gadilif

Eyal Waldman is an Israeli. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyal_Waldman

The specific composition of this specific mountain range in Fordow made it almost ideal for this purpose. It's not only the depth, but also the rock type, the fact that the rock layers were compressed, and overall accessibility - all of these limit the selection space for 'deep holes in the ground for building a nuclear facility'. Also, you need to take into account an important fact: It is in Iran... There may be other, better locations on Earth, but having sovereignty on the land is key:)

It's a bad law (although somewhat covered with 'good intentions', it does have a scent of racism which shouldn't exist in state laws). However, note that the outcome was the unintentional creation of Jewish/Arabs communities in the Galilee, which actually help bring Jews and Arabs together. It is also important to note that Arab Israelis have full rights as citizens, have representatives in the parliament and even were a part of the previous coalition. This, of course, is not the case for Palestinians in the occupied territories, and this issue MUST be resolved (one- or two-state solution, either way the current situation is unbearable). With that, the current coalition does include extremists, and many (according to recent polls, >60%) in Israel want to see them replaced.

So, a couple of thoughts: First, a nitpick - the range of emotions probably behaves more like a weighted average than a regular average (recent experience impact your overall interpretation of a certain event differently than the first time). Second, there seems to be an assumptions that thoughts and words are 'digital', and so follow the entropy laws of digital entities. This seems like a logical leap to me, which requires proof (especially since this seems to be in the foundation of the claims).

The facts are, well, different: As of now:

No international court has ruled that genocide has been committed by either side.

The term "genocide" is used politically and emotionally by many, but legally it carries a very high burden of proof.

The ICJ case and other investigations (e.g., by the International Criminal Court) are ongoing and may shape future judgments.

I'm not sure that's what he meant. My understanding from the post is: First, do your job (I'd add - do it well). That's table stakes, and, some people may be happy with that. But, if you want to get promoted, if you want to 'not feel trapped by your title', then, do more. Don't wait for others to tell you what you can or should do - take initiative. Then, people will notice and you'll either get more responsibility/get promoted, or at the very least, you'll gain more experience (with results to show for it), and in any case you're better off for your next position.

I see your point, and tend to agree. However, at least for the time being, I see the AI tools not inherently different than refactoring tools which were available over a decade ago. It helps me move faster, and I feel like it's one more tool I need to master, so it will be useful in my toolbox.

I can really relate to the feeling described after modifying save files to get more resources in a game, but I wonder if it's the same kind of 'cheating'. Doing better in a game has its own associsted feeling of achievement, and cheating definitely robs you of that, which to me explains why playing will be less fun. Moving faster on a side project or at work doesn't feel like the same kind of shortcut/cheat. Most of us no longer program in assembly language, and we still maintain a sense of achievement using elite languages, which naturally abstract away a lot of the details. Isn't using AI to hide away implementation details just a natural next step, where instead of lengthy error prone machine level code, you have a few modern language instructions?

The author writes "I do not foresee any smartphone app ever being approved for this purpose." (the purpose is 'passing classified information for military operations'), while in fact, I'm not sure I see the issue - all the app (any one of them, including WhatsApp, Signal, etc.) needs to add is what is referred to as 'conditional access' to some chats. Meaning, you can define chats as only authorized for users whose identity is provided by a trusted Identity Provider, or are running on certified devices. This type of security is already implemented in many enterprises, supported by browsers (to some extent, at least), and can be relatively easily be supported by applications. Custom made chat apps already use this (e.g. Workplace Chat, which is used by Meta), and so I'm not sure it's something we won't see supported by other commercial apps messaging apps.

+1 on traveling light. The author did mention this, too: " Your enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should haul. Travelers still happy on a 6-week trip will only have carry-on luggage."

Nice. This reminds me of Ontological remodeling (https://desystemize.substack.com/p/desystemize-9).

The thing is, it's not about removing brain matter, it's about replacing brain matter (with a manufactured copy, for example), and applying the same process in a secondary location (physical or digital, I guess). Will 'you' at some point stop being 'you'? Will the secondary copy at some point become you?

Interesting. I read somewhere a long time ago a description of dreams being incoherent because 'the brain doesn't have enough compute power to simulate reality well enough'. This seems to me like the exact experience you're sharing. Reality is generated, but no 'memory' to keep it consistent/coherent. So, are dreams really just GenBrain (and the things you think about before falling asleep the generating prompt)?

Meta AI (FAIR): In human cognition theory, human thinking is governed by two systems: the fast and intuitive System 1 and the slower but more deliberative System 2. Recent studies have shown that incorporating System 2 process into Transformers including large language models (LLMs), significantly enhances their reasoning capabilities. Nevertheless, models that purely resemble System 2 thinking require substantially higher computational costs and are much slower to respond. To address this challenge, we present Dualformer, a single Transformer model that seamlessly integrates both the fast and slow reasoning modes. Dualformer is obtained by training on data with randomized reasoning traces, where different parts of the traces are dropped during training. The dropping strategies are specifically tailored according to the trace structure, analogous to analyzing our thinking process and creating shortcuts with patterns. At inference time, our model can be configured to output only the solutions (fast mode) or both the reasoning chain and the final solution (slow mode), or automatically decide which mode to engage (auto mode). In all cases, Dualformer outperforms the corresponding baseline models in both performance and computational efficiency: (1) in slow mode, Dualformer optimally solves unseen 30 x 30 maze navigation tasks 97.6% of the time, surpassing the Searchformer (trained on data with complete reasoning traces) baseline performance of 93.3%, while only using 45.5% fewer reasoning steps; (2) in fast mode, Dualformer completes those tasks with an 80% optimal rate, significantly outperforming the Solution-Only model (trained on solution-only data), which has an optimal rate of only 30%. For math problems, our techniques have also achieved improved performance with LLM fine-tuning, showing its generalization beyond task-specific models.

I think the definition of 'new' can be extended a bit to cover insights as well, and in that case we may look at insights generated by LLMs as 'new knowedge'. For the person receiving those insights generated by the AI, while they had the data, the extraction of information out of it resulted in, well, new knowledge.

Some of it, definitely. But if the purpose is to seek others and announce yourself (like we did with Voyager 1 and 2), then you'll want it to be plain. Also - Public radio transmissions are not encrypted (as your purpose is to have as many listeners as possible... You monetize on ads).

Thanks for the PBS reference, interesting! As to the energy required, well, yes, I guess manipulating huge masses will be costly, but, if there is an efficient way to do this, then gravity waves are a parallel plane of communication. The analogy I heard once is about tribes communicating with smoke signals, while the air around them is filled with radio waves. Maybe we can't hear anyone out there because we're not listening to the right thing...

Yes, but not efficiently (it will be very slow) and will be hard to detect because of noise (the article mentions the 'cacophony' of gravity noise). This is similar to EM radiation, so, you do frequency modulation (or amplitude, but that seems harder with gravity - you'll need to modify mass...), so you have a base high frequency on top of which you add lower frequency. The substraction later gives you a clean signal (or, Gravity Radio).

So, going from a very narrow frequency band (up to 1000Hz) to a much wider range, which can theoretically encode information (e.g. frequency modulation)... Hmm, I'm wondering if comms over gravity is something a sufficiently advanced civilization might consider using, and should we be looking for that 'Hello, world' in some 'natural frequency' like we're doing for EM radiation?

I didn't try exercising with it, but, Quest 2 was getting too hot for me even after a short while playing Beat Saber for example. Quest 3 is much better in that aspect. I can actually keep it on for long durations, and heat isn't a problem at all.

Yes, though she'll need to be accompanied by her parents.

This is... not a surprise. Jews have lived in Islamic countries for centuries, and had very good relations with their Islamic neighbors. In fact, there are many Jews with Arab origins living in Israel today. Unfortunately, after WWII, most Arab countries forced the Jews living there to leave (mostly to Israel). There are minor Jewish communities in some Islamic states still, but in recent decades this is very rare (there is, obviously, a large minority of arabs, both muslims and christians, living in Israel. Yes, as first class citizens - I'm not talking about the occupied territories, but Israel within the 1967 lines).

Current versions actually support both stationary and room boundary. Also, since you begin in Passthrough mode, you can start using the device immediately (and only set up boundary when you actually need it - apps trigger space setup only when moving to VR mode for the first time, if needed).

I don't know. Personal opinion follows, YMMV: I've been to Tokyo recently. The subway system is much less convenient than, let's say, NYC. There are multiple operators, you need to purchase tickets separately to each one, it's not obvious for a tourist to understand the reasoning, and you can't pay with credit card (in 2023...), You need to either purchase a special card from a desk, or pay cash. In 2023. I consider that a hassle (it actually surprised me, I envisioned Tokyo as the city of the future. It is indeed, only it seems to be the future of 1993, sadly not of 2023).