aetherson

Nope, try again. "You can't possibly learn enough about a system to simulate it" is still a different and weaker claim than "It is mathematically impossible to compute this thing that is being computed."

But also: if general intelligence were computable, but it was not possible to learn how to make the computer that can compute it, then you've disproved evolution.

"Current LLMs are not going to get to AGI" is a different and much weaker claim than "AGI is mathematically impossible."

If you want to argue for a fundamentally non-material mind (ie, that human cognition happens in a physically impossible, spiritual plane), then cool. Though you might want to give some consideration to how much it seems like physical processes on the brain can demonstrably affect cognition.

If you aren't arguing for a non-materialist position, then the distinction between "artificial" and human intelligence isn't meaningful. A powerful enough computer could simulate the material processes in your brain. If as the OP claims it is mathematically impossible for a computer to generate intelligence, no matter how powerful that computer, then it is impossible for your brain to do so (via material processes).

Hacker News heist plan initiated.

That may be true, but Tesla stalled out a long time before Musk's rightward turn.

Okay, a heated debate in my slack group is now going. We need more deets:

* When you say that you don't hand-wash, can you clarify? Does that mean you just take the dish and put it directly into the dishwasher after throwing any large chunks of food away? Or do you rinse it or even soap it, you just don't scrub it thoroughly?

* You mention washing the dishes multiple times per day. Does any food actually dry on your plates before the dishwasher gets run?

* You don't have a problem with fingerprints or lipprints on glassware?

* Do you feel like the salt tank has benefits beyond hard water mitigation?

I've seen a lot of people claim this for 15 years, but every experience I've ever had with minimal or no handwashing of dishes before putting them in the dishwasher has resulted in visibly dirty dishes.

It's possible that the (several) dishwashers I've used have been "not good enough," but if so I suggest most people's dishwashers aren't good enough.

More likely they are unable to update their own status page, but in either case not covering themselves in glory over at GCP right now.

Cloudflare status page reports an issue: https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/

Does anyone know if it's region-specific? We're experiencing it and are in us-west-1.

We're experiencing intermittent slowness and timeouts on our GCP everything.

There's a little of this, but more so, you only get one reconciliation bill per year. And anything that's not a reconciliation bill has to be bipartisan.

People on this thread badly need to familiarize themselves with most-favored-nation/permanent normal trade relations. There seems to be a contingent who believe that there are a mess of separately negotiated tariffs between each country.

But there aren't. The WTO generally put that system away and now to first approximation everyone gets the same deal as everyone else.

We have most favored nation status with most other countries, so they generally don't have any other nation that is getting better terms than we do. That's the point of the WTO.

Albeit in limited areas and, as far as we can tell, with pretty high unit costs.

But I think the smart money is that Waymo will get appreciably better in the 5-10 year timeline. Perhaps massively, crazily better, but at least steadily, noticeably better.

It's uneven, I do see places that seem to have kept self-checkout minimal or nonexistent, but I think that you're right that overall it's winning.

We also have some circumstantial evidence that trade across the Bering strait was very limited or non-existent in that it didn't appear to introduce Eurasian diseases to North America.

People need to divorce the training method from the result.

Imagine that you were given a very large corpus of reddit posts about some ridiculously complicated fantasy world, filled with very large numbers of proper names and complex magic systems and species and so forth. Your job is, given the first half of a reddit post, predict the second half. You are incentivized in such a way as to take this seriously, and you work on it eight hours a day for months or years.

You will eventually learn about this fantasy world and graduate from just sort of making blind guesses based on grammar and words you've seen before to saying, "Okay, I've seen enough to know that such-and-such proper name is a country, such-and-such is a person, that this person is not just 'mentioned alongside this country,' but that this person is an official of the country." Your knowledge may still be incomplete or have embarrassing wrong facts, but because your underlying brain architecture is capable of learning a world model, you will learn that world model, even if somewhat inefficiently.

It is at least theoretically possible that "women with resume A" is statistically likely to outperform (or underperform) "man with resume A." A model with sufficient world knowledge might take that into consideration and correctly prefer the woman (or man).

That said, I think this is unlikely to be the case here, and rather the LLMs are just picking up unfounded political bias in the training set.

Just think how young they would've died otherwise. ;)

Surely if there is one person in history who we would be pretty sure would be thrilled to have a posthumous animatronic version of himself, it is Walt Disney.

Armies are combined arms, with few exceptions (Mongolian horde, perhaps), they didn't have just a single unit type. But armored heavy cavalry (with stirrups) wasn't some kind of weird sociological hang-up of European nations, it was a very effective unit type to have in your mix, such that societies were "willing" to spend significant resources in supporting the existence of that unit.

Here "willing" really means, "subjected to competition pressure such that societies that didn't support heavy cavalry units were for the most part militarily bullied into either annexation or standing up their own heavy cavalry support system."

That lasted until the technological realities of war changed (sufficiently-advanced firearms), at which point quite rapidly those societies stopped fielding heavy cavalry, which is another data point that this wasn't some kind of peacock display from nobles.

You only went to that effort to support cavalry because it won battles.

Dammit, came here to say that.

You don't appear to know what "average" means. You mean that the modal value is zero. The average value is not.

There are all kinds of bets where the modal value is zero or negative that are good bets!

You played a stupid game, you won a stupid prize.

Something is different than nothing. When people repeatedly insist that something and nothing are the same, they get trivial answers.

And learn which side of the digits a dollar sign goes on please.

Sounds like your startup equity has been worth about $3000-$5000 per year?

Yes. Something is more than nothing. This is not rocket science.

I really want to insist on the principle that we are nuanced enough people to say, "startup equity is worth less, in expected value, than public company equity, but 'less than public company equity' is still more than zero."

They sure are insistent on it being literally zero for people who don't think it's literally zero.

If you like, I'm happy to update my claim to, "startup equity often has non-trivial value, say, >$1000 per year."

It's not really possible to have nice uncontested stats about this because the definitions of the rounds aren't fully neat, there are potentially generational effects, and how you divide up industries isn't fully neat either.

In a typical year, a double-digit number of tech companies IPO (there was a big jump in 2021 and then a crash in 2022/2023, with 2024 seemingly back in the double-digit range). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/charted-four-decades-of-u-s...

Let's be really clear, though: there's "getting good value for options" and then there's "getting some value for options." It is straightforwardly true that in general big public companies have better comp than pre-IPO companies: the guaranteed value of equity in your Metas or Googles or even lower-tier public companies is generally higher than the expected value of pre-IPO equity, even if you are relatively risk-insensitive.

That is importantly different from "the value of pre-IPO equity is zero," or "it is a one-in-a-million event to get value from pre-IPO equity."