simonh

It has, but I think in both directions.

It used to be assumed that playing chess would require the same level of general purpose problem solving cognitive skills that the best chess players possess. But of course a Chess grandmaster that spend a few minutes learning Go can beat a Chess AI at Go with no trouble at all, because a chess AI is incapable of making effective moves in Go at all. Clearly those expectations were incorrect. Pointing that out isn't revisionism.

On the other hand, intelligence is an incredibly broad term. About as broad as a term can get. Arguably Eliza, or an Excel macro has some degree of decision making ability in some sense, it's just unbelievably primitive.

So, we need to be clearer what we mean by intelligence. We're learning that as we go along. At least now we have a few more bits of the map between us and an IF statement visible to us.

Sure, but they're still LLMs and still do the same things largely the same way they did 3 years ago. There are some architectural changes, and maybe these will merit a re-assessment over time, but fundamentally it's still the same basic technological approach refined and scaled up.

It's slammed. HN strikes again.

It is, and it's not impossible there was some, but we have pretty decent records of her ancestry, we know the Ptolemys were shocked by the idea of intermarrying with the local population, and we have busts and paintings and coin profiles of her, so we have evidence of what she looked like as well as pretty much anyone from that era.

You can see several of these here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra

Because they cannot comprehend the factors that meant it took the Android team 3 to 5 years working flat out to even vaguely approximate technical parity with the iPhone OS of the time.

Even given that the Android team actually did understand what they needed to do to achieve that. Nobody else in the industry did. They thought that if you just ported an OS the job was done. That’s barely even the start.

Or Ryan Gosling.

https://youtu.be/TeONP37qsSo?si=cPLF_UpcuW7dfruT

Because being in a building Nazis have been in is just like making an actual Nazi salute. Twice.

The whole point of gamepass is that you don't buy the games. If enough people are playing it through gamepass that shows it supports the value of gamepass, if not sure that's a problem.

They still get usage stats.

She says she can usefully steer LLMs, but how would she know? What knowledge of the research topic, methods and their applicability would she use to judge that, if all she’s doing is writing a prompt asking ChatGPT to write a summary of her research topic, methods and their applicability?

Supposing using LLMs as research tools is fine, the chalk talk is still necessary to test that the researcher has the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to discriminate usefully between alternative responses, and refine prompts and such. You can’t just get a response from an LLM and then refine it for your specific needs by saying “now refine that reply for my specific needs”. You need to know and understand what those are, and why.

That is irrelevant for the laptops Asahi currently support or are working on supporting.

It basically just has to look like macOS in some trivial sense, it doesn't have to be macOS, there are no obstacles. The system is designed specifically to enable booting custom compiled kernels and former members of the Apple team have said booting other OSes was intentionally left open. The company just doesn't make any guarantees about that.

iBoot firmware exists and is already in our hands.

Any manufacturer could put an eFuse in any of their hardware and lock it. No hardware can be proven not to have such exploits. That's the first point marcan makes in that post.

I suppose it's possible, after all if the thing can phone home and update itself, that could be spoofed so it updates itself with your code.

However if that phone home feature is read only, it could always just re-root itself.

What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project?

How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical.

Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use?

It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door.

Wishful thinking if you ask me.

If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?

purchase /= run

marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585

For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.

In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU.

Also these comments are worth considering.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377

The US navy escorted ships through the strait back in the Iran Iraq war, but the situation has changed. There are naval drones and aerial drones now, the Iranians have access to Russian satellite data, and the US doesn’t have the volume and mix of ship types it had back then. The US navy has been over optimised for deep water peer fleet conflict. Bear in mind, the Red Sea has been functionally closed by the Houthis for years now.

It would triggering an apocalyptic conflagration deter a bunch of religious fanatics that are actively trying to bring about a prophesied apocalyptic conflagration?

Bush was a paragon of informed, shrewd judgement compared to this clown show.

I don’t think that’s it. Iran has demonstrated an ability and willingness to strike the equivalent infra in the gulf states, including the very vulnerable gas liquefaction facilities in Qatar. If the US destroyed their oil infrastructure, all that infrastructure goes. Hormuz would be irrelevant, there’d be almost nothing to ship through it. Plus given the long term reductions in the gulf supply already from damage, the world now needs Iranian oil.

That’s why Trump has allowed Iranian oil already outside the gulf to be sold, was willing to drop oil sanctions on further Iranian shipments, and was so panicked when Israel hit an Iranian oil facility.

I’m familiar with 40K, I played Laserburn back in the 80s. I met Bryan Ansel before 40K existed.

The comment I replied to equivocated between absolute limits to comprehensibility to humans and sociologically constructed limits, implying that thinking there may be the former makes someone ‘fine with’ the latter. That’s nonsense.

It’s not a matter of what we want or don’t want, or are fine with. The universe doesn’t owe us explanations. Of course I’d prefer to understand everything, or as much as possible, but we don’t always get what we want.

He’ll never live it down.

I worked on Quartz at BAML for 4 years, it was great. I met Kirat Singh once when he visited the UK, he took the basic concept from Goldman to JPM, then to BAML.

Very much so, I worked on Quartz at BAML for a few years.

The whole idea was actually to use as much existing Open Source technology as possible. Hence Python and it's rich library ecosystem, instead of something home grown like SecDB/Slang. This was supplemented with proprietary infrastructure and libraries only where there was a clear need. For example a Directed Acyclic Graph library to ease migrations from the Excel sheets used by Quants. The distributed object store was pretty neat.

You could code up a basic web service with minimal functionality and have it running in nonprod in an afternoon, and then production the day after. All that boilerplate stuff was super low friction, so you could spend much more of your time on solving the actual problem.

That’s not how sticker shock works.

Sure, but I've no problem with that. I think there is a role for government helping get new technologies and industries off the ground. It can make sense to offer tax breaks to get new future sources of tax revenue going for example. I'm not a fan of intrusive industrial policy in general, but that's a practical and not an ideological objection. It can make sense to meet some strategic goals.

The government also legitimately needs space launch capacity, they're a customer for that. Look at how commercial companies invest in the buildout of supplier infrastructure, or offer framework contracts to help suppliers to make necessary investments.

They're not own goals, they're achieving what they set out to do.

Musk is a fascinating example. Incredibly hard working, visionary, detail oriented. Without him we'd probably not have had reusable rockets for another generation or more. With Tesla he also accelerated electric car adoption. He was also brutally honest about their chances of success, when pitching SpaceX to the other initial investors he gave it a 10% chance of success. He was little more confident about Tesla, saying the main objective was to prove the concept and push adoption across the industry. Yes he's famous for giving absurdly short time scales for advances like "full self driving", and this is reckless and irresponsible, but I think he genuinely believes what he says at the time.

Yet he's also a sociopathic fascist arsehole. It turns out these traits are not all on the same axis.