itsyonas

All right, but perhaps they should also list the grand promises they made and failed to deliver on. They said they would have fully self-driving cars by 2016. They said they would land on Mars in 2018, yet almost a decade has passed since then. They said they would have Tesla's fully self-driving robo-taxis by 2020 and human-to-human telepathy via Neuralink brain implants by 2025–2027.

> - <Denial despite the insane rate of progress>

Sure, but not by what was actually promised. There may also be fundamental limitations to what the current architecture of LLMs can achieve. The vast majority of LLMs are still based on Transformers, which were introduced almost a decade ago. If you look at the history of AI, it wouldn't be the first time that a roadblock stalled progress for decades.

> But I bet it would catch up real fast to GCC with a fraction of the resources if it was guided by a few compiler engineers in the loop.

Okay, so at that point, we would have proved that AI can replicate an existing software project using hundreds of thousands of dollars of computing power and probably millions of dollars in human labour costs from highly skilled domain experts.

> I sometimes have the image that Americans think that if the all Chinese got to read Western produced pamphlet detailing the particulars of what happened in Tiananmen square, they would march en-masse on the CCP HQ, and by the next week they'd turn into a Western style democracy.

I'm sure some (probably a lot of) people think that, but I hope it never happens. I'm not keen on 'Western democracy' either - that's why, in my second response, I said that I see elections in the US and basically all other countries as just a change of administrators rather than systemic change. All those countries still put up strong guidelines on who can be politically active in their system which automatically eliminates any disruptive parties anyway. / It's like choosing what flavour of ice cream you want when you're hungry. You can choose vanilla, chocolate or pistachio, but you can never just get a curry, even if you're craving something salty.

> It's weird to see this naivete about the US system, as if US social media doesn't have its ways of dealing with wrongthink, or the once again naive assumption that the average Chinese methods of dealing with unpleasant stuff is that dissimilar from how the US deals with it.

I do think they are different to the extent that I described. Western countries typically give you the illusion of choice, whereas China, Russia and some other countries simply don't give you any choice and manage narratives differently. I believe both approaches are detrimental to the majority of people in either bloc.

I disagree. Elections do not offer systemic change. They offer a rotation of administrators. While rhetoric varies, the institutions, strategic priorities, and coercive capacities persist, and every viable candidate ends up defending them.

This suggests that the Chinese government recognises that its legitimacy is conditional and potentially unstable. Consequently, the state treats uncontrolled public discourse as a direct threat. By contrast, countries such as the United States can tolerate the public exposure of war crimes, illegal actions or state violence, since such revelations rarely result in any significant consequences. While public outrage may influence narratives or elections to some extent, it does not fundamentally endanger the continuity of power.

I am not sure if one approach is necessarily worse than the other.

"Whataboutism" is being overused to the point of meaninglessness. It describes deflecting criticism by raising an unrelated issue. I did not do that. I did not avoid a question or dodge the criticism. I just pointed out an irony.

> I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives.

How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?

Surely I don't need to point out the irony of complaining to the US government about another country wanting to impose extraterritorial laws?

The livestock industry is an ecological disaster of unimaginable proportions. 50% of all habitable land is used for agriculture. Of that land, 83% is used for livestock, despite the fact that it only provides 18% of the calories consumed worldwide.

> While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle.

While governments and politicians generally like to portray themselves as being driven by morals, they are actually driven almost entirely by economic interests.

> So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, [...]

Well, I would like the freedom to live on a planet with an intact ecosystem. I also think that animals would like the freedom to live a life free from unnecessary exploitation.

> [...] and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.

Both are high-impact areas, but changing your diet is much easier than changing your choice of transport - in some countries. Transport emissions account for about 25% of all emissions, 60% of which are caused by individuals' use of cars.

And after all of this, we haven't even touched on what fishing is doing to our oceans.

> Either you need a really anti corrupt body which can do their work and fight against such issues

If changing the system is off the table, then this is what any solution would inevitably look like. I do not think the problem is a flaw in the system though. Calling it a systemic issue is misleading, because the system is largely functioning as designed. The logical response, therefore, is to change the system itself.

That idea sounds frightening, largely because most political parties treat the system as untouchable, presenting it as if there are no viable alternatives (thus convincing people that there are none, making them feel helpless). This creates a dead end: people experience the full force of the system's pressures while being told that nothing fundamental can be changed.

In that vacuum, scapegoating becomes an easy outlet. When the system itself cannot be questioned, frustration is redirected towards marginalised groups, under the implicit belief that punishing or excluding them will somehow relieve the pressure on everyone else, and that's how we ended up at this point (imho).

A system centered on people's needs would judge success by outcomes like health, stability, and quality of life rather than by growth metrics. If a policy reduces stress, improves wellbeing, and lowers long-term costs, it should be pursued even if it shrinks parts of the economy or even the economy overall. The fact that we currently treat any reduction in economic activity as a failure, regardless of human benefit, reveals how misaligned our priorities are.

I hope Zohran succeeds in improving people's lives, but I'm not holding my breath. I've been burned too many times before...

> But one of the things which we saw was that although zohran won, I just didn't expect so much competition in the first place when Cuomo got around 40% I think?

I think this primarily relates to how people are socialised. In Germany, we call this an 'elbow society', i.e. a society where people aggressively push their own interests and compete ruthlessly, showing little regard for cooperation, solidarity or fairness. People feel so lost in the world that they are losing their humanity, only looking out for what maximises their own outcomes. I believe this can be changed, but it will require a large-scale cultural shift driven by society, education, the media, and so on - the same institutions that pushed us in the other direction in the first place.

I do think that this is at the heart of the problem. The issue is not an overall lack of wealth, but how it is distributed. This is not going to change, no matter how many data centres or factories are built in the US. Ultimately, all the wealth will still end up in the hands of a select few.

Not to mention that we are already exceeding a number of planetary boundaries, which endanger humans. The ever-growing demand for natural resources and energy, which is directly coupled to GDP growth, is not likely to end well.

It would work in many cases, though not all. You would not hash everything together. Instead, you hash normalized identifiers independently, such as email address, phone number, or physical address. An incoming dataset would only need to match one of these to be excluded.

> I would assume so. It's sort of a catch 22 because if they delete your data, they have no way of knowing about you when they buy another batch of data. To have some sort of no track list, they have to keep your data.

They could store a normalised, hashed version of your data and use it to filter any incoming datasets. But, of course, why would they?

> Continental USA: 8 million square kilometer.

> Germany: 0.35 million square kilometer.

This does not matter much, since most people do not travel across states, countries, continents, etc on a daily basis. Most people probably travel within a 50 km (30 mile) radius (travelling to and from work, daycare, school, shopping, etc.).

iirc, the average is slightly higher in the US, but this is probably more due to how the US has approached urban planning over the last century or so than to the size of the country.

> But the answer is obviously (trigger warning for the libertarians...) taxes.

I think many people forget the huge societal cost of owning and running cars, including infrastructure maintenance, crash-related deaths and injuries, health conditions caused by crashes, air and noise pollution, climate change, resource extraction, and time lost in traffic. In other words, the savings from reducing these social, health, and environmental costs could easily finance the ticket. A study estimated that a modal shift of 10% to public transit could save Germany about 19 billion Euros a year (https://foes.de/publikationen/2024/2024-04_FOES_OEPNV.pdf).