mateo1

You mean I can't take the Nobel Peace Prize by force? Can't be true, I'm the most peaceful guy the world has ever seen.

Ok, why would you want plastic to decompose in 2 months? What about shelf life? Will I need to worry about my packaging decomposing?

I don't get why they'd destroy the PPE if it exists and it's up to standard? Even governments can resell these products?

What exactly is this "MagNex" product and why is it worth an (long and mostly irrelevant to the point) article?

"We're going to release not-your-voice in 2 days anyway, maybe you want think about the deal again?"

That's a funny way to read the article. What it really says is that VW saw a big market in China, which is now dominated by local companies, so they're not gonna overproduce cars by building another factory. Also the free money river known as subsidies is drying out in the EU so people won't be buying that many EVs. And tesla/byd might be cheaper, but I wouldn't call them any better. That's a personal opinion of course.

I'm not a programmer, and when I write a program it's imperative that it's structured right and works predictably, because I have to answer for the numbers it produces. So LLMs have basically no use for me on that front.

I don't trust any LLM to summarize articles for me as it will be biased (one way or another) and it will miss the nuance of the language/tone of the article, if not outright make mistakes. That's another one off the table.

Although I don't use them much for this, I've found 2 things they're good at: -Coming up with "ideas" I wouldn't come up with -Summarizing hundreds (or thousands) of documents from a non-standard format (ie human readable reports, legal documents) that regular expressions wouldn't work with, and putting them into something like a table. But still, that's only when I care about searching or discovering info/patterns, not when I need a fully accurate "parser".

I'm really surprised on how useless LLMs turned out to be for my daily life to be honest. So far at least.

Doing a meta-analysis on something easily quantifiable is sketchy enough, doing a meta-analysis on something as vague and hard to measure as "cognitive intelligence" is.. well, it's sociology's territory. Not to say it isn't of value, many discoveries were made on a lot less methodologically strict grounds and this kind of "conversation" does create the stimulus for further, more specific research, but you ought to read this more like a an investigative journalistic piece with a lot of opinion rather than hard science.

What dose of any substance is harmful instead of harmless? Is this a philosophical question or a practical one? If it's a practical one, we don't know, because if there are any effects they're too weak to infer with certainty. Unlike for example those of benzene in your sunscreen or acne products, or flame retardants in your furniture.

That's because these are generally valid arguments. The phrase "the dose makes the poison" did not just occur in someone's head for no reason.

There's a couple things to note about "forever chemicals":

They're around "forever" because they are extremely unreactive. The concentrations the public is concerned about are ridiculous. With such small concentrations, huge timescales for the cause-effect chain to take place and countless confounding factors in between it's basically impossible to make the bold claims the general public makes.

That being said: Workers are exposed to much higher concentrations and they should have been protected from it. New chemicals shouldn't be used as widely as they do by simply assuming they're safe. There are uses (like cosmetics etc) were no risk is really warranted so they should be more restricted with what they use.

At the end of the day though, when you ban something you need to really understand and take into consideration what kind of damage you'll do to people by banning a substance and all the products that depend on it vs. what kind of damage the substance will do. You can't pretend that you can just ban a whole class of really important compounds without any societal side effects.

And that's coming from someone who's really concerned about dangerous chemicals. If you know chemistry, and look around you, you can tell there's a lot more dangerous issues than PFAS that aren't being tackled and nobody seems to care about. Primarily how nobody seems to check what's really included in tons of "cheap" (in terms of manufacturing, not always of price) imported cosmetics, personal hygiene products and parapharmaceuticals.

People are buying protein powders and supplements of unknown producers, raw materials and manufacturing methods by the kilos, plastic cooking utensils from the internet and boil/oven bake them with their food, buy sketchy adhesives for their PVC water pipes, and then complain about some 1ppt concentration of inert chemicals in their drinking water. I understand how the public is easily swayed on things that are technical, and I am happy with people being aware of potential dangers, but the focus is really misplaced on something that looks new, scary, unsolvable and interesting instead of tackling the old, boring but important and serious issues we come across every day.

Concrete is 15% cement and 85% stone. Just crushed, homogenous, predictable and structurally sound stone. You can't reinforce stone like you can reinforce concrete, and you can't pour stone. Stone will not replace concrete. As soon as the energy crisis ends, concrete prices will fall again. The requirements for stone to be used structurally are high, and I don't think production could ever match the demand that replacing concrete would create, or if it did, it would be a whole lot more expensive.

It's naive to think they don't already know.

And/or this is #145 on their to-do list, so after a good 15 months of postponing it, an overworked IT council guy told his supervisor "if you want X implemented without overhauling system Y just get rid of apostrophes" so this article happened.

Besides, when you're just looking for a prime, you can spot things that look like a prime and test them deterministically.

Yes, yes, and also you'll likely be paying for it. 1kW*0.25$/kWh=185$/month

She will just do it on Instagram reels now. I wish They were banning all short format video platforms and black box algorithmic suggestions. But obviously they aren't.

Huh, I thought this couldn't be true, but it is. The first time I noticed annoyingly fast cuts was World War Z, for me it was unwatchable with tons of shots around 1 second each.

When everyone holds the data you don't have an edge. They had dedicated users who kept generating new and relevant "content" for a for-profit company with an implied agreement to keep it accessible and discoverable, but they decided to kick them off the platform and try to take hold of what their users had effectively created. That didn't exactly work.

The reason Reddit can't really do this (and they tried) is because people notice and react. If they turn reddit into Facebook they'll lose their "clients", particularly the "productive" ones. I'm not going to use Reddit if old.reddit.com breaks or if I can't sort by new/top. I'm sure there's hundreds of thousands if not millions of users like me. People using the new layouts might "interact" more, but it's a shallow interaction. They don't write long form text, they don't post anything original etc. If they want a link farm they can have it but it'll gradually empty out and turn into a cheap tabloid-esque aggregator that copies twitter's trending. Maybe Reddit can't be very profitable after all and they should scale down their expenses and keep it as it is.

It's not just that. I'm pretty sure your stomach and gut also provide information regarding caloric intake, on top of other sensors detecting the raise in blood sugars/lipids/aminoacids. And even if it didn't, you'll get hungry when your body/brain detects you've switched to using reserve power. If eating doesn't satiate the hunger by providing energy, the response would likely be to make you hungrier and hungrier.

Is there anything more uncivil than the complete disregard for human life?

That might have been the worst thing I've read on the internet all year. Would you embrace your "dignified" death at 70 when your pension runs out and you have no food, clothes, home or medical help? Or heating? Is this really something you believe or something you typed drunk after a fight with the pensioner next door? Would you also embrace the reaper and think it's a sad, but not bad thing if you lose your ability to work next year, burn through your savings and die on the pavement because nobody cares?

There are many things to dislike about a soviet republic, but lack of democratic representation isn't one of them. I wish we could recall MPs via a vote like they could.

One more thing that's said I'd like to underline because it's often overlooked but has tremendous importance is the identity "ownership". If individuals and companies could easily prove who they are (to build trust) through government services, the internet would be a much better place. It's an idea that's almost forgotten but there have been numerous attempts in the past to make this happen, and it could be the building block of a better internet. Big companies would no longer need to be intermediaries for sorting out spam from search results and ranking trust ratings for e-commerce. A micro-payment network could fund small time creators who would also build a name. Things would be better. I'm hopeful that in the next 10 years after LLM garbage takes over the world by storm something like this will emerge.

Like when you were booting windows and waiting an extra 3 minutes for your single processor CPU to finish all the startup tasks before doing anything else?

Learning is unique as the whole point is to do the thinking yourself.

This is not about improving your experience. This is about getting end users to behave a certain way. If you have a gambling or trading app, you could automatically adjust the UI based on your end users psychological/behavioral profile, gradually over time, to put the more profitable/higher risk option in more prominent/more likely to be used positions. Or maybe your user clicks "block access" by muscle memory and your AI based predictor finds out that if they replace the block button with the allow button users now click allow way more. Big success. I can't wait to see how much more value we can extract from people by controlling their behavior through UIs.

Using Google as an arbitrator of truth? What could go wrong? The core concept of breaking down statements to check for factuality is otherwise sound.

Yep, and it's disconcerting how much trust people put into this system. I've got a masters in engineering and some random guy would try to argue with me about something as simple as calculating energy consumption from wattage because "chatgpt said something similar, but your answer is a little off".

Articles, social media posts and photos are now often AI generated. There is going to be a certain percentage of today's students that will graduate "knowing" blatantly wrong things an LLM told them. These things will eventually make their way to books and society.

One thing the scientific community never got around to accepting themselves and admitting to the public is how much of the learning is trust-based rather than fact-based. Nobody can prove everything from the ground up, you need to put your trust into your predecessors. Eventually you'll have the capacity to doubt and check a percentage of what they said, but not everything. When this circle breaks and you don't know if your lecturer is for real or just parroting LLMs we'll be in trouble. The "financialized" ultra-competitive environment of higher education doesn't help with that either.

Yep. All these tech giants are taking the labour that people provided to the world in good faith in what I've seen described as a gift economy, and trying to lock it up. On the internet for the longest time people were providing their knowledge and fruits of labour for free, anticipating reciprocity (which on average they got). They stopped when reciprocity stopped. Platforms would monetize their efforts, control the distribution and often remove the reference to the creator.

These AI systems are being build on top of all the collective effort and resulting knowledge of the entire humanity. We can pretend they are just another private enterprise or we can acknowledge that they are something more than that.

And it's not just the productivity we could achieve with democratizing these systems. There's another danger. When big companies buy up all this intellectual property, what better choice would they have than to lock it up? At least until recently you could argue that IP rights owners were as entities incentivized to proliferate this knowledge, now the opposite is happening.