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Yes but "the search space is too large" is something that has been said about innumerable AI-problems that were then solved. So it's not unreasonable that one doubts the merit of the statement when it's said for the umpteenth time.

I should have been more specific then. The problem isn't that the search space is too large to explore. The problem is that the search space is so large that the training procedure actively prefers to restrict the search space to maximise short term rewards, regardless of hyperparameter selection. There is a tradeoff here that could be ignored in the case of chess, but not for general math problems.

This is far from unsolvable. It just means that the "apply RL like AlphaGo" attitude is laughably naive. We need at least one more trick.


The whole fight with Anthropic was because they wanted to use it for mass surveillance (and autonomous weapon systems).

How is mass surveillance not orwellian.


I wrote: it's not particularly orwellian. like all the other us administrations have had mass surveillance boners too. and the us is not nearly as surveillancey as other fascistic regimes, or even contemporary social democracies.

finally, orwellian means a lot more too, especially "controlling how people think by controlling their language". again, the trump administration doesn't do that much of those things.

this administration has a lot of problems, but its pretty straightforward.


>Hey that's a weird thing in the result that hints at some other vector for this thing we should look at

Kinda funny because that looked _very_ close to what my Opus 4.6 said yesterday when it was debugging compile errors for me. It did proceed to explore the other vector.


> Especially if that "thing" has never been analyzed before and there's no LLM-trained data on it.

This is the crucial part of the comment. LLMs are not able to solve stuff that hasn't been solve in that exact or a very similar way already, because they are prediction machines trained on existing data. It is very able to spot outliers where they have been found by humans before, though, which is important, and is what you've been seeing.


That's silly, they don't want to manage people, they prefer to build actually useful things. I've recently learned how many programmers actually don't care about building things.

They love the craft, for all they care they could be working in a black box in a void as long as it fed them interesting problems to solve.

They don't see any actual benifit in the AI increasing the velocity of how fast they build useful things. That was never of value to them, all they see is the problems becoming more boring to solve.


Problem is that "others with AI" aren't producing what I consume, i.e food, heat, clothing, housing and health care.

They're just producing what I produce, i.e software.


That’s fine. New opportunities to provide value will emerge. If software becomes oversupplied, fewer people will enter that field and move to other areas where value is needed. If you only want to add value in the software space, then yes, it may be a problem.


If now only everyone who is talented at crafting software (or any other job that might be replaced), but who is out of a job could magically be as talented at something else, and enjoy doing that other work, then we would have no problem. But one issue is, that often significant time goes into becoming good at what one does. Switching has a very high personal cost in terms of time and having no income for a prolonged time.


Even worse, people are not the same as when they were younger. They may have less ability to learn. Almost certainly they have lower internal motivation and enthusiasm, since their career of choice was just taken from them. Job retraining programs are probably a big hint here. They have a poor track record.


I produce software too but I starting producing food recently. I feel like it really takes edge off my AI-related anxiety. (I also realize I'm more rural than most of HN).


Or it could have just been a genuine question. I'm not American and I've seen DoW used in newspapers and thought the name change was official. Personally I've thought it a more apt and honest name for what they do.

But the backlash in the commments here show how ideologically charged the question seem to be.


I wasn't aware of how ideologically charged the question was. I'm also not American, but I'm glad I made the question. It's a clear sign for us not Americans to just leave them be.


> It's a clear sign for us not Americans to just leave them be.

Depending on where you live in the world that might be quite hard to do soon.


I agree. I live in Brazil and even though tariffs and interventions weren't directed at us, they influence the economy and political decisions. Also, Venezuela is right next to us, so instabilities there do tend to affect the whole region.


> Or it could have just been a genuine question.

Yes, exactly that’s why I wrote several examples to support why the chance for that is very-very slim.


Easier to work in hypotheticals than to do a bit of research like read the other comments. Just explained it was an honest question and why.


Do you really trust in random comments on the internet which states something to which the possibility is slim, because literally nobody cares why somebody calls the way it is, when that somebody knows both names, and when it's not political? I don't think that's optimal, and it's a hefty understatement of course.


On the other hand calling it "Department of Defense" seems quite whitewashing of what it actually does.


It spends the defence budget...


You see how that's a circular reasoning? The defense budget should by all accounts be called the war budget if we look at how it's spent (Iran).


Which is used primarily for offense anyway


I'm pretty sure the amount the money spent on offensive actions is significantly less than the defense


When was America last invaded by a foreign adversary?


This resembles anti-vax logic. We haven’t been invaded because our military maintains a strong deterrence and strategic depth.


I think you're the one applying anti-vax logic here. Imagine beating a guy up for looking at you wrong and then get into a semantic argument with the judge on how you shouldn't be charged with assault because it was actually an act of defense, you see if you hadn't assaulted them they would surely have assaulted you so it's defense.

You're basically saying the US don't need a Department of Defense because the Department of War is doing such a good job.


Yeah, otherwise the USA would have been invaded by Cuba, Iraq, Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and a hundred more, and they all would have a fight over who can have it. Thank god the US defended themselves against those terrible guys. Especially the WMDs were quite the close call, the Iraqis were minutes away from nuking the land of the mart.


Cuba's an odd rhetorical choice given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis


> otherwise the USA would have been invaded

Yes, invading Hawaii was part of imperial Japanese planning. If you don’t understand that defense spending is still worthwhile even if you don’t blow anything up with it, I’m not sure how we connect.


You haven't shown the value. There are multiple countries that have a very low defense spending and since WW2 haven't been invaded.


But... you ARE blowing things up with it?


>We haven’t been invaded because our military maintains a strong deterrence and strategic depth.

How do you know that's the reason? There are many countries with very low defense spending that haven't been invaded since WW2.


Maybe.

I was just saying that the purpose of the Department of Defence is to spend the "defence budget".


So slightly before 1440 was peak Truth for humanity?


One fun thing would be to raise the abstraction level of the game.

How would it feel to only interact with your base/economy/army via prompting and face someone doing the same.

Would words per minute replace APM, what would the meta look like etc. Would you be able to adjust the system prompt for your "army" to suit your play style?


I’m sure it would be fun at first, but it would quickly become frustrating and repetitive.


then, you would automate that


I get the feeling you are approaching Hesse's Glass Bead Game.


Imagine being able to vibecode your units' attack and movement behavior during a match to dynamically counter enemy strategies.


It sounds like Tolkien didn't quite agree with the simplified take that Orcs are "just" a force of evil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma


To me it sounds more like he really wanted to give them some agency and the ability to speak, but then was unable to resolve the moral dilemma that came out of it - with different works suggesting different "solutions" to it. As the Wiki article points out, Tolkien was a devout Christian and part of his world view included beings which were wholy and irredimably evil while still able to speak and reason on some level. When you look at Christian iconography, you don't really have theologians saying "well when you have angels slaying demons, are the demons really evil or are they just misunderstood". That's your orcs. Since Tolkien really cared about world building he wanted to make it fit neatly in the myth of creation but as far as I can tell - he was never able to do it neatly.


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