Isinlor

The fact that USA is doing anything for Ukraine is astounding all in itself.

Russia is not even a remote threat to USA, besides nuclear weapons.

Russia is a threat to Europe - Ukraine, Georgia, Baltics, Poland, Finland, Kazahstan.

And still Germany and France would be happy to give up Ukraine whole to Russia if not for USA.

Germany was happily making itself dependent on Russia and paying Russia to modernize their army. Germany was even bypassing their own sanctions after 2014 to deliver weapons components to Russia that are now being found in wrecks in Ukraine. All while Germany is deeply relaying on USA for defense from Russia. It's crazy that USA was so chill about it until Trump.

As a Pole born and raised 40km from Kaliningrad oblast it's really weird that I trust USA more than I do Germany, France, Italy etc.

Solar is on par with fosil fuels. And at least in EU with cap & trade system accounting for externalities as well as stopping sponsoring Russian wars and terrorism, I would not be surprised if renewables were twice as cheap.

What we care about is overall cost, not how much is required to reinvest.

If a renewable energy source is for example twice cheaper overall including the need to reinvest 25% then it is twice cheaper overall.

Only North Korea, Syria, Eritrea and Belarus decided to vote against resolution condemning Russian invasion on Ukraine.

Russia has no allies. Even China is reluctant to take over what remains from Russian market abandoned by Western companies.

https://twitter.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1499072011729096705

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” - Carl Sagan

Social market economies exists and do fine - Nordic countries, even China.

That's the only version of "communism" I can see as a steelman.

Communism as a centrally planned economy can not work until central planning system will be as smart and knowledgeable about peoples needs as the people themselves.

Digital Markets Act is done deal, only formalities left.

It has support of the EU Council, Parliament and Commission.

If you read DMA it gives quite a lot of executive powers to EU Commission, so that approach can be adjusted as needed.

As long as there will be political points in bashing American big-tech, it will not fizzle out.

What's the cost of Germany owning Sundetenland? Is there any?

The peace for our time. - September 1938, Chamberlain

If you imagine apocalypse today like a nuclear war, that would still not be as bad as humans had it when only barter was known. The very poorest parts of the world are still beter off than most of the people before 1700. Only 200 years ago 4 out of 6 children were dying before they were 10.

Commmunism never worked. Util we develop artificial superintelligence it will not work. Billions of people making decisions involves ridiculous amounts of data and processing power. Human brain has around 100 trillion synapses and there is around 8 billions of humans.

But social market economies do work right now.

With passwords you will get even higher probability if you just try 100 most popular passwords allowed by the service on hundreds of thousands of users.

Try making password creation too difficult and now password reset will be the default authentication for a lot of users anyway.

I personally think Poland handled Lukashenko regime very well. There is no reason why migrants should be robbed by Belarus and then dumped into Western Europe trough Poland. Strong response discouraged more tragedies.

And don't get me wrong. We can have discussion about how many migrants from the whole world we can host in Europe. As someone with strong libertarian leanings I'm personally quite divided on it myself. But it's not up to Belarus to decide.

Polish people in few cases did offer help to middle east refugees. But they do not want to stay in Poland. Many of them will just disappear into thin air. They want social welfare of Western Europe and are very vocal about it.

On the other hand, Ukraine is protecting us from Russia. Most men are not allowed to leave and are expected to fight if necessary. The last we can do is to provide them with weapons and take care of their families.

BTW - Poland participating in US wars is also due to fear of Russia. We need powerful ally or we will become refugees once more. In quite naive way we also saw US as a moral leader.

Russia was thought to have the second most powerful army in the world, while Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe.

It was assumed Ukraine will fall in 3 days.

Whether Russia succeeds or not depends on your expectations.

To me, as a Pole, the fact that Ukraine is demilitarizing Russia is a great success of Ukrainians.

Russia will be too spent to even consider attacking Poland yet again, hopefully for at least a decade.

Ukraine looking east to Russia is done. Almost nobody in Ukraine wants to keep relationships with Russia. So there is great hope that now Ukraine will be able to make up its mind and choose Western path to prosperity as did Poland. Mind you, Polish and Ukrainian economies were the same size in 1989-1991 after we pushed Soviet Union to collapse. Before the war in 2021 Ukrainian economy was 3 times smaller than Polish.

Also, the push to transition away from Russian gas has never been greater in EU.

The goal is to cripple Russian economy, not ruble.

Russia is exporting oil and importing most of everything else. We made it very difficult for them to import that everything else especially in industrial quantities.

Whatever was produced in Russia, like tanks, will have issues with production lines.

Cutting of gas and oil imports will hopefully happen in few years perspective. Russia is already helpfully limiting supply of gas. I would want to see them cut it off fully as they did to Poland, Finland or Bulgaria.

They would risk their biggest market with potential for growth for a tiny market that is shrinking further. Also, China may not like NATO, but they are not great fans of the war in Ukraine either.

Ultra-high-energy cosmic rays are possible candidate. For example, Oh-My-God particle had energy of a baseball traveling at 100 km/h. 40 million times higher than particle energies of terrestrial accelerators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

Given current predictions we would need colliders the size of the Solar System.

Something bigger than Neptune orbit.

We are ~12 orders of magnitude away from the grand unification energy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_energy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desert_(particle_physics)

I'm highly confident that LaMDA can, or with small fine tuning should be able to apply Rule 110 [0]. People claim that LMs are just pattern matchers or hash tables. Rule 110 is literally 8 elements long hash table.

I'm not sure why you think that question whether LaMDA is using language to achieve its goals is relevant? Whether it's using language, tokens or floats seems to me just accidental.

> If we are modeling LaMDA as an agent whose perceptions are text prompts and whose possible outputs are text answers, than it giving a text answer that matches the prompt is more similar to an animal running away or howling in pain than to a human communicating.

I can agree to a comparison to an animal running away or howling in pain.

With regard to communication. I guess LaMDA doesn't have communicative intent besides providing likely completions. But communicative intent is not difficult to achieve. Act of communication can be modeled as cooperative hidden information game. Hanabi is that type of game, I believe there are computer agents that can play Hanabi with humans. They certainly do have communicative intent, many of the even have explicit theory of mind of higher levels.

> indicating that it had a plan and was displaying normal behaviors with a higher-plan behind them

Deception and planning is also achievable by current computer agents that play games like no-limits texas hold 'em poker on superhuman level.

LaMDA is probably no good in Poker. But LMs can kind of play games like Chess or Gomoku.

GPT-3 (and LaMDA probably too) also seems to be able to combine deception and theory of mind in a functional way:

https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1535835610396692480

I think it's exceedingly hard to formulate necessary condition for sentience.

I haven't seen a good formulation yet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

Small disclaimer: I don't want to take position on sentience or consciousness.

"LaMDA is not an agent with desires that it expresses in language."

Some counter points:

- being an agent is not a high bar to clear; a thermostat is an agent

- "with desires" - LaMDA can be thought of as rational agent whose objective function is to produce text with high likelihood

- "that it expresses in language" it expresses likelihood of next token in language

"it can't fear anything because there is no time for it to do so."

There is a time for it to experience something and that is when it does feed forward pass.

Also, as you correctly notices, LaMDA is not only doing greedy text generation, but also a deeper text completion search. But in fact just prompting a model like GPT-3 or Gopher with "let's think step by step" and letting it process in context is already significantly improving performance on wide variety of reasoning tasks [0]. I don't see how this is functionally different from human pondering.

The only objection that seems reasonable to me is that LaMDA is not correctly describing it's internal state, because it will happily generate descriptions of its internal state that we know are physically impossible. Like being a squirrel.

But I don't see how you can describe a system that will be fundamentally functionally more capable than closed-loop computation. LaMDA is almost certainly Turing complete. Postulating that it is fundamentally not capable of doing something is the same as rejecting Church-Turing thesis and postulating super-Turing computational model. That's a heavy claim.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11916

Do you have the link to the report?

Well, then just don't buy Tesla. Problem solved. I don't own one and I don't want to.

But toxic exhausts within a city can not be tolerated.

I don't want externalties being offloaded on me and the democratic rule of law is there to make sure that we balance it.

Assuming that everything in this pdf is correct, the conclusion should be that the "The Reproducibility Project: Psychology" does not provide evidence one way or another. There may be replication crisis, but the study could not tell the difference between replication crisis and 100% reproducibility.

But today there are a lot more studies that find issues with replicability:

- Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2515245918810225

- Reproducible brain-wide association studies require thousands of individuals: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04492-9

- Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z

- Raise standards for preclinical cancer research: https://www.nature.com/articles/483531a

- Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology: https://www.cos.io/rpcb

- A Survey on Data Reproducibility in Cancer Research Provides Insights into Our Limited Ability to Translate Findings from the Laboratory to the Clinic: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I did not know that about the deal. Thanks for the info.

With SpaceX it is certainly a successful revolution. There is whole bunch of new startups that would not exists without SpaceX. Most of them will die, but some will not.

It is also quite clear that Tesla already achieved it's goal of accelerating transition to sustainable energy. Volkswagen shift is certainly linked to Tesla. And Volkswagen actually committed fraud on emissions that probably led to death of many people.

Situation with Theranos and Tesla is completely not comparable. Autopilot works fine. You are safer with autopilot activated on a highway than you are driving in a city per kilometer driven. Whether you are safer on a highway with or without autopilot is debatable and we don't have good enough data to settle it. So, Autopilot is not prefect by any means, arguably not market leading solution in the category of drive assist, but it works fine.

The bigger issue is with Full Self Driving. Tesla can drive you around in a city - so the way they spin what FSD means is almost satisfied. The issue is that it is extremely stressful experience and I'm 100% convinced that you are more likely to get in an accident when babysitting it vs. if you would drive by yourself and pay the same amount of attention.

But I think in 5 - 10 years they may be able to actually deliver proper working solution. They are making progress.

Yup, I think he has done like 1 day of it, before he dropped off.

There is some long running pattern here with getting cold feet on bad decisions ^^ .

For car industry and space industry it is a complete revolution.

From what I understand he can legally backtrack from the deal, but he would have to pay some billion dollars penalty. Not cheap by any means, but he can afford that. And having billion dollars at stake you can try to look for a lot of legal reasons to not pay that billion.

But my guess is that he genuinely thinks that 5% number is not accurate based on his twitter feed comments. His feed comments is mostly crypto scammers. Some independent people also claim that 50% of his followers are fake.

Twitter claim of 5% is very specific and probably accurate in a legal sense. But if you have tens of billions at stake and a deal that looks like a mistake it's entirely reasonable to dig deeper.

Here you have Dr. Daniel Rasky, a NASA Senior scientist talking about SpaceX and Elon. Daniel Rasky was involved in specific studies that were comparing operation of NASA and private companies. He also has first hand experience from working at SpaceX and with Elon. He is expert on advanced entry systems and thermal protection materials and he was for example involved in decision to select PICA as a heat shield for Dragon, and he explains how that went with Elon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E

Here is Elon answering questions of National Academy of Science members about Starship. He explains in detail why he pushed the team towards steel and away from carbon fibers:

https://youtu.be/da3iF2Np51A?t=951

Here you have another direct conversation with Elon:

https://youtu.be/t705r8ICkRw?t=172

Here is Elon discussing with Sundy Munro mass manufacturing and engineering.

Sandy Munro is a veteran engineer from General Motors supplier and directly at Ford. Sandy Munro is now running a consultancy company that tear downs cars and suggests improvements to wide range of clients from the car industry.

https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=78

Because Elon probably spends max couple of hours per week on Twitter acquisition?

His modus operandi is taking quick decisions and backtracking if he is wrong.

Actually it's not only his modus operandi, SpaceX according to NASA evaluation is also working that way.

It's basically depth first search vs. breath first search.

Dr. Daniel Rasky, a NASA Senior scientist

https://youtu.be/MxIiiwD9C0E?t=1464 :

> I think there are some things and kind of going back to in some ways back to the Apollo days if you take a look at kind of the environment that NASA had in Apollo it was kind of what Elon has with his young engineers. you had you know people trying things and in what works and what doesn't work I think over the years we've gotten into a very risk-averse profile and we're I call it full matrix engineering that okay that all concerns that anyone can raise have to be chased down a hundred percent before you can make any decision. Okay, so yeah like a full matrix of all the things that may be pertinent to a certain decision and you have to fill that entire array before you can make a decision to go forward and there's times when that makes sense but it doesn't make sense for everything we do. SpaceX uses a sparse matrix okay 51% okay when do when we get to 51% okay enough we're gonna make a decision and then we're going to try it and move on.

Did I miss the part where Gwynne Shotwell was CEO and CTO at SpaceX? Or the part where she put all her money into the company?

Shotwell is absolutely awesome, but she did not came up with the initial capital or the idea of rocket reusability and Mars settlement. She did not convince Tom Muller to join SpaceX etc. etc.

The fact that Elon noticed Shotwell and gave her COO position is an example of excellent leadership skills from Musk.

For contrast, Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin is an excellent example of bad leadership.

Boeing is also an excellent example of bad leadership.

You will also encounter issues here.

Transistor is a sensor. It detects voltage on the base pin. Transistor density and so sensor density on a modern CPU is really high. In fact modern CPU transistor density is 3 orders of magnitude higher than nerve density even on your retina.

It's at the order of ~100,000 rods/mm^2 for retina and ~100,000,000 transistors/mm^2 for modern CPU.