Nathan Peck
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Nathan Peck
@nathanpeck.com
1.1K followers 570 following 380 posts
Technologist in Software, AI, and Infrastructure Orchestration
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I spent some time writing another essay in my ongoing series about humanity, consciousness, and AI.

I explore some of my recent thoughts about collapse and the future. I'm also experimenting with a new format designed to "prove" the human provenance of writing: nathanpeck.com/it-wont-happ...
It won't happen to me, and other lies we tell ourselves
“Ten decisions shape your life, you’ll be aware of five, about.” It’s a lyric from The Strokes. It’s also a surprisingly deep description of the relationship between choice, circumstance, and luck.
nathanpeck.com
I'm thinking about this image. Each generation reduced the distance their kids could roam, despite experiencing broader freedom themselves (or perhaps because of it).

Did the parents remember close calls or scary circumstances that they wanted to protect their kids from?
"It is estimated that more than one in five U.S. adults live with a mental illness (59.3 million in 2022; 23.1% of the U.S. adult population)." (www.nimh.nih.gov/health/stati...)

The mental health epidemic in the US started long before ChatGPT. Glad to see OpenAI trying hard to not make it worse.
Maybe AI translations help shift that as well, for example the massive rise in Cebuano Wikipedia thanks to AI translation bots.

But the real shift we'd need to see is broader world usage of alternative services like Baidu Baike, or KakaoTalk, etc. TikTok shows that will be an uphill battle though.
I think the dominance of English as the "language of the internet" helps maintain that English standard as well.

The question is whether the next 30 years would also see a transition away from English as the dominant language of the internet. That's a bit harder to imagine
Reposted by Nathan Peck
The smarter you are, the longer you can postpone being wrong.

Every hour of research delays the moment you have to face the fact that the map and the territory will never match.

www.joanwestenberg.com/p/the-map-i...
The Map Is Not the Territory (and It’s Definitely Not Progress)
How Smart People Stay Stuck
www.joanwestenberg.com
Sounds about what I’d have expected. The stats for mental health issues, depression, and suicidality are absolutely horrifying.

ChatGPT is surfacing a view into a massive ongoing mental health crisis worldwide. About time they tried to direct these people to help
Reposted by Nathan Peck
Zohran Mamdani is so scary because he is planting the idea that you can tax billionaires and use the money to help people instead of debating what services to cut to pay for tax cuts. Which is literally why the US government is currently shut down.

He is destroying decades of political messaging.
These techniques are good, but they still rely on the US government not interfering with the technique. If the US government says: "AWS Nitro is illegal now, we have mandated that there must be a backdoor" then there will be a backdoor, and there will also likely be a gag order about the backdoor
The cost of hosting your data under the control of a fascist country is way higher than the cost of running your own hardware though.

I personally think the cloud is in very shaky territory. That amount of centralization is only possible in a high trust environment, and trust is on the decline
It’s only after time outside the American bubble that you see how much everyday life there is designed with quiet hostility, sometimes in malice, sometimes just from basic indifference.

I don’t want to live like that.
American traffic lights are positioned for the convenience of drivers in a car-centric society.

New Zealand traffic lights are positioned so that drivers notice pedestrians at the corners, and avoid hitting them.

It's a deeply thoughtful decision that has doubtlessly saved many human lives.
When an American driver approaches a traffic light their eyes are centered on the road, angled up slightly towards an overhead stoplight framed against the sky.

When a New Zealand driver approaches a traffic light they are looking at the corners of the intersection, where pedestrians are standing
When I moved from America to New Zealand the traffic lights bothered me. They were low and positioned at the corners of the intersection.

US traffic lights seemed better: suspended overhead, centered above the lanes.

It wasn't until 6 months later that I realized how stupidly America-brained I was
Reposted by Nathan Peck
Watching mainstream news sites try to come up with euphemisms for the video where Trump dumped "a brown liquid or sludge" on protestors is a great example of the sane-washing that the media has done for his administration since the the first time around.
News Outlets Won't Describe Trump's AI Video For What It Is: The President Pooping on America
Major outlets said the President dumped "brown liquid" that "appeared to be feces" in an AI-generated video. They refused to call a spade a spade, or poop, poop.
www.404media.co
Oh wow! Moonlighter is an amazing game. Can't wait to see what ya'll have built for Moonlighter 2!
I think it’s possible for two things to be true. There is a legitimate water issue, and it’s not primarily caused by AI. It’s caused by climate change and 50+ years of minimal to no real investment in US water systems
In short, my take on Wardley’s post is that if anything he’s an optimist there! I think the reality is looking like it will be far weirder and more broken.
Additionally any chaos caused by Bitcoin is part of a broader pool of chaos caused by climate change, AI, and fascism, which will likely destroy free form access to a shared worldwide internet (and by extension, Bitcoin as the defacto currency) long before the monetary thresholds in that post
I think that 2013 post is too optimistic. It’s a little too neat of a story to say that Bitcoin is the cause.

I see Bitcoin as a symptom of underlying social collapse and the breakdown of traditional societal responsibility. A world without Bitcoin still has these deeper problems
Right these assets only make sense when you have stored wealth to protect.

And you are correct: if distrust in a currency originates from distrust in the government, then that is usually a warning sign of impending inability to maintain basic levels of security and stability. Dark times ahead…
Additionally, latency doesn’t matter. When you are waiting 10-20 seconds for inferencing compute to complete what’s an extra 200ms around the globe?

LLM’s can and should only be running in areas of high renewable power availability.

The reason this isn’t reality is national AI arms race and greed.
A lot changes when the government is willing to thrown around the terrorist label and use the legal system in sketchy ways.

Suddenly you realize it’s actually quite easy for them to seize all your dollar assets if they don’t like you. Gold and well managed bitcoin has physical / secrecy protection
As I recall, the original Miyawaki forests were planted in the 1970’s and 1980’s, so there is plenty of long term observation of the effectiveness in Japan.

Fewer studies for other climates and plant species, but the fundamentals are good, even if small adjustments are required for other regions