markwkw

You trim, yes, but AI content surely invades (all?) areas of written material. People are increasingly using AI to assist their writing. Even it if's for slight editing, word choice suggestions.

Even AP doesn't ban the use of LLMs, its standards prohibit direct publishing of AI-generated content. I'm sure its writers leverage LLMs in some ways in their workflow, though. They would probably continue to use these even if AP attempted to ban LLMs (human incentives).

Mechanical engineering interviews seem to do the same as software: "Engineers always ask about beam bending, stress strain curves, and conservation of work. Know the theory and any technical questions are easy."

Basically an equivalent of simple algorithmic questions. Not "real" because it's impossible to share enough context of a real problem in an interview to make it practical. Short, testing principles, but most importantly basic thinking and problem solving facilities.

You can easily demonstrate that an LLM does know certain fact X AND demonstrate that the LLM will deny that they know fact X (or be flaky about it, randomly denying and divulging the fact)

There are two explanations: A. They lack self-reflection B. They know they know fact X, but avoid acknowledging for ... reasons?

I find the argument for A quite compelling

I wish they tried to solve the 1989 4x4 crossword puzzle optimization with a modern solver, but a small memory limit (~8MB) and perhaps a severely underclocked CPU to showcase the algorithm improvements.

I think there is something special. Some special coupling of emotional states between us (manifests as empathy, feeling of community, feeling of connection). Not saying that this connection cannot be replicated or faked, this remains an open question.

Perhaps building an AI vastly smarter than us will conflict with replicating this coupling. Perhaps we will prefer artwork from an AI with which we do feel this type of connection. Perhaps this will make us build an AI that is really close to us in terms of experiencing feelings an emotional states, even if it means it's less "smart". This wouldn't be a dull outcome...

I sometimes wonder how people managed in the 19th century. Many went from villages to increasingly crowded cities. With no savings, minimal or no education. Industrial production was ramping up, but with crazy demands on workers, long hours, no safety standards. Couldn’t get a mortgage and wait for a nice corporation to build an apartment for you. Couldn’t look for a place in suburbs (how would you commute). Somehow our grand-grand-grand ancestors managed. Seems astounding.

On the other hand, in coming times of global depopulation, what will housing situation look like?

I don't know. Look at hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations, many layered regions and municipalities, meddling politicians; agencies and bureaus involved in US market (or EU market).

If you wrote down all the rules of Google app store, including all their sweetheart deals (I'm sure there are many), and accounted for all departments within Google that influence AppStore, it would be massively smaller and way simpler conceptually. The scale of bureaucracy, inconsistency, bad incentives and accumulated cruft is just not comparable.

Sonny: Yes! Rapidly and repeatedly. [then add the actual quote:] Can you?

Human: ...

Oh how the tables have turned.

These two effects are not similar in scale. Fertility across the globe is falling by a lot. Africa went from 6.7 to 4.2 in a span of 50 years. Asia went from 6 to 1.9.

Anywhere but least developed countries child mortality is low, such that fertility replacement level is estimated at 2.1 (vs 2.0 if everyone survived until reproductive age).

We used to have 5-6 kids, with one dying if you were a bit unlucky (statistically speaking). Now we have 2 or less.

Isn't the utility of the cycler that it can be a massive object with a lot of shielding for humans and permanently installed life support systems? Like a big space station for whole crews to live safely and comfortably while in transit.

You (incrementally) build up a large cycler in parts, each part accelerated to the orbit once.

Once the cycler is large, it seems infeasible to burn fuel to periodically adjust the orbit since it's massive. Unless propellant less stuff like light sails can be used over long periods.

I think the root cause is increased abstractness of jobs.

A job where you cut and plane wood to make planks that are used to build houses has a straightforward connection to basic life.

A job where you are trying to influence a group of people - so that they organize themselves to efficiently - make a change to a software tool - that affects a process for measuring of a collective endeavour - of a bigger group of people who are trying to optimize the selling and buying - of complex derivative financial contracts that are used to - increase the efficiency of a market of another financial product - which is a virtualization of actual trading of real world goods - so that incredibly complex entities (corporations) can get various and hard to grasp benefits - so that ultimately planks are cheaper ... such a job is virtually impossible to appreciate.

We are transistors in a byzantine supercomputer of global economy.

Good health -> athletic ability + mental ability + good outcomes all around

In this video, a cardiologist from UK directly addresses the problems that full body scans cause for both individuals and healthcare systems on aggregate level. I think this answers questions on how additional information could be detrimental to peoples health. He talks about several biases that are involved in measuring the effect of medical screening.

On the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky.

From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.

How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.

This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"

I just had a thought. A thin robotic worm. Can squeeze through and around important organs/vassels. When its head reaches the tumor it gently chews and siphons the tumor. I’m imagining tiny mechanical jaws just for cool effect

To me it became unbearable after it became flooded with people trying to add content without bringing any actual insight. They'd largely reuse existing materials or top google/wikipedia results and used certain style that became annoying to me (I wonder if others also started noticing the 'quora-style' answers)

If I was to attack the CICO argument I would say: - you control CI, but there could be feedback loops where the type of CI influences CO: eg consume 1000 kcal of steak vs 1000kcal of fructose and attempt 30 minutes of zone 2 cardio - will energy burn, muscle growth, etc, be the same? Will baseline metabolic rate be the same afterwards?

- different type of CI may result in different adherence to CI (how much you eat in reality vs intention) and CO (how much activity you can even perform given limited willpower and how CI type affects your well being)

Home deeds, loans, mortgages are not accounting concepts, but more in the ... contract(?) land.

When a loan is made, a loan document exists; and accounting entries exist somewhat separately. A contract can be entered without writing, a contract can result in complex accounting treatment which may be investigated, rules clarified, decided, corrected when methodology errors were made.

Do you mean that the blockchain is supposed to help with the accounting side, or with the contract side, or both?

This is true only if your definition of “computer nerd” includes terrible shape and never working out.

Metaverse being “not-engaging” is not an engineering type of observation, rather some kind of psychology/marketing type of insight. I wouldn’t trust engineers telling me something is, or is not going to be engaging to the general public.

In a large corporation, different precesses can be handled and developed by separate teams often working in silos.

After many years, there may not be a force to assure these processes are consistent, have rules that make sense in relation to one a other. I think the answer may just be it’s “dumb” because no one cares or has the power or will to look at things holistically.

Many animals will multiply and consume available resources without stopping. Cute bunnies left to their own devices on a lush meadow will multiply and keep eating grass until the is little grass left, upon which they will die en masse. Invasive fish crowd everything else out, insects that eat whole swaths of forest leaving no remaining habitat for themselves.

Perhaps animals who are territorial and fight, within-species, for territory can be considered to have a mechanism of self-regulating their consumption of resources.

Humans are perhaps the only animal that will even consciously contemplate the consequences of their actions on the environment. We are, I would say, the furthest from the virus.

Chess is, in a way, doomed. At this point cheating by a smart perpetrator is nearly impossible to detect. - Miniature devices can even be implanted. You can probably already have a chess engine onboard your body. - Accomplices of a cheater only need to transmit a few bits of information to be useful - making cheating cheap when audience is allowed. - Statistical methods will not be able to detect a player increasing their apparent skill by a small margin (help with occasional moves, successively picking suggestions from a varied group of chess engines so that adherence to one engine cannot be proven)

Given this, we will be left with cheaters getting caught rarely through obvious slips in op-sec (device falls out, gets picked by a detector through unlucky occurrence)

or

We will be forever accusing people of cheating. They will deny it. We will ask them to explain why they made certain moves. They will fail to explain themselves sufficiently... Are we here yet?

There is little hope for stopping cheaters.

example: Moon Ribas, an artist, has a small vibrating sensor embedded permanently in her feet that communicates wirelessly and vibrates whenever there is an earthquake somewhere in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Ribas#Seismic_Sense

The idea can be extended to an implanted device that receives subtle signals from the user to have a representation of the game state and communicates back through gentle sensations.

Where could I educate myself on the vulnerabilities of PoS? It seems like for PoW, the vulnerability comes from variability of computing power of miners - if miners capacity dips for a few hours because of external events, attacker can use that opportunity and bring online a lot of resources to do a 51% attack.

Doesn't a PoS attack require 51% of coin ownership? How would an attacker obtain that without being massively rich to begin with?

They can already easily cut (or threaten to cut) main power lines anywhere nearby. It’s not like ukrainian army controls all the area except for the the plant itself.

So we’re back to the question: how can they be so stupid to attack the facility itself?

So he aims to be scarier than Hitler? Quite an ambition. Tragic for everyone involved.

Astronauts can reportedly see highways, airports, dams with a naked eye from orbit.

I don’t think this is true. Looking at this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/pMchk.jpg from UN, objects above 500km take ~25 years to decay from orbit. They reportedly start at 550km, so I wonder how they hope to achieve 3 years of deorbit without active control.

Isn’t it the case that when you’re an undergraduate you do the grunt work and collect and process all the base data, and the risk is actually on the side of the supervisor?