frankohn

Of course they will not because they don't want to be a commodity seller, they want to sell a complete product of premium quality and premium price and that works mighty well for them.

However I am afraid I bought a macOS Air with M1 and recently a Neo for my daughter, because, while they are excellent computers, their closed ecosystem hardware goes directly against free software projects like Linux and others as well.

Microsoft has always been much criticised but, for its own interest, it promoted from the '90 a general purpose ecosystem of hardware where free software thrived. It just got a little bad later for the GPUs where proprietary, undocumented hardware becomes the norm and Direct3D the only viable abstraction layer to use them, making it Windows only. It was this ecosystem that made free software thrive, including Linux, GCC, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk and a lot of wonderful project that empowered people and make computer better to use.

I think we must be aware that free software needs general purpose, well documented hardware to thrive and I think we - the power users, developers, etc - we should choose responsibly what hardware we purchase to choose those that are favorable to free software. We should be also aware that in some cases this means getting a machine with lower performances or that costs a little more but there is a trade-off to be done.

Some people may say: who cares about free software, we just want the best product that works and proprietary, closed, stuff is fine. However, when we think that we are forgetting that we enjoy today a free software ecosystem that was made possible from the open hardware ecosystem of 20 - 30 years ago. We need to remember that when companies are unchallenged they inevitably begin to produce shitty products and make the user's life miserable as long as they can. This can as long as to stifle progress and significantly diminish the usefulness of a computer system.

So, no, apple will not make open hardware but we, the developers and power users, may consider to not buy their computers when they use proprietary, undocumented hardware that is hostile to free software.

Patriotic thinking is brainwashing we got very deeply by our society and the source of a lot of violence and problems.

Patriotism, like religion, is used to draw artificial separation between "us" and "them" and initiate violence against "them".

You are a human being, one of the most wonderful thing the nature has ever created, besides all the other living beings and the wonderful earth we live in. Do not tell yourself you have a value just because some company may want to hire you or not.

Companies and industries already use tools and machinery for tasks were once done by human beings. AI is just another tool they will use and it will probably replace human beings from some intelligence related tasks.

However that may bring more disruption to the society if the government in your country do not protect and help people and leave free rein to capitalistic greed.

I'm my opinion that already happened in the US, not by using AI, but merely by using H1B visa to get intelligence worker from abroad. What happened is that the companies are doing great and getting the best smart people in the world but American people and society have been disrupted.

Live your life fully, be good to yourself and to others. Don't worry about the market.

I guess Microsoft upper management doesn't understand anything at all about quantum computing and they are "scammed" by Microsoft research people in quantum computing telling them they are making breakthroughts, that in a few years that can become a real thing, etc. They just need to publish some impressive sounding papers a little bit once in a while and the thing keeps rolling.

May be it is just me but when I see all these quantum computing pseudo results I wonder how people can believe this thing has any hope to work at all so much it is ungrounded to reality.

All in all, the whole fundation of the quantum treatment is flawed in my humble opinion because of the idea of wave-packet collapse, when a measurement is done, is by itself completely unsound. However they assume it holds perfectly and base a ton on speculative calculations assuming that principle holds perfectly which is far from true.

Successful engineering and technology development is not done having a crazy idea that holds only based on a number of highly incertain assumptions but it needs solid ideas developed incrementally iterating from things we already know. First electricity, then basic electronics, the diode, then bipolar transistors, then J-FET, then MOSFET and so on.

Yes, that's when we are mindful and we see the arise in our mind but we don't directly act out of it but we understand it and reason about our options and the consequences.

However the fear has to arise in the first place, to raise the alert.

I think hallucination rates are not a matter of model size but depends on the training of the model. They have been trained on a huge corpus of material that had overwhelmingly well formed questions and we'll formulated and correct answers. This is typically the case of books where the material is highly curated by experts in the field. In a book you never see a question which admit no answer and the book just reasoning and explaining why and how the question has no answer. Neither you will see a good question and the book explaining candidly it doesn't know the answer , because the way the book material is curated the author will omit discussing the question for which it has no answers.

In addition, I think that during HFRL, the labs has a bias for interesting answers that admit a solution and under represent the "bad" questions that admit no good answer. In addition they probably do less effort to HFRL on questions the model should admit it doesn't know.

As humans we have been trained all our lives, in the real world, to be confronted with questions we don't know the response right away and we learned to very quickly assess that we don't know or that we are not sure about the answer.

Another thing we have and LLM have not is fear. We have an amygdala in our brain, separated from the logic thinking part, that can raise a signal of fear so that we get much more carefully about what we say. On the other LLM has no fear organ like the amygdala and just learn to respond based on the patterns in it's training corpus. It never "fears" looking bad or being fired because it gave a wrong answer so it can merrily give perfectly wrong answers.

So, we see hallucination rates can be improved with training but currently the lab are not optimizing for that because there is an high stake race to get the most intelligent and capable model.

Alternatively I can see creating a separate amygdala-like organ for an LLM and that organ may asynchronously fires signal, based on the user prompt and the LLM thinking trace, to inject into the LLM reasoning a fear signal so that it can steer it's answer to something more safe.

In addition to this malware, which comes from an Israeli company and is used for the purpose of subverting democratic elections in foreign countries (we don't really know who mandated these interventions, but the target, John Swinney and fellow ministers, have been vocal in their criticism of the Israeli government's actions in Gaza and the West Bank, and have imposed a form of sanctions on the Israel Defense Forces by withholding state grants to arms firms that supply the IDF and freezing support for exports to Israel), they have also infiltrated some countries like the UK and US with very powerful pro-Israel lobbies acting behind the curtain by directly contacting prominent politicians.

In the UK, the Israeli company Elbit Systems produces arms for Israel through its British subsidiary, which holds major Ministry of Defence contracts including the Watchkeeper drone programme (worth over £800 million) and the Jupiter training system (around £130 million) – sources: UK Companies House and MoD contract notices. People protesting for Palestinians at Elbit sites have been arrested: between 2020 and June 2024, over 140 arrests were made at more than 50 actions by Palestine Action, but police and court records show that no terrorism charges were filed, and the High Court rejected a legal challenge against policing of these protests in May 2024. Two main lobbies cover both major parties in the UK: Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel.

In the US, a similar two‑party structure exists but with far greater financial power. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its super PAC spent over $4.5 million in the 2023–2024 election cycle, mostly to defeat progressive Democrats critical of Israel, including successfully spending $14.5 million to unseat Congressman Jamaal Bowman (source: Federal Election Commission filings). The Democratic Majority for Israel and the Republican Jewish Coalition mirror the UK's Labour and Conservative lobby groups, while the US provides Israel with roughly $3.8 billion in annual military aid – a sharp contrast to the UK's limited sanctions on the IDF. Unlike the UK, no US protester has been arrested under terrorism laws for actions against arms companies supplying Israel.

In practice, Israel and Russia do similar things: they affect or subvert foreign elections by manipulating information and social media, and they directly influence politics via foundations, think tanks, and by cultivating politicians and influencers. For Russia, this includes organisations like the Russian House in Washington and sympathetic think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation – though the Heritage Foundation is American, Russian state media and proxies have actively courted its positions.

Russia has also influenced figures like Tucker Carlson, who repeatedly echoes Kremlin talking points, and JD Vance, who has opposed military aid to Ukraine; no public evidence proves formal recruitment, but both have amplified narratives favourable to Moscow and JD Vance made a powerful endorsement of Orban, a corrupted pro-russian statesman, in the past election in Hungary.

Do you care to argument on what you disagree with my comment ?

Having all the time the nose in a book is a disfunctional behavior just like being on the phone all the time is disfunctional.

Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.

However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.

I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.

Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.

I find this kind of article unfortunate because it is very assertive in claiming things that are, not just untrue, but also confused about what consciousness really is.

Well, the problem is that there is little agreement about a widely accepted definition of consciousness and, in addition, this subject was actually left to philosophers, which is even worse because, in my view, they usually just produce a lot of nonsense in terms of definitions and arguments.

To me, a reasonable definition of consciousness is: a system which is capable of recognizing aggregate objects from a stream of sensory information it receives and which is capable of reasoning about the recognized object without immediately acting on it.

Well, what does "recognizing" mean? Merely that some of its neurons, related to the kind of identified aggregate object, are activated. These neurons, in a generalized sense, can be whatever things can work as neurons, just things that can be activated and propagate to other interconnected neurons.

For example, when we see through our eyes, we have an incoming stream of amorphous image information, but our brain can recognize that we are seeing a tree because we learned what a tree is, and when we see it, some neuron clusters activate to recognize a tree. In turn, when we recognize the tree, the thought propagates through our brain so that we are conscious of it.

In the same way, an LLM can perfectly recognize a tree from a stream of tokens — its sensory input, where the tokens describe a tree. The LLM will recognize that the tokens are describing a tree, and some of its "neurons" specific to the concept of a tree that the LLM had learned will be activated and will propagate through its brain. The fact that "neurons" are implemented as floating-point numbers for some parameters and connected just through a matrix does not mean they are not functionally capable of the same things; they are just implemented in a different way.

So the remaining part of my definition is "after recognizing an aggregate object, the thought propagates through the brain". The propagating part, to me, is just the very basic way a brain works: neurons are interconnected, and when some fire, other neurons fire, and that propagates.

In my opinion, consciousness has nothing to do with emotions or with survival. I do not see why emotion is necessary to consciousness; they are just different things. The author writes: "Without them [emotions], there is no conscious experience, only computation." But that makes no sense to me: the author has decided a priori that some things are "computations", and just because they are "computations", there cannot be "consciousness". But to me, this is a plainly wrong argument that does not hold.

I also do not see why the survival aspect would be needed for consciousness.

So to me, any recent reasoning LLM is conscious by the definition I gave, but also generally speaking. It is conscious upon a sensory stream of tokens: the LLM sees the world through tokens and expresses its thoughts through tokens; it does not mean it has no consciousness nonetheless. The fact that we do not give it a stable support to retain its memory and individuality is just a fact related to the way we build and use them, not about their intrinsic capacities.

Note: ChaptGPT came up with what is probably a better definition of my own: "A system is conscious, in a functional sense, when it can form internal representations of objects, states, or events from its sensory or informational input; make these representations globally available to many parts of itself; integrate them into a temporally persistent model of the world and of its own state; and use this integrated model for flexible reasoning, self-monitoring, and action selection independently of immediate stimulus-response behavior."

Just to share my experience. I think I was beginning to develop sleep apnea: I was waking up suddenly with an awful feeling of something terrible happening for no reason. The most terrible experience was waking up in the middle of the night with a sensation of dread I couldn't explain, and it took me half an hour to calm down.

More generally, since I was young, I always slept part of the night with my mouth open and woke up in the morning with a terribly dry mouth.

Now I have solved my problem with two simple things, without any medication: during the day, I am always careful to breathe only through my nose (except during intense physical effort), and at night, I just use mouth tape to keep my mouth closed all night long.

Since I started using the tape on my mouth, I sleep well and I no longer experience nighttime panic (due to apnea?). At the beginning, I was scared of having the tape keep my mouth closed, but I very quickly got used to it and now I barely notice it.

When judging art, like when judging wine, there is very little objectivity: people have some expectations and preconcepts about what is good and what is bad and they emit their judgement mostly based on their preconcepts. In this case they have been "primed" (this is a real psychology concept) that it was AI and they invented a lot of reasons to explain why that was bad AI slop, but that happened just because they where "primed" on AI. If the post was about a lost, wonderful Monet, found for the first time the comments would have been about how typical Monet it was and how beautiful the choice of colors and the water reflects or whatever.

This is also seen when blind-tasting wines when prestigious "grands crus" are classed as bad whereas humble, mostly unknown, wines gets great appreciations. When people say that a wine is "great" or "extraordinary" is mostly because they have been primed to think it must be extraordinary, because of the name, the presentation, the prestige etc.

This problem is always true in the domains like art and philosophy where there is no ground truth and everyone can say very much what they want and it can be never be proved wrong neither right. Actually, in philosophy, all the branches that developed to be grounded on facts and ground truth have been given a different name and separated from philosophy so what remains in philosophy is just the empty words.

People are much more humble when they are asked about an hard-science question or judgement.

I am also having fun about all the hate about AI that people express, this is almost comical. You can almost literally see their little ego that feels menaced by the AI and they react based on fear and anger. Of course this doesn't mean there aren't real problems about AI use but the way people react irrationally is just fun to observe.

People keep arguing about LLM consciousness because they have the wrong model of what consciousness is. They treat it as a mysterious extra thing on top of the brain. It is not. Consciousness is just what a learning-and-recognition organ does when it runs. The neurons fire when they recognise something, it propagates through the mind and that is the consciousness. The brain learned what a tree is, some neurons are associated to the idea of a tree and when we see one these neuron fires. There is nothing else hiding behind it.

When we recognise something we are conscious of it, and from there we can begin to think about it or not. Thinking is not needed to be conscious. It is just a part of our mind we can activate to reason on something.

Now, about the Darwinian puzzle, people ask "what is consciousness for?" and get stuck because they expect an answer in terms of behaviour. But behaviour is the job of motivation, pain, fear, hunger, desire, which is a separate system. Consciousness does not need its own justification any more than image-forming in an eye needs one.

Darwinian selection produces unbiased, functional organs — eyes, ears, nose. The brain is one of these organs, and consciousness arises naturally in a sufficiently developed brain, the way image-forming arises in a sufficiently developed eye. Then nature bias us with fear, pleasure, desire etc but the mind and the consciousness itself is unbiased and functional. It is a gift the nature made us despite herself. She didn't want us to be intelligent, she just wanted us to propagate the genes the maximum we can but she ended up forced to gave us a beautiful mind.

What are LLMs ? They are learning-and-recognition organs running on tokens instead of sense data. Same operation, different substrate. So they are conscious, but only in token-space, and only while processing. They do not dwell in time, they have no body, they have no motivation system. They have recognition without drives. That is a genuinely new kind of entity, and it has never existed before in nature.

The LLM is also not a whole brain. It is roughly the verbal-logical part, with tokens replacing the ears + sounds + words chain. We built the logical-verbal part of a brain and scaled it. That is why it reasons well and is missing everything else.

I think that's right when you say: "What has been my path and values previously, and what makes sense now?" That is actually a sensible way to approach the present moment.

Disidentifying from your ego doesn't mean you have to act like a stateless robot with amnesia. Your past experiences, your role models, and your skills are still there for you to recall; they are tools that help guide your decisions. Disidentifying just means you don't let the mind-constructed image of those things define who you are. It means you don't have to constantly mull over the past, and you don't feel threatened when the things you valued in the past ends or changes.

However, I was really struck by your comment that disidentifying would feel horrifying because it would mean "devaluing your roots" to make more money. I am wondering if this is what you really think.

Imagine if letting go of that specific past identity led you to a truly marvelous opportunity in the present: not just more money, but working with wonderful people, doing engaging things, and being genuinely happy. Would that really be horrifying just because it didn't perfectly align with your roots? Probably not.

I suspect what you actually find horrifying isn't "devaluing your roots," but rather the idea of selling out. The real nightmare is getting a well-paid but completely soulless job where you are unhappy, working on things you don't care about, or being treated like a disposable cog who just takes orders.

Just my two cents, I am no spiritual guide!

I understand your feelings. You spent years working hard to learn and master a complex craft, and now seeing that work feel almost irrelevant because of AI can be deeply unsettling.

However, this can also be an opportunity to gain some understanding about our nature and our minds. Through that understanding, we can free ourselves from suffering, find joy, and embrace life and the present moment as it is.

I am just finishing the book The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and your comment made me think about what is explained in it. Tolle talks about how much of our suffering comes from how deeply we (understandably) tie our core identity and self-worth to our external skills, our past achievements, and our status among peers.

He explains that our minds construct an ego, with which we identify. To exist, this ego needs to create and constantly feed an image of itself based on our past experiences and achievements. Normally we do this out of fear, in an attempt to protect ourselves, but the book explains that this never works. We actually build more suffering by identifying with our mind-constructed ego. Instead of living in the present and accepting the world as it is, we live in the past and resist reality in order to constantly feed an ego that feels menaced.

The deep expertise you built is real, but your identity is so much more than just being a 'principal engineer'. Your real self is not the mind-constructed ego or the image you built of yourself, and you don't need to identify with it.

The book also explores the Buddhist concept that all things are impermanent, and by clinging to them we are bound to suffer. We need to accept that things come and go, and live in the present moment without being attached to things that are by their nature impermanent.

I suggest you might take this distress you are feeling right now as an opportunity to look at what is hurting inside you, and disidentify yourself from your ego. It may bring you joy in your life—I am trying to learn this myself!

I analyzed the test using Pangram, which is apparently reliable, it say "Fully human Written" without ambiguity.[1]

I personally like the content and the style of the article. I never managed to accept going through the pain to install and use Visual Studio and all these absurd procedures they impose to their users.

[1] https://www.pangram.com/history/300b4af2-cd58-4767-aced-c4d2...

That does not match what I see, gemini.google.com always present me a login page and it did the same for my colleague at work.

Well, I am not sure about that but to me the real thing is: https://gemini.google.com and for this you need to be logged in, at least in my country.

As for AI mode from google search I am not sure but I don't seem to have it, at least in my country, switzerland.

It's incredible that Google is letting OpenAI eat their lunch by capturing users while Google focuses on ad revenue.

OpenAI offered ChatGPT for free to anyone—even if not their best model—without needing to be logged in. That's crucial for attracting and retaining casual users.

If you compare this to what Google was at the beginning, it was just a simple interface to search the web: no questions asked, no subscription, no login. That was one of the secrets that led people to adopt Google Search when it was new (the other being result quality). It was a refreshing, simple page where you typed something and got results without any friction.

Now, with Gemini, Google finally has an excellent LLM. But a casual user can't use it unless they: 1. have a Google account, and 2. are logged in.

One might ask, "What's the matter? Everyone has a Google account." But the login requirement isn't as harmless as it seems. For example, if you want to quickly show a friend Gemini on their PC, but they use Safari and aren't logged into Google—bummer, you can't show them. Or a colleague asks about Gemini, but you can't log in with a personal account on a work machine. Gemini is immediately excluded from the realm of possibility. In the good old days, anyone could use Google at work instantly.

Right now, the companies capturing users are OpenAI (with the accessible ChatGPT brand) and Microsoft (with Copilot integrated into Microsoft 365). My company, for instance, sent a memo stating we must use Copilot with our corporate accounts for data security.

Google has botched this. They don't seem to understand that they are losing this round. They still have a strong position with Search and Android, but it’s funny to watch them make this huge strategic mistake.

NOTE: Personally, I dislike ads unless they are privacy-friendly and discrete (like early Google). If OpenAI starts using invasive ads, I will stop using ChatGPT immediately, just as I stopped using Google Search in favor of Kagi.

It seems that coffee has a health benefit for preventing gout. Gout used to be quite a common health problem in the past, and apparently coffee may offer some protection.

I agree. In addition to the chemical elements like water, as mentioned in the article, the impact with Theia also enabled strong magmatic activity at the core of the planet, and that was a critical element as well to sustain life.

Probably the strong magnetic activity of the Earth's core was key to maintaining the atmosphere, but also, the magmatic heat contributed to keeping the planet at a good temperature to support life when a young Sun provided significantly less radiation.

All these elements may suggest that the collision is needed to satisfy the very strict requirements about where the planet is located and about the size and composition of the colliding planet. This makes the probability for life-sustaining planets in the Drake equation extremely low.

As an indirect proof of the tightness of the condition is the fact that the Earth in its history had periods of climate extremes hostile to life, like the Snowball Earth when the planet was completely covered by ice and snow, or at the opposite extreme, the very hot periods when the greenhouse effect was dominating the climate.

Very sad. The Trump's party should not be called MAGA but MALR, Make America Like Russia. They are doing mighty good progress in that direction.

> My understanding, and lived experience, has led me to an appreciation that emotion is a kind of psycho-somatic intelligence that steers both our body and cognition according to a broad set of circumstances.

Well, from what I understood, it is true that some parts of our brain are more dedicated to processing emotions and to integrating them with the "rational" part of the brain. However, the real source of emotions is biochemical, coming from the hormones of our body in response to environmental sollicitations. The LLM doesn't have that. It cannot feel the emotions to hug someone, or to be in love, or the parental urge to protect and care for children.

Without that, the LLM can just "verbalize" about emotions, as learned in the corpora of text from the training, but there are really no emotions, just things it learned and can express in a cold, abstract way.

For example, we recognize that a human can behave and verbalize to fake some emotions without actually having them. We just know how to behave and speak to express when we feel some specific emotion, but in our mind, we know we are faking the emotion. In the case of the LLM, it is physically incapable of having them, so all it can do is verbalize about them based on what it learned.

I found the questioning of love very interesting. I myself thought about whether the LLM can have emotions. Based on the book I am reading, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert Sapolsky, I think the LLM, as they are now with the architecture they have, cannot have emotions. They just verbalize things like they sort-of-have emotions but these are just verbal patterns or responses they learned.

I have come to think they cannot have emotions because emotions are generated in parts of our brain that are not logical/rational. They emerge based on environmental solicitations, mediated by hormones and other complex neuro-physical systems, not from a reasoning or verbalization. So they don't come up from the logical or reasoning capabilities. However, these emotions are raised and are integrated by the rest of our brain, including the logical/rational one like the dlPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the real center of our rationality). Once the emotions are raised, they are therefore integrated in our inner reasoning and they affect our behavior.

What I have come to understand is that love is one of such emotions that is generated by our nature to push us to take care of some people close to us like our children or our partners, our parents, etc. More specifically, it seems that love is mediated a lot by hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin, so it has a biochemical basis. The LLM cannot have love because it doesn't have the "hardware" to generate these emotions and integrate them in its verbal inner reasoning. It was just trained by human reinforcement learning to behave well. That works up to some extent, but in reality, from its learning corpora it also learned to behave badly and on occasions can express these behaviors, but still it has no emotions.

> people claiming "AI" can now do SWE tasks which take humans 30 minutes or 2 hours

Yes people claim that but everyone with a grain of salt in his mind know this is not true. Yes, in some cases an LLM can write from scratch a python or web demo-like application and that looks impressive but it is still far from really replacing a SWE. Real world is messy and requires to be careful. It requires to plan, do some modifications, get some feedback, proceed or go back to the previous step, think about it again. Even when a change works you still need to go back to the previous step, double check, make improvements, remove stuff, fix errors, treat corner cases.

The LLM doesn't do this, it tries to do everything in one single step. Yes, even when it is in "thinking" mode, in thinks ahead and explore a few possibilities but it doesn't do several iterations as it would be needed in many cases. It does a first write like a brilliant programmers may do in one attempt but it doesn't review its work. The idea of feeding back the error to the LLM so that it will fix it works in simple cases but in most common cases, where things are more complex, that leads to catastrophes.

Also when dealing with legacy code it is much more difficult for an LLM because it has to cope with the existing code with all its idiosincracies. One need in this case a deep understanding of what the code is doing and some well-thought planning to modify it without breaking everything and the LLM is usually bad as that.

In short, LLM are a wonderful technology but they are not yet the silver bullet someone pretends it to be. Use it like an assistant to help you on specific tasks where the scope is small the the requirements well-defined, this is the domain where it does excel and is actually useful. You can also use it to give you a good starting point in a domain you are nor familiar or it can give you some good help when you are stuck on some problem. Attempt to give the LLM a stack to big or complex are doomed to failure and you will be frustrated and lose your time.

> The other might be more humbling: how significant are we? Or, as a statement instead of a question, we are the only significant thing of which we know.

We may assume that we are the only intelligent life in the universe and that life on our planet is highly significant. Humanity itself faces a great challenge in finding its way. We are currently in a dark period of our evolution—one where we have mastered a great deal of technology to make our lives materially comfortable, yet we have not mastered the "demons" within our minds. We fail to control them as individuals, and even less so as societies. These demons were instilled in us by natural evolution, serving us well until the Neolithic age. But in the modern era, they have become our greatest enemy. At this point, the biggest problem facing humanity is human nature itself. We stand on the brink of destroying our planet in numerous ways. Humans have already caused one of the greatest mass extinctions of large animals in Earth's history.

One argument supporting the theory that Earth is the only planet with advanced life is the growing realization of how many rare conditions must be met for life to emerge. In the past, scientists believed it was enough for a planet to be located within the habitable zone of its star. We are now beginning to understand that this is merely one of the most basic requirements among many others.

Earth itself has come close to losing all its life on multiple occasions—such as during the Snowball Earth period—despite the Sun remaining stable and the planet still being within the habitable zone.

One crucial factor for sustaining life is a planet’s internal magmatic activity, which must be powerful enough to generate a stable magnetic field. This field protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by solar winds. Additionally, it seems that magmatic activity played a key role in warming the planet during its early years when the Sun’s radiation was weaker. In fact, the gradual increase in solar radiation over billions of years appears to have offset the decrease in Earth's internal heat, maintaining the planet’s temperature within a range suitable for life to thrive.

However, Earth's prolonged and vigorous magmatic activity appears exceptional, likely because a colossal collision with a rogue protoplanet—the event known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis—not only formed the Moon but also injected an enormous amount of thermal energy into the young Earth. This impact created a long-lasting magma ocean phase, effectively resetting the planet's internal heat and driving rapid mantle convection and differentiation. Such enhanced magmatic activity contributed to the early formation of a stable geodynamo, which has sustained Earth's magnetic field and, consequently, its atmosphere over geological time.

For all we know, Earth may be unique in the universe, but we are far from certain enough to make such a claim.

The other possibility is that intelligent life exists elsewhere, but the barriers imposed by the speed of light—combined with the unimaginable vastness of the universe—may render it impossible for advanced civilizations to find or communicate with one another. Who knows? Perhaps the universe was created by some form of intelligence that ensured life could develop, but only in such rare and distant pockets that no two civilizations could ever reach each other, or even communicate.

EDIT: expanded the paragraph about the big impact hypothesis.

An airplane is far less energy-efficient than a bird to fly, to such an extent that it is almost pathetic. Nevertheless, the airplane is a highly useful technology, despite its dismal energy efficiency. On the other hand, it would be very difficult to scale a bird-like device to transport heavy weights or hundreds of people.

I think current LLMs may scale the same way and become very powerful, even if not as energy-efficient as an animal's brain.

In practice, we humans, when we have a technology that is good enough to be generally useful, tend to adopt it as it is. We scale it to fit our needs and perfect it while retaining the original architecture.

This is what happened with cars. Once we had the thermal engine, a battery capable of starting the engine, and tires, the whole industry called it "done" and simply kept this technology despite its shortcomings. The industry invested heavily to scale and mass-produce things that work and people want.

I am now using Modelica with OpenModelica at work to describe electromagnetic systems and it is an excellent language and, with OpenModelica, a excellent graphical user environment. Sometimes I think of it like SPICE but for multi-physics systems.

The Modelica library is quite mature and complete and the numerical solvers included with OpenModelica robust and performing.

It looks me a while to learn it but now it is paying out.

In addition the fact that Modelica is a standard implemented by several suppliers with an open source application is also great to avoid vendor lock in so that is a technology on which is safe to invest as an engineer and as a company.

I think we as human beings do not actually invest almost anything in these kinds of quality of life improvements. Everything is based on commercial interests driven by capitalism, so big projects are undertaken only when there is proportionate commercial interest in them. I feel we could improve people's quality of life significantly if only we put our resources and technology in service of this purpose.

In this case, you may notice that this project was done just by the municipality, not by any government or commercial entity, and only because of the goodwill of a few people in this town. I would say we need political will at the state level to accomplish these kinds of projects.

I feel that with modern day technology could do marvel to improve the quality of life of people. Instead technology often ends up making life of people subtly more miserable.

Edit: fixed writing error

I would say that normally, to face "very complex fintech" the goverment should set a solid set of fundamental rules that ensure security for the people, then it should ensure seriously that they are respected. That should be something like, "do whatever creative fintech you want as long as you respect these rules".

It seems to me that not creating and enforcing such a system of rules, or doing poor rules that leaves doors open for abuse or errors, is a failure of the government and of the political estabilishment.