ardaoweo

From Wikipedia:

"In 2023, former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato said that France downed the plane while targeting a Libyan military jet in an attempt to kill Muammar Gaddafi. Amato said that Italy tipped off Libya about the planned assassination and consequently Gaddafi did not board the Libyan military jet"

To be honest, this theory of mistaken identity sounds much more plausible than anybody shooting down (or bombing) a random passenger plane flying an Italian domestic flight on purpose. Whether the presumably Libyan plane they actually targeted was transporting nuclear material or Gaddafi, I have no idea. Shame on them anyway for covering it up.

Already quite a while ago I was entertained by a particular British tabloid article, which had been "AI edited". Basically the article was partially correct, but then it went badly wrong because the subject of the article was about recent political events that had happened some years after the point where LLM's training data ended. Because of this, the article contained several AI-generated contextual statements about state of the world that had been true two years ago, but not anymore.

They quietly fixed the article only after I pointed its flaws out to them. I hope more serious journalists don't trust AI so blindly.

Yep. If the Swedish government really cared about children, they would do something to stop the massive underage gang violence problem the country has. 12 year olds being used as hitmen for drug gangs is not normal, yet that's the reality.

I've always wondered how big of a part Soviet Union / Russia psych ops played in stirring this completely irrational anti-nuclear mentality. The side-effect of getting Germany hooked on Russian gas was extremely convenient to them.

Of course the Chernobyl disaster played some part, but it didn't result in such irrationality in most other surrounding countries. Perhaps the anti-war mentality and guilt from the horrors of WW2 also plays a part?

In any case, what a disaster German energy policies have been for whole Europe.

They are revolutionary for use cases where hallucinated / wrong / unreliable output is easy and cheap to detect & fix, and where there's enough training data. That's why it fits programming so well - if you get bad code, you just throw it away, or modify it until it works. That's why it work for generic stock images too - if you get bad image, you modify the prompt, generate another one and see if it's better.

But many jobs are not like that. Imagine an AI nurse giving bad health advice on phone. Somebody might die. Or AI salesman making promises that are against company policy? Company is likely to be held legally liable, and may lose significant money.

Due to legal reasons, my company couldn't enable full LLM generative capabilities on chatbot we use, because we would be legally responsible for anything it generates. Instead, LLM is simply used to determine which of the pre-determined answers may fit the query the best, which it indeed does well when more traditional technologies fail. But that's not revolutionary, just an improvement. I suspect there are many barriers like that, which hinder its usage in many fields, even if it could work most of the time.

So, nearly all use cases I can think of now will still require a human in the loop, simply because of the unreliability. That way it can be a productivity booster, but not a replacement.

I tend to agree with you. If what Putin has done so far doesn't cause a massive internal revolt, then selling what they've gained by now as a victory shouldn't be too hard either.

Attitudes (and apathy) of the Russian population is the most astonishing thing about this whole conflict, and something that should be remembered when dealing with the country in the future, even after Putin.

Generally the US does a pretty good job training and keeping their grunt soldiers alive, and evacuating them if wounded. Russia really hasn't done well in these aspects if we look at the Ukraine war, or any earlier wars for that matter. Their tactics tend to prefer quantity over quality.

But yes, as pointed out I'm sure Russia places some more value on lives of skilled, well trained personnel than the average poorly trained grunt soldier, simply due to higher utility value.

Well, it should be noted that the helicopter in question was designed to be used by an organization that couldn't care less about loss of life, as we have again seen in recent years. So I guess this aspect of human life wasn't a big concern to the designers, the military can always get new human resources from Siberia or whatever poor part of the country.

Too much sun exposure is definitely bad, because it increases likelihood of skin cancer. Moderation is the key.

Nuclear has its role to play when the weather isn't windy or sunny, at least until storage technology gets good enough. Especially in Northern parts of the world it's a big deal, because during winters solar is pretty useless.

Getting rid of coal (and natural gas, to lesser extent) should happen ASAP, and nuclear can be a part of the solution for the transition period.

Russians do plenty of jamming that expands beyond their borders in the Baltic, either on purpose or just as a spillover as they don't care. Before Finland joined NATO they used to also violate our airspace on frequent basis, but since then that has stopped.

https://yle.fi/a/74-20079715

Have there actually been advances in robotics that could make them mainstream, or is the progress still painfully slow? I think robotics would be the next logical step after AI hype, but I'm having hard time figuring out which company will be the next Nvidia there.

Server-grade motherboards that have been widely used for a long time sounds like a legitimate product business. Whether or not they have long-lasting competitive advantage, that is another question.

IMO humans are quite well equipped for manual labor, much more so than for most office jobs. Millions of years of evolution perfected us for eye-motor coordination, not writing code or attending Teams meetings. Building robots that can do it as well as humans is going to be a difficult task.

I agree. Specialists who understand (or even do) cutting edge research will be in demand, because LLM's need existing data to train on for good performance. People who can talk to different stakeholders, and deeply understand the company and its business domain will probably be also needed for requirements gathering and management. But the average programmer who writes CRUD apps or integrations like millions of others, and converts fairly refined requirements to code, they will likely impacted very much.

Only if you provide an alternative way for the newly unemployed to earn a living. Otherwise you just get crime, hunger and eventually war.

It's absolutely fascinating how differences in brain structure can cause a wide variety of conditions. Somehow I was linguistically (especially reading and writing) way above average in my childhood, but suck at mathematics and motor skills. Due to my mother's health condition my brain was scanned after I was born, and they found some abnormalities with left lateral ventricle. Apparently it's located near basal ganglia, which makes me wonder if the abnormality has a connection to these conditions.

I agree. It's likely common that children with ADHD or autism diagnosis also have parents with such condition, but they were simply never diagnosed. At least in my family's case it's quite evident, though it took me a while to recognize.

Soon the cheapest Ikea sofa I could find in 2015 (about 200 $) has lasted me a decade. Sure, the cover worn is worn out and covered with another textile for that reason, but it's still usable. I can sit on it and watch my TV, which is even older.

Easiest way to find happiness in material quality of life is to lower one's standards.

If we got universal basic income, people could do whatever they want. I for one would be content spending my time gardening and trekking in the nature. I despise office work and do it only for money.

It's forcing the rich to give us UBI that is the problem.

Yep, if automation really accelerates there are two ways to prevent the collapse of the economic system as we know it now. Either invent lots bullshit jobs, or create universal basic income and pay people for doing nothing, or something unprofitable.

I predict that rich people will continue to pay for a real psychologist to get genuine human contact. Meanwhile, the big masses of poorer people will eventually get to enjoy LLM-powered AI ones, which may be an improvement or a downgrade depending on the current state in their area. My country's state funded healthcare system is already utilizing web-based therapy, LLM's will just replace the human writing responses.

Yes, I think nursing is perfect purely from a "not being replaced" perspective. An absolutely massive demand from aging population with lots of money, requires physical movement, eye-motor skills between and inside varying environments, like moving between old people's houses and then taking care of the people inside. On top of all that, a real human nurse could (ideally, when not worked to death) give genuine human emotional understanding.

Some forms of art will be more protected than others. Think of somebody who builds unique artwork by hand 100% from random wood and other material found in the nature. Good luck having AI robots pick those from the wilderness, put them together, or 3D print a fake one that looks exactly like a real thing.

Motor/hand eye coordination most definitely. That's what millions of years evolution has optimized us for more than anything else. Anything involving manipulating and movement in varying physical environments remains a hard problem to solve in cost-effective manner, despite all the money poured to self-driving cars and general purpose robotics. Of course we have solutions that work in specific contexts, factory or lab environment, but that's about it.

I believe emotional intelligence will become a close second. As long as we don't have perfected humanoid robots like in TV series Westworld, people will likely prefer genuine human contact in certain situations (psychologist, therapist, service sector, nursing...)

Tiny PC's make excellent low-power servers for lots of purposes, but personally in the end I just decided to build my own desktop PC from cheapish previous gen parts to have more flexibility. Now I have an AM4 consumer board based system with 8 core Ryzen 7, more ECC ram than I will ever need, 4 enterprise grade SSD's with ZFS, intel NIC, and RTX 3060 for some AI experimentation. Thanks to efficient PSU choice the whole thing idles at just 30W running Linux, about 10 of which is due to the dedicated GPU. I should be even able to game on it through GPU passthrough to Proxmox VM, though I haven't tried it yet.

For networking I can recommend Fujitsu Futro S920 thin clients, especially for EU users. They are dirt cheap here, and with aftermarket riser & intel NIC they are great routers with opnsense/pfsense. Apart from that, I have a couple of raspberry pi's running dedicated tasks, and space heaters (e-waste tier enterprise desktops) running BOINC during coldest months.

Yes, everyone that opposes Russia's imperialist tendencies wants war. If everyone just willingly got annexed by Russia there would be peace.

Yep, Putin will absolutely try to grab new land whenever he thinks he can get away with it, no matter how many young Russian men die in the process. To him it's just a game to fulfill his fantasies of being a great conquering czar, and for that reason credibility of NATO's article 5 is vital.

Even the good relations between EU and Russia pre-2014 were just theater on Russia's part. Here in Finland during those years shady Russian businessmen kept buying properties that made no financial sense, but were located close to critical infrastructure or military locations. They have never acted in good faith.

If Trump withdraws the US from NATO going back to the old ways is not an option, at least EU doesn't want to lose its Eastern half to Russia.

At least in Finland modern apartment blocks are really the worst, much worse than 100 year old wooden houses. Usually they are built to maximize constructor profits, with bad floorplan that makes that any kind of airflow through the apartment by opening windows impossible. No AC of course, and concrete walls which preserve lots of heat.