HN user
I agree, but considering the age of AI was ushered in with the largest and most complete theft of IP in human history, from inside the good 'ol USA, we shouldn't trust any LLM provider with critical information of any kind, and instead push even harder for better local models.
even companies that proclaim zero data retention have yet to produce a mechanism that makes me trust that claim
all the data on how you have interacted with their models
1) there is a very non-zero chance that the US government also has that data from OpenAI and possibly Anthropic
2) unless you are asking the chinese models to draw up plans to overthrow the chinese government, it's extremely unlikely they would ever care.
while china has a track record of harassing it's own dissident citizens abroad, if you're not chinese and not trying to subvert their government (or are a high-ranking government official yourself), it's kind of silly to suppose they would ever care about you or what you do.
and if you have information they want for their own national development purposes, like EUV engineers, they are much more likely to offer you fabulous amounts of money instead of try to intimidate or threaten it out of you.
so was invading Ukraine
the difference is that Putin's hand was forced by age, (possibly) illness, and the last several decades of how he chose to run his country. Putin's power base is a relatively small group of elites and oligarchs who would happily snuff out the man who pushes them out of windows if they get too uppity, if they were given the chance. He needed the cover of war to maintain the fiction of his type of strongman "only I can save us" leadership.
Xi's power base is the simple fact that his leadership has transformed China into the #2, and now because of Trump possibly soon the #1 world superpower. He has also acted aggressively in the last decade to find and remove corruption and prevent individuals from accumulating the kind of wealth and influence that could threaten his power from outside official Party channels. Of course, as I'm not Chinese myself, I have no clue what the internals of Party politics actually look like. But as an outside observer it seems clear that Xi et. al. do not actually need Taiwan for anything other than national pride. They know the US would go to the mat to protect it as TSMC is extremely vital to US military power. And since China cannot compete in that arena and has too much to lose, they instead have focused on weakening the US from within, quite successfully of late.
By the time China finally takes Taiwan it will be with little fanfare and little consequence - they won't touch it until the US either has lost its military capabilities, or the US has its own internal chip industry. Anything else is an existential risk for the coastal cities that are China's entire economic advantage.
its science journalism tbh, the realities of climate change's impact is so spread out and complicated that it's difficult to communicate to a largely scientifically-illiterate audience. see the perennial confusion over cold heavy snow winters being an artifact of global warming due to increased energy in the weather systems causing more volatility instead of just a simple "everything is warmer now."
so journalists focus on Number, because Number is simple and understandable. even when Number is mostly or completely bogus.
my money is on: eventually frontier model dev and training becomes basic research funded by governments, and LLM operators become essentially private utilities a la ISPs, competing mostly on data center operational costs and occasionally new chip tech to run models cheaper
and governments will keep running massive data centers with classified frontier models for intelligence and propaganda purposes
This assumes that all areas of research are bottlenecked on human understanding, which is very often not the case.
Imagine a field where experiments take days to complete, and reviewing the results and doing deep thought work to figure out the next experiment takes maybe an hour or two for an expert.
An LLM would not be able to do 24/7 work in this case, and would only save a few hours per day at most. Scaling up to many experiments in parallel may not always be possible, if you don't know what to do with additional experiments until you finish the previous one, or if experiments incur significant cost.
So an AGI/expert LLM may be a huge boon for e.g. drug discovery, which already makes heavy use of massively parallel experiments and simulations, but may not be so useful for biological research (perfect simulation down to the genetic level of even a fruit fly likely costs more compute than the human race can provide presently), or research that involves time-consuming physical processes to complete, like climate science or astronomy, that both need to wait periodically to gather data from satellites and telescopes.
Ah, I see - thank you for the context! If you don't mind one more question - do you have to leave a substantial amount of cash in the Steam account in case of very late refunds? Or does Steam just send you an invoice or something?
why are refunds so commonly counted against sales in this way? Wouldn't a refund cost essentially nothing?
digital music is not artificial scarcity, because it's not the copied bits that are the resource, it's attention. we only have so much time and attention for consuming media, and only so much attention and memory space in our brains for keeping track of where to find it. large budgets can easily dominate these channels and limit the average person's apparent choice.
this is what I mean when large players would outcompete smaller players in a digital marketplace with no copyright. the only way for this to work would be with a benevolent neutral 3rd party managing the marketplace, like Steam, so users can easily see when a large player is cloning a smaller players work - but even then it still depends on the good will of the general public to prefer the "original" artist which is not guaranteed.
the reform needs to happen at the layer where whether a copyright is valid or not is decided upon, not before (at the point of "should copyright exist") and not after (enforcement).
a world without copyright means those with the largest advertising budgets will reap nearly all the rewards from new IP created by small artists. BigCorp Inc. can just sit around and wait for talented musicians to post something interesting on soundcloud, for example, then just have their in-house people copy it and push it out to radio and streaming platforms via their massive ad budgets and favorable relationships for getting new material onto the waves immediately. meanwhile the original artist gets nothing.
the position of advocating against all copyright protections at all only makes sense for people who are already wealthy enough that they don't need proceeds from their art to survive.
Megacorps being naturally risk-averse, and the lion's share of the rest of the capital being held by that banquet room, it's going to take one or a few scrappy startups hitting it big while also committing to WFH/etc to get the banquet to loosen the purse strings a bit and kick off a new wave of investment a la Web 2.0 post-dotcom-crash (which was coincidentally also post-oh-noes-outsourcing-1.0)
That plus a few years of new successes might get the megacorps to start hiring en masse and possibly see the value in WFH again, but it'll take a lot of these stars aligning to produce several new unicorns that can eat a few lunches to get there, which will probably take the rest of the 2020s and possibly part of the 2030s (based on the last time this happened, going from 1999 crash to the 2010/2011 renaissance)
If I was a betting man, I'd guess the first wave of new startups will be unifying a huge dataset of local info with AI into like the AirBNB-of-local-whatever personal concierge sort of thing, like OpenTable on steroids. but I'm frequently wrong, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
R voters claim the economy is bad under a D president and immediately switch to claiming it's good under an R president.
adding on to this, typically it takes 1-3 years for the effects of an administration to really bear fruit in the economy, either good or ill. So a common tactic from the R side the last several presidential cycles is to claim ownership of the economy handed to them by the outgoing D president, then when their policies cause some kind of problem, blame the incoming D president 4 years later.
See also: who the R's blame the deficit on vs. which party's presidents actually increased the deficit the most over the last 20-25 years.
why isn't he in jail
In 2020, a Pennsylvania white man illegally voted via mail-in ballot on behalf of two deceased parents.
Also in 2020, a black woman in Memphis voted while ineligible due to a felony conviction without being informed she wasn't allowed, and was convicted and sentenced to 6 years in jail.
As for how this applies to why Trump is not in jail for his convictions, I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
until it hallucinates a config and rings up a $10,000 AWS while you're asleep
group chat
hmm having a sort of mini-forum-like experience tied to particular pages in a book seems like a fascinating idea! being able to discuss plot twists and such only once you've already gotten to that point?
wow this seems like an amazing idea actually! any names yet? I'd love to check it out once it's done!
I think that's part of the carefully-crafted hype messaging. Close enough to get excited about, but far enough away that by the time we get there people will have forgotten we were supposed to have it by then.
To paraphrase Goggins, "Who's gonna carry the cabbage?"
While it's true there are a lot of jobs obsoleted by technological progress, the vision of personal AI teams creating a new age of prosperity only makes sense for knowledge workers. Sure, a field worker picking cabbage could also have an AI team to coordinate medical care. But in this brilliant future, are the lowest members of society suddenly well-paid?
The steam engine and subsequent Industrial Revolution created a lot of jobs and economic productivity, sure, but a huge amount of those jobs were dirty, dangerous factory jobs, and the lion's share of the productivity was ultimately captured by robber barons for quite some time. The increase in standard of living could only be seen in aggregate on pages of statistics from the mahogany-paneled offices of Standard Oil, while the lives of the individuals beneath those papers more often resembled Sinclair's Jungle.
Altman's suggestion that avoiding AI capture by the rich merely requires more compute is laughable. We have enormous amounts of compute currently, and its productivity is already captured by a small number of people compared to the vast throngs that power civilization in total. Why would AI make this any different? The average person does not understand how AI works and does not have the resources to utilize it. Any further advancements in AI, including "personalized AI teams," will not be equally shared, they will be packaged into subscription services and sold, only to enrich those who already control the vast majority of the world's wealth.
If WFH was accepted corporate policy, and allowed for moving large distances away, then reversing back to RTO is not just an inconvenience, it's as much a life-upending disruption as moving for a new job.
I agree the shadow DOM is annoying and best left alone - at my job we just avoid it completely, and our entire web component library is meant to just wrap ordinary light DOM elements with functionality.
Used this way, WC are light, easy, and do basically anything you'd need.
Cars are not software, and it's ethically and morally wrong to test them in production.
Musk is playing games he doesn't understand, and wagering other people's lives to do it. He should at minimum understand that he has many, many fans who trust that he knows what he's doing, and will not expect Tesla's products to be cutting corners on safety and testing because "simpler is better" and "move fast and break things."
There are ways to find optimizations without removing a bunch of stuff and just shipping it like that to the general public: it's called engineering.
If Musk really wants to find ways to optimize the concept of a car further, he'll have to give up on point #4 and accept that it's going to take a lot of test cycles to figure out what works and what doesn't. Rushing out half-baked concepts that are likely missing key safety features because "let's see what happens" is exactly the kind of braindead approach to engineering management that is keeping me approximately 10,000 miles from anything Musk is in charge of.
this is actually explained briefly in the first movie
NEO: Do you always look at it encoded?
CYPHER: Have to. The image translators sort of work for the construct programs but there's way too much information to decode the Matrix.
Everyone learns to read the raw code because humans don't have access to enough compute to decode the live matrix data stream
It's a hard discussion, because the real issue is whether we as a society want prison to be about punishment or rehabilitation. Like many things, Americans generally seem to be split on the topic:
Some want prison to be a hard punishing experience and are fine with low quality of life and forced labor, because they believe that this sort of punishment will make criminals regret doing crime, and discourage future people from doing crime. This is the same logic that leads to supporting the death penalty (deterrence).
Others want more of a Nordic model, where prisoners are given essentially a basic but relatively-well-appointed studio apartment, good food, activities, etc - but also with a lot of mandatory therapy and "social rehab" classes and stuff like that, in order to reform prisoners back to model citizens.
Really what it comes down to is what we believe is the source of crime. Are criminals regular people who made a bad choice (and thus the source of the decision can be found and rectified)? Or are they a different kind of person more likely to do crimes (and thus must be locked away from society without bothering to try and "rehab" them)?
Like anything it is an incredibly complex and nuanced problem. But personally I think we should all agree that if the State is going to maintain the power to lock people up, we shouldn't allow doing so to become a profit center.
think of how shareholders drive a company's behavior, and how much of most public corporations bad behavior is generating dividends or increased share price for large institutional shareholders, because the leadership (board) is voted for by those same shareholders
now imagine if a company's only shareholders are the employees who work there. how much different would a company act if the people to whom the leadership are responsible are the employees themselves?
I am once again asking you to consider plasma gasification. Here is my standard comment, copied again:
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Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:
1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere
2. need to clean it from time to time
3. not necessarily a profitable business
Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.
Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.
In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.
---
ADDENDUM:
* This is NOT the same as incineration. Plasma gasification does not produce toxic gases vented to atmo, etc. The main byproducts are "syngas", which is mainly H2 and CO and can be reused to power the facility, and slag.
I disagree, police should not be able to turn off the cameras, but the footage should NOT be public by default. Instead, the footage should be regularly audited by a vetted third party not connected to the police, police union, of families of police.
The footage should of course be archived for some long period of time measured in years for use in proceedings, and audits the discover significant periods of no footage not attributable to technical malfunction should be grounds for immediate dismissal of the officer.
Making allowances for the officer to decide when it's "appropriate" to turn off the camera will inevitably lead to the current situation of the cameras being not used nearly enough - only instead of "oops it was off" it will become "I used my judgement that this was a sensitive event and turned it off, whoops now no one knows who shot first"
Some children are literally living in a warzone and don't know if they will survive through the week, some live in poverty, some lose one of their parents or both.
This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Yes, there are children who experience worse trauma and stress than COVID lockdowns. However, those children of war will be also be developmentally stunted, far, far, more than the children of COVID lockdowns.
This is a "yes, and" scenario. Reducing stress in all its forms during early childhood development is the goal here, and the fact that some have more than others does not mean those with less stress are worthy of casual dismissal.
A self-sufficient colony outside Earth is a worthy goal in and of itself:
1. The indomitable human spirit and drive to explore and expand
2. It's cool
3. More room for humans
There are also reasons that don't apply to Antarctica:
1. Hedging our bets against planet-ending catastrophes (global warming, giant asteroid/comet strike, ultra-pandemic)
2. Another stepping stone to exploring further interesting/important space goals, like gathering resources from the asteroid belt/moons of jupiter/etc, discovering life on Europa, and so on
Another story about waste "solutions," another opportunity to remind the gentle readers about plasma gasification. A re-post of an earlier comment of mine on the topic follows:
---
Why are we still not talking about plasma gasification? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification
As far as I can tell, the only real "disadvantages" if you can call them that, are:
1. more expensive than throwing the garbage in a big pile somewhere
2. need to clean it from time to time
3. not necessarily a profitable business
Other than that, it can handle just about anything that's not radioactive, can be designed to produce 0 toxic byproducts, and can run at or at least only slightly below energy neutral. Plasma gasifiers can also consume a huge amount of garbage for their size, so much so that the US Navy is starting to put them on the latest generation of aircraft carriers.
Not building out more gasifiers seems to me a failure of the free market. Because it's hard to make it profitable, no one is doing it - when really we should just be building one or two near every major city and funneling all our garbage there.
In theory, we could build out enough to start working through all the landfills too.
it's more complicated than that because of the scale of human society. example: mandatory LED light bulbs.
any individual person considering only themselves, would be correct to choose filament over LED because of cost and very little electricity savings. However, every light socket in the country switching to LED in aggregate represents a significant amount of energy savings for power plants and therefore less carbon output. this is a basic complication.
going one level deeper, there is the supply chain of LEDs vs filament bulbs and the relative impact of their carbon footprints and mining of rare earth minerals. This is where it starts getting difficult to parse which is a net gain for the planet.
another level below that is what you cite, the costs associated with the transition itself. A lot of energy (both electrical and human) is wasted by both supporters and detractors arguing in the public sphere, spending entire global broadcasts on the subject, flying around in private jets, etc. How much of this is necessary depends on the net savings from the first two levels, which is pretty hard to calculate accurately.
So you do you, but personally I try not to commit to blanket statements that erase all nuance and subtlety - generally that leads to missing important context.
You don't need to skip eggs! They are high in cholesterol, but the dietary cholesterol from eggs doesn't impact your serum (blood) cholesterol levels the way other fats do. Eggs are one of the best bang-for-your-buck foods you can work into your diet.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/high-blood-ch...