HN user
Yes, this is the thing. In the scientific enterprise, the writing is mostly wasted time. Why would you write it up if machines can do it competently?
Sure, some people are artists - but most aren't.
Neat info. I would guess that Toyota produces twice as many vehicles per employee at least in part because the regulatory and social environment where Toyota operates is better.
There is often an underlying sensible economic reason for doing things like destroying perfectly wearable shoes or burning edible crops. Understanding involves admitting things people don't want to admit to themselves.
Nike destroying shoes: the shoes they make are just cheap synthetics and foam, and the per-pair materials and manufacturing cost is a small part of the cost of the shoes. Nike is a marketing company that sorta does shoes. The shoes themselves aren't a very important part of the value they provide to people who buy their shoes. People who buy their shoes are buying a social signal about who they are and how much money they have that doesn't work if the shoes are too cheap.
NERVA / RD-0410 are basically like chemical rockets but better (maybe 800s specific impulse, vs. 300 for a chemical rocket). In contrast, Orion was 6,000s to maybe 100,000 theoretically.
It could be monologue or dialogue, but it should be less full of verbal "syntactic sugar" than NotebookLM podcasts. More to the point, more detail-oriented, can pronounce math.
Can pronounce math is the real showstopper for me. Last time I tried, NotebookLM would try to say the TeX out loud. Like underscore dollarsign...
1) you aren't able to listen to something safely while driving on the highway? 2) the cars pretty much drive themselves on the highway these days
I'd like to have audio overviews of scientific papers, so I can "read" them while I drive. NotebookLM/Gemini Notebook sorta does this, but the two-person podcast format is kind of annoying and it can't pronounce math.
Is there something out there that will do this? I'm sure the right harness around frontier models would make it work.
Surely it's only open weights?
That's a pretty unfair read in my opinion. Whatever the Mullvad guy supports (it is...a bit difficult for me to understand), it isn't the KKK. It isn't even close to the KKK. Not comparable. And he owns half the company, which means he has a lot of control...but the company is much more than ownership. It employs a lot of people and does a lot of good work. The good work it does is totally unrelated to the guy's political leanings. Whereas, a KKK bake sale is by and for the KKK. You buy muffin, $ from muffin less muffin costs --> KKK.
It isn't.
China's murder rate is about 0.5 murders per 100,000 people per year, while South Africa's is 44 per 100,000 people per year (assuming both countries report honest statistics). That's an 88x difference between two large countries. [0]
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
half the calls could be handled by folks without guns.
Let me point out that you must know which half before the fact for this to be of any use.
Sometimes you might be 95% sure no guns are required. Is that good enough? What does that buy you? 10% of calls?
Populations across the world are not comparable in a variety of ways, including in a "best-case" base criminality rate. So you can't compare per-capital rates of imprisonment and go, "Gee, that's high in Country X compared to Country Y and Country Z".
There's an old saw: A Scandinavian economist once said to Milton Friedman, ‘In Scandinavia, we have no poverty’. Milton Friedman replied, ‘That’s interesting, because in America, among Scandinavians, we have no poverty, either’ [0]
0: https://iea.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/Sw...
N.B.: there was selection for the worse-off in those coming to the U.S.
She should at least put it on https://www.biorxiv.org/ !
When you realize that Google Maps is a business directory that also happens to do mapping, things make sense.
Yabbut...we sort of need to make it up as we go along. This is unprecedented! Thinking machines!
That said, there is stupid "making it up" and smart "making it up". But it does need to be made up.
I'll remind you about 1972:
https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)
Current times aren't even that spicy.
I get that this is in the news (or at least the nerd news), but really...do y'all canvass the companies you buy things from, figure out on net who the people who work for them support in politics, ask whether that's what you like, and move your business around based on that?
It seems crazy to me. Part and parcel of having a pluralistic society is that we treat each other the same in public-facing parts of life without regard for stuff like sex, political positions, etc.
You gonna refuse to accept mail from the postman who supports something you don't like? What about the ice cream shop?
Mullvad does an excellent job, and I support them.
Better yet, design and popularize an AR grip that is the state of California
You're on HN. You likely have lots of extra money.
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Mass shootings kill almost no one. They're a red herring. Even with a really stupid, inclusive "3 or more people injured" criterion. If you use that criterion for defining what a mass shooting is, the modal number of people killed is...one.
It's less polarized than people think. Most people just don't care about most opinions. ~1/3 of opinions are unanimous.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260310212334/https://fivethirt...
https://reason.com/2025/06/05/is-the-supreme-court-really-th...
I remember the word "regulated" back in the day does not mean "regulated" like the FDA regulates foods, it means "regulated" like we still use it for regulating a mechanical watch. "To adjust (a mechanism) for accurate and proper functioning."
...but... it continues, "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed"
Yeah, I mean it's bad in this really direct, near-term way. But we couldn't keep going the way we were going. It was insane. Pants-on-head retarded. And so my read, and my hope, is that this current period of trouble is the price for getting back on track. Treating truth as something that can be discovered. Funding people and ideas based on merit.
I mean...sucks bro. I can imagine that in much of science, where DEI and the wokeness is unrelated to the things you actually study, it was just lip service. And you were sometimes forced to hire idiots, I guess. But when you study human behavior, it's not just lip service - the DEI edicts, speech controls, etc. are about the things you study.
"90% of the systematic differences in behavior between men and women are driven by biology"
"~70-80% of the variance in intelligence is heritable"
"Your personality is mostly defined by your genes"
"Small-scale societies before modernity were hierarchical and extremely violent, which is why they were successful"
"There are no matriarchal societies at all, past or present"
"Slavery was a human universal until recently. Its end was when a bunch of Westerners were like "Maybe that's wrong and we should stop" - and they forced everyone else"
You know what's also cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting rid of math classes in public high schools because brown kids do poorly in them. All people are born a blank slate, amirite? So it must be ~~systemic racism~~. And bullshit "research" that was designed (and advertised) to come to that conclusion got funded everywhere. The government was entirely captured by this complete nonsense. And it did a huge amount of damage, not least of which is the reaction to it we are now experiencing.
I can imagine how it just seems like a stupid social game in physics, but if you study humans it's really the meat of the thing.
Am scientist. We needed change. This seems like a stupid way to get change, but it's better than nothing.
Academia was not doing well pre-Trump. The DEI infection ran deep - and it still does. Complete nonsense was getting funded in the social sciences and cognitive science / psychology. It was really tragic. And now all these institutions are saddled with personnel debt. The morons they hired during the DEI moral panic - some of them are even tenured by now. People who overtly aren't even doing science - they are performing their politics with science. Overtly.
This is a blunt instrument, yes. But things were going very poorly overall, and we needed a shake-up.
Given the choice between: Biden (or later Harris) is elected and things keep going the way they were going, or the current timeline, I choose the current timeline.
(P.S.: Scientific American is trash now, you shouldn't read it. https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6202 )
GrapheneOS is fantastic
If you'd like to donate to the project, you can do so here: https://grapheneos.org/donate
Aside from the EFF, where can I send my money? Is there somewhere / someone that's working on this specifically?
Please God no