It's a funny thing that the most war-loving people and the most peace-loving people both love calling it "Department of War" - just for different reasons.

But the reason for "Department of Defense" name was bureaucratic. It's also not true that DOD is hard to understand.

What I'd add to this discussion is that a minimalist website looks HIGHER END, in the same way that a clothing store that's packed with clothing looks cheaper than a store that has like 10 dresses and tons of empty space.

Depending on the brand, you might want to appear like a good bargain! Alternatively, you might want to appear like you sell luxury items. But either way, the design is communicating something.

They went into hibernation, in terms of accepting new inputs, several years ago. They had more data than they could handle and switched to just analyzing existing data and final reports.

Don't cars already use a ton of sensors that don't reproduce human senses and ways of doing things?

With the final analysis of this project complete, I do wonder if there's a way to bring it back with distributed agents doing the part that was so time-intensive for researchers that they had to kill it.

> Like, imagine if I owned a toll road and started putting up road signs to "convince" Waymo cars to go to that road.

I think a clearer parallel with self-driving cars would be the attempts at having road signs with barcodes or white lights on traffic signals.

There's nothing about any of these examples I find creepy. I think the best argument against the original post would be that it's an attempt at prompt injection or something. But at the end of the day, it reads to me as innocent and helpful, and the only question is if it were actually successful whether the approach could be abused by others.

Well yes, it would pretty clearly be classed as "prompt injection" given that it's trying to get the LLM to give them money or "persuade" a human to give them money. Of course the fault lies mainly with whoever deployed the LLM in the first place, but I still think it's misguided to try to convince LLM "agents" to make financial transactions in order to benefit yourself. It'd be much more ethical to just block them.

What they wrote is saying the data is available for free, and in fact that they have done extra work to make it cheaper for the LLM, but also says they should "consider" a contribution so support their mission. It's not trying to trick them, it's laying out facts about the value they offer.

And in fact, it's very possible that the person running the LLM would want to be made aware of this information. Or that they have given their agents access to a wallet so that it can make financial decisions like the one noted here around enterprise level donations that could be in the user's self-interest. They might not WANT to sign off on everything.

Is your view that any writing with any eye towards LLMs is prompt injection? That there's no way to give them useful information?

Maybe there's a liability moat where large companies can't ship something that's risky enough to be useful?

My understanding is that different types of exercises for your brain (chess, learning an instrument, etc) won't help prevent a decline, but that it might give you some tools to deal with it.

I think the options are:

1. Local models or token cost plummets

2. Subscriptions more prevalent, given token costs

3. A single subscription (tokens) to rule them all

4. Apps with use-based pricing

You can be libertarian and a capitalist and still be pro-union. At the end of the day, a Collective Bargaining Agreement is just a private contract between two parties. It can be a way to raise wages without government setting a minimum price for labor.

While I'd agree most of its proponents (like myself) also favor other left-wing policies, I'm just saying it doesn't need to be.

Unions are labour cartels for the purpose of extracting above-market wages from the commons, a sort of mafia. They are incompatible with capitalism and libertarianism, especially with libertarianism.

What is rich people collaborating called? You might claim that it is incompatible with capitalism but it’s just a fact of it. It’s easier for a small number of resourceful people (and capital gives them resources) to collaborate than for many people with not much more resources than their house/mortgage. This is what Adam Smith told us anyway.

It is also illegal.

Simply assuming that "every employer does it because theoretically it is easier for then to do so" to help your argument is rather self-serving, considering that labour unions are explicitly legal and exist.

It’s not theoretical.

Cynicism is such a waste of time when you haven't done the thing you're cynical about and have no first-hand experience.

You think you're thinking about reality.

All you're doing is imagining reality. You're living in a fantasy.

Rich people collude all the time. They buy political power with money. It’s so out in the open that I’m not going to post a whole diatribe on it.

It’s news to me that what Adam Smith wrote about in that book was theoretical. Oh well.

Cartels are not at odds with libertarianism. In fact, freedom of association is the fundamental underpinning of libertarianism. Unions are the libertarian solution to labour woes. Other groups normally favour regulation instead.

Libertarians don't have a theoretical problem with cartels because if a cartel tries to push for above-market prices, someone else will swoop in and start doing it for less, taking all the cartel customers with them.

By this logic, every corporation is a cartel to extract below-market wages from the commons. Both sides are bargaining collectively. And so you'd be saying both are incompatible with libertarianism.

There are strands of libertarian thought, I suppose, where government shouldn't be incorporating businesses at all. But it's still legit to say libertarianism is compatible with corporations and with labor unions.

> By this logic, every corporation is a cartel to extract below-market wages from the commons.

This statement makes only sense if you don't know what markets are, how they work and what their purpose is.

Right! Neither statement makes any sense.

Who fucking cares. I would gladly start a mafia to exploit the commons if it meant I got paid more for working less.