ifwinterco

War is profitable and the people who profit run the US and Europe

For very small companies (startups) AWS makes a lot of sense because you have very few employees and you don’t want that limited employee time being spent managing servers

Yes true, I can see that actually.

I feel though that if you picked a random sample of members of the public and asked them about the probability of the singularity you would get blank looks from most people on the left tail even if you explained it.

Whereas if you had the statement "ChatGPT can be useful for some things, but it isn't going to fundamentally change the world" you would get a lot of people on both tails agreeing and the people who disagreed would be clustered in the middle.

Maybe that's just my bias speaking though and actually I'm the midwit

It's the bell curve meme every time - very, very often stupid people end up being "wiser" than moderately intelligent people.

Meanwhile the really intelligent people end up with beliefs surprisingly close directionally to the stupid people who've barely thought about an issue, just fleshed out with 100x the detail.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

It was already written in a very performant language so no significant performance improvements should be expected.

The benefit of a rust rewrite is memory safety improvements, but currently they've just rewritten zig to unsafe rust so they don't have that either yet

From what I've heard from gambling addicts (thankfully this is not something I'm prone to), there is something about the actual process of gambling that makes it addictive beyond the loss/reward system.

People who are really into roulette get a buzz off seeing the wheel spin, hearing the ball bouncing etc.

Probably that comes after the initial addiction to the reward function but it then strongly reinforces it.

I don't think there's an equivalent for paying to watch a movie because the time to payoff (or not) is too long and the sensory experience is too inconsistent to elicit a conditioned place preference.

LLMs on the other hand... the time to payoff is shorter and the experience is consistent every time. It's just lacking the tactile/sensory elements

Definitely, although there is a massive sampling bias: the minority of people who are in that state are also much more likely to post about it online.

Most likely (hopefully) 99% of users aren't like that and they'll just log off if quotas get slashed

I don't go that far and I'm not exactly scared to fly on a Boeing (because statistically it's still very safe, I ride motorbikes which is probably 100x more dangerous etc etc).

However I definitely prefer flying on an Airbus, put it that way

The economist is pravda for the global globalist class.

It's not at all surprising that they're hostile to the idea of a nation doing anything to take its fate into its own hands when it comes to supply chains etc.

I found this with kimi k2.7 as well: on paper it should be quite cheap, but it's not because it uses a lot of tokens for quite simple tasks

Performance is not the issue, electric cars are like driving a fridge, it doesn’t matter how fast it goes.

"Comparable acceleration" is basically irrelevant to me, that's a number, numbers don't matter, I want quality of experience not arbitrary quantities.

If you’re not a proper petrolhead you won’t get it and that’s fine, most people aren’t and a car is just a tool for them.

Yep, go to the same place as cocaine and fentanyl which luckily nobody ever uses right?

The issue is Duolingo is rubbish, what the app does isn’t that hard to replicate and there are already competitors that have a better product.

So if AI is real then that‘s the cherry on top: people can now make an alternative to your ineffective messy app even easier.

For those kind of SaaS products with no moat LLMs could actually be a problem and definitely aren’t a good thing

Low bid to cover ratio - it's rare for bond auctions to out and out fail (that would be fairly disastrous), but you can have an auction where they successfully sell all the bonds they were trying to sell but with much less demand than they were hoping for.

That's not a good sign and it's a blatant red flag for the market

It’s got worse though right? Older models from before everyone went off the deep end with CoT don’t do this and just write the code with 1/10 the token usage.

The downside is the code isn’t as good but it is produced a lot faster and more cheaply and often it’s actually fine.

CoT has made LLMs better (say 50% improvement or something) but increases cost by an order of magnitude. That graph is going in the wrong direction and has been for a while now

Broadly Latin was the main language in the western Roman Empire but educated people would also have spoken Greek, and in the eastern Mediterranean it was reversed (almost everything was done in Greek but Latin was used for official purposes and by educated people).

Coptic is the interesting one though because it's actually the latest version of ancient Egyptian

I once had work MDM on a Mac just... disappear one day. They definitely didn't intentionally remove it, nor did I do anything to remove it, but one day it just wasn't there. Maybe accidentally removed from the MDM management console for some reason?

Either way, everything still worked exactly as before, just now my Mac wasn't reporting back to the company at all. This went on for over a year until eventually I left the business, handed my laptop in physically and went on my way. I assume they noticed at that point, but before then they apparently had no idea.

I probably should have told someone, but since I hadn't done anything I didn't feel bad about it, and it was a lot easier to get stuff done without the corp stuff breaking everything

Also sometimes (depending on the company) being seen to visibly chip in fighting fires can win you real credibility that you can put in the bank and then use later when you want to slightly slack off for a bit.

So it can actually make logical sense to do it occasionally even from a purely selfish perspective if it's half an hour on a random Tuesday evening and you aren't actually doing anything else important.

All depends if the company is actually going to be grateful or not though

There's a difference between using stimulants on long missions to stay awake (especially if, for example, you're flying an aeroplane) and getting cranked on speed before a battle purely because you're rather fight high than sober.

The German army in WW2 famously experimented with the latter during the invasion of France, but they seem to have reigned it in after that, mainly because while it might be initially effective, soldiers aren't much good for anything when they're having an awful comedown after a meth binge.

Modafinil is a good choice for the former because it's extremely effective at keeping you awake, but has almost no classical dopaminergic stimulant effects and isn't really fun to use

It’s a mixed blessing because while the competition should lead to better designs it also leads to massive fragmentation in the drones used which has negative consequences for maintenance, training etc compared to the Russian approach of making huge numbers of a few proven designs

Yes I fear you’re right, power is addictive to most people, once they have a taste they want more.

Likewise loss of power is traumatic, picture the barely conscious 90 year old senator getting wheeled into congress to vote or something or other. Few ever give up power willingly even if they’re just a small node in a bigger system and not even really in control

The funny thing is it’s so transparent. Like… is that the point? They want us to know how dodgy they are, kind of as a “** you”?

Often the point of propaganda is not to convince, it’s to demoralise.

On the other hand I could also believe that they live in such a bubble they genuinely don’t understand how it comes across. Add in a non-negligible amount of neurodivergence and maybe that’s the simplest explanation

Yes in theory it should be easier to get on with people if you yourself don’t hold many strong opinions.

Unless of course you’re dealing with a zealot who gets angry if you do anything other than passionately agree with them, but there’s not much you can do in that case anyway

I don’t think there’s any one thing or set of things you can read that will make you informed on all topics.

Human knowledge is siloed and you need to already be well-informed to judge the quality of information (this is the cause of the dunning-Kruger effect, if you’re really bad at something you lack the tools to understand just how bad you are).

So imo you have to accept you’ll always be ignorant of most topics and get comfortable with thinking “I don’t know”.

Within your own specific areas of competence you should be able to identify independent sources of information that add value and consume those while discarding the rest.

Also when it comes to politics and international affairs: no substitute for travel. Go to lots of places with different systems, talk to people and you will learn a lot more than you will from reading the economist

Truth is reading any of these MSM sources on either left or right is bad imo.

Before reading them you're merely uninformed, after you're misinformed which is far worse

The backlash is baked in now I think, people hoping it will just go away are delusional.

But if European elites (including UK) are smart they should be able to avoid the worst outcomes, most people don't really want trouble.

Issue is, there's no sign of smartness so far

Yes, this is part of why I lost interest in video games (probably mostly just getting older if I'm honest).

However at the risk of sounding basic, RDR2 (2018) and Cyberpunk (~2022, once they fixed all the bugs) are both really good single player games that are a lot more fun to play than anything from 1980.

How many more of those will we see? Not sure

Some ticket prices are crazy, but the issue is a lot of trains are already very busy especially at the weekends, even with those prices.

If trains were made cheaper, some of them would become extremely unpleasant to use. In an ideal world, we'd have both more capacity on the busy routes and cheaper tickets, but that will need a lot more work than just nationalising the train companies.

(Or just fewer people would solve all these problems, but that doesn't look likely to happen...)

Yes, that's a fair counterpoint. I guess my counter-counterpoint would be that LLMs actually seem to have characteristics closer to the first group than the second, in that they (currently at least) need enormous quantities of physical things and energy in order to work.

So the nuclear power problem of "it works fine and it's actually very good in a lot of ways, it's just too expensive" could be quite relevant

I believe this in general but the issue with AI specifically is historically in every cycle we've overestimated the potential of AI in both the short and the long run - people in the 60s were genuinely quite convinced we were close to AGI for a few years, as ridiculous as that now sounds.

This is why you get "AI winters" but we've never had a "steam engine winter" or a "railway winter" or a "petrochemicals winter"