hwillis

> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933

> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.

> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933

> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.

Lower skilled than office clerks and customer service representatives? Because they were in the study.

> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5219933

> Our main finding is that AI chatbots have had minimal impact on adopters’ economic outcomes. Difference-in-differences estimates for earnings, hours, and wages are all precisely estimated zeros, with confidence intervals ruling out average effects larger than 1%. At the occupation level, estimates are similarly close to zero, generally excluding changes greater than 6%.

> Indeed, the reported productivity benefits were modest in the study. Users reported average time savings of just 2.8 percent of work hours (about an hour per week).

On the grounds that he should have been sent to literally any other country, totally inapplicable to any of the other cases without specific preexisting orders against ES specifically. And notably they have outlined exactly nothing except that the administration had better say how they plan to get him back- the SCOTUS response to the executive saying "we have no plan" was just to say again that they wanted to know the plan.

The government is imprisoning people indefinitely (forever?) for unproven allegations and misdemeanors. They should be able to file habeas petitions for unlawful imprisonment. The courts are doing fuck all about it because the government is contracting to a foreign country to physically imprison them. That's crazy.

> when I hear someone suggest an alternative theory I don't immediately feel the need to group them with everything I think is wrong with the world

Modified theories of gravity are not new and there is nothing immediate about my feelings on them. I understand homeopathy, and I am very confident that the idea that water has a special memory for particular chemicals is very silly. In the same way I understand MOND theories, and they are mostly silly.

> That's how science works. Scientists are not prophets, they do not have the luxury of starting with all the answers.

You are unfamiliar with the history of these theories if you think that their changes have been in any way scientific. MOND originates when the first observations of dark matter were very simple: galactic rotation curves. It was a reasonable attempt to explain why stars at galactic edges rotate faster than you would expect.

Later, we got much more detailed observations which revealed that there was actual, complex structure to those orbital perturbations. Structure that is totally independent of the visible matter. We found the Bullet cluster, where 2 galaxy clusters are orbiting a third invisible cluster.

Rather than admit some of this structure could not be explained, MOND theories grew wildly more complicated, and starting adding in more and more terms with arbitrary constants attempting to fit each new piece of data. That is not scientific. It's not how we got from Newton to Einstein. It's Aether theory.

There are certainly physicists who do respectable work on MOND. They put that work out as a proposal, and recognize how good the evidence for dark matter is. They are a minority of the proponents, and I really mean that. There are a huge number of people publishing fringe time-cube types of theories about it. I am not lightly comparing it to homeopathy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube

Cosmic inflation is the observation, not the explanation. The expectation is that cosmic inflation should be much, much larger based on what we understand about quantum mechanics: that vacuum is practically boiling with energy, and should be forcing stars away from each other. Instead we observe that it is very small.

I was being somewhat tongue in cheek responding to OP, who was not specific about what they find problematic. The vacuum catastrophe is the area in physics where our explanations explain the smallest amount of our observations. We're very confident in our measurements and understanding at both the large and small scale, and there is essentially no explanation that anyone has any confidence in.

By comparison, observations of dark energy/matter are practically perfectly accurate. It's a single order of magnitude difference from expected observations. We have some half-decent candidates to explain them. Unlike magic, inflation is not a theory in search of an observation. The fact that we don't see inflation is what is so desperately confusing.

We would most likely freeze to death. As the black hole crossed the asteroid belt we would be pulled away from the sun as it started to compete with the black hole's gravity. Depending how fast the black hole was moving we might die over a few months or we might freeze to death in a few days. Probably there are paths where the earth would briefly be pulled into an elliptical orbit, and then we would be burnt to a crisp as we circled back close to the sun.

Definitely more problematic. And Webb only made it more confusing :(

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant_problem

> Depending on the Planck energy cutoff and other factors, the quantum vacuum energy contribution to the effective cosmological constant is calculated to be between 50 and as many as 120 orders of magnitude greater than has actually been observed, a state of affairs described by physicists as "the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in all of science" and "the worst theoretical prediction in the history of physics".

There are- things like flat or hollow earth, antivax and HIV deniers, homeopaths etc.

Proponents of all of the above are looking for a grand unifying cosmology. Dark matter and dark energy are confusing and unknown, so people want to just simplify them away. Flat earthers want to simplify away the existence of other planets. Antivaxers want to simplify away medicine.

Because it's complicated astrophysics and largely unknown it is normal to put dark matter and energy theories into a non-fantastical category. The very large majority of physicists think MOND and similar are defunct theories. Dark matter and energy are very different, separate phenomena that just share a name. It does not make sense for them to have a shared explanation. There are also so, so many ways we observe dark matter that make it clear there is matter involved. Every new observation has completely overturned the predictions of every MOND or modified gravity theory, and they just come back with a totally different explanation to fit the new data.

bad news about salt, then.

As if Biden and Trump would not have been replaced at multiple points in their regimes, if the US had a mechanism for it? The trains kept running in France. Sounds like a system that is both more responsive and more stable.

I can tell when a dirt bike is running rough, but that doesn't mean I can design the helmholtz resonator in the exhaust. That difference is engineering.

Not really. Mostly they are built by machines. Extremely skilled machinists work in research or niche development, where they can solve new problems. Very skilled operators can tram a machine better, or eke out more repeatable clamping, and make slightly more accuracy out of an established process.

Their time is much better spent creating new processes or making low-run jigs and things.

> The state of the art (and has been for eons) is hand scraping

No, it absolutely is not. Optics machine tools make things flat and accurate within a few atoms. Cheap surface plates are more precise than any human could hope to achieve by hand.

Hand scraping is remarkable- skill can get you ~micron cutting depth. It would be totally obsolete except that the rough crosshatch pattern it creates is useful for retaining oil. Modern tools, especially the most precise tools, are not hand scraped. Cheap clone knee mills are hand scraped. Single-point diamond cutters run on air bearings with no oil, because the oil gap in plain ways is too large.

Hand scraping is thoroughly limited by the viscosity of the marking fluid. You identify high spots by painting a flat blue and rubbing it on another flat part. If the whole surface rubs off then you can't tell where to scrape. The fluid does not spread out in single atom thickness.

> My brother is an extremely skilled machinist, the sort who could build machine tools if he had the resources.

Machine tools are not designed by extremely skilled machinists, they are designed by engineers. Machinists do not know how frames deflect or resonant modes or overconstraint or the other things that are critical in machine tool design. Machine tools are inherently dynamic systems where moving cutters cause feedback into the system. Being able to make something accurate under static conditions is very different.

> Imagine if you could only see in a very narrow portion of the visible light spectrum, like only green or something.

No, that's how lidar works. Lidars have a single frequency and a very narrow bandwidth. Automotive radars have a bandwidth of 1-5 GHz. They operate around 80 GHz, which is very well reflected by water (including people) and moderately reflected by things like plastic. 80 GHz is industrially used to measure levels of plastic feedstock.

Compare TSA scanner images, which are ~300 GHz: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/a-Front-and-back-millime...

You are correct that most automotive radars like Bosch units [1] are very low detail though. Most of them don't output images or anything- they run proprietary algorithms that identify the largest detection frequencies (usually a limited number of them) and calculate the direction and distance to them. Unlike cameras and lidars they do not return raw data, so naturally when building driver assistance companies instead relied on cameras and lidar. Progress was instead driven by the manufacturers and with smaller incentives the progress is slower.

[1]: https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/solutions/sensors/front-ra...

Backing this up: automotive radar uses a band at ~80 GHz. The wavelength is ~3.7 millimeters, which lets you get incredible resolution. Not quite as good as the TSA airport scanners that can count your moles through your shirt, but good enough to see anything bigger than a golf ball.

For a long, long time automotive radar was a pipe dream technology. Steering a phased array of antennas means delaying each antenna by 1/10,000s of a wave period. Dynamically steering means being able to adjust those timings![1] You're approaching picosecond timing, and doing that with 10s or 100s antennas. Reading that data stream is still beyond affordable technology. Sampling 100 antennas 10x per period at 16 bit precision is 160 terabytes per second, 100x more data than the best high speed cameras. Since the fourier transform is O(nlogn), that's tens of petaflops to transform. Hundreds of 5090s, fully maxed out, before running object recognition.

Obviously we cut some corners instead. Current techniques way underutilize the potential of 80 GHz. Processing power trickles down slowly and new methods are created unpredictably, but improvement is happening. IMO radar has the highest ceiling potential of any of the sensing methods, it's the cheapest, and it's the most resistant to interference from other vehicles. Lidar can't hop frequencies or do any of the things we do to multiplex radar.

[1]: In reality you don't scan left-right-up-down like that. You don't even use just an 80 GHz wave, or even just a chirp (a pulsing wave that oscillates between 77-80 GHz). You direct different beams in all different directions at the same time, and more importantly you listen from all different directions at the same time.

If you wanted to show someone a walkaround of the Sistine chapel or David, would you be better off using triangles and PBR and raycast lighting? You don't really gain anything from all that; you're doing a tremendous amount of computation just to recapture the particular lighting at an exact time. If you want the same detail that a few good pictures capture -tens of millions of pixels- you need to have many billions of triangles onscreen.

With splats you can have incredibly high fidelity with identical lighting and detail built in already. If you want to make a game or a movie, don't use splats. If you want to recreate a static scene from pictures, splats work very well.

Apples, not oranges. This isn't for 3d models and scenes- think of it as a fancy version of streetview or an apartment walkthrough. Those project pictures onto a sphere around you. Gaussian splats are an improvement that uses multiple images to interpolate viewpoints- take two pictures from different angles, and guassian splats let you take a look from between those views, or above or below them.

This method uses ai to generate even more unseen structure, so with relatively few images you can still represent a real scene with some level of fidelity. It will never need dynamic lights or animation because the point is just to look as close as possible to a still image. Splats do that FAR better and more efficiently than you ever could with dynamic lighting, triangulated models, and visual effects.

> the price of the water can’t be equal to marginal cost of getting more water

Increased demand by definition means consumers will pay more for the same quantity. Even if the marginal cost was flat it is in the producers interest to raise prices. You're essentially asking why markets have to do what markets do.

> Water can be piped in from elsewhere, can be made from reverse osmosis from even briney aquifers or seawater or even sewage.

Do you think that costs the same as pumping water out of a lake or water table?

> is it just a mispricing of the water?

...You think a drought is a mispricing of water? As if water was more expensive, there would be no shortage? A draught is a mis-cost of water; when water becomes more expensive than is sustainable.

> Usage fees are then added on top, paying anywhere from $11.35 per megapound in the summer to $35.013 during peak season.

Steam with <1112 BTUs per pound vs room temperature will condense, so the heat value of a megapound of steam is at least 325,895 kWh. That's a marginal cost of 1 cent to 3 cents per MMBtu or 3.5 cents to 11 cents per MWh. The hookup cost ($3,555) is much smaller than the cost of the steam ($13k-$44k per the article).

For comparison natural gas costs a couple dollars per MMBtu and wholesale electricity costs $40-$60 per MWh. *The steam is orders of magnitude cheaper.*

If the article's quoted prices are accurate (note: Lincoln Towers seems to pay $2.43 per megapound, significantly less than the $11.35 usage fee the article gives immediately before. Not sure what's up.) then steam is practically free. I'm not really sure how that's possible; maybe there are subsidies or regulations enforcing production. A significant amount of the steam is from cogeneration, where steam is a byproduct of pollution-reducing processes- it makes sense that would reduce the cost, almost all steam would need to be a byproduct to explain the price.

Uh, no. It's because when plane engines break they fall out of the sky onto things. They break when they aren't correctly modified to take the new fuel. It is not very realistic to mandate conversions for all of the (often quite old) planes today- like from manufacturers going out of business. It is not trivial to convert an engine, fuel system etc. and also meet the same performance so that things like stall and thrust and altitude are still accurate across the important ranges.

In practice, it's a choice between:

1. Banning or buying out older planes at not-insignificant cost 2. Swapping fuels and doing your best to get people to fix their planes, causing crashes 3. Playing it slow, requiring new planes to be compatible with lead-free fuel, building new lead-free infrastructure, and gradually encouraging people to transition

Currently we're doing 3 until it's determined that 1 is cheap enough to do. That said the FAA could certainly be doing more, but that's much more (IMO) on them not taking the issue seriously than on voters being appeased. Its a national agency, not the local school board.

Aha! But you have neglected steps as well, fetid ignoramus!

You portray such a +++ animal as simple and obvious, but indeed in fact you would need (++++++):

1) adherins and cadherins to bind this sheet together 2) an organelle to produce and regulate the cellular proteins 3) a method to encode those proteins 4) a method to replicate and propagate that encoding so that new proteins can be encoded 5) start and stop codons and a method of duplication or recombination errors to allow for new copies of protein encodings to be created separately from old copies...

I wondered if o1 would do better- seems reasonable that step-by-step trying to produce legs/torso/head/horn would do better than very weird legless things 4o is making. Looks like someone has done it: https://openaiwatch.com/?model=o1-preview

They do seem to generally have legs and head, which is an improvement over 4o. Still pretty unimpressive.

Cambridge analytica had all data associated with real names, and it included all your likes and even some people's private messaging.

Yes, anonymized research data is very different.

When I have done things like this, I just grab a slider or input and wire it to a uniform. Uniforms are passed into the shader and can be updated without recompiling.

> > or to find someone to hold accountable > This is why it would have to be decided by a judge as part of sentencing. If they're actually accountable then why shouldn't they be held to that?

I am more insinuating that it will lead to much more falsified evidence- something that is already a problem even while completely shielding them from consequences.

> why? It's their fault the public had to spend money on this, so why shouldn't they pay for it?

Because that isn't really accountability, practically speaking. The department funding is very distantly coupled to personal impact. When a division of a company does badly, they don't cut its funding as a form of incentive or punishment. Individual performance is done through the system of management and personal incentive. You don't want to fund the police based on how many crimes they solve- you do it based on how much crime exists. Likewise you shouldn't cut funding for bad policing- it's something that can also just be actively managed instead of simplified to a budgetary concern.

Biosafety prevents or delays the farm from being infected. It doesn't lessen the impact once it happens. One bird can infect all the others in hours even when they are in separate buildings just from spreading on clothing. If they are infected they will die.

If a small farm gets an infected bird, they can't just raise the prices of their eggs. Those eggs will just disappear from the stores because all the birds are dead. If they are doing rigorous isolation, like hiring totally separate people taking care of completely isolated flocks, that should increase their prices. Farms that are spending more money on isolation and chosing not to increase prices are still at high risk- they just haven't been unlucky yet.