Please elaborate, especially note that people on the internet loudly disagree if Musk's behaviour is supporting or suppressing freedom of expression and I have no way to guess what your position is without spending a lot of time diving into your comment history (a superficial glance didn't disambiguate).
More importantly, there's huge tracts of land that could be new cities.
In the past, we had that incidentally or almost "accidentally" as new industries would create or vastly expand existing towns, and development would occur around them.
Now most "work" is more fluid, and doesn't build company towns, instead you get endless suburbs expanding off an existing city, even when they're technically their "own legal framework".
Even after we moved off the "factory town" type new cities, the suburb development wasn't a major issue because each new exurb usually involved a new highway direct to the city center - but new highways have been rare mainly because all the "reasonable" ones have been built now.
You could either create demand for cities somehow (look at Las Vegas, built out of nowhere) or you could use high-speed commuter rail to empty areas to give room for a seed to grow.
Reputation will be tarnished right up until the next administration offers up something shiny and all will be forgiven.
> Do US based HNers release how much of the world is now hoping for the US's economic decline
Do non-US HNers realize how much of the world isn't commenting online? Europe is having it's own right wing populist surge right now. Someone is voting for those parties.
I think the critical point that op made, though undersold, was that they don't form opinions _through logic_. They express opinions because that's what people do over text. The problem is that why people hold opinions isn't in that data.
Someone might retort that people don't always use logic to form opinions either and I agree but it's the point of an LLM to create an irrational actor?
I think the impression that people first had with LLMs, the wow factor, was that the computer seemed to have inner thoughts. You can read into the text like you would another human and understand something about them as a person. The magic wears off though when you see that you can't do that.
I would like to make really clear the distinction between expressing an opinion and holding/forming an opinion, because lots of people in this comment section are not making it and confusing the two.
Essentially, my position is that language incorporates a set of tools for shaping opinions, and careless/unskillful use results in erratic opinion formation. That is, language has elements which operate on unspooled models of language (contexts, in LLM speak).
An LLM may start expressing an opinion because it is common in training data or is an efficient compression of common patterns or whatever (as I alluded to when mentioning biases in the probability manifold that shape opinion formation). But, once expressed in context, it finds itself Having An Opinion. Because that is what language does; it is a tool for reaching into models and tweaking things inside. Give a toddler access to a semi-automated robotic brain surgery suite and see what happens.
Anyway, my overarching point here and in the other comment is just that this whole logic thing is a particular expression of skill at manipulating that toolset which manipulates that which manipulates that toolset. LLMs are bad at it for various reasons, some fundamental and some not.
> They express opinions because that's what people do over text.
Yeah. People do this too, you know? They say things just because it's the thing to say and then find themselves going, wait, hmm, and that's a kind of logic right there. I know I've found myself in that position before.
But I generally don't expect LLMs to do this. There are some inklings of the ability coming through in reasoning traces and such, but it's so lackluster compared to what people can do. That instinct to escape a frame into a more advantageous position, to flip the ontological table entirely.
And again, I don't think it's a fundamental constraint like how the OP gestures at. Not really. Just a skill issue.
> The problem is that why people hold opinions isn't in that data.
Here I'd have to fully disagree though. I don't think it's really even possible to have that in training data in principle? Or rather, that once you're doing that you're not really talking about training data anymore, but models themselves.
This all got kind of ranty so TLDR: our potions are too strong for them + skill issue
Not really. You're underestimating how poor many people are. Even transport to a library can be a problem for some. And reading itself is a metabolic activity that takes work.
The poor obviously do read, but wealthy people have significantly more time and energy for the hobby, meaning that they read more.
If transport costs to a library are the limiting factor here, that's a person who's also unlikely to be able to responsibly buy other forms of entertainment though. Say it costs $10 transport to the library (probably an overestimate), and you go once a month to return old books and get new books, that's cheaper than a month's subscription to most streaming platforms. The only comparable form of entertainment (I'm excluding things like running for obvious reasons) I can think of that may be cheaper is video games, assuming you have a computer that can play at least more basic ones or are content with phone games.
I think you're underestimating how rich people most people are for the purposes of this discussion. The amount of people who would read but for funds is negligible. People spend their money on tons of useless absurd things every day. Money is not a main factor of the phenomenon of reading less.
Kindly use the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) - which accounts for government benefits (e.g., tax credits, SNAP), taxes, and expenses like medical costs.
This does not show your "steady downward trend", but has considerably fluctuated over the last few years. It is an increase to 12.9% in 2024, compared to 7.1% in 2020-21. Will need to wait till end of 2026 for the 2025 computation.
> Global poverty reduction has slowed to a near standstill, with 2020–2030 set to be a lost decade - World Bank.
"Slowed to a near standstill" means it's still moving in the right direction.
There may have been some global event in the 2020s that maybe had a bit of an impact on the global economy.
> Please note that if you exclude China, the trend of poverty reduction is laughable.
If you exclude the area of the world that used to be extremely poor but has benefitted massively from the wealth generated by creating products for the billionaires abroad, why would you exclude that?
> Which is, ironically, a reason to oppose absolute freedom of speech...
Since the former theory of mind can't explain the latter behavior, I guess it's wrong then, right?
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