Because it is not pleasurable at all? When I was a kid, I saw a couple of friends get addicted to smoking, from the first cigarette. I have seen dozens of acquaintances as well because I was interested in the process.
Even myself tested his firsts cigarettes.
It was so painful. The body reacts violently when you try to poison it. Severe coughs that people try to hide, trying to appear strong while they could not help it making impulsive movements. It tastes like sh*ht, it burns your lungs. You stink, your clothing and breath stinks.
It takes a lot of concious and painful work in order to force your body into accepting that.
For me it was pure stupidity to make a deliberate effort to get hooked into an addiction, so I just did not continue.
I couldn't help but see that this way. I read a lot so I knew what was coming next. It is like casinos not inviting mathematicians or physicist to conferences, as because of their training, they can see the probabilities inside out and never fall in the emotional trap.
Genetic lottery, I think. There are some "addictions" I've been able to give up incredibly easily, and others I still struggle with. Other people have the opposite problem, others still don't have any at all. The older I get, the more I think willpower is a made up concept.
Sadly true, I think. My grandparents gave up smoking at the same time after grandad contracted emphysema. They were the generation that believed smoking was good for them and smoked for 50+ years. My grandma was shocked that she had physical withdrawal symptoms, something she associated with "druggies". But it went away after two weeks. After that my grandma never thought of smoking again and actually became repulsed by smoke. But my grandad never got over it, he craved a cigarette every day for the rest of his life.
That's funny, as I was reading the comments on this page I was thinking the opposite: I don't understand people who get addicted to things.
Smoking seems gross and stupid and self-destructive to me.
Alcohol does nothing for me, I don't understand why people drink alcohol when it's clear they will get a hangover. Sometimes I drink wine or beer but there's nothing appealing about it.
Gambling (casinos, online, sports betting) seems stupid and pointless - it's pretty much guaranteed that you'll lose, it's the whole point of a casino.
Caffeine - I drink tea and coffee, but most of it without caffeine. Sometimes I drink caffeine every morning for a couple of weeks (mountain biking vacation), and then I stop it and feel bad for a day and then I'm back to normal.
I am very prone to (mostly digital) addictions, but on nicotine, despite having been smoking 7 years, I’ve quit cold turkey without trouble, and since then, I can absolutely just borrow one to a friend, maybe 2 or 3 times per year, without any withdrawal symptoms. It does not have any effect. I don’t understand anything about that :|
I don't know what everyone is getting so mad about. This is a well defined concept. A pace car deliberately sets the pace of the race under dangerous conditions, regulating how fast people can go.
You are all getting mad about absolutely the dumbest thing when there are giant things to be worried about here.
I think it's less mad - and more pointing out the obvious elephant in the room.
1. It's just bad communication, full stop - just look at the comments here, even people allegedly in support of Anthropic are all arguing over what the phrase is even meant to mean.
2. It's flowery language and oddly out of place - which yes, can be triggering for people who have to deal with Claude doing this as well.
Claude seems overly apt to reach for "coinages", or neologism (yes, aha, I learnt that phrase, after spending time dealing with Claude...). It will create some made-up phrase to describe an otherwise dry, scientific CS concept, and nobody seems to know why. Surely it can't be user-focus groups?
So it would be peak-AI if somehow, the Anthropic communications team was also using Claude to author these blog posts, about how they were "pacing the frontier" - which either means they're betting big on AI, and going at it faster than OpenAI...or maybe it means they need to slow down releases, because it's too buggy...or maybe it means they're worried about regulatory capture? I honestly have no idea.
It's like the whole "Advancing Our Amazing Bet" corporate-speak from my old bosses - maybe they were trying to soften the blow or something, or be nice, but it ended up just confusing the heck out of everybody.. (Spoiler alert - the phrase actually meant they were shutting the whole thing down)
You appear to be confused about the concept. Depending on the context, pacing or pace setting can mean either slowing things down or speeding them up relative to what the natural pace would have otherwise been. So it's actually not well defined. The commenters here aren't necessarily mad, just calling out Anthropic for being unethical in trying to artificially slow down competition by lying about fake dangers. (And I actually really like Anthropic's products.)
The most instructive kind of problem solving is solving problems badly and learning why you did a bad job. Do that enough times ina row and they call it a career.
This. But then I have a very hands-on learning style - I cannot learn things by watching (or reading about) others doing it. I have to mess one up myself first.
It won't be a government crackdown, it'll be an insurance crackdown. Want to run your model in a commercial kitchen? Better have the badge showing certification by the NSF for food handling and prep, UL for general safety, etc or when you stab a customer your insurance won't pay out and it's on you.
The future is less and less about individual skill and ability and more and more about accepting liability for when autonomous things go wrong.
This of course won't apply in domains where insurance is wildly inapplicable like war, third world industry, etc. Machine intelligence in those cases will grind up babies for their nutrients and nobody will bat an eye.
How does insurance apply to 10 people that get together on a forum and share resources? This is assuming hardware gets faster and training gets easier.
Insurance isn't a working paradigm here. Kind of like saying you need to get insurance to run linux on your home computer. Your your self spreading AI worm needs insurance.
Same way it does for kitchens currently? If I host a dinner party for three close friends, I don't need special insurance, but if I'm McDonald's, I'm absolutely going to have insurance. Money changing hands is the existing checkpoint for when something is serious. Linux on your home computer? Totally fine. Want to run a colo and charge people money to access Linux computers you're renting them? Insurance needed.
Looking terrible isn't nessesarily a bad thing. The pelican is heavily pre trained now. Having a crappy pelican means you didn't try to juke the stats.
Apologies for not taking the time to find it, but there was a post that tried to determine if the pelican was benchmaxxed across a bunch of models by comparing it to other SVGs, and found that it wasn't at all.
Depends on the class of the star. Our sun? About 1/4 radius and in is fusion reaction. But it gets weird in other stars. In red giants the fusion zone is a very small shell around a dead core. Maybe something like earths orbit in radius, but very very thin.
This makes sense as long as public control makes the outcome of that money better than letting the bazillionare control it. I'm not sure which way the actual truth tilts, but I suspect it's sometimes one and sometimes the other.
In my opinion, giving one person that level of economic and social control as a concept is more of the issue than optimizing for the most positive outcome.
E.g., the most intelligent and benevolent king in history might be better in those particular outcomes than democracy, but we should still pick democracy because the concept of giving one person too much powerful is too dangerous.
I think our society needs to think of wealth more in these terms than it does at present.
reply