Windchaser

> Surely every police organization in the United States is just racist.

Well, there's personal racism, meaning personal prejudice against a race. But then there's also institutional racism, like policies that turn out to be racist. Racist policies can be blatantly racist, like redlining, or they may indirectly turn out to be racist.

But yes, I think institutional racism is fairly common and very well-documented in the US.

> You're literally just describing a chicken-and-egg problem.

If you want to understand this more deeply, I highly recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' book "Between the World and Me".

Yes, it's a chicken and egg problem, but our police and judicial institutions are actively sustaining/aggravating the problem.

Damn! My info was out of date.

But it doesn't look great that we're up there with El Salvador (a failed state), Cuba, Rwanda (another failed state), and Turkmenistan

> But at a moment's notice their allegiance can switch.

Is that true, though? I don't expect that the individual biases of officers or judges, or the institutional biases of the police or immigration departments, can switch at a moment's notice.

> it seems pretty close to police state levels of power, corruption and control.

And: which country has the highest incarceration rate in the world?

Ancedotes are personal stories, like "oh, my dad was down at the post office the other day, and he saw..."

This is not a personal story, not an anecdote. I'm reporting on a study that looked at incarceration rates for drug use vs the drug use itself.

Why is that important? Because the study itself is solid, and it shows that there is some sort of bias between police/policing and african-american communities.

Sure, maybe that bias doesn't show up in other areas like firearm-related crimes. Or: maybe it does, and we haven't yet figured out how. Or, maybe it plays an indirect role, further eroding the relationship between the AA communities and the police, gradually building up a mutual dynamic that subjects black people to an unhealthy chronic level of stress and despair and harassment while also "justifying" the prejudicial activities of the cops.

There are whole books written about this. But at a minimum, I can't imagine just brushing over a 4x higher arrest rate for the same level of crime. That's pretty damn big.

I would expect that the NSA-like orgs have access to the data about where we travel, your spending habits, your comments on Reddit or HN, etc., etc. Basically, a profile on each of us. It might not be a collated readable profile as such, just a vector in a big NN describing our risk potential, but, all the same.

Yeah, I remember reading that a study found that white and black youth used marijuana at roughly equal rates, but black youth were about 4x as likely to be arrested for it. Due to differences in the # of stops, then differences in searches, then differences in actual arrests, with white youth getting more lenient treatment at each step.

And then this just reinforces the idea: "well, look at the crime statistics, black kids are more crime-prone, right"

There are times where you want to check for existence before fetching a key-value pair, and there are times where you want to automatically throw an error if the value doesn't exist.

Both have valid use cases. It's weird to be sarcastic about it.

... have we?

Can AI handle driving yet?

This is probably the boldest claim in the entire comments section, considering we're only in 2026.

Compare 1926 to 1999, and how technology advanced in that time. Radio wasn't widespread in 1926, nuclear fission hadn't been demonstrated, the idea of the semiconductor energy band gap, underlying the entirety of the modern computing industry, wasn't put forth until 1928. And yet, 20 years later we were purifying silicon, and 10 years after that (1954) the first silicon transistor was created and kicked off the semiconductor boom. 50 years later, we were in the Internet bubble.

We've got decades upon decades upon decades to come up with new ideas and implement them, even before the end of the century.

> Humans name their vehicles, so they're definitely going to name their $10k-$20k house bot

huh. I can only think of one friend I've ever known who named their car.

Anyways, not saying I necessarily disagree with the rest of what you say, but it's out there, for sure. We're a good distance away from an AI that can meaningfully act like a friend.

(Though who knows what AI will look like in even 10 years? I'm not ruling this out)

> at parties, and even at the dinner table all looking at their phones

This is very different from what I see.

At coffee shops and on trains, sure, people are working or on their phones. But at dinner and parties, at bars and climbing gym and dances, we're there to be there with each other.

Maybe a cultural difference between where you are and where I am?

Isn't the modern economy already a runaway improvement? First writing and agriculture, the stone age became copper became bronze became iron became steel, and one Revolution after another - agricultural 1 and 2, industrial, information.

Looks like AI will be another revolution, and eventually, probably the largest.

Have you heard of the idea of "steelmanning"?

> And nobody in western capitalist societies has to live with real hunger or starve.

??

I have friends raised in the US who experienced serious food scarcity as children (~20-25 years ago), and they have plainly disordered eating as a result. The stories I hear, many variants on things like "oh, yeah, as a kid I learned you can get rid of hunger by just drinking more water".

I don't know of anyone who's suggesting we kill all the mosquitos. Even if we killed all the human-sucking species, that'd still only be 3% of the ~3500 different species.

or... apply some science?

Of the ~3500 mosquito species, only about 3% drink human blood. And many of those are invasive in the areas we care about.

Less "regression to the mean", and more evolutionary architecture. Selection of the fittest applied to schools of architecture, with grades being the selection pressure.

Maybe better to put it as "emotionally unhealthy relationships" are costly to society. Singlehood is also less economically 'optimal' than partnerships, and divorce combines some of both.

> You should try AFK dating sometime, it's even worse! Out of all the women I've met, only 0.00000001218% been interested enough to date and marry me, and I didn't even touch any of the apps! Brutal.

Sampling bias. How many did you ask?

> You're telling men to use "conventionally" unattractive women as target practice, implying they will be more receptive to attention, presumably due to a general lack of it. Then your advice is to leave these women behind once you've gotten what you needed, and to then seek women more attractive to you.

I dunno, this seems to be interpreting the comment in the worst way possible. Like, assuming bad faith.

The comment above suggested that guys approach less-attractive women until they "build some confidence". This is not about the woman's receptivity to attention, this is about the guy's confidence or lack thereof. It makes sense: when confidence is worse, the conversation is more awkward and stilted, and that awkwardness is more likely to reinforce the idea that talking to strangers is a waste of time.

The charitable interpretation would be this: that you practice talking to strangers in scenarios that feel safe. Gradually, work up towards your goal - making new friends, talking to people you want to date, etc.

> Exaggerating a bit, but I'm fairly sure the Spanish speech was: "if you kill the other guys with your much better weapons, you will reach El Dorado"

And they basically did. Not a singular city of gold, perhaps, but the Spanish looted tens of billions of $$ worth silver and gold from Central/South America between 1492 and 1550. Which is all the more impressive given how little European manpower it took and how low their relative incomes would've been at the time.

> Any ideas?

Unpopular, maybe, but what about the normal reasons? The researchers are looking to make a name for themselves, and/or they genuinely care about AI advancement.

> Something needs to be done about this.

Well, I'm sold. Let's nuke the moon

It's crazy that you can "see" (identify) the Milky Way at a level 5/6 on the Bortle Scale, even in the light pollution of the suburbs. But you don't realize just how brilliant it really is until you're really out to a dark sky spot.

For reference, the Bortle Scale[*] goes from 1 to 9, with 1 being pristine darkness and 9 being Manhattan.

Also worth noting that the Milky Way is brighter in early summer, late May to mid-July, as that's when the Earth's night sky is facing the most towards the Galactic Core. Go find yourself some deep dark sky on a new moon, and sit back and enjoy the enormity of the cosmos.

[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bortle_scale#/media/File:How_l...

I mean, for what it's worth, when I need to multiply two numbers, I mentally call the "multiply numbers" algorithm stored in my head, then sit down and work through the process on paper.

I've got no problem with an AI doing something similar

I mean.. the fact that the "low-hanging fruit" is a Millennium Prize is still pretty impressive.

(And yes, I know that they solved the 'easy' form of the NS problem. It's still pretty damn impressive)

/chiming in

Eh, it's not obvious to me. A lot of DL NNs generalize well, meaning that they learn whatever the underlying pattern to the data is, and then can accurately reproduce answers that are outside of the training set. (And we can verify this with mechanistic interpretability). They learn and "understand" the pattern, not just the training data.

So it is not clear to me that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of also generalizing broadly and learning to reason. "Reasoning", here, would be deriving the underlying pattern of how concepts logically relate to each other in the abstract, and applying that pattern as needed to reach new conclusions.

Can you explain your thinking here? I.e., why LLMs cannot generalize with regards to abstract deduction.

> Fundamentally the problem with living forever goes beyond billionaires. People get stuck in their ways of thinking > Philosophically, living forever may be corrupt by nature

Sure, if people get stuck in their ways forever. But what if they don't?

If we can solve longevity, we might also be able to "solve" brain plasticity, therapy, psychology, sociology, etc., such that people's beliefs will be more flexible and people's minds more open.

I think it is incorrect to assume that we would solve biology while all of the fields researching the health of the mind made little progress.

We shouldn't imagine the future as being like today, only different in a few key ways - this is the trap of sci-fi authors. The future will be different in more ways than we expect. We might well fix 'old people are stuck in their ways' before we fix longevity.

Right - I'm saying that you can greatly improve productivity / reduce employment while still having humans in the loop. We've already seen it happen with farming, from 1900 -> present.