mithr

AI doesn't add anything to the ability to do mass surveillance

I recommend reading Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus for a deep discussion around this.

He makes the point that what makes this AI age much more dangerous for mass surveillance isn't just the collection of data, which has indeed been possible for a while, but the new ability to have AI sift through that enormous volume of information, an ability which until recently has not been possible in a meaningful way without a ton of manual work to support it.

Older attempts at mass control of a population already involved mass surveillance, even in a large amount of detail, but even when capturing in detail all citizens' activities, there were just not enough people around to be able to dig through that and analyze it. This has been somewhat true even with the help of computers, though computers have certainly already been making this easier.

But now you can just give all that data to an AI with your instructions, and it'll apply some sort of "judgement" on your behalf, completely autonomously, and even perform actions against those folks it finds, again autonomously, without needing to manually build a whole infrastructure to do that with manual rules. That's a very meaningful upgrade for someone wanting to control a population.

My apologies, internet stranger, for thinking I had different goals than the ones you so cleverly picked up on in my one paragraph comment. Clearly you were more correct about my goals than I was.

Others covered specs etc, but just came here to say the intro video is so much fun! I really enjoyed that.

It's not meant as a perfect analogy for global warming, but rather an illustration of how a constant state isn't necessary for something to be said to be "changing", which was OP's claim.

It doesn't; that's kind of a first-glance reading of the phrase without really thinking about it.

Something can said to change from a certain standard even if it wasn't perfectly constant to begin with. For example, if I always kept my house at 65-75 degrees for the past year, and now it's 85 degrees inside, I could certainly say that the temperature in my house recently changed and gotten warmer. That might lead me to check whether my AC's working, rather than say "well I guess the temperature has never really been constant, and 85 is within the range of possible non-constant temperatures, so everything's perfectly normal and nothing has changed."

Electricity costs are a big factor in this, imo.

Rates for my northeast town increased by ~25% in 2024 and are going up by another ~10% this year. It's a hard sell to spend a large amount of up-front money (even after rebates, which decreased this year) to convert to a system that will cost you more than you pay today, and may not work as well in cold weather (every heat pump company I talked to suggested keeping my existing gas heating in place and automatically switching to it when it gets cold enough).

I was also told that the electrical grid in my area is having difficulty keeping up with the push towards heat pumps, which increase load exactly on the coldest nights of the year, when you need heating most.

I agree with some aspects, and think the author perhaps misunderstood some others.

If I collect 100 XP, what does it mean for my language skills? For that matter, why do I collect extra XP when I receive a potion? Can the XP I collect be used in a way to carefully guide me towards the specific language skills I would explore next?

Using XP to guide the user towards a particular path is an idea, but it's just not one that Duolingo uses. The purpose of XP in Duolingo is simpler: people like numbers to go up, so they get XP for using the app. It also enables an ecosystem of rewards; I'm generally not a competitive person, and there have still been days where I took a few more Duolingo lessons because I was close to completing a "daily challenge".

Similarly, friend streaks, leaderboards, etc, all have innately appealing hooks. They won't all appeal to everyone all the time, but one of them will appeal to someone some of the time. If they get you to practice for 5m a day more than you would've otherwise, I think they've served their purpose.

Broadly, I agree with other comments about expectation management and time commitment. Could you get yourself to a solid level of understanding in a new language only by using Duolingo? Possibly, but you'd need a lot of dedication and hard work, and much more than 5m a day. If you really wanted to learn a language, and had the time, there are much more effective ways to get there.

Duolingo isn't really built towards encouraging that kind of intense learning, because they know most people who download the app are looking for a bite-sized learning experience, and are willing to accept bite-sized results in return. For myself, I can say that after a couple of years of leaning Spanish on Duolingo, with no previous experience in the language, and an average effort of probably ~10m a day (many days less, some days more), I can read texts if they aren't too complex, follow a casual conversation, and communicate basic things. That's way more than I would've been able to do if I wasn't using the app.

I'll respond to the content, because I think there are some genuine questions amongst the condescension and jumping to conclusions.

telling kids the truth before they're ready and without typical parental censorship

Does AI today reliably respond with "the truth"? There are countless documented incidents of even full-grown, extremely well-educated adults (e.g. lawyers) believing well-phased hallucinations. Kids, and particularly small kids who haven't yet had much education about critical thinking and what to believe, have no chance. Conversational AI today isn't an uncensured search engine into a set of well-reasoned facts, it's an algorithm constructing a response based on what it's learned people on the internet want to hear, with no real concept of what's right or wrong, or a foundational set of knowledge about the world to contrast with and validate against.

what exactly is the fear

Being fed reliable-sounding misinformation is one. Another is being used for emotional support (which kids do even with non-talking stuffed animals), when the AI has no real concept of how to emotionally support a kid and could just as easily do the opposite. I guess overall, the concern is having a kid spend a large amount of time talking to "someone" who sounds very convincing, has no real sense of morality or truth, and can potentially distort their world view in negative ways.

And yea, there's also exposing kids to subjects they're in no way equipped to handle yet, or encouraging them to do something that would result in harm to themselves or to others. Kids are very suggestible, and it takes a long while for them to develop a real understanding of the consequences of their actions.

This. The idea is super cool in theory! But given how these sort of things work today, having a toy that can have an independent conversation with a kid and that, despite the best intentions of the prompt writer, isn't guaranteed to stay within its "sandbox", is terrifying enough to probably not be worth the risk.

IMO this is only exacerbated by how little children (who are the presumably the target audience for stuffed animals that talk) often don't follow "normal" patterns of conversation or topics, so it feels like it'd be hard to accurately simulate/test ways in which unexpected & undesirable responses could come out.

Is it just me that finds the angle here odd?

"The cost of treating illnesses has gone up due to X" rather than "more people are getting sicker due to X".

Makes it more of a detached conversation about pricing than about how something is hurting actual people, who perhaps have value beyond a purely economical one.

In Massachusetts, Kia has disabled Kia Connect for all vehicles purchased over the past few years. Any data collected by cars must be made accessible to third-party shops, and Kia opted to disable any data collection (and thus disable Connect entirely) rather than allow that to happen. It doesn't matter where you actually live — as long as you bought in MA, the car's VIN is locked out and no one can do anything about it. You're typically told this at the very end of the sales process, after everything is signed, and it's framed as "oh, by the way, MA has a terrible right-to-repair law that has forced Kia to disable Connect, you should write your state senator."

It's... interesting to see just how easy it is to access this functionality if the VIN check is bypassed.

I don't know that I completely agree. To some degree, sure — most folks probably don't notice the year-to-year updates in e.g. computing power.

But my 70yo mother, who is pretty far from being technologically savvy, uses continuity every day to copy one-time-use codes from her phone to her computer, even though she'd have no idea what the term "continuity" means in this context. She notices that it's easier to snap better pictures in more conditions than it was a few years back (and that pictures she receives are better looking on average, too). She uses 1Password with FaceID, which I set up for her, because it's so easy to just look at your phone to unlock that there's very little in the way of enabling and using that, and she doesn't need to write down passwords anymore.

I think some of the magic of the Apple ecosystem is that you don't have to know about these things in order to use them. Someone shows you how to do something (Apple could certainly improve on the organic discoverability of many of these features! Some are impossible to find without looking), and then it often just works. And these things do keep getting closer to that ideal over time, with each generation. When I first started using continuity — long before my mother did — it definitely did not work all the time, and I persisted because I'm a techie early adopter. Eventually, though, it reached a state where once folks learn about it, they can just use it.

I'm also not sure about the 3-4 year number, at least from personal experience, fwiw. We pass down phones in my family, and it easily takes 5-6 generations for them to reach the end of that chain and be in use for a year or two before they're switched out for the next model. Battery has never been the reason someone in that chain switched phones.

I'd say

"Ground-Breaking" New Magnet Free of Rare Earth Metals Developed Using Machine Learning

Would've been a more accurate, but less click-baity title, that didn't imply the existence of an artificially intelligent entity developing something by itself. Human researchers used machine learning to comb through many possibilities and find one that fit the bill — which is still interesting and cool.

Whoa, TIL that suspension railways exist!

My first thought after seeing the end of the video was "why is this video flipped?" until I realized that it was only the train that was "upside down".

Really nicely delivered, and a pretty great practical illustration (to the right audience) of the effects of global warming.

I do think this modified scenario makes the solution much clearer. At the same time, I also think that it feels like a significantly-enough different scenario from the original that saying the two scenarios have the same probability then becomes the non-intuitive part. The act of revealing what's behind the second door seems like it should change the probability from 1/3 (one door) vs. 2/3 (one of two doors) to 1/2 (one door of the remaining unopened two) vs. 1/2 (one door of the remaining unopened two, since one was "eliminated").

It's amazing how even seeing the probabilities written out, or running simulations, doesn't really make it easier to truly understand the result.

I think the reason it's so hard to understand is that we try to break the problem down into more digestible problems, and in this case, if you only consider the last stage of the game, it certainly seems like it should be 50:50 odds.

In other words, at the final round, you are presented with two doors. Ignore the fact that you already chose one, and assume you were starting at this point: you enter the game, see two doors, and need to pick the one you think hides a car. So intuitively, your odds of choosing which of two doors has the car are 1/2.

It's hard to really understand why it matters that the previous rounds occurred at all — why it matters how you narrowed the selection to these two doors. I don't think the 1000 door version makes that easier to understand, because the same thing is true there — if you come into a game, see two doors, and are asked to choose between them, it's very hard to understand why it matters whether in a previous round there were 2, 3, 10, or 1000 doors — there are only two now, when you make your choice.

This post brings back memories about the Johnny Mnemonic "interactive action movie" game, back in the 90s!

The biggest drawback for me is that AVP only works if you're watching things alone. You can easily watch an iPad with your SO, with your kid, with your friends — and AVP may be a better experience, but only for you alone.

It may be amazing on a plane, but even then only when you're traveling by yourself.

I think change in the remote work world is that we can no longer take these casual relationships for granted, or assume that they will just come into being. In this new world, we have to be intentional about building them.

Whereas in an office environment, we'd naturally run into folks at the proverbial water cooler, and slowly develop more of a relationship with some folks — and similarly for camaraderie with the folks sitting around you — that just doesn't exist in remote.

In my experience, it is still possible to build these kinds of relationships, though. But it requires actively building them. It requires intentional effort, which doesn't come naturally to many of us, and especially so since many of us have not been used to having to do that, having come from office settings pretty recently. I was able to build meaningful friendships with remote colleagues, some of which have lasted beyond my time at the company, by intentionally making the time to ask and care about their lives outside of work, by setting up recurring 1:1s to just chat, etc. This can sometimes feel like it's "wasted time" that's taken away from your work, but I believe it's really important in order to feel better about where you're working and who you're working with, feel less like a cog in a machine, and as a result (at least for me) end up doing better work.

I wonder if, as the tech world becomes more accustomed to remote work, we'll eventually get better at this as an industry. My hope is that it'll get easier, or at least more natural as a result.

Same here. I also find myself peeved at the article author, who for some reason decided to spend half a paragraph essentially parroting the company's PR over just how justified this delay is, despite earlier mentioning that they promised Matter support over a year ago.

Ikea ... has “decided to delay this functionality” and will provide an update “when it’s time.” The ongoing delay is understandable given that Ikea’s products already integrate well with other platforms, and the company is focused on keeping things as simple as possible for anyone who delves into the smart home on a whim while shopping for a new bookcase. And when you consider the hurdles required to get everything running on Matter networks during this period of transition, Ikea’s delay is more than justified.

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Cards Against Humanity”

There are just so many factors in play, and many statements in this articles can spawn their own large-scale discussions.

More than 100m people today live in an area without enough primary-care doctors

I have several friends who are primary care doctors, and their patient panels are 2000-3000 people. That is an absurd number of people, and requires a ton of work on their part, leading to poor work/life balance. Being a primary care physician is becoming more difficult and less attractive, even for people who otherwise would be really interested in being generalists and building the kinds of relationships that come with being a PC.

the problem is particularly bad in rural areas

Generally, highly-educated people tend to live in urban areas (there are many sources that track this trend). In addition, rural areas tend to imply private practices (because there aren't as many large hospitals in those places), and private practices are even harder to work at — whereas a hospital has an entire department dedicated to billing and dealing with the myriad insurance types their patients have, private practices have to mostly manage on their own with minimal staff. This winds up taking a ton of their time, and is a major reason some folks I know have not gone that route.

As the baby-boomers age the need for medical care rises and the doctors among them retire

This may be a "usual suspect", but it is a real one.

it takes 10-15 years after arriving at university to become a doctor in America

IMO, this alone largely answers the question in the title. While training, physicians don't generally earn a lot of money (relatively, and especially since many of them train in large hospitals, which are based in large cities, which have higher costs of living). The expected reward for spending a 10-15 years of your life studying and working hard, long hours, in schools and then residency programs that are short-staffed and have multi-day shifts, must be high enough to justify the cost, even for those that go into it with a very idealistic mindset.

This feels like a bit of a naive interpretation of the situation. At its core — regardless of specific lawsuits, etc — the questions here are (1) should copyright laws be adapted to the new reality of generative AI, (2) should artists be able to control how their work is used given generative AI is a reality, and (3) do we as a society think people should be able to make a living as artists, and what are the implications of that either way when it comes to AI models and their use.

Until this point, an artist who has developed their own personal, recognizable style, could be somewhat confident that it is difficult for someone else to generate a new piece of art exactly mimicking their style. That is to say, it was never impossible — there have certainly always been other artists out there who are capable of taking artwork and creative something new in that style — but there were some barriers to getting there, including that those artists aren’t easily and instantaneously accessible to every human being on the planet, that they generally don’t work for free, and that they would need some time to produce their work. The combination of these factors resulted in a system wherein, for the most part, if you really wanted to create something in the style of a specific artist, you would need to commission them, thereby supporting their ability to live and continue creating art. And/or they sold merchandise with their art, or collections, etc.

Now, on the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go to an image generator and have it generate art in the style of a specific (sufficiently well-established) artist quickly, easily, and freely. The barriers have, overnight, gone from being reasonably protective to pretty much nonexistent. As a result, artists are asking themselves how they can continue to live and create art. This is something a sufficiently well-established professional artist used to be able to do before generative AI came into the picture, because other than the odd copycat (which again took time and effort and an actual human with the right ability), they were the only ones who could produce images in their own styles, and this ability was thus a valuable resource that people paid for. If anyone can now produce identical images independently and for free, then this ability may no longer be a resource other people will pay for.

Part of what these court cases are trying to determine is exactly whether any copyright does apply to generated images. You wrote that “publishing, that is a different story, and we already have laws offering such protections both with respect to illegally-produced or copyrighted content”, but those laws are exactly what’s being tested here: artists (and organizations like Getty) are seeing what they claim are AI-generated copies of their copyrighted works in use out in the world (so these have been “published” by some definition — they are not only being printed out and hung in people’s garages for them and their friends to look at in private), and are suing to stop that.

But aside from that, I think there is a real philosophical discussion here. If you’ve trained as an artist your entire life, have worked hard to develop a unique style, and are one of the relatively few artists who have been successful doing so — should a company be able to wait until you became popular, then just take all of your work, and use it to train a model that can produce works exactly in your style easily and without any effort, which it can then provide to people freely or for a subscription?

This also isn’t as much about the output, as about how the output was obtained. If the model did not actually ingest your images, but someone wrote a prompt that involved a super-detailed description of what made your style unique, going into color palettes, line thicknesses, art styles, influences, etc etc, and you would have to get all of that right in order to generate something that looked like your art, then I think most folks would be generally ok with that. But when (1) your prompt can just be “give me art that looks like soulofmischief made it” and it’ll give you just that, and (2) you know that your art was used to train the model in order for it to be able to do that, then there is a question of whether fair use laws should be adjusted to prohibit this behavior and protect your ability to live off of your work.

I also think that regardless of the outcome of these lawsuits, no one is really coming for your own models and hour ability to tinker in your garage. It may not be legal today to duplicate a copyrighted image and hang it in your office, but no one will ever know (or care enough to do nothing about it) if you do. Similarly, even if this use becomes copyrighted, nothing will practically stop you from building your own large model that includes any copyrighted images you want, for your own personal use, in your own garage. But if you then turn around and try to profit off of that model, or if you want someone else to produce a model (thus stepping more into the publishing realm) that’s where a line may be drawn. I personally think that’d be fair.

Finally, zooming all the way out, I believe that it should be possible to make a living as an artist, and I think when we have discussions like these, we should keep reminding ourselves to think about how our technical or legal arguments affect that outcome.

The issue at hand isn't actually directly about how the output images contained the Getty logo; the lawsuit isn't saying "you're showing our logo on your output, which isn't a Getty image, and we take issue with that". It's whether Getty images can be ingested into the training set without consent or compensation to Getty.

The reason the distorted logos matter is because they make it much more difficult to claim that Getty images were not ingested and used for training — if they weren't, then how come the outputs have those logos? And similarly, they make it much more difficult to claim that these source images were only used as "inspiration" for the generative algorithm and thus fall under fair use — if they're only used for "inspiration", how come they generate/copy easily-recognizable parts of the original images (i.e. the logo) as-is?

The Anova Precision Oven is one, it goes as low as 77F (25C).

Interesting, and it's cool to see an illustration of how weird it is that there's no quick way to cross the park! It takes the same ballpark amount of time to get from east 86th St & 2nd to Kew Gardens (~14 miles apart) as it does to get from east 86th & 2nd to west 86th St & Broadway (~1.5 miles apart)...

Ha, I had the same thought! Felt almost like Blade Runner, some futuristic reality where a sad guy watches 3D videos of how great his life used to be.

The displays in this device are crazy.

I'm actually curious about this, and how the displays will actually feel. The ads/keynote all talked about how they're "more than 4k for each eye", which sounds like a lot when you're talking about TVs or monitors, but... stops sounding quite as impressive when you realize you're talking about IMAX-sized screens (which is the main "wow" draw for watching movies in VR), or when talking about augmenting reality.

Does someone really sit on their couch, put on a massive headset, and scroll through their vacation photos? Does someone watch an entire 2+ hour movie with a sweaty headset strapped to them (and plugged into a socket) instead of on a couch with their family/friends?

This was exactly my biggest question. In what situation do you sit and watch family photos of a vacation with your kids alone on your couch? In almost all cases, you're doing that with your family, or showing them to someone else. And if you've got a family (as many people in the ads did!) you're also watching movies together with them most of the time. Apple completely sidestepped talking about how other people might be able to share your experience. Even if this is amazing for actual work, and you're working in a physical office (as the guy in the ad did! as Apple requires all employees do a few days a week!), how will you show your coworker what you're working on? They also conspicuously focused on manufacturing, presentations, and conferencing as their office use cases, and not coding, despite repeatedly stating that small text looks very clear.

As for the "running inside and grabbing a headset" aspect, it felt like they were implying that people will wear this everywhere they go (which they similarly imply won't feel weird exactly due to the weird eye display thing), so you'll already be wearing the headset. But that feels like a very, very ambitious goal, that right now seems ridiculously unlikely/niche.