matusp

It is a good blog, not a good paper.

The thing is, you can play it in any way you like. You don't have to optimize for speed at all if you don't enjoy it

With the volume of outputs in today's academia, this is simply not possible. There are conferences with tens of thousands of submitted papers, grants have hundreds of pages, etc.

The AI companies also have a lot of space to grow their income (more ads, price hikes, ...). It seems realistic for them to turn profitable. But the market expected much more from these companies.

The standard of living in Rome was not surpassed for more than a millennium. Large parts of the empire were at peace for centuries, allowing economy and trade to thrive. Many provinces that were peaceful and prosperous were ravaged by wars, ethnic conflicts, and plagues for many centuries after the fall.

There are thousands of people working in top level labs. Somebody would leak it

Is matter code? There is some sort of computation happening in space over time.

I understand that motive. On the other hand, LLM smell makes the text untrustworthy. I have detected it as well, and I immediately started to wonder about whether I am reading a reasonable expert analysis or just an AI hallucination. I still don't know.

I recommend prompting the LLM to mostly fix glaring grammatical and stylistic mistakes, not to rewrite the entire thing into a LinkedIn post style text.

There are many ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine that really welcomed the Russian army. The problem is that the rest of the country is not that happy about this.

Can you give me some examples of these interactions / vibe?

This is the question that led to the communist movement in the 19th century.

Of course mediocre and bad leaders make their mark on history. But Carlyle's Great Men theory is more about paradigm shifts that Great Men can will into existence, not just random noise they bring along. The problem with GM theory is that there is only a handful of examples to support it. Napoleon is one such example, and it was undoubtedly the inspiration why the theory was proposed in the first place. People were trying to come to terms with the fact that one leader can have such a dramatic impact on the entire world.

I find it interesting how slow the spread really was after the initial burst. I am used to think about Christianity as a global religion. But before 16th century it was a pretty regional thing and its position seemed pretty precarious in handful of moments.

https://docs.polymarket.com/concepts/resolution

The problem is that AI is mostly yielded by the Silicon Valley caste that is as popular as bankers in 2008. People are sick of tech companies that are acting as parasitic as possible.

How exactly would you deploy 10,000 drones? If you start thinking about the logistics of it (you need to store them somewhere, somebody needs to bring them from the storage and prepare them for launch, somebody needs to navigate them, ...), you will quickly realize that you budget is not as big as you would like.

Dataset quality is a huge issue in ML in general. You can often list a few dozen random samples from any given dataset and you will find out something weird going on instantly.

It's like asking what if AWS starts doing it, they have all the infrastructure in place. LLMs are just one cog. There is a lot on the application side they are not doing at all.

Never heard the term Lusophone before. TIL

Before clockwork, human mind was a city (Plato, Marcus Aurelius, i.a.)

That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia.

LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.

Oil is up by 100% in recent weeks. It might have to give, but probably not with these prices.

Cyrillic is probably a successor to Glagolitic. Glagolitic was the first Slavic alphabet, but when they tried to use it in Bulgaria, it had all the UX problems you mentioned. What they did is replace most of the characters with their Greek counterparts, while keeping the Glagolitic writing system and some of the characters with no counterparts. Bulgaria was close to Byzantium, and people were more likely to know and use Greek letters already. Nevertheless, Cyril and Methodius should still get some recognition, as the shape of the letters is not as important as having the system to write down the Slavic language into letters.

There are no indications that Ukraine will lose this war.

Apart from not controlling 20% of their territory?

They are going to lose, the question is how much. I don't see Russians losing the territory they occupy right now, unless some black swan event happens. It remains to be seen how much more territory Russia is able to conquer until they lose their appetite.

AI is not trying to do anything. It's a technology and it does not have agency.

I think that the perception problem with AI is not about the technology itself. It's about the famously parasitic Silicon Valley companies that are the pioneers of the technology. I can imagine a society where AI is welcomed and celebrated, but the people wielding it would definitely need to be less psychopathic than what we have over here.

Despite all the AI hype, I wonder how much it only exists in the tech bubble full of terminally online folks. Unless you spend significant part of your day online, most of the AI risks mentioned in this series are probably negligible. The most affected demographic is computer nerds that grew up enjoying utopian Web that is now turning dark.

Illiberal democracy

Looking at the pictures in the article, the level of detail is not particularly great in some parts. It seems like many building have very simple shape and color. With some modeling skill, I can imagine carving and painting 100s of these in a day. Although I can't imagine doing it for 20 years.

I would however like to know what his research was like. Was he just following Google Maps/Earth? They were released in 2005 and 2001 respectively and NY has had coverage from the get go.

It's called terrorism only when it comes from a certain region. Otherwise it's sparkling military action.