phlakaton

Most people in America have nothing to fear from their water, but there are problems at the underprivileged fringes. Surely you remember Flint, Michigan. The last lead service line there was removed, IIUC, just a couple of months ago – over 12 years since the crisis began!

Amazon filters would not have remotely been a reasonable solution to that problem.

You also have Captain Sisko's arc where he is declared, and ultimately follows the path of, a prophet for the Bajoran people. And it works because for all his protests he fundamentally is a good person from the enlightened (if imperfect) 24th century of Roddenberry's vision, in the necessary place at the right time.

That the writers at this point in Trek canon started playing pretty fast and loose with Roddenberry's vision doesn't erase the deeply optimistic and even spiritual grounding of that show.

I would not call Deep Space 9 a dystopia. Nor Babylon 5, for that matter. They are not happy places to live, for sure, but both settings are abundant in hope and possibility.

I think the key thing for a university student is to get the big ideas down: what is a container exactly, how does it work, how does it differ from a VM, what assumptions does it make about what you're running (and how do you run something that doesn't fit that pattern), why do images exist in layers and how are layers implemented, what are the performance benefits/tradeoffs, etc. etc.

When I was learning Docker I can't tell you how many people would describe it to me by analogy to a standardized shipping container, and start going off about shipping container dimensions and supersized cargo ships and trucks and railcars... and finish by smiling beatifically, like they had just explained the whole thing in a masterstroke. Let's... uh... not do that. :-D

In a problem set, the student might learn a bit about dockerfiles or docker-compose.yml... but only, I think, so they can try building and running a container of their own!

So they completely ignored the discoverer's suggestion. Humbug.

That doesn't make me nervous at all. I've been waiting for the legal challenges from deep pockets to roll in.

I'm not entirely sure they will, though.

Not so much if the community is private or restricted.

I agree, it wasn't clear at all to me... until I clicked the links.

Now it's clear to me.

Surely we live in the AGI times that were prophesied.

I think the answer is straightforward. You complain that a substantial PR is no longer evidence of good faith. What is evidence? Participation in the community.

I think mailing lists (or an equivalent) are coming back. In a big way.

Crypto has been sold many many ways, but most of it is not a stable store of value.

Stablecoins are what are supposed to be stable sources of value, but Zeke Faux's book Number Go Up points out how opaque and unaccountable the companies managing these currencies are. From his reporting, their "tractor app" appears to be not so much farmers in sub-saharan Africa receiving aid payments but criminals looking for anonymous ways to transfer lots of money.

Are they? And how would you know if they were?

The blog post provides some context but no understanding.

It's meaningless because it's unverifiable. Dario all but said we wouldn't notice if they were pacing or not, because they have no intention of stopping development. The bits we could in theory verify are the external audits, whose independence has already been called into question.

At the very least, dumping a new model on the world before the ink on the glossy brochures of "Pacing the Frontier" was even dry calls into question their commitment.

Well, I'll drink to that!

You say that like it's a bad thing.

Consumers are worth less than creators in the cosmic scheme of things. I believe we should be much friendlier to consumers than our laws currently allow, but there should be a balance, and that balance should not privilege consumers above all.

And the reason that piracy doesn't exist in that case is because the creators have all had to go out of business. ;-)

If it allows you to distinguish readily between human intelligence and computer intelligence, it seems quite relevant to the question of whether computers have achieved something akin to human intelligence.

It may not be useful for anything else, but at least it can say that.

The East Bay does have some spillover! But there are various reasons it's not as attractive. My hunch is that one of the major reasons is that commutes from the Peninsula and Silicon Valley itself are rough.

Maybe wages if the company puts the IPO proceeds towards additional hiring. The other bits sound pretty speculative to me. I could see outside investors walking away with most of the early gains, leaving employees and locals underwater.

Let's just say I'll believe that when I see it. Looks to me like they'll be operating at losses well beyond their IPOs.

Silicon Valley exists as a persistent thumb on the nose against load-balancing ideas. It's had an absolute glut of tech companies for many decades now, with no apologies needed. Many people in the region benefit from that concentration of talent, wealth, and capital.

Those were arguably due to neglect rather than public housing being problematic per se. Perhaps the same thing would happen if the Feds tried it again; perhaps the neglect is a practically unavoidable consequence given our politics. But I think it should still be on the table. We tilted at the Bank of the US a few times before figuring out the Federal Reserve, after all.

But I agree, it would be far preferable to let property developers solve this problem. I support regional and state-level interventions and accountability. I don't want this particular federal administration within a thousand miles of the problem!

It is not OpenAI's or Anthropic's responsibility to build housing in SF. It is the city's. Putting the heat on the mayor and supervisors is the correct move.

I've been "entertaining" myself recently with a report on how various Bay Area cities are tracking against their housing elements. Remember, these housing elements were their state-mandated plans for additional housing units between 2022 and 2030, and extra emphasis was put on this cycle to make sure the plans were realistic, accountable, addressed the magnitude of the need, and included (relatively) affordable housing.

We are close to halfway through this time period. San Francisco has built, according to this report, less than 10% of their commitment. They have a little over four years now to come up with 76K units. See: https://cities.fairhousingelements.org/cities/san-francisco

Last year SF built 1.75K units. This year, by June, they had built 400 units.

This isn't an OpenAI problem.

There is no serious discussion on this point. There was never intended to be. There is only the bullying, and now the tone policing. But we all have better things to do with our time.

And I can provide more than adequate evidence supporting that assertion.

There's no debate. There never was. There is only concession to the diktat or resistance.

I think you mean the Gulf of Mexico.

It's poor form to let a crybaby bully have his way.

When I see "friendly introduction," I don't expect to see a deadhead sticker front and center. But I guess if you're an actual Deadhead it's not that startling. ;-)

All this plus a malware popup too, at least when I looked.

1. Sure we have values for earlier periods, estimated through abundant and reliable (in its own way) geologic evidence. But you don't even need to bo back further than 100 years to see how wildly our climate is whiplashing right now.

2. Yes, which is why climate scientists put lots of error bars on their predictions and document carefully the assumptions they're making. To wit, the assumption that we will continue to be as bone-headed about our impact on these systems as we have been. But it is still the case that I have little idea what the weather will be in my back yard in 3 mos but a pretty good idea of what global mean temperature we're looking at in 5 years.

Nope! C.f. classical mechanics at scale vs. statistical mechanics.