goethes_kind

Meh. I guess people like the style. The Honda Cub had far more impact worldwide and is a superior machine in every aspect.

pg doesn't support this, so I don't buy these conspiracy theories.

We got so far with transformers and huge amounts of compute and huge amounts of data. If we can get an architecture that is able to extract a slightly higher order of reasoning it will have a cascading effect when we apply the same level of compute and data. I see lots of potential for progressive improvement in this direction. Problem is, it's quite expensive to develop and test new architectures, but that's were the financial capital comes in.

With all the capital behind these LLM companies, I would be surprised if we don't see any architectural improvements that lead to better reasoning. Training bigger and bigger models is clearly not sustainable, so I'm sure all of them are working in this direction. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the first time that AI has so much financial capital behind it.

Populism is just democracy taking the reigns back from the entrenched political establishment. There is nothing democratic about a social class of bureaucrats gatekeeping all political offices. If anything, it seems to me that populism is necessary to overcome the local minimum that the political landscape settles in from time to time.

From a game theoretical perspective this is a good result. It is a clear reiteration of the message to the Democrats: you won't win by claiming to be 0.1% less bad. The Democrats should have fielded a strong personality in their own right. This is not about left or right. It's about mobilizing people by giving them something to care about. "More of the same" and "not like that guy" isn't very enticing.

I don't think the policy positions even matter that much, if you can make a strong case and gain the confidence of the electorate.

There is just no upside to founding your tech startup in the EU. You'll just be at a disadvantage. And as long as we have a unified US/EU market, this is not something that can be fixed. This has always been the downside of any kind of trade agreement that opened up the markets to foreign competition. Typically, the two parties pick winners and losers. Europeans export cheese and wine and Americans export Google and Facebook.

My reading of this: the EU wants to give its old fashioned SME software houses a chance with their software products, against the likes of FAANG that typically offer the software for free.

Of course this also hurts EU startups, but that does not concern Brussels because the whole EU establishment is always defending the incumbents. And this is imho one of the reasons the EU is falling behind, because incumbents don't react well to paradigm shifts. It's a losing strategy. For all its many faults the US seems to have realized a long time ago that you cannot protect incumbents at the cost of startups.

I'm very happy with this one and in general I agree with the theories put forth.

That press release is a bit fucked though. Where did European colonizers create inclusive economic institutions? In the US? Australia? Canada? South Africa? That's not an accurate portrayal of what really happened.

No, you will ruin your life.

If this was politics, "impressive" wouldn't be the adjective used.

Why is there only one Apple, anyway? It does not make sense to me. Their niche is luxury consumerism + overbearing paternalism. I don't think that is hard to replicate.

Since BlackBerry gave up on making smartphones, there is no other phone manufacturer trying for the same market. Sure you can buy an Android with cutting-edge tech specs, but you don't get the Apple customer experience and the brand recognition.

I think, most people who want to be immortal are actually motivated by either the fear of death, or the desire to travel far and experience life in the future. But these are distinct motivations.

Immortality itself does not compute. It just does not make sense. You are a product of your time. So if you end up 10000 years in the future, what is going to happen? It wouldn't be good if you were still you, a 2000 millennium person. So lets say you managed to evolve entirely to become a 10000 millennium human (if that's even a thing). Then, you're not really you anymore. There is no discernible continuity. So in effect it's like you died and were reborn multiple times over. "Immortality" only really makes sense over smaller timescales on the order of centuries, at most.

I can tell you, I have relatives who were alive before WWII and although they are alive, they are not part of the present. They are not fascinated by AI, they are not on Instagram or TikTok, they are not really partaking in the present, but mostly reminiscing the life they used to have in their childhood and early adulthood.

Not directly answering your question, but if I were in your exact position, I would consult for local startups. I don't mean, being a programmer for hire. I mean actual expertise consulting. I think that would be super fun, and a way to invest in early startups without putting your hard earned $$$ at risk.

Here's a question since everyone keeps bringing up the DotCom bubble. Although the bubble burst, have not the people who were building in the 1999, still more than made up for their losses by having the know-how and being able to capitalize on the subsequent emergence of the WWW as we know it today?

Could we not one day come up with an AI that is more empathetic than the average human?

I'm in my 30s but I'm feeling this so hard.

Growing up we used to have these kid/youth centres that were run by local Catholic organizations. We used to hang out there after school. Ostensibly the point was that there'd be 30 minutes of catechism doctrine, but we didn't really care about that. To us it was just a the place where everyone would be. I miss that so much. A place where you can just go and meet people your age, without any reason to be that and without having to pay an entrance fee.

Now as a grown up we have community centers, which are run, not by the Church, but by sort of hippie-lefty people. But it's not really the same atmosphere, because you go there, and it's just one demographic of people. It's not quite the same.

There's also pubs and climbing gyms which people often use as low effort places where one can mingle, but again, it's not quite the same. I don't like drinking multiple times a week and I really don't like climbing.

Ah, my memory is failing me, but I wanted to recommend you a career path. IIRC it was about creating formal certifications for industry to follow. It includes little actual maths, but lots of formal reasoning and therefore well suited for mathematicians. I remember some people gave a recruitment talk at our uni's math department in Germany about this very, little known career path. Jobs exist both in the public sector (als Beamter) and private sector too.

Somebody maybe help me remember the actual job title. I cannot recall what they are called in neither English nor German.

DISCLAIMER: If you have back/spine problems and you delay surgery because you hope the problem would go away on its own, with healthy living, you might end up with damaged/dead nerves which is irreparable damage, which even a delayed surgery cannot fix.

With regards to for-profit medicine, this is why I hate all market based health insurance systems. Even if you are rich and get treated like a king, you still have to question whether your doctor/surgeon is trying to sell you a procedure. The only system that does not suffer from this issue is the NHS (e.g. UK) where the incentive is lacking. The debate about health care systems tends to focus on availability and coverage, but this for-profit perverse incentive is orthogonal to all that.

AI is not rocket science. It's child's play compared to space tech.

What exactly is causing the fiction? Is it that there are some laws that make cross-border funding a challenge? Or is it simply that it is hard to network and gain the confidence of VCs if you don't live close to where they operate from?

What difference does a "working financial market" make?

What would be different if the company was based in mainland Europe? Wouldn't Microsoft and Nvidia still be able to invest?

I agree that the problem is not entirely to be blamed on the respective governments. The lack of private investment is a fundamental part of the puzzle. I have been trying to figure out why private capital loves to take huge risks in the US but is so financially conservative in Europe and I am not yet satisfied with the answers I get.

I should be for this, because this is how I make my living in the most literal sense.

But to be honest, I am dismayed with how the ecosystem works in the EU. Billions upon billions of funding for research, some of it good and (let's face it) a lot of it not so good. But either way, no commercialization will result out of all this fundamental research. Any commercialisable results will be spun into startups in the US and China decades before any EU entity follows their path. The many scientists trained with this funding; many of them will end up in the US, and maybe of them will end up in European companies, but not in any position that would make them use any of their acquired skills.

At a time when the EU economy is falling behind so evidently, I'm frustrated that we have these people in power proposing the same old paradigms that don't really benefit the continent.

You need a social life to be on Instagram, so it has some kind of positive selection, even though those same people might get lost in the fake Instagram world.

      Most leaders I have worked with are too far in the past or 
      will not be interested in me leaving my current   organization.

Doesn't matter. I would ask them anyway. How important your recommendations are is context dependent so you want to figure that out first and then take proportional effort to get some.

One option is to contact some research group and express your interest in volunteering some of your time. Be open about your desire to gain some experience and get a feel of what it is like to do research, and ultimately get a recommendation letter. My sister did that and it worked really well for her.

That's all well and fine, except that is very much not the situation with Israel and Palestine.

Quite the opposite. Israel has the Palestinians entirely cornered and that already for the past 76 years. They have always had the upper hand and could very easily have negotiated a reasonable peace deal. Heck, where they not racist ethnonationalist bigots they would have incorporated the Palestinians in Israel as happens in normal situations when one state decides to land grab another. If anything it is the Palestinians, you know the victims who are entirely cornered and helpless, who should use your argument to justify civilian causalities, but you would be completely horrified if were to write that.

Israel's evil keeps taking me by surprise. I guess when people go down the path of dehumanization there are truly no limits to what they are ready to do.

But what is even sadder is that the supposedly morally superior western world is entirely bribed and blackmailed to stand behind Israel. And then you have countries like Germany where you get thrown in jail for being upset at Israel.

What sounds sensible to me is for Israel to somehow incorporate the Palestinians in a way that Israelis can still feel secure and trust their own government, but without the need to keep a boot pressing on the neck of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian people should be afforded the same judicial and military protection that Israelis currently enjoy.

What the wider region thinks of Israel is something else entirely. I most definitely do not condone any kind of ethnic-based violence. Israel should still continue to serve as a safe haven for Jews worldwide.

Crafting the story as "Arabs v. Jews" or "Muslims v. Jews" is a propaganda narrative. It's Palestinians vs far-right Israelis. There are people of all faiths and ethnicities on both sides.

What the Arabs (not the Palestinians) did wrong, which hurt the Palestinian cause immensely was to expel the Mizrahim after the Nakba. Might have felt like pay back at the time, but it cemented the current geopolitical situation.

But in any case the way forward is deradicalize both peoples and guarantee protections for both.