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For once, the Italian fascination with grammar and sentence analysis comes useful.

For some context, when moving abroad I felt that most other countries don’t really teach grammar and language analysis to the point that we do in Italy. I did attend a language-focused school, which obviously leaned even more towards this tendency; but I get the impression that most competent teens graduating italian schools have a more extensive grammar-related vocabulary than other cultures.

It makes sense then that Italian learning books would be more focused on grammar compared to other languages. I felt it extended to how we were taught English as well (i.e. the opposite direction). I don’t think it is the absolute best tactic for language learning, but perhaps it is the best one when restricted to purely written exercises.

I’d be curious to know whether you had a similar impression. My evidence is all anecdotal, mostly from talking to various people around Europe.

For example this one:

https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyp166

It’s a decently big meta-review. It cites studies which more or less say exactly what I said very early, e.g. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02071515

I might be completely wrong, of course. I’d rather be proven wrong than stay ignorant, so please do share the studies you had in mind.

Look at that, there are all exactly the same problems as space data centers! Although I’m surprised by cooling underwater being hard.

This is precisely the picture that I seemed to get when looking at this in depth some time ago. Most meta-reviews highlight a correlation between _number of blistering sunburns_ and melanoma. Not between actual amount of UV exposure. You may think that they’re the same, but they’re not. In fact, the same meta-review was noticing weak anti-correlation between chronic sun exposure and melanoma, I.e. people who work outside shirtless actually have better odds than baseline.

Most risk seems to come from occasional exposure to extremely strong sunlight compared to your day-to-day baseline. Practically speaking, if your skin is able to tan, absorbing as much sunlight as your environment allows for most of the year, with the intrinsic gradual build-up over spring, should be harmless if not even beneficial.

Of course, this highly depends on your genetics and your location. Avoid sunbathing around the equator regardless. And if you’re physically unable to tan, as some people do, then this might not be true either. I couldn’t determine that as easily.

Absolutely. Even in extended thinking mode it was thinking for only a few seconds in prompts that used to take minutes. Much faster token/s in any mode and significantly worse, exactly as you describe.

It seems like they might still be heavily nerfing / quantizing the models in production a couple weeks before a new release, like they have always (unofficially) done.

That’s exactly the thought process of every teenager ever, and also most people who want to connect with their friends through gaming beyond their teenage years.

Not everyone experiences gaming the same way.

A genre is a volume in song space.

More seriously, there’s no reason you can’t assign more than one genre to a song, or say that “it’s a mix of A and B”. You can extend the concept to albums and artists just as easily.

I’m not familiar with R.E.M., but on rateyourmusic.com they’re marked as alternative rock, jangle pop, pop rock, indie rock, neo-psychedelia, and folk rock. “Don’t go back to Rockville” is marked as Jangle pop, and the “Reckoning” album overall is mostly Jangle pop with some influences from post-punk and Paisley Underground.

You may not agree with these categorizations, but it’s a crowd-sourced website so you can go vote for different genres. You may also disagree with the existence of all of these genres, some of which I’ve never heard of myself (but as I said, I haven’t listened much to R.E.M. in general), but my point is more that if you’re familiar with them then you kind of know what to expect from the song.

I’d never heard “don’t go back to rockville”, but just from these genres you named to make your point, I already knew what it would approximately sound like. And indeed listening to it confirmed that.

I haven’t used an android device in 2 years, but I was just like you for almost a decade. At some point I got tired of all the micro-annoyances that I had with android and my oneplus phones (my last one was the oneplus 7T), such as awful brightness sensor, terrible compass, suboptimal gps, and low quality vibration engine. All stuff that you’ll never hear about in an actual review, for some reason. My music player is an app called “Music”, and my ebook reader is an app called “Books”. I have spent exactly zero seconds looking for these apps since they’re already included with the phone, and are not developed by an unknown hero that could be hit by a bus at any moment. On books I read books that I bought from the iTunes Store, and epubs or pdfs that I downloaded online. I can access the epub files of both my own and the store-bought stuff from my mac’s filesystem. Everything is fully synced to all of my other devices through iCloud, a service which I’ve spent zero minutes setting up and zero minutes maintaining. These apps have all features I need, since all I want them to do is open my files and keep track of progress. They’re not customizable and I don’t care about it. I could download open source apps from the App Store or alt-store if I wanted to. I pay 3 euros/month for my cloud storage. It works and I haven’t had problems with it. I share it with some family members. My browser is safari with uBlock origin lite. Admittedly I had to spend some time looking for a decent ad blocker, it’s not as easy as android. I’m also not trying to live a minimalist or retro life, although I appreciate the ideology. My main philosophy right now is just that my phone is a tool through which I read books and listen to music (among other things). It has some limitations, but they’re not important. I don’t want to have to think about setting up a media server to listen to music, or figuring out syncthing settings once again because it’s been 3 years since I last set it up and it now broke all of a sudden. I just want to not have to think about this and get on to more important aspects of life.

Basically everyone who has played videogames on pc will notice the difference. I easily notice a drop from 360Hz to 240Hz.

I also use 60Hz screens just fine, saying that getting used to 120Hz ruins slower displays is being dramatic. You can readjust to 60Hz again within 5 minutes. But I can still instantly tell which is higher refresh rate, at least up to 360Hz.

Thank you for your clarifications. I don’t really know what to make of these experiences, I know for sure that it can’t be much more than a small percentage of tourists getting pickpocketed. Plausibly, the people with negative experiences are a loud minority.

I also now realize that my original comment may seem harsher than I intended. I fully understand your point of view since I was also born in a comparatively poor place, and I realize how uplifting it is to see everything around you improve at a rapid pace. But despite this, cases like that of Naomi Wu are egregious. Nobody can say for sure how much each “inconvenient” aspect of her online presence (accusing companies, being openly gay, having an Uyghur partner) has contributed to her shutdown, but the fact is that this person can’t publish her videos on tech anymore. This is very hard to justify for me.

Nonetheless, thank you for sharing your opinion. It is very valuable to get your perspective here.

Southern Italy. We’ve had burglars once actually, but that’s about it. I’ve since then also lived in Switzerland and Sweden, which are obviously much safer. Perhaps I’m too optimistic, but I don’t see the point in worrying about this. I take my precautions like anyone else and that’s about it.

Anyhow, sorry to hear about your experience. That’s how statistics work I guess. For any particularly unlucky person there’s a correspondingly lucky person that averages them out.

Conning is definitely more of a thing, but I wouldn’t place it in the same league as pickpocketing of tourists. Which of course is a thing, I don’t want to deny it. Just that using it as a reason to avoid Europe is absolutely blowing it out of proportion.

Don’t you think you’ve been influenced by propaganda? You have admitted yourself that you couldn’t even find information on Naomi Wu.

I’ve lived in Europe my whole life. I’ve never been robbed or felt unsafe. It’s also a very diverse region so it’s hard to generalize. But the supposed “decay of the west” is mostly internal propaganda from our very own anti-migration right wingers.

But regardless, I’d take having a 0.001% chance of my wallet (which contains zero valuables) being stolen versus being silenced by the government for criticizing the regime or being unable to acknowledge your sexual orientation. Let alone all the history rewriting and censorship.

The point is that this is not what people were worried about in the 70s. Even halving the population we’d still have all of these problems. While we obviously don’t suffer from famine, at least not globally.

Those predictions have completely failed and were replaced by new issues.

As a relatively young person with good eyesight, I can’t really say that Liquid Glass has caused any real visibility issues for me. I think it looks pretty sleek 95% of the time. The app search when pulling down from the home screen is much faster, it has a delay of almost 1 second before which feels more like 0.1s now.

But nonetheless, there’s so many more bugs and visual glitches. Battery life is still unstable and feels markedly worse than before. Safari looks cool, but UI buttons being on top of content is foolish for the reasons highlighted in this article. Overall, it’s just much more visually inconsistent than before. And the glass effect on app icons looks blurry until you get 5cm away from the screen and really pay attention to the icons. I definitely won’t be upgrading my Mac any time soon.

I just wish we would get away from this annual upgrade cycle and just polish the OS for a while. We don’t need 1 trillion “features”, especially when they increase the complexity of the user experience. MacOS in general did this very well, ever since I switched I’ve been very impressed at how much you can accomplish with the default app in macOS, all while looking cleaner and leaner than windows software. No new feature is even close to that balance of power and UI simplicity anymore.

I mostly disagree.

> I was not just counting clicks; I was watching behavior.

This is completely superfluous. The rest of the paragraph is fine, but the only real ChatGPTism is this one.

> They are not just hitting your site and leaving; they are programmed to mimic engagement

In this case it’s a valid sentence. What makes it sound overly AI are the semicolon and the timing, which is exactly the usual “it’s not just {1-5 words}; it’s {1-5 words}”.

Also, perhaps I’m not a typical audience member (I’m not), but I was not assuming any of that. I would try to explain how I parse this kind of language, but the gist is that a 10 sentence word with unambiguous meaning doesn’t really leave space for interpretation. Your attempt to “anticipate what the audience is thinking” is just a writing style, nothing deep about it.

My point mostly being that, as I mentioned in the parent, this is clearly a text written in the ChatGPT style, with simple yet over-expressive language. I personally heavily dislike the style, but I’m a non native speaker used to either scientific or fiction prose. I don’t encounter it too often, and to me it sounds like a parody of Silicon Valley vernacular. Scam alerts immediately start firing in my brain. There’s no “good way” of doing it nowadays.

It’s interesting that this matches _exactly_ the ChatGPT writing style. There’s clearly some human data and work behind, but the entire article has the usual “it’s not just X, it’s …”, bold emphasis on specific words, bullet points, and probably more that I’m just subconsciously picking up.

Nothing wrong with using ChatGPT for help of course, I just found it interesting and kind of ironic given the contents of the article. It would be even more interesting if this was the actual writing style of the author, since this must be what ChatGPT was fine tuned to adhere to. Is it the predominant style of communication in adtech?

It’s our job. It’s mundane. It’s only cool again when you step back for these kind of publications, or when you go to a conference and you see a bunch of adjacent (and importantly, completed) work. 99% of the time we look at a screen / piece of paper / whiteboard.

There is no obvious limit to how big you could scale up this experiment right here. In practice, these circuits are already big enough that you can quite literally see them with the naked eye (~mm in length). Nothing really stops you from making one meters in diameter, aside from the obvious impracticality of cooling such a massive structure to the required temperature. Nobody expects this to break any known physics by doing so. In fact, some of these experiments have also been used to estimate lower bounds for nonlinear versions of quantum mechanics (where collapse is a real thing, and the larger an object is, the faster it collapses).

But you should not really think of a physical wall in this case. The experiments that have proven the macroscopic tunneling behave according to the same exact math, but nothing is really tunneling through macroscopic walls. The cooper pair electrons are, but that’s a different Nobel prize (Josephson, 1973).

This is pretty much what we do to apply small bias currents to our superconducting circuits. The signals are small (<1 uA), and the power is dissipated outside of the cryostat, so this method is very simple and effective. The voltage and resistors don’t even need to be that huge, ~10 MOhm or below, and correspondingly, <10 V.

Apes do have opposable thumbs. They still don’t really engage in any intellectual activity that we can recognize beyond basic communication. They probably have an internal dialogue, but their curiosity and capacity for communication stops at immediate needs like hunger and danger.

What we’re exceptional at is survival. To the point where as few as 1% of our species even needs to think about making food. Also, citation needed on the complexity of whale songs exceeding the complexity of human language.

But besides, this is not the point. What I question about this rhetoric is using human-developed moral frameworks to justify that we’re somehow a “disease” roaming the planet. As if a tapeworm that were to achieve total worldwide domination would stop and think “wait, I shouldn’t reproduce further because other creatures may suffer”. Same story with any other mammal.

The reality of it is that we are clearly among the most successful species. Keeping the environment safe from us is extremely important, but undermining our own achievements and romanticizing other species whose only virtue is being less successful at surviving than us is strange. With our own moral codes, no less.

I’ve seen different figures for information content of DNA but they’re all mostly misleading. What we actually inherit is much more. We are the result of an unpacking algorithm starting from a single cell over time, so our information content should at the very least include the entirety of the cell (which is probably impossible to calculate). Additionally, in a more general sense, arbitrarily complex behavior can be derived from very simple mathematics, e.g. cellular automata. With sufficient complex dynamics (which for us are given by the laws of physics), even very small information changes lead to vastly different “emergent behavior”, whatever that means. One could improperly say that part of the information is included in the laws of physics itself.

A biological example that I like: the neural structures for vision develop almost fully formed from the very beginning. The state of our network at initialization is effectively already functional. I’m not sure to which extent this is true for humans, but it is certainly true for simpler organisms like flies. The way cells achieve this is through some extremely simple growth rules as the structure is being formed for the first time. Different kinds of cells behave almost independently of each other, and it just so happens that the final structure is a perfectly functional eye. I’ve seen animations of this during a conference talk and it was one of the most fascinating things I’ve ever seen. It truly shows how the complexity of a biological organism is just billions of times any human technology. And at the same time, it’s a beautiful illustration of the lack of intelligent design. It’s like watching a Lego assemble by just shaking the pieces.

What’s the problem with releasing a server executable? As far as I can tell that would be enough to get around this legislation. And I can’t imagine that to be prohibitively expensive.

Literally it means “things that we wish for”, from the latin verb “desiderare” (to wish).

I would rather have self expression than draconian laws. All Western European countries are as safe as they need to be.

It could also be that their brain is somehow just more optimized. Some extreme outliers (e.g. Von Neumann or Tao) don’t seem to have any significant gaps in their abilities. Although Von Neumann did die of a brain-related issue, so perhaps what was gained in efficiency was lost in reliability. Kind of like tuning an engine.

But this is biology after all. Most likely, plain improvements with zero downsides, very narrow improvements at the expense of something else, and improvements at the expense of life expectancy, are all possible mutations.

Decades of research on the g factor seem to imply that most cognitive tasks are indeed heavily correlated.

Nobody would be communicating with neutrinos or gravitational energy. EM radiation is way easier to emit and detect, and at cosmic distances they all scale exactly identically (inverse square law). The other things you mentioned are mostly sci-fi inventions and there’s nothing in known or unknown physics that would hint towards them being plausible communication media.

It’s not about being shortsighted, it’s about everyone being constrained by the same laws of physics. Our models, however imperfect, are still unreasonably good.

IIRC the highly diffractive nature of the medium limits resolution to something like 1 cm^3. I’m not an expert but I talked with some people working in the field a few years ago and this is what I remember. The computational problem is almost intractable.

No short term brain computer interface with optical techniques just yet.