GlibMonkeyDeath

Spend lots of in-person time with eligible members of your preferred demographic. That's basically it.

That's why school is ideal (surrounded by eligible people of the same age, usually with little life baggage); but work, religion, sports/hobbies, or preferably a combination, are also time-tested hunting grounds. I used a combination of school and sports.

Dating can't be reduced to a spreadsheet. Many of the long-term marriages I know about (including mine) would not have survived that degree of analytic scrutiny up front. Conversely, of the divorced people I know, many looked like good matches "on paper."

Humans are still social monkeys, and it takes a while to figure out compatibility.

But Radio Shack was also a pioneer in intrusive information gathering. They would always ask for your name and address at check-out, often practically insisting they couldn't complete the sale without it. I usually gave them "1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington DC" as my address. I hope Clinton and GWB liked those catalogs!

Sandwiched between their description of the cosmos, how AI is like any other life form and needs to be trained with wisdom, criticism of unbridled greed, and the warning that the modern world may destroy itself, (and BTW the Kogui are resilient and will be fine, and offer their help), there is a more practical concern: These machines are going to need critical minerals and rare earths, and the US and Colombia just signed an agreement about these. The Colombian government promised to protect the Kogui territory; their perspective on this protection is bitterly thus:

"That it was granted is one thing.

That it be, respected we imagine, might be removed another."

So no doubt they rightly feel (and are) threatened by the all-consuming corporations making this thing.

A better way to look at this data is the sum of wealth for each percentile (https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...) The top 10% (90-99%, ~$67T, >= ~$2M in net worth) owns more than the top 1% (99%+, ~$60T, >= ~$15M in net worth). The top 0.1% own ~$27T.

Any yearly tax that exceeds the "4% rule" will essentially be confiscatory, so let's say that a tax of 1% won't bring out the pitchforks (is that tiny?) On the top 0.1%, that generates about $0.27 T compared to 2026 Federal collection of about $5.2T (on a deficit of about ~$2T) https://www.us-debt-clock.com/data/deficit-by-year

As I pointed out in a comment about solar power in another thread, if that money was spent on installing solar+battery, in about 5-10 years we could have more or less converted the US grid with a 1% wealth tax on the 0.1%. Of course, we could also reverse the recent (2016 and beyond) tax cuts as well, which would help fix the giant gaping hole in the US budget. The stock market would probably take a hit, reducing the wealth of the top whatever by far more than a small tax would.

Many will say that the purpose of this tax isn't just to raise revenue for the US government, but to reduce power of the most wealthy. I personally think that taxing wealth is not going to be effective for doing this, without passing laws that limit the effect of wealth in US politics.

Triumph of the Nerds

And we can sure find those trillions when we want to: https://defensecommunities.org/2026/04/trump-requests-1-5-tr.... Or https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/extend.... Or...

I do sort of worry that an experimentalist like me will become more or less a technician in the next decade or so, with AI suggesting experiments, and doing the calculations and data analysis.

But that said, in physics (and particularly biophysics) there are many things that are simply going to have to be done in the real world. Even the action of the simplest enzymes are pretty much beyond our ability to compute from first principles; and any engineered thing that goes into a living system has to be tested, as there are many pathways that are just unknown. I don't care how "smart" an LLM is, it doesn't know what it doesn't know, just like us monkeys.

Over the years I have seen many beautiful theories murdered by ugly experimental facts. AI isn't going to change this.

But I totally get the anxiety - it's a real John Henry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)) moment for the mathematics field. Clearly this is going to restructure how mathematicians are going to be trained and how they work.

This link shows the longitudinal drop in 2022 for the US - almost assuredly pandemic related https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38. Otherwise the scores are higher than ever.

But still, it feels like there is some missing information here. Surely, with a summa cum laude from Rice and a Ph.D. from Princeton in ChemE, he has impressed someone along the way. He needs to concentrate on places where he has a connection, however tenuous. Especially at the relatively rarefied Ivy STEM Ph.D. level...

If he is having trouble getting people to make connections for him, well, that would definitely be an important piece of the puzzle...

But in my opinion, the solutions that passkeys provide come with the costs that are being discussed here, and I haven't found the trade-off worthwhile.

Laser guy here. It's a highly-non-linear search problem (so not great for PID until you are close), and human intuition is used in surprising ways. For instance, maybe the operator knows that one adjuster is particularly 'wonky' and drifts more than the others; this is discovered through trial and error. Believe it or not, some people seem to have "the touch", and others never seem to get it (I think it might just be a matter of patience - alignment can be boring as hell and some people find it frustrating.) To be trained, usually someone starts out by "shadowing" a more experienced person, but eventually people develop their own style that can be hard to fully verbalize.

I am curious if they could de-tune the system, ask the AI to hit a target, and get anything sensible. Because the AI would be relentless, I bet it might work better than expected...

And the real world is still unpredictable - just look at anything in biotech. There is literally no way in many cases to "compute" an outcome correctly, without doing the actual experiments. It's not just a matter of intelligence - many biological processes are simply unknown. That's also what will keep skilled blue collar workers employed for the foreseeable future - many if not most job sites are unpredictable.

So some jobs will continue to be lost to automation, but the smart kids of today who learn to use the new AI tools will be in a good position to prosper, I think. But they will still have to have domain skills to use the tools effectively.

Hmm, that's a lot but hardly "lost" to other manufacturers. More like Ford is not going to try to compete in the BEV market...

What could possibly go wrong...

AI is just doing math - While this is true, basically one could say that the brain is just doing math, too.

AI is going to kill us in ten years - Points out the incentives of the big AI companies to propagate this

AI is a bubble that’s about to pop - Financially it will pop, but AI is here to stay as a technology (like other technology bubbles)

Using AI is a betrayal to our human souls - It's just another tool to use

All these are pretty sane, in my opinion...

"Just off the top of your head, would you say you have a positive or negative image of each of the following? (Small business, Free enterprise, Capitalism, Socialism, Big business)"

So these terms are left as self-explanatory. In the US, "socialism" covers a huge amount of ground (from any government program at all, all the way to Soviet style communism.) So who knows what items people were picking.

One thing that is interesting, look at the gender and age splits in the above link for "socialism" and "capitalism" - 15-20 point divide between genders overall, and I bet the split is even more stark among young people.

I think you answered your own question - the economic incentives are all aligned to make the experience bad for the user, mediocre for the advertiser (who doesn't have a choice at the moment), and great for Google, at least in the short term.

Unfortunately for Google, the other AI companies hoovered up the Internet too, so Google's hard-to-reproduce scale is no longer the moat it used to be.

And unfortunately for us, the economic incentives to inject pervasive ads into LLM outputs are irresistible, so enshittification is guaranteed once search engines are abandoned.

The Oneida's also produced a violent assassin: Charles Guiteau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_J._Guiteau (I guess it is debatable they "made" him, same as with the Zizians)

Let's hope Thiel and company redirect that democracy-destroying energy into making quality flatware sometime soon...

Here's a link to the interactive dashboard of "big questions"

https://nafshordi.com/aps-dashboard/

I peeked at Q7 - Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics (Target Questions dropdown in the Controls Panel) - unsurprisingly Copenhagen remains the most accepted QM interpretation. Kind of interesting, as Rovelli et al. are really pushing relational or informational interpretations these days, which isn't even one of the responses (unless it is contained in "other".)

The rest of the questions are about cosmology - I think these questions (mostly) won't be answered without new data.

"The borough also says visitors encounter its "Play Smart Rules" when entering the park, including a specific instruction: "Do not twist chains.""

So the town buys crappy swings, knowing full well that kids are going to spin them (who hasn't done this a million times as a kid?) Then they slap up a sign telling the kids not to do that. Basically entrapment.

Here's an idea for them: maybe the town shouldn't cheap out on unsafe equipment for children...