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I'm on your side, but I would argue many of the first computer discovered proofs might be called original proofs without intelligence, as they rely on massive programmatic case checking.

I would be far more interested in people making confident proclamations like this taking the notion of "what do we do if you are wrong" more seriously. I think you're wrong, I think it is fine to have the other belief, but you should at least start thinking about what is to be done if you are wrong.

Please read my comment. The impact of this pseudo-singularity is still enormous and scary. Could be even worse than Skynet. But it is a Wizard of Oz scenario.

While we are discussing this, I strongly believe we should hedge against the concentration of power that is happening today.

Please join/help open source groups doing small + local or distributed models. There's a lot to do. Join Discord/IRC servers and organize.

Open³: weights - source - training data.


It is interesting to see the progressive/left current in the US re-discover their close cousin in deontological christianity. It's obvious from an outside observer, as Nietzsche wrote on: these are both expressions of the slave revolt in morals.

> Techies have a weird way of thinking themselves world saviors and having poor binary decision making ability.

rich coming from a belief system that thinks everyone who had the opportunity to go through their water-dunking ritual and culpably didn't is automatically going to be tortured in the underworld for eternity.


As a non-Catholic, this shows such a poor grasp on what makes Catholicism different from Protestantism that it’s comical. Some early Calvinists, for example, said that Catholics were wrong because they DIDN’T believe that. It would have taken you so little effort to uncover your lack of understanding before broadcasting it to the world.

What specifically is wrong?

Catholicism introduced the whole concept of purgatory, which specifically avoids the idea of eternal suffering. Water baptism is not a requirement for grace (read: salvation), although it is a requirement to be recognized as belonging to the Church.

someone who knowingly/culpably rejects baptism is not going to purgatory. as a non-catholic, i think you are misinterpreting here.

this is verbatim from the Catechism,

> Baptism is necessary for salvation for those to whom the Gospel has been proclaimed and who have had the possibility of asking for this sacrament

Sure, there are other routes - but not for someone who has culpably rejected a water baptism. Again, from the Catechism,

> Purgatory is the state of those who die in God’s friendship, assured of their eternal salvation, but who still have need of purification to enter into the happiness of heaven.

> He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and Baptism, and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through Baptism as through a door. Hence they could not be saved who, knowing that the Catholic Church was founded as necessary by God through Christ, would refuse either to enter it or to remain in it.336

Purgatory is not meant for those who culpably refused to enter, absolutely not.


That's not what the church believes but okay whatever. At least I don't think a computer magically becomes a person.

the correct usage is dashes on both sides of the word, the usage above was extra confusing because it was incorrect

I use it, but you're supposed to hyphenate on both sides so this usage was incorrect.

why do people build bots like ^ what is the motive?

yes, i'm very in favor of the shift towards direct-to-consumer among chinese retailers, but that might be because i'm not actually all that sympathetic to small business

I recently bought some custom-built pool lighting directly from the manufacturer in Ningbo, and I have to say, the sales, delivery, and customer support I received was top notch. Their representatives were fluent in English and competent, the product quality was excellent (yes, I carefully inspected it upon receipt because it's going into water), and the entire process from measurement to delivery was fast and smooth. And, of course, the price was right.

In a way it makes the Temu problem more frustrating

Because it’s not a Temu problem,

it’s a problem of allowing the collapse of your own civilization?


Isn't pool lighting low voltage (12v?) so not much of a risk even if faulty?

That's right, so I wasn't that worried about physical safety. Mostly worried about damage to the product that water ingress could cause.

I'm not all that sympathetic to small businesses that exist functionally as drop shippers for the same products with the same absence of support. Much in the same way I roll my eyes and go to 7/11 over the cute "local" markets that are supplied by the same suppliers nationwide, and you end up in a shiplap-walled coffee shop with $8 bags of chips that could exist anywhere.

Small businesses that do the work of curating a niche item, doing QA work that's absent on the shipments from china, and then offering much stronger aftermarket support/replacement/repair? That is often worth a (substantial) premium over wondering if the item showing up in a month is going to work as intended.


There is totally a market for a global website which instead of shipping goods direct from China by plane instead has local warehouses 1 per city and can deliver to your house within a few hours by motorbike.

Aka like Amazon but with much smaller margins.

The savings would come from the fact sea freight is so much cheaper than air freight.


And the losses from having warehouses storing zillions of products that do not get sold for a long time.

There’s a reason the likes of Aldi and Lidl have limited product choice.


Aldi and Lidl deal with perishable goods. Temu (by and large) doesn't.

Aldi and Lidl sell way more than just perishable goods. You can buy electronics from there

But they are, especially those with batteries

Fine, Action then.

Several AliExpress sellers advertize warehouses in EU, so guess they basically do what you say already.

That’s called “Walmart”

Not in Europe.

Europe has plenty of dollar store equivalent.

Yes, workers in non-profits are status-compensated as well as monetarily compensated. I don't think this is an argument for non-profit unionization.

I don't think you've ever met anybody who worked for a non-profit in your life.

both my parents worked for non-profits their entire lives

"status-compensated"?

people enjoy doing high-status things and will trade off pay for status. asking for equal pay as low-status work is essentially asking to have your cake and eat it too

Is working for Wikipedia somehow a higher status job than working for Google?

edit: I'm asking because my 7 year stint as an engineer at Wikipedia hasn't provided me with an endless stream of lucrative job offers.


absolutely and i'm surprised that you don't think so.

e: and to your edit, i'm talking about social/moral status


Can you explain what you mean by social/moral status? I haven't seen a big run of non-profit workers marrying movie stars or becoming Pope.

Isn't the Pope like the canonical high-status non-profit worker?

Yes, however, my point is that the vast majority of people working for non-profits do not receive that sort of recognition. So what does "social status" mean?

Yes, but notice that the pope gets paid very well

Your edit is comparing opposites, basically making the ops point for them.

You work at google for money. Money is high status under capitalism.

You work at Wikipedia for status in the traditional sense - you trade capitalist status (the salary) for the higher actual status of working for a non profit.


No one thinks non-profit work is ‘high-status.’ People do it because making the world better in some way is more personally motivating than figuring out how to put video ads on refrigerators or whatever.o

Ok, I don't necessarily disagree, but it is thus living your values, which at the very least increases ones self confidence and self perception of status.

Whether one thinks that improves one's status in the eyes of others imo depends on one's cynicism. "Whatever, I'm living my values, they just don't get it. Maybe others will one day."

That's how I see it for myself anyway, if I'm being honest. But in the end I don't think there's any better path to happiness and fulfillment than living my values.


Sure, but happiness and fulfillment isn't status. Not because there's anything wrong with them but because that's not what "status" means.

feeling better because your job fits better in your moral framework that you get from society is a status-mediated effect and i feel you can usually find social scaffolding under things that are articulated as purely intrinsic.

If words don’t mean what they mean, absolutely

I'd love to live in a world where working for a non-profit was high status. Unfortunately that's just not the world we live in. Maybe if you are someone high up at a well known charity, but the bulk of the people keeping non-profits running do not get status from their work.

Uh...

Can you name me a single job where the tradeoff is "You won't get paid much because this position is so respectable"?

There are respectable jobs where you don't get paid much because the area of work simply does not generate much money (charity), or because they're being exploited and guilt tripped into working hard because of their mission (charity), and there are jobs which are respectable primarily because they pay very well...

But there are no jobs where you're "status-compensated", where you are paid less but that's okay, because the job is so respectable so it's okay to pay you less.


i like how on the internet you can just say things

That applies to the real world too actually.

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