I’m sorry Aston but everybody knows earth is an infinite pool of resources, and if somehow somebody finds out that it’s not, then we just go to earth 2. Easy peasy. By the way we should just tell people in the world that are in no situation to get proper food or even water that they are stupid because wealth creation is in reach of anyone willing to pursue the path. Starving is just being lazy.
lud
sodapopcan
Do you remember that one Pinky and The Brain episode where they actually did take over the world? It’s a real episode if you forgot it! They did it by first creating an exact replica of Earth made entirely of paper-mache. Then they convinced everyone to move to paper-mache Earth, or “New Earth” I think they called it, by offering them a free t-shirt. Since no living human can resist a free t-shirt, the plan went off without a hitch. So Pinky and The Brain finally had control of Earth …except there was no one to rule over cos everyone was gone, and they started watching broadcasts from “New Earth” and the consensus was that everyone loved paper-mache Earth way more than “real Earth.” So now their mission was to take over “New Earth.”
I swear this is relevant (probably).
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mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
You might find it intriguing to read my rant The Thermodynamics of Money: Why the Money Stock Obeys the Ideal Gas Laws · YokerHood · Aleksei Matiushkin
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DaAnalyst
DaAnalyst
I’d appreciate if you put just 1% of the effort and scrutiny you otherwise put into your work into breaking down those two distinct implied groups, for it’s difficult to argue against blanket arguments or observations.
Let me try and guess.
The Problem
Who are you talking about? The homeless (some of whom are truly unfortunate, but some are also drug addicts or have decided to live that way)? The people living in third world countries (whose poverty is almost exclusively owed to their own governments and whose liberation would require nothing short of a military intervention - and it’s not like the “West” hasn’t tried for better or for worse)? People living paycheck to paycheck (have you analyzed their own time preferences and compared them to yours? Is the situation each one of them find themselves in truly a matter of luck or the logical consequence of a string of poor life decisions? Hard to tell and it would require analyzing tens of millions of individual cases, one by one)
The Solution
A revolution, like a communist one with all the “goodies” and torturing everyday people who were better off and didn’t feel as envious and resentful as the Bolsheviks? The perspectives? Everyone’s equally poor except for a handful of party members? Let alone the inhumane aspects of such atrocity, If you apply it to the whole world where’s the information about prices going to come from? It’s the most essential signal driving production and trade (and therefore avoiding scarcities, starvation and millions of deaths). The Soviets had the US to copy the prices from. Who would the world communism have? The signal can only come from the free markets, the same one that’s prone to the Pareto Law and creation of the 90:10 type of inequalities you observe.
Even more taxes and even more redistribution and wealth destruction? Like even more leverage and power to the political caste the existence and nature of which you would be actually attributing most of the inequality blame you put on otherwise the engine of the world prosperity, if you invested just a bit of your time into studying economics and reading books from the authors that are deliberately taken off the “liberal” university curricula (e.g. Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, Friedman, ..). Due to the rampant redistribution (e.g. most countries in the EU at or over 50% of the “public” spending/GDP ratio, with France being the absolute #1 at 57%) and the indebtedness the system is slowly but surely approaching the point of the so called Keynesian event horizon, the point at which only a direct confiscation from the citizens bank accounts will be able to preserve it.
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To conclude, absent any details (problem breakdown), it’s hard to argue so I gave my best at guessing what you may have meant. Anyway, my point is this: If a wealth is earned legitimately (as in resulting from a voluntary exchange, which excludes doing business with the state), there is precisely 0% of it that rightfully belongs to anyone not involved in its creation, and that holds true for a wealth of $1 and a wealth of $1 TN. Also, worth mentioning that private charity had used to be fully in motion and functional in the West before the state introduced itself as the mandated intermediary and monopolized the welfare.
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lud
I did not watch this animation series but I know about it. I believe it’s called “Minus et Cortex” here. That looks like a fun episode though I should not have read all of your post 
Will watch if I can find it 
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achempion
I want to chime in to answer the crowd with “AI will get better and cheaper” arguments.
AI can get better, but each meaningful step raises costs exponentially.
We already distilled all human knowledge into models and generating next meaningful signal requires substantial resources, time and expertise. It isn’t sustainable once cheap options run out and AI providers have to pay themselves for acquiring knowledge.
Results can also get better from increasing model size and weights precision. Largest models already approaching 2TB of memory required to run them (weights + KV cache to serve multiple clients). Each increase here adds inefficiencies as models no longer fit in one GPU, increasing demand on memory bandwidth and slowing down the inference / training.
On AI getting cheaper, I can’t see this happening either. Current subscription prices are subsidised and this can’t happen indefinitely. From what we know, running frontier models for the full work day needs $200 - $500 at current API prices. People also reporting burning through thousands of dollars per day. You might argue that you can get by with smaller & cheaper models, but getting value from them requires expertise in software engineering which world is actively loosing. Systems also getting more complex with each day, as companies are pushing full gas on LLM-generated code.
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OndrejValenta
I was just listening to https://youtu.be/KNxEkrMFCFc?si=e99aAKznrJ6lXfNF this morning and there was another bombshell to add to this, at least, I see it that way.
For “security” reasons, they are going to start training models offline now. If they told me this in March, I would be like “damn, the situation must be quite bad, I’m so glad these professionals are taking good care of us”. Today, after quite harsh sobering period over the summer, I’m like "ok, so the models started to consume so much of already generated AI stuff, they are getting dumber by minute, not mentioning the inability of the training process to remove ‘poisonous’ content…
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mudasobwa
Creator of Cure
This sounds like if we give the powerlifter twice as much meal, they’ll shift their record by two times the weight. Or hire nine women to give a single birth in a month. The universe does not work that way.
The models were good enough more than a half of year ago. Opus and even Fable were steps backward. Last Gemini Argon is notably worse than Flash. A chess player knowing by heart all the 10200 openings hardly can win a tournament against scolars.
RAG/MCP and harness are 90% of the success today. The model just needs to be good enough.
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sodapopcan
Ha, “Minus et Cortex!” I’d love to know why that was chosen, even if not “Minus et le Cerveau.”
To keep this sorta on topic with this thread (which I keep veering from), instead of using AI, I recalled the plot memory (that is, the memory function of my organic brain, not RAM) which I saw around… hmmmm… I’d say probably a little over 35 years ago at this point? Clearly that particular episode had an effect on me as I can’t recall a single other episode, but ya, there could be gaps and some, ahem, hallucinations when it comes to what actually happened in the episode
I see there are some Minus et Cortex episodes on YouTube. I have not found the one in question, but selfishly this could be a fun way to get my french back up. I used to speak fairly fluently as a kid, and I’ve been considering moving to Montréal recently.
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