room."
Users need to know the electrical features of their H/W and its limits. If a loudspeaker output stage is designed (hardware wired) so that it can never act as an input then no later firmware update can turn the speaker into a microphone.
This is why hardware authentication is becoming more and more important.
Right, it's true that if there is an amplifier stage then it doesn't work. But some devices have had also tiny speakers used for for user interface audio feedback mechanism also used beeping error codes etc. Those SoC can drive that kind load of quite well directly and there is just a tiny speaker coil from IO-pins. That kind of speaker can function lousy microphones. That's what that PoC was all about.
Orwell's 80 years ahead of his time. The great unwashed who watch Netflix etc. either don't know or don't care that they're mirroring the closing moments of the book.
The warning has been there for 80 years and still most are unaware. When Vespasian built the Colosseum it was to help rule over the unruly. Netflix and ilk are its modern incarnation.
> The majority of the problem is also simply the ability to record.
Exactly, and recent announcements like Apple normalising always on recording, even wrapped in “big promises” on privacy, deserve a lot more attention and strong regulation.
Problem is this argument can be leveraged to wipe out any living or non-living thing whos numbers pose a potential threat. Other religious groups, races, even sufficiently different cultures.
Who killed the Neanderthals? Were sapiens actually smarter or were they just less accepting of those different than them?
Except it just happened. Boeing was found to have massive safety issues since they were granted the right to self-certify. It made a lot of news but nothing much changed, they can still self-certify a bunch of stuff.
Runway incursions and midair collisions are another example.
Only airliners are required to have TCAS, smaller planes and helicopters don't even need radios or transponders unless in certain airspace. Midair collisions do lead to fatalities, enormous fatalities if an airliner is involved.
Runway incursions and overruns are similar. They cause lots of fatalities and injuries but only the busiest and largest airports have automated systems to warn when a runway is occupied or end of runway (overrun) arrestor systems. Most still rely on human voice to deconflict.
We should aim for the long game. An insanely expensive one-time mission using disposable rockets to analyze rocks that we've already analyzed with rovers is probably not the best path.
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