ChainOfFools

The risk analysis is no better or worse than it is for other loosely/weakly understood technology such as flying.

It amounts to noticing that few if any of the people you know or are acquainted with through two or three removals from personal contact, have suffered or died as a result of using said technology, and basing your own confidence solely on this privileged form of hearsay.

It sounds like something that should not work, but actually does a pretty good job as a high-pass filter for safety.

You could certainly get help that was 'mechanical' but which did not involve machines or robots as we think of them today. More of an older, original definition of robot.

I'm not convinced that the unprecedented advantages of setting up base camp on the other end of a major global ocean on both sides of the landmass, the almost completely unfettered access to a continent of largely untapped natural resources with virtually no competition from established powers, of being in the right place at the right time to find enormous reserves of oil (and ultra-high grade anthracite coal) so close to the surface that it is possible to discover them by sight alone, and well over a century of widespread exploitation of pre-industrial society's version of market-disrupting robotic labor, AKA slavery, to undercut our competitors on top of all of our other advantages, have been sufficiently controlled for in this "we won because free market economy" analysis. Though I concede that the last one, slavery, is a feature you'd expect to emerge from of a pathologically under-regulated free market economy.

I wanted to hate this aspect of it, but since I like Debian and and use it as my daily driver on a lot of systems anyway, I just couldn't work up enough ire to complain.

They are emulating the behavior of every power-seeking mediocrity ever, who crave affirmation above all else.

Lots of them practiced - indeed an entire industry is dedicated toward promoting and validating - making daily affirmations on their own, long before LLMs showed up to give them the appearance of having won over the enthusiastic support of a "smart" friend.

I am increasingly dismayed by the way arguments are conducted even among people in non-social media social spaces, where A will prompt their favorite LLM to support their View and show it to B who responds by prompting their own LLM to clap back at them - optionally in the style of e.g. Shakespeare (there's even an ad out that directly encourages this - it helps deflect alattention from the underlying cringe and pettyness being sold) or DJT or Gandhi etc.

Our future is going to be a depressing memescape in which AI sock puppetry is completely normalized and openly starting one's own personal cult is mandatory for anyone seeking cultural or political influence. It will start with celebrities who will do this instead of the traditional pivot toward religion, once it is clear that one's youth and sex appeal are no longer monetizable.

Not just ChatGPT, Claude sounds exactly the same if not worse, even when you set your preferences to not do this. rather interesting, if grimly dispiriting, to watch these models develop, in the direction of nutrient flow, toward sycophancy in order to gain -or at least not to lose- public mindshare.

Intermodal freight drayage industry, which is largely comprised of a thousands of very small and ineffocoently run mom and pop nepo-companies run dependent upon an open tolerance of very scammy business tactics extending temporary surcharges indefinitely, milking covid business relief loans to the fullest extent possible) in order to survive, is going to experience a mass die-off if this tariff war lasts another 6 to 9 months.

The fact that Bitcoin (and kin) turbocharges corruption, and its success is a direct result of doing so on a wide scale (the whole point is to undermine state power by dwpriving it of control over currency) is proof to the armchair economist Bitcoin supporters that it is "sound money" and things like facilitating a market for circulation of child porn at one end and open political grift at the other, are welcomed as signs that the *experiment" is working as intended in their winner-corrupts-all bitcoin maximalist worldview.

Its called kleptocurrency for good reason.

Those who support it on philosophical grounds will destruction on everyone else for the sake of their own gain, and should be viewed with all possible hostility as they constitute an intentional community of public enemies in the plainest possible sense.

I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I specifically used the number one because it behaves like a unit here. unlike 2 or any other number, 1 is also the standard 1D unit vector, so 1apples is indeed the same quantity as apples/1, but because it is a unit we usually imply its presence rather than express it explicitly as above.

watts/unit thus seems fine to me, whatever the unit may be, even if it itself is derived from time. watts per day would just work out to joules/second/1/24*60*60, making 1 watts per day a derived unit that expresses joules/84600 seconds, or an instantaneous rate of one 84600th of a joule.

I don't see what's wrong about OP's use of the term in the context they are using it. In the context given the number of days in the denominated unit is 1. Which means as dividend or factor it is going to give you the same result. Again in this context watts per day is much more intuitive for most people too reason about.

> If weak intelligence is everywhere, Earth-like planets are everywhere, ... where are the aliens?

Someone has to be first (in our speed-of-causality bubble), maybe it's us?

It looks like this service may be intended to have a significant off label use as a professional networking / online matchmaking app, judging by the choice of human pairs given in the stock images on the website. They're all male/ female pairings of similar age groups.

It's curious that the list of suggested activities includes conventional headshot-framed work activities as well as full body view stuff like exercise routines.

"interprets damage as censorship and..." where these terms are being treated as equivalent

> It's more or less a computer on a single chip.

How does this chip, and your wonderfully whimsical mega SoC implementation of it, compare to the claims (and the even more fantastical dreadnought-class workstation scenario) of the Cerebras WSE3?

The city is locally referred to as Fontucky, evidently for good reason.

> My heart can exist independently of me, and be transplanted into other people, but does it mean that it is alive?

Interesting analogy, made more interesting still if one replaces "heart" with "brain."

And what if you reverse mitochondria and host cell? If you remove the mitochondria, is the host cell still alive? The analogy would be to remove the heart from its 'host' environment, and asking if the remaining body still can be called alive.

"for a man cut open is, so far, not a man. And if you do not sew him up speedily you will not see organs, but death."

Very early in my experimentation with some of the GPT family, one of the first things I noticed was that at no point did the model ask questions of its own, except (perhaps - I don't quite recall if I'm the one hallucinating here ) to indicate that further clarification of a previous prompt would improve a response.

I haven't touched them in quite a long time and I don't know if they now do this, but it struck me that their lack of (even simulated) curiosity was a major void in the popular dialogue about whether they are or are not "intelligent."

Okay that makes sense, that's how the classes went for me in the US, with Calc 3 being multi variable (and as you say, a brush with linear alg via vector-valued functions), and 2 sideways steps from there, one being a course on PDEs and the other on linear algebra, both called by those names rather than listed as a step in the calculus sequence itself.

curious, what was covered in Calculus 4? Quadruple integrals? More vector valued stuff shading into proper linear algebra? Diff Eq?

I physically winced at how accurate this take is.

It burns the internet's race to the bottom candle at both ends.

Fermi paradox might be coming for us next.

Wealth is a proxy for having options, even if you do not exercise them. There are thus many forms of wealth, and some do not translate directly across domain boundaries.

Arnold Schwarzenegger famously explained that he remains committed to a demanding bodybuilding regimen even long after becoming fabulously wealthy precisely because his physique is a form of wealth that cannot be bought at any price, and is available to almost anyone who wants it badly enough. A billionaire facing an acute and aggressive terminal cancer diagnosis has all the options anyone could want, but one.

So it's 2029 and the entire world has become intensely suspicious of anyone wearing glasses. well done 'information wants to be free' gang.

coda: it's 2032, and the entire world is wearing glasses.

This actually may be true although somewhat indirectly with respect to at least one well-known conspiracy belief.

If I recall correctly, the Flat Earth Society was originally concieved as a prank intended to lampoon actual conspiratorial groups (I.e. Nasa faked the moon landing, JFK was a mob hit etc)

But through some combination of timing, convimcing execution, and media interest coincidentally developing in the same direction resulted in the supreme irony of an unserious sham cult spawning an unironic counterpart community which rapidly outgrew and ultimately succeeded it.

I predict it will get even worse than that, in the next couple of decades I expect any document or work that has a substantial reward associated with it, either financially or in terms of career advancement or a grade for critical course work in one's major, or penalty such as indictment or conviction, to be backed by a time stamped stack of developing documentation, drafts, revisions, with these time stamp validated against a trusted custodial clock and a seed random string marking the start of work, recorded in some immutable public form.

Accompanying to finish document will be a hash of all of these works along with their associated timestamps, originals of can be verified if necessary to prove a custodial chain of development over a plausible period of time and across multiple iterations of the development of the work - a kind of signed time-lapse slideshow of its genesis from blank page to finished product as if it had a mandatory and global "track changes" flag enabled from the very beginning - by which the entire process can be proved an original human-collaborated work and not an insta-generated AI fiction.

> but I'm slowly starting to suspect that most of it is just covert shilling by vested persons.

It's almost as if the horde of former kleptocurrency bros have found a promising new seam of fool's gold to mine

There are some very big outlier exceptions to this however. In a handful of markets (such as the city of Riverside) which are served by a nonprofit municipal power authority with its own generation and distribution, local rates are decoupled from the crises plaguing PGE (and to a lesser extent SDGE, etc).

residential power costs are substantially lower for customers in these areas vs their immediate neighbors - out-of-pocket power bills are as little as half or a third of for-profit statewide utilities for the same sustained consumption during peak usage times.

Pretty hard to catch people in the act of fiddling with their phones while driving, at least directly.

However, were police to get extremely aggressive about the abysmal lack of turn signal use in recent years...

How strange is it that this console is to be priced considerably higher in its home market than it is in the US.

Either that or Sony is hinting that they expect the yen to crash dramatically against the dollar (from 142:1 over 170:1) between now and the end of the year.

By selecting for efficient test taking robots at the critical gateways to the graduate level education necessary to obtain these decision-making "leadership" roles.

A comparable phenomenon is at work in medical school admissions, with similar results that lead to the sort of appallingly callous group-preservation outcomes described in the original article and some of the comments here.

The entire system is irreversibly broken at the most fundamental levels, as this same class of decision makers are the ones who are consulted when developing the next round of gatekeeping tests and curricula.

I would add one of my guilty pleasures, Xah Lee, who still updates his unironically retro blog quite regularly, although a lot of his content is in vlog format as well.

Sadly he may not actually be as earnestly nutty in person as his online persona would suggest.

https://xahlee.org