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> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law

Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.

It is called "the dual state" [0]

At least in nazi Germany, the state was explicitly designed like that. Most people should never come into contact with the prerogative state and spend their lives in the normative state, as capitalism doesn't work well in a prerogative state. You need to believe that punishment doesn't come arbitrarily in order to follow the rules.

But of course, things are very different in the prerogative state, where actions have unclear consequences.

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

Specu-less would be the English etymological equivalent. Like careless or tasteless.

it isn't. It's a really old Belgian company that kind of was slowly there for 80 years being fine dozing off and selling their cookies on the local market. And suddenly an invention show on the local television where a finalist invented biscoff spread woke them up to innovation and it seems that in 10 years they conquered the world.

https://www.gva.be/regio/antwerpen/rivierenland/bornem/vlaan...

They probably can tune for it, but it is not what the shareholders want anyway. I am unaware of any frontier lab who is actually interested in building something like that, long form proza indistinguishable from humans. Automated code and low hallucination rates are more important topics, and trade-offs need to be made.

Edit: why the style is like marketing corp-speak has to do with personalization not working well yet. So the default vanilla style is very corp. Most chatbots allow you to change the system prompt though and that can get rid of a lot of these issues in a lot of chatbots. But it is hard to maintain such a system prompt as the bots change so quickly.

Language models don't have a characteristic style you can spot from a mile away. They haven't had it since before ChatGPT.

What is true, is that chat models (and by extension agents) have a very characteristic style after their LLM went through post-training. But the pre-trained language model doesn't have that style.

So if you want to write well with an LLM, you could and it is a well understood problem. It is more a matter of that not being of much interest, as it competes with having the model be good for chat interfaces.

How to have a well-aligned, RL'ed, safe or thinking model, which also writes well in long-form, is a bit an open problem. Though presumably agents could do it when they have access to a pretrained model.

Not OP, but the message has a curious mix of ASCII with non-ASCII characters, like the same apostrophe character is sometimes in ASCII, and sometimes not. There is even a rogue em-dash in there.

I moved to the UK, and also got a dryer at that point.

The weather in the UK can be very humid, and if you don't have much of a garden, it can be impossible to dry your clothes at times. We've had times where our living room was full of clothes for more than a few days, and it wouldn't matter because it wouldn't really dry anyway.

So we've invested in dehumidifiers and a dryer, and it made our life a lot more comfortable.

If a fix existed, then why didn't Danfoss have a fix?

I agree that they had a firmware update, but unless they had the operational capacity to update the checks notes freezers of all their customers, that is not a fix. The theoretical and technological aspects of solving a problem are often the easy parts.

It's like if NASA would claim to have a fix for the Opportunity rover on mars to get it operational again. All they need to do is to replace the batteries. Well, that is not a fix if there is no way to actually replace the batteries in practice.

I don't see why the existence of a firmware update would remove the culpability of negligence from the hardware manufacturer.

I can only discuss published work, but take for instance this paper as one of the conjectured approaches: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20396

There is a general idea that beauty in mathematics is about being maximally compressing. Say I have a book with all formally correct logical statements. I could prove everything by truth table, or I can maximally compress my book with all proofs of all statements, and that will make my math beautiful. Because it forces you to reduce everything to a core of very general statements which are powerful compared to the length of the proof.

Math as some kind of condensed crystal from the sea of all possible logic.

There are other ideas of how to do it. The time has come now to just try a bunch and see which ones produce good results.

> but I don't see how

LLM's are trained on human knowledge and taste. They are actually pretty good at deciding if a conjecture would be found "interesting" by the mathematical community or not.

Note that I am saying LLM, and not chatbot or agent. But even a chatbot can often still reasonably rank a list of mathematical statements by vague properties like "interestingness".

How to RL this is a bit of an open question, but there are interesting conjectures of how to do it.

All reagents are symmetric, so how do you design a reaction where you produce more left or right? So starting from purely symmetric reagents and catalysts, how do you produce asymmetry?

When the chirality of the product is an autocatalyst to its own chirality. So if your reaction starts off with a little more left than right due to molecular randomness, the left is an autocatalyst which means there is a runaway process and you end up at the end of the reaction with a lot more left than right.

If you repeat the reaction from scratch, it is random if you end up with a left product or a right product. But the product of your reaction is not a 50-50 mix left-right! I.e. you created asymmetry in your solution from purely symmetric solvents.

I have seen these parodies before, and while they are accurate in style, they seem to misunderstand or misrepresent Curtis' message. A message which is not that hard to understand, except that it falls comfortably outside of the Overton window:

"Driven by the seductive post-war fantasy that human beings and nature are self-regulating machines -- a cybernetic delusion shared equally by California tech-utopians, holistic ecologists, and free-market economists -- we willingly surrendered political power and moral responsibility to automated, network-driven systems, only to find ourselves trapped in a static, dehumanizing loop that cannot envision an alternative future and leaves the existing, unaccountable hierarchies of power completely intact."

But if you apply the logic that led to the conclusion of "natural equilibrium", truth of the matter is that we wouldn't be able to say if the waiting will be over before or after the heat death of the universe.

Even the "million years" is an overoptimistic view, and probably reflects the idea that the ecosystem was in some kind of messianic state of equilibrium before man arrived, which happened roughly in the last million years. But even that is broadly a fiction. Ecology is not a system, and it is not stable even without human intervention.

It's because the models have different purposes in decision making, in ways which decision makers don't often appreciate.

Models are still great at helping us understand the world and are in many ways the best thing we have. The problem is that today we are overly relying on them to make real policy interventions on an ecology (e.g. what is a "healthy" amount of animals to cull or fish) based on an ecosystem, which is just a poor model.

If we could get rid of this idea of "stability" and "equilibrium" in economics and ecology, I would be a happy man.

> Ironically, the experts, the ones building the "wrong" models, tend to be the ones most aware of this

Exactly why I'm here :-)

On this topic, I can never end recommending Adam Curtis's series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and on this topic of "bounce back" the second episode in that series.

The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy projected onto the natural world rather than an accurate reflection of ecological reality. We can model the world in the language of system theory, but the models we make there might not have much to say about the real world. We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning. The parallel with economics based on the "homo economicus" is striking, also there you reason from an ideal model and try to make inductive statements about the real world, which in many places directly conflict with observation. The "eco-system" and "natural equilibrium" stem from this approach of applying system theory to ecology, and are ideas which are now _very_ ingrained in western thinking, but which are obviously off.

Here is the start of that second episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgoereMDUJ0

Pokémon has an accent in all languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon

Wow, in terms of angle, how far are these planets separated from the star?

I always thought we would never be able to image something like that. The distances would be too small and the contrast too large to figure something at the resolution we can get on earth. I'll need to read up on how this was done.

it's the other way around. For there to be a demand for large quantities, the price must be low. The graph seems correct.

Does someone know where to watch the official livestream? The internet is so swarmed with all the recasters I cannot find the official stream anymore...

Edit: https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-14

I've been birdspotting for the last year (in the UK, there is an addictive app called birdex, which is basically like a pokedex in the pokemon game, except it does birds). I am proud to report that I've observed 110 species this year. The last one was this weekend, where apparently meadow pipits are traveling across London parks while they're heading south.

It's not just regional dialects and individual birds, I am noticing that the time of the year also matters. Tits sound different in spring, summer and autumn, and so do e.g. robins.

It's a hobby I can recommend to everyone. Whenever I am outside now, I can listen for any faint sound and then make a mental note of all the birds I observed.

in the case of large language models, the wire is the communication of your parameters between your layers of memory that is often the bottleneck. To do a forward pass, you need to use all parameters once, and so the communication between the compute and the storage is the bottleneck, and that bottleneck is also a bunch of wires.

It's odd that you can see the borders between Belgium and France for various birds (like the swift and cuckoo), same for the border between Germany and Poland.

I wonder why that is? There are no topological features defining these borders. Maybe the data is normalised in some way across countries?

No, it was really helpful advice I read somewhere. That when explaining something, always overestimate someones understanding, and underestimate their vocabulary.

Edit: apparently it's a vsauce thing. I do think it's right, it helped me a lot in life.

Overestimate their understanding, underestimate their vocabulary.

* We have an oracle that can answer any scientific question!

* Can I ask it a question?

* Don't be silly, only our high priests can.

* No problem, then I'm going to continue doing collaborative science without using the oracle.

* Don't bother, our high priests will scoop you as soon as we see there is interest in a question.

Fortunately, the article is neither about the Netherlands nor about its highest point. The title is a joke about hallucinogens.

they can win with any odds. But, they can only barely win even with queen odds: https://lqo.leumon.com/

Also, while we don't have made statues that old, we do have manuports from 2-3 million years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuport

Manuports are natural rocks in "funny" shapes, like faces or falluses, which are found back (far) out of place and often in the neighbourhood of other human remnants.

It was though? I remember a default being a real option in the media.

But in the end, it was clear that unlike in Iceland, bankruptcies were not considerable, and so a bailout was going to happen. The only question was how the bailout would be structured.

Yanis Varoufakis made his name back then by going against the grain and proposing a hairsplit, but instead an approach was chosen where Greece never really defaulted, but its population was harshly punished for it.