mr_toad

We used to just call it globalization.

I don’t know why academics think that uttering the right words will actually change anything, they’re not Gandalf.

Colonialism and terrorism are two words that get so overused they’ve become meaningless.

> In bloated organizations, there is a lot of fat to cut.

The problem is that the bigger and more bloated a company is, the harder it becomes to tell what is fat and what isn’t.

> now they are up to $134B in net income, and they need to let 25% of the company leave?

Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’re going to spend $134b on new data centers.

Buying your own car works out cheaper than taxis - according to the car dealer.

I don’t think that there was much fixed scheduling for water transport prior to the the development of steam engines either, because you were usually at the mercy of the winds and the tides.

They have to transform the world more than whatever the bond rate is right now, (which admittedly is increasing). I'm not sure that that's greater than office software, digital banking etc. But I don't think it's as high a bar as some people think.

In most cases it’s only the object recognition systems that use machine learning. I know that Tesla was talking about using non-deterministic AI for the decision making as well, but it’s a worry if they’re already doing it.

> no way of knowing if the AI is bullshitting them

Back testing, hold-out sets, cross validation.

This has all happened before.

The education industry has been lowering the bar for admission to higher learning for half a century or more, while dumbing down the content of high school and even primary school education. All because we can’t have children feeling bad.

It’s terribly ironic that things like calculus, linear algebra and matrix manipulation were being weeded out of the curriculum, right before machine learning took off.

> I think it's not so surprising that it isn't necessarily immediately radically transforming every industry everywhere.

Computers and the internet didn’t radically change every industry everywhere. But every industry everywhere uses computers and the internet, and more pertinently, they pay good money for it.

AI doesn’t need to transform the world, it just needs to pay off the sizeable investments in data centers.

It gets complicated, because protons and anti-protons are composite particles.

To simplify somewhat, one quark from each will annihilate, leaving four quarks and a lot of energy, which re-arrange into mesons (two quarks each), which then decay into photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos.

Positrons aren’t useful because they annihilate to produce gamma rays, which can’t be contained. However, anti-proton annihilation produces a bunch of particles, including pions, which could be contained in a magnetic bottle and directed for thrust.

Compression requires prediction, and good music seems to require a balance between predictability (repetition) and novelty. This can be seen in even the simplest (verse/chorus) song structure.

No, but it was created to mitigate these sorts of risks.

They may style themselves as militias, but they act like paramilitary forces.

In practice as well as in law they are controlled by the federal government.

Only a couple of states actually have their own militia that is independent of federal government.

I’m only surprised that it doesn’t specify that super has to be in all caps.

If you’ve got some sort of stain on your résumé so bad that you can’t get even get a job flipping burgers you can always fall back on a career in politics.

I look forward to the authors next post where they discover that processes aren’t real either, they’re just convenient abstractions provided by the operating system.

All of them? It’s basically a parody of knowledge work.

You’re not going to get venture capital funding by using auto.arima

IP has very low marginal cost, emeralds don’t.

Historically, more efficient technology has led to a greater demand. It began with more efficient steam engines that required less coal for the same amount of work. That didn’t lead to a reduction in demand for coal, instead the acceleration in demand for coal changed the world.

However you measure it, in LOC or in MB or in ops per second, demand for more software always seems insatiable. This trend will likely continue up until software can be produced with zero humans at all. But I can’t see that happening unless we invent actual real artificial intelligence.

Even they can be replaced. They probably won’t even be last to go.

> The simple answer is media. First television, then internet, then smartphones.

It probably began with cave painting. Once Grog discovered cave art he realized that he didn’t actually like his fellow tribesmen all that much.

> Nah, they're directly driven by social media radicalization.

It’s much easier to radicalise someone who is already disaffected.

Why would you assume that he was working for the Saudis? Spy agencies will recruit people of any nationality. Much more likely he was working with (or planning to work with) one of the two countries that are building AI.

> Spies used to put effort into these sorts of things.

This guy’s handlers, or whoever he was planning to sell this tuff to probably put in some effort. They’re less likely to be caught, and more likely to have gained something.

Should the founders have looped in the British authorities? Or shouldn’t they have been plotting sedition?