Wow, I guess PT Barnum was right about never losing money on underestimating the intelligence of people but this really is a new low. If TikTok is selling a video snippet app like smallpox infected blankets to Native Americans then I guess this is putting the smallpox onto whiskey barrels for them. The one thing olds like me still use the Internet for, reading things I want to, why not spend more of my day moving my eyes back and forth over words carefully chosen by machine to trigger dopamine spikes in my head?
Au contraire, it's the most successful of products, an innovation that comes from a purported flaw. Due to distraction while it was made its handle is so short it can only be wielded by one hand, which is all Thor needs to deliver his "mightiest blows." The implication is that Thor's two handed swings would break any weapon.
Dan, isn't it pretty clear? GPT-3 is not becoming more human. You're becoming more of a robot. The very nature of therapy is that a real, imperfect, unpredictable person is listening. GPT-3 doesn't want to solve your problems. It just wants to make you click on it.
Apple has always had conflicts between its business interests and the "bicycle for your life" ethos. We just used to not notice because they were bringing us such great shiny new things on a regular basis. It's been a long time since Apple has made any innovative software for your digital life. Despite the ability to steal and claim any good idea created for iOS for the last 15 years I can't think of how any Apple application or software-based utility has affected my life in any positive way for a number of years.
Native New Yorker here. Out of towners are obsessed with the BEST slice, but the true measure of NYC's 45 degree greatness is the decent quality following a Poisson distribution. My tip: just travel to any random spot in the five boroughs. First; you will be impressed how close you are to a pizza spot wherever you are. Second: you will be impressed with the slice, and with the variety of people who are good at making it.
Have any nerdy Congresspeople wanted to solve this ridiculous inefficiency in recent years. Seems like a natural "the Europeans kick our ass at forecasting" message would go over well and potentially negate the lobbying from Weather Channel and others with a vested interest in perpetuating this stupid situation.
This really brings back the memories. So many great ideas executed to 90%, all in a wacky brightly colored package. I was one of the leaders at Palm in 2000 and we did a pretty deep dive on partnering with Yang while looking at the device. I even went to Moscow to check out the small army of teenagers he had thinking up games by the boatload and spinning ideas of a teenager-led digital revolution. Yang understood the teenager customer really well but not the economics of devices: a sophisticated and complex wireless device built to look like a toy but costing well over $100. We wanted him to come up with a better made device that parents would buy for their teens (post 9/11 security) with all the Cylandia concepts and better working radios, but he had his own ideas of taking the product in a million directions at once.
A good introduction but there has been much work since this came out. See these more recent books by an historian that looks at things through the lens of two prominent North American nations:
It may be clearer to those of you who are smarter than me, but I guess I've only recently begun to appreciate what these experiments show--that AI graphical art, literature, music and the like will not succeed in lowering the barriers to humans making things via machines but in training humans to respond to art that is generated by machines. Art will not be challenging but designed by the algorithm to get us to like it. Since such art can be generated for essentially no cost, it will follow a simple popularity model, and will soon suck like your Netflix feed.
This is complete idiocy. Celebrities and billionaires don't get special speech rights. There are very good reasons all aircraft are tracked publicly. If Elmo's plane ever goes down or gets hijacked he might appreciate why. According to Twitter's new "policy" any person who takes a picture of someone in front of the Eiffel tower or any recognizable place can be accused of doxxing and banned.
No, not as always. The laser confinement mechanism works, it has been shown, lasers that are more than 20 times as efficient as these NID lasers are now available, so the improvement needed to scale and "commercialize it," whatever that really means looks more like 10x than 200x. In the world of fusion, that counts as really good progress. For one thing, perhaps a lot of the research money will move to lasers now.
>From an instution standpoint there are some bad apples but....
He makes it easy to tell where he is coming from by using the straw man for all apologists for system failure, those pesky few bad apples.
Fortunately he also states clearly the main problem with a healthcare system run in a semi-corrupt, neoliberal developed country (think aging population):
>I've spent the bulk of my career as a CEO and senior executive operating large health systems.
It never ceases to amaze me how experts at something can't resist trying to be experts at everything. His examples from political science are just so off, but I have to concentrate on his example of Mearsheimer. Far from being one step or two ahead of the crowd, Mearsheimer's problem has been that he's still standing back in the 1980s. His realpolitik approach was refreshing and appealing for the time whensomewhat phony Cold War ideology and its false equivalences and distinctions permeated our politics and academia. But in trying to fit world events to his great power nonsense, he deeply distorted what happened in Ukraine in 2014 and seems unable to see that Russia has never truly acted like a modern state but remains an internal empire that while spanning a continent has an economy the size of Brazil, and less institutional capacity than most Latin American nations. The idea that we could somehow make common cause with Russia to counter China's rise has always been an old joke. The 2022 war in Ukraine was expertly predicted by a political scientist, but it was in 1993, when my grad school professor Ilya Prizel pushed back against all the End of History BS and said Russia would eventually assert itself in the middle of Europe, if desperately. He was dead right.
The best part of his engrossing Twitter thread is that he inserts a multitweet interstitial "ad" for his passion project promoting reforestation right in the middle of his spiel.
Um, are you aware that this quote was uttered to justify the prosecution of a man for protesting the draft in WWI? And that is legal today to shout it as loudly as you want?
This is a truly horrible trend. A huge failure of one of few the things almost all agree government is for. Where I live in California I have decided that besides Best Foods mayo and a couple of items like corn syrup for pecan pie once a year, I have no reason to walk into a chain grocer and instead buy locally from produce stores in my neighborhood or from Trader Joe's which has both excellent quality and excellent value if less SKUs. It has greatly improved my life as a consumer.
Appalling tone of conversation. Comparing a multibillion dollar high tech company's workplace safety procedures to street violence in poor parts of the US or in mechanized agriculture is insulting. SpaceX has tried to ignore this tragedy and their silence and opaqueness about it mean nothing will be learned that could prevent the next disaster.
Not an expert but I believe the problem with molten salt cooling for reactor designs is that nuclear reactors are supposed to just run for decades without replacing major parts that are really really radioactive. We just can't make parts that will resist corrosion for that long, unlike those towers in the solar arrays, which are really simple to replace. That's leaving aside the high level waste recovery, disposal, and storage issues.
The ADPPA seems like a great example of regulatory capture and gridlock of the federal government by rich corporations and individuals and how federalism (state's rights) is a crucial and increasingly fragile element in holding our economy and our society together. Privacy is a particularly fraught area. SCOTUS says it's not a constitutional right at all (unless it's your money, in which case it's speech), which means states will have to define not data privacy and the limits of the surveillance economy but abortion and marriage and contraception too.
The Mormons are fascinating for many reasons and highly skilled at building a certain kind of American community. One of the things they are best at is spinning their clean scrubbed version of history, which as with many groups has as many despicable acts as heroic ones. They were indeed quite persecuted on their flight across the continent, but that traumatic origin story doesn't justify to me some of the less attractive aspects of modern day LDS culture. Some interesting reading:
All this somewhat strained perfection does have a cost, however. Utah leads the nation in rates of anti-depressant use and several types of cosmetic surgery. [1]
People that charge class warfare just don't want anything to change. Wealth accumulated by the rich mostly by burning dinosaurs is just as fictitious as any QE from the Fed.
I think they are saying the earliest extant minerals that crystalized on Earth are zircons that formed within the first 100 my of the planet's formation. The minerals he is talking about show up here on meteorites from elsewhere in the solar systems and predate the planetary nebulae by billions of years.
Let's realize the real AI success story here is the increasing speed with which Google's HR algorithms can identify researchers who need to be fired because they threaten Google's fragile advertising cartel.