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Unfortunately, it doesn't look like this is sufficient.

While I had great success with GrapheneOS in the past, bank apps in Brazil have started blocking it, even when the profile you run it under has Google services installed. So GrapheneOS (again, even with all Google Play Services and all other dependencies installed in a given profile) is still not completely transparent to apps.

This may be a coincidence (as I don't use it every day), but I noticed blocking started just as the recent Felca Law (which introduced mandatory age verification for every software, app and OS in Brazil) came into effect.


Bank is saying it doesn't want your money, correct?

How about this for an evaluation: Have this (trained-on-older-corpus) LLM propose experiments. We "play the role of nature" and inform it of the results of the experiments. It can then try to deduce the natural laws.

If we did this (to a good enough level of detail), would it be able to derive relativity? How large of an AI model would it have to be to successfully derive relativity (if it only had access to everything published up to 1904)?


I don't know if any dataset of pre 1904 writing would be large enough to train a model that would be smart enough. I suspect that current sized SOTA models would at least get to special relativity, but for general relativity and quantum mechanics I am less sure.


(Not op)

Maybe not you in particular, but I expect people to be more forthcoming in their writing towards LLMs vs a raw google search.

For example, a search of "nice places to live in" vs "I'm considering moving from my current country because I think I'm being politically harassed and I want to find nice places to live that align with my ideology of X, Y, Z".

I do agree that, after collecting enough search datapoints, one could piece together the second sentence from the first, and that this is more akin to a new instance of an already existing issue.

It's just that, by default I expect more information to be obtainable, more easily, from what people write to an LLM vs a search box.


> Explains why RL helps. Base models never see their own outputs so they can't learn "this concept exists but I can't actually say it."

Say "Neuromancer" to the statue, that should set it free.


> Humans are more efficient watt for watt than any AI ever invented.

Indeed they are. For now. The long term trend is not in our favor.


I disagree, the long term trend is that we do not have the available electricity and water for this to continue for much longer.


Regarding electricity, it depends on what you mean by “we”, I guess

https://www.voronoiapp.com/energy/-China-Generated-More-Elec...


> block cars in cities a couple of days per week, individually selected per person.

The net result in São Paulo (Brazil) for (something that approaches) this is that people end up buying a second vehicle.


So like a pollution tax. People who can't afford the second vehicle will drive less.


Local governments in BR have already made ads using generative AI that were shown during prime time TV hours[1].

You can argue that is a bad thing (local designers/content producers/actors/etc lost revenue, while the money was sent to $BigTech) or that this was a good thing (lower cost to make ad means taxpayer money saved, paying $BigTech has lower chance of corruption vs hiring local marketing firm - which is very common here).

[1]https://www.cnnbrasil.com.br/tecnologia/video-feito-com-inte...


I have no doubt there will be AI advertising. I bet it’s the primary untapped revenue stream. My argument is that it will be associated with cheap, untrustworthy products over time, even if it’s possible to spend more money and get better AI ads. Same thing as social/search ads.


> in Brazil it is 20% (sugar cane based)

30% in 2025 for cars (from 27%), 15% biodiesel in diesel for trucks (from 14%).

Source: https://www.em.com.br/politica/2025/06/7183470-governo-aumen...

> The whole bio-fuel industry is a very complex mix of economics (often requires subsidies to make sense), geopolitical (less imported oil), environmental concerns (mass scale farming soil degradation and CO2 emissions derived from it) and logistical (completely different transportation and refining process).

Don't forget lobyying by the relevant sectors!


And the social implications of converting farmland from growing food to growing sugar cane/corn/soy. It is a VERY complex topic, but it seems overall it is a marginally positive thing for Brazil (even in emissions). While a very negative thing in the US because of all the subsidies required to make corn ethanol viable and overall negative emissions impact compared to oil gasoline.


> Choosing what traits one considers exceptional, will by definition select what species one considers exceptional.

/Every/ other species that has /ever/ lived will cease to exist (at the latest, in a billion years or so).

Humans are the only ones (so far, anyway) that have any hope of surviving more than that.

That seems pretty exceptional to me :P

Disclaimer: the fact that we're exceptional doesn't mean we don't do dumb things and we shouldn't improve and do better.


Are you sure? I'm pretty sure there are types of bacteria that has existed long before humanity existed, and will exist long after humanity is gone.


"has existed long before humanity" isn't relevant for my argument.

"Will exist long after humanity" -> maybe, maybe not. If we're smart, capable and humble enough, we could, in principle, intentionally outlast them.

By "intentionally" I mean: we can design our future lightcone such that, by whichever measure you care to choose, there are still humans around. Yes, bacteria could be still around, but it won't be because they _chose_ to be around, it will be because it just so happened that the universe arranged itself in a way that they are still around.

By "in principle" I mean: if we spent enough resources, energy and smarts and built a civilization around this goal, we could plausibly (given the known laws of physics) do this. Whether we _will_ do it or destroy ourselves first any of the possible various means, is an open question.

Lineages of bacteria that exist today, here, will only keep existing in the _far_ future (billions of years from now, after the sun chars Earth and then spends its energy budget) if it just so happens that a panspermia event kicked some off our solar system and then they just so happen to find a suitable solar system to keep existing.

We can design our future, bacteria can't.


The problem with that argument (which people also use on animals like sharks) is it assumes that these other organisms haven't also been evolving in the human timeframe. Yes, you can find evidence of organisms that look more or less like modern bacteria or sharks long before humans existed, but the idea that these organisms haven't been under selective pressure since is false. Indeed, they are probably under greater selective pressure now due to the effects of humans on the planet.


Bit of a ship of Theseus situation I suppose. Humans have been and will continue to evolve as well, but you still want to credit them as "humans", so why not give the same logic to the bacteria?


Pretty sure no bacteria will survive on earth after the sun expands enough to char it, yes.

Even if I'm wrong, and it does survive _that_, then it eventually won't survive the sun spending its entire energy budget.

We're the only ones that could intentionally (as in, actively design our future lightcone) to survive that, so that makes us special in my book.


The counterpoint is that not doing so (implying some sort of infinite monetary loss if the entire human species is wiped out) would mean you want to spend every single unit of monetary value of the entire global economy to preventing this (which is also obviously nonsense - people have to eat after all).

So you have to put the monetary value somewhere (although you're completely within your right to question this specific amount).


I think what I’m trying to express is that it feels like the answer isn’t any amount of money, it’s just undefined, like a division by zero or trying to read the value of a binary register on a machine that’s turned off. I think Pirsig called it a Mu answer.


That's the most interesting application of capitalism-as-as-resource-allocation mechanism I've ever seen, that's something I look forward to thinking about more.

My immediate reaction though is to doubt the mapping of dollar to value - e.g., the 10 million dollar valuation of the human life, but also the valuation then of all the things that year-dollar-cost could be spent on. Many of those things probably don't map very well between true value, and dollar cost (my go-to example of this is teachers fulfilling one of the most critical roles to ensure a functioning society, yet the dollar cost paid for their labor being typically far lower than most other jobs).


You're right to doubt it!

And indeed, accounting for externalities (unmeasured or unmeasurable) is a tough economic proposition. If it weren't hard to account for every single variable, creating a planned economy would be easier (ish).

FWIW, there's a whole sub-field just dedicated to determining the value of life for various purposes (a starting link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life). You may disagree with any specific assessment, but then you have to argue how that value should be calculated differently.


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