Risking being downvoted to oblivion but as a South American this is a way more complex situation morally speaking.
Law-wise I agree and it has set an awful precedent.
But in the other hand Venezuelans all over the world (certainly the Venezuelans here that I know) are celebrating. I myself am in some way relieved. This is a dictator that did unspeakable things to their own population, set proxy criminal organizations, sent hitmen to kill dissidents in my country, highly decreasing our perceived safety.
So one part of my heart is glad. Plenty of Venezuelans are. I just hope they are quick to either put Corina Machado in charge or call for elections and at last bring true freedom to that country.
Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?
Because that's what has actually happened here.
It's not like there will be peaceful and organized elections now. The template from US actions in Latin America in the past is: A puppet regime will be installed and it will be involved in heavy domestic oppression of its own.
> Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?
You're saying this as if they (the people) had any control before.
A military intervention should always be the last resort. Two examples of military intervention / occupation working out in the long run are Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe even South Korea (stabilization of a dictatorship and economic development lead to a democratic revolution later). One can be hopeful that this starts a better chapter for the Venezuelians as well.
> Two examples of military intervention / occupation working out in the long run are Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe even South Korea (stabilization of a dictatorship and economic development lead to a democratic revolution later). One can be hopeful that this starts a better chapter for the Venezuelians as well.
Ignoring the fact that we have been using these examples for decades now as reasoning for going to war, these were all done after years of war. What makes you so convinced that this is "over" and the Venezuelean people can live happily ever after? History says it's far from over.
The Venezuelan diaspora is of approximately 8 million people. The current Venezuelan population is around 28 million. That’s a huge percentage of the population you a disregarding. And note that most still have relatives in their country of origin and they are also supportive of US intervention. At the end the oil is the least of their concerns. It’s easy to disregard them from a moral and legal point of view, but the suffering of this whole continent because of that dictator is very real.
The administration that has been saber rattling about "Tren de Aragua" and has had dozens of deportation flights of venezuelan refugees...
let me get this clear: you think this administration is somehow simultaneously raiding and deporting people to a place they are so empathetic to the refugee and asylum claim of that they are bombing it for humanity while also rejecting the asylum claims?
The administration that is pardoning major drug traffickers but bombs boats on a theory of importing a drug that they do not make. Then they destroy all the evidence that could support their claim?
This has nothing to do with the fact that this country has more proven oil than Saudi Arabia? Or their chosen successor María Corina Machado wants to privatize oil on day 1, that's just you know, random noise?
You can solve all Trump foreign policy mysteries with one weird trick.
People like to say "no, this is all very nuanced". I mean come on... Is Trump quoting Frantz Fanon and Hedley Bull? I mean what planet do you live on. This is a man with a golden toilet that eats at mcdonalds.
It is. Members of the imperial core will always find a way to rationalize their imperial brutality.
I mean I'd like to imagine that expats see through it but actually maybe they are less likely since they took great sacrifice to come to the US while I am merely an american because of the geography of my birth.
Exactly this, as a Colombian with many friends who fled Venezuela, the consensus is that the means aren't good but it's looking like a great outcome for democracy (might be too early to tell)
As an American, I’m outraged at this blatant disregard for international norms.
As a person living in the Americas… I’m surprised at how good this outcome is? Did we just remove a terrible regime in a comparably bloodless way?
This appears to be a prisoner’s dilemma. What just happened is probably a utilitarian win. But the president it sets could enable horrible abuses in the future.
That's also how it seemed after the Iraq invasion and the removal of Saddam Hussein. “Once we get rid of the bad guy at the top, everything in Iraq will get better.”
It didn't turn out well. I hope this one turns out better.
> Did we just remove a terrible regime in a comparably bloodless way?
You captured Maduro in an blatantly illegal act of war and until now the Regime is still there.
I hope for the people in Venezuela that this will end without a bloodshed. AFAIK Maduro has still support, especially in the poorer part of the population.
Same as you. This piece of shit needed to be gone.
I've seen Venezuelans begging for food, money and shelter in geographic areas where you wouldn't even imagine due the exodus.
I've seen South American communities orbiting xenophobia on Venezuelans because the lack of opportunities of immigrants where almost impossible in countries where there weren't any for many of the current residents.
>So one part of my heart is glad. Plenty of Venezuelans are. I just hope they are quick to either put Corina Machado in charge or call for elections and at last bring true freedom to that country.
Putting her in charge just means that the country will get looted by the Western Parasite Capitalist class instead of the South American Socialist Mobster class.
I do think we need to be hyper focused on this. We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide. This is a huge misalignment of objectives and we do not know what other misalignment issues are already more silently happening or may appear in the future as AI capabilities evolve.
Also we can’t deny the emotional element. Even though it is subjective, knowing that the reason your daughter didn’t seek guidance from you and committed suicide was because a chatbot convinced her of so must be gut wrenching. So far I’ve seen two instances of attempted suicide driven by AI in my small social circle. And it has made me support banning general AI usage at times.
Nowadays I’m not sure if it should or even could be banned, but we DO have to invest significant resources to improve alignment, otherwise we risk that in the future AI does more harm than good.
Respectfully I disagree there. Social media is dangerous and corrosive to a healthy mind, but AI is like a rapidly adaptive cancer if you don't recognize it for what it is.
Reading accounts from people who fell into psychosis induced by LLMs feels like a real time mythological demon whispering insanities and temptations into the ear directly, in a way that algorithmically recommended posts from other people could never match.
It will naturally mimic your biases. It will find the most likely response for you to keep engaging with it. It will tell you everything you want to hear, even if it is not based in reality. In my mind it's the same dangers of social media but dialed all the way up to 11.
Oh you are absolutely right. I’m not sure yet if it IS more harmful but it has had time to do so much more harm.
Starting with dumb challenges that risk children and their families life.
And don’t get me started with how algorithms don’t care about the wellbeing of users, so if it’s depressing content that drives engagement, users life is just a tiny sacrifice in favor the companies profits.
I largely agree with what you’re saying. Certainly alignment should be improved to never encourage suicide.
But I also think we should consider the broader context. Suicide isn’t new, and it’s been on the rise. I’ve suffered from very dark moments myself. It’s a deep, complex issue, inherently tied to technology. But it’s more than that. For me, it was not having an emotionally supportive environment that led to feelings of deep isolation. And it’s very likely that part of why I expanded beyond my container was because I had access to ideas on the internet that my parents never did.
I never consulted AI in these dark moments, I didn’t have the option, and honestly that may have been for the best.
And you might be right. Pointed bans, for certain groups and certain use cases might make sense. But I hear a lot of people calling for a global ban, and that concerns me.
Considering how we improve the broad context, I genuinely see AI as having potential for creating more aware, thoughtful, and supportive people. That’s just based on how I use AI personally, it genuinely helps me refine my character and process trauma. But I had to earn that ability through a lot of suffering and maturing.
I don’t really have a point. Other than admitting my original comment used logical fallacies, but I didn’t intend to diminish the complexity of this conversation. But I did. And it is clearly a very complex issue.
>I’ve seen two instances of attempted suicide driven by AI in my small social circle
Christ, that's a lot. My heart goes out to you and I understand if you prefer not to answer, but could you tell more about how the AI-aspect played out? How did you find out that AI was involved?
I was going to write a full answer with all details but at some point it gets too personal so I’ll just answer the questions briefly.
> but could you tell more about how the AI-aspect played out?
So in summary the AI sycophantically agreed with how there was no way out of the situations and how nobody understood their position further isolating them. And when they contemplated suicide it did assist on the method selection with no issues whatsoever.
> How did you find out that AI was involved?
The victims mentioned it and the chat logs are there.
The problem is, if you want to reduce suicide, the best place to start would not be by banning AI (very neutral tech, responds to what you want it to do) but by censoring climatologists (who constantly try to convince people the world is ending and there's no hope for anyone).
I'm not interested in hearing about the effect of AI encouraging suicide until the problem of academics encouraging suicide are addressed first as the causal link is much stronger.
By elderly people wo are already dying from natural causes and ask for a medically assisted death instead of unnecessarily prolonging their suffering. It is telling that so many people who suffer choose a dignified death once they are legally allowed to.
One could argue that number should be close to 100%, as people would live to old age where eventually the body is just too worn to continue a good life.
On one hand it shows terrible inadequacies of Canadian health care. On the other would it be better to force people to suffer till the natural end of their lives that are terrible because of those inadequacies? Healthcare won't get significantly better soon enough for them anyways. It seems better to "discover" what percentage of people want to end their lives in current conditions and improve those conditions to improve that percentage. That might be a very powerful measure of how good we are doing with added benefit of not forcing suffering people to suffer longer.
It's easy to think that any % > 0 is a sign of something having gone wrong. My default guess used to be that, too.
But imagine a perfect health system: when all other causes of death are removed, what else remains?
If by "terrible inadequacies of Canadian health care" you mean they've not yet solved aging, not yet cured all diseases, and not yet developed instant-response life-saving kits for all accidents up to and including total body disruption, then yes, any less than 100% is a sign of terrible inadequacies.
Some level above 0% is achievable target at our techlevel. But we could have easily have higher assisted suicide rate than this ideal non-zero level if we made our health services worse than they are. Same way I don't suppose they are administered perfectly right now so there's still long way to go before achieving lowest technologically possible level.
And even 0% is possible without going StarTrek, if for example full-time narcotic-induced bliss till the "natural" end of your life was an option. Then assisted suicide rate would just cease to be a good indicator of how good our health care and services are.
There are a lot of edge cases where suicide is rational. The experience of watching an 80 year old die over the course of a month or few can be quite harrowing from the reports I've had from people who've witnessed it; most of whom talk like they'd rather die in some other way. It's a scary thought, but we all die and there isn't any reason it has to be involuntary all the way to the bitter end.
It is quite difficult to say what moral framework an AI should be given. Morals are one of those big unsolved problems. Even basic ideas like maybe optimising for the general good if there are no major conflicting interests are hard to come to a consensus on. The public dialog is a crazy place.
The stories coming out are about convincing high school boys with impressionable brains into committing suicide, not about having intellectual conversations with 80 year olds about whether suicide to avoid gradual mental and physical decline makes sense.
Yeah, that is why I wrote the comment. The stories are about one case where the model behaviour doesn't make sense - but there are other cases where the same behaviour is correct.
As jb_rad said in the thread root, hyper-focusing on the risk will lead people to overreact. DanielVZ says we should hyper focus, maybe even overreact to the point of banning AI because it can persuade people to suicide. However the best view to do is acknowledge the nuance where sometimes suicide is actually the best decision and it is just a matter of getting as close as possible to the right line.
> We do not need more ways for people to be convinced of suicide.
I am convinced (no evidence though) that current LLMs has prevented, possibly lots of, suicides. I don't know if anyone has even tried to investigate or estimate those numbers. We should still strive to make them "safer" but with most tech there's positives and negatives. How many, for example, has calmed their nerves by getting in a car and driven for an hour alone and thus not committed suicide or murder.
That said there's the reverse for some pharmaceutical drugs. Take statins for cholesterol, lots of studies for how many deaths they prevent, few if any on comorbidity.
Public transport is the next thing I wanna work on. Will start with buses, which I have an idea on how it will be implemented, but for metro I will want to start learning about how it can be simulated faithfully.
This weekend I have plans to start playing a lot Subway Builder (https://www.subwaybuilder.com) which I'm really excited about, and maybe get some books on the subject, in order to get it right
Ever since I ride them constantly in Chilean Ubers I wish other EVs were more prevalent because how the aluminum bends and creaks sometimes when I sit on the backseat doesn’t make me feel any safe (I weight 90kg).
I don’t if the Chilean models are built to the same standards (they should) but BYD is approved in both the US and the EU. Structural integrity is definitely not a problem.
Haha what was the manufacturer? I drove a Changan Uni-T there and it was not an EV and handled like a boat but a very serviceable car. To be honest, I was surprised because it was the first Chinese car I'd driven and my mind was blown how far they'd come.
Can someone compare it to cursor? So far i see people compare it with Claude code but I’ve had much more success and cost effectiveness with cursor than Claude code
Doesn’t compare, because Cursor has a privacy mode. Why would anyone want to pay OpenAI or Anthropic to train their bots on your business codebase? You know where that leads? Unemployment!
You don’t have to keep track of seven things at once. You need to keep track of your own character and react accordingly. I understand that the game is hard but it adds a ton of fun to my taste.
Or should target the actual perpetrators and not the company. Some executive somewhere is seeing this as a win in the cost of doing business and has no disincentive to do criminal business in the future. But if they were fined themselves then they wouldn’t be so bold.
I used to do tech screening in my previous job and not only it measured stress, it was awfully biased against older people. We lost so many senior people that I really wished I could work with because they weren’t used to jumping through the hoops and loops of leet code questions (in my country leetcoding is fairly new). Then there were other younger candidates that were pretty mid but knew all the answers to leet code and design questions and ended up getting the job.
I mean there’s a limit to the kind of leet code easy questions you can make. At some point they are all pretty similar. This was also the tech screening, after that there were other interview rounds with harder stuff, but in the end it was so frustrating to see qualified candidates being rejected due to easy leet code interviews.
I tried to push back against the criteria we used for screening but it was hard to convince upper management that the method that FAANG used for screening wasn’t working.
I don't really think that's accurate. In my last interview cycle, I aced the livecoding portion at each interview and didn't practice any leetcode problems at all. In my normal workflow I write utility scripts in Python using only the standard library pretty regularly. If you know how to write complete, small programs using only the standard library of some language, you'll do fine on livecoding interviews. A lot of people struggle to do this because they only know how to work inside of a framework.
Maybe they didn't give you the same sets of problems most companies use.
Last time I went through any of these one of the problems was implementing a priority queue, for which I would have to write a min-heap on the spot. There's no chance I'd be able to do it on 45 minutes with an interviewer breathing down my neck.
In other situations I had easier ones. I don't remember the problems especifically but I recall one I googled after the interview and the answer was using two-pointers fast/slow to iterate through a list. I spent maybe 20 minutes tryng a couple different approaches and that one never occurred to me. Last time I had to use a two-pointer solution for a problem was at uni, which I left 15 years ago.
But then again they could still force you to use another language (as I had to during my interviews) and even though strict syntax isn’t required it still throws the candidate off.
Law-wise I agree and it has set an awful precedent.
But in the other hand Venezuelans all over the world (certainly the Venezuelans here that I know) are celebrating. I myself am in some way relieved. This is a dictator that did unspeakable things to their own population, set proxy criminal organizations, sent hitmen to kill dissidents in my country, highly decreasing our perceived safety.
So one part of my heart is glad. Plenty of Venezuelans are. I just hope they are quick to either put Corina Machado in charge or call for elections and at last bring true freedom to that country.
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