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YIMBYism is about relaxed zoning so that commerce and diverse types of housing aren't physically segregated, but even in the most "free" places industry is segregated because the needs of industry are incompatible with human habitation. No one wants to live next to a refinery, nor should they be put in a position where that's their only option.

(I get that you're being ironic.)

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> No one wants to live next to a refinery

I do.

Specifically because of who doesn't.

My neighborhood is across the street from a company that specializes in the repair of hydraulic hammers, a water treatment plant, paper mill and recycling center and a freight rail so we've got it pretty good as is but I see no reason not to continue improving.

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Yeah no worries, apart from the facetiousness I'm a pretty YIMBY person un-ironically. But it is infuriating that people adopt YIMBY rhetoric to try and defend data centers and other harmful industrial uses in areas with high land value. It's not only completely counter to the ideals of YIMBYism but also insulting as YIMBY has always been about lowering housing and commercial use costs through heavily relaxed zoning, NOT pushing through anything that anyone wants to develop in some sort of libertarian wet dream.
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YIMBYism is about telling people who are mad about some structure being built near where they live, and who are engaging in poltical activism to try to stop that construction, that their anger about the structure shouldn't let them stop it from existing.

In this respect there is very little difference between a NIMBY getting mad about a data center and getting mad about a new housing development that will make the area more crowded and use more water.

The only difference is that you yourself are mad about data centers. If you are a YIMBY generally-speaking try to see how the anger you feel about data centers is like the anger your opponents have about new housing, and let that empathy make you a more effective YIMBY.

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Honestly, it sounds kind of incoherent to me. How do you imagine YIMBY relaxing zoning and allowing things at lower cost and not simultaneously allowing people with money to push through what they want?

It sounds more like you are saying YIMBY but imagining MIMBY (maybe in my ...) where you've just replaced those other guys making the decisions with your own cabal?

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> How do you imagine YIMBY relaxing zoning and allowing things at lower cost and not simultaneously allowing people with money to push through what they want?

Relaxing zoning laws never meant throwing them completely out the window. It has always been a matter of pruning zoning rules that overly restrict land use to the point that minor deviation from the norm is impossible.

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Whatever the level of relaxation, I don't understand how you think it is going to enable low cost development of your preferred things, while excluding those with money from absolutely pushing rules to their limits to build their preferred things..?
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I've seen a lot of people indicate they think people's predictions for the future with AI are like a psy-op and that none of them really believe it.

Isn't it simpler to believe that people like Terrance Tao who have been in good standing with the academic community for a long time are telling the truth? Like you may very well disagree with their predictions based on your lived experience or theories... But it doesn't take some crazy leap of faith to follow their logic of "AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".

Like sure CEO's like Amodei/ Altman/ and Musk may have an incentive to hype things up but not every opinion by every smart person has to be part of some grand conspiracy.

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>we can scale this up exponentially

Lost me here. It usually means something will require exponentially more resources, and eventually a finite limit (money, time, raw materials, land, energy, lifespan, speed of light, etc) will be hit.

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I'm not sure what you mean, we have already scaled up AI exponentially. The amount of AI compute in the world has been doubling every 7 to 8 months [1], so it is already exponential despite not being able to do human or super human research. The % of all AI compute going towards academic style knowledge research is quite low as well. So it stands to reason AI Compute used to do research would in fact scale up exponentially if we did figure out how use weights in a datacenter to do frontier research.

That doesn't mean were going to go right to Dyson spheres so that every possible molecule is going towards scaling.

[1] https://epoch.ai/trends

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Academics aren't infallible at all. The studies showing tobacco as non-harmful had the collaboration of a great many cooperative scientists. Generally speaking, many academics are amoral and will do very unscrupulous things for grant funding and exposure. It is a business.

> AI could get better at fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> scaled up human level or super human level research will lead to major scientific breakthroughs".

Again, this is a misapprehension of the technology itself and its most ideal use cases. Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation. If you do this, you will expend valuable resources verifying the output that would be better spent just verifying the inputs in the first place. I'm no Luddite and I do think AI is cool and incredible technology. If you reframed that sentence as "AI could get better at taking the busywork and tedium out of fundamental/ applied STEM research than humans -> we can scale this up exponentially -> leveraging human strengths with AI's super-human strengths at assorting and analyzing information will lead to major scientific breakthroughs" then I would have absolutely no issue with it. But the marketing copy never says that and instead frames it as "AI can do anything a human can do and better," which is a) patently untrue, and b) suggests a very troubling agenda that the big corporations will have to answer for at some point or another.

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My point is just we don't need to jump right to everything is a hype train and it's all a conspiracy to pump stocks. You are welcome to disagree with Tao or anyone elses line of thinking.

> Any software producing stochastic or probabilistic output and cannot produce verifiable, repeatable, and predictable data cannot fundamentally replace something that requires a high level of proof and validation

Human output is also stochastic and probabilistic - our brains are not deterministic software. There is no fundamental reason we couldn't replace the human role in research with some form of AI (LLM or otherwise) if AI keeps improving.

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Medicine researched even with government funding is out of reach for a lot of people. It's going to take a leap of faith to think that "breakthroughs" researched from a private business is going to be enjoyed by the masses.

Socialized risk and privatized profit is the default. AI isn't going to change that. If it is as successful as the hype, it's going to exacerbate it.

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However, That doesnt make it not real.
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> Totally trust him, bro.

I was really expecting a /s at the end of this, but that'll do pig. that'll do

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