Are we gonna get a cure for cancer and other devastating ailments? Because if AI gives us that, I'll let it destroy the workplace and boil the oceans. If not, I may be part of the crowd that goes to arson the data centers and hang the barons, when that day comes.
Yes, "interesting" is the right word. The government is talking about suspending cell phones for kids in connection to that. But honestly, what's really scary right now is how many kids and young adults seem to be "zombified" (for lack of a better word), and how bad this turns out later in the job market. Tomorrow I need to have a serious talk with my boss about how we should not hire a prospect because of total lack of in-person interactivity. Immigrants from war and poverty-stricken countries are over-represented in our "successful hires" pool because they still know how to speak.
> Corollary: our brains are basically the dumbest possible solution evolution could find that can host general intelligence.
I agree. But there's a very strong incentive to not to; you can't simply erase hundreds of millennia of religion and culture (that sets humans in a singular place in the cosmic order) in the short few years after discovering something that approaches (maybe only a tiny bit) general intelligence. Hell, even the century from Darwin to now has barely made a dent :-( . Buy yeah, our intelligence is a question of scale and training, not some unreachable miracle.
Hm, interesting. I use Kagi assistant with search (by Kagi), and it has a search filter that allows the model to search only academic articles. So far it has not disappointed. Of course the cynic in me thinks it's only a matter of time before there's so much AI-generated garbage even in academic articles that it will eventually become worthless. But when that turns into a serious problem, we will find some sort of solution (probably one involving tons of roller ball pens and in-person meaty handshakes).
I was planning to use Vimeo for some video hosting... I guess I'll have to self-host now. Oh well. At least this happened before I actually committed to buying a plan or even creating an account. With private equity poisoning the well like this I'll probably be better off hosting my videos in AWS; doubt anybody will be buying them anytime soon.
I don't know if I understand, grasp or agree with the geopolitics in your comment, but the weather in the north has indeed been getting nicer as of late; last summer I spent quite some time swimming in the beach without wearing thermal suits or anything at all really. So if anybody thinks that living in US is a tough bite to swallow lately, emigrating to Scandinavia or Iceland is not such a bad thing. Greenland though is still a little too tree-less and bare for my taste, and there my wild speculation[^1] is that the current US administration is looking for some harsh hell to set up forced labor camps to send anybody they don't like.
[^1] With NATO, the security reason given by US makes no sense. And as for natural resources, I'm sure there are perfectly legal and inexpensive mechanisms that US companies can use to set up mining operations in Greenland.
My thoughts to the Iranian people, may they get what they need and deserve at a cost that is not too high.
As in all conflicts, there's always a "fog of blame" where there isn't absolute certainty about who is right and who is to blame. Though it's not that hard. Because their survival depends on it, dictators are very good at blaming others--anybody, really--for their own shortcomings, and they usually wield the kind of hard power that makes them extremely costly to topple in terms of suffering and human lives.
Life is too short to have to deal with despots. We need a better, perhaps less-crowded or less xenophobic world where every person can protect their right to exist by simply packing and leaving as a last resort.
Agreed, but right now, I'm getting Bay of Pigs vibes from the whole affair. Trump baits the protestors into action -- don't worry, we've got your backs! -- and then hangs them out to dry.
There are a lot of people not particularly under the US umbrella who are doing ok. India for example. It's debatable how under the umbrella Europe is these days with the current president.
Slightly tangential, but I think that dogs have allowed for some bad things to happen to us. Like, they are available physically, so if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person (your one and only partner), you can get a dog or five, or simply pet your friend’s dog or even a neighbor’s. Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.
Are nuclear families a post-agricultural phenomenon? AFAIK, it's a much recent societal change driven by the industrial revolution (i.e. 300 years ago vs ~15,000 years of agriculture)
> ... if you don’t want to go insane in this society of ours where you are allowed to have physical contact with at most one person ...
There are animals where the male and female only ever live together and are loyal (and not for the sake of the idea of loyalty, they're animals). It's not something speficic to some human societies.
> Many post-agricultural revolution civilizations predicated on small family cells and strict property and succession rules would have been impossible without a dog to pet.
That's silly. US Midwest farmers meet every detail up until "would have been impossible"; dogs are common but not ubiquitous, and farming communities are highly social.
(Cats, ironically, are ubiquitous on farms, because of their utility at hunting mice and rats.)
Ironically, you're describing the classic "cat lady" trope, only with the wrong pet type.
I don't really understand this comment. Are you saying dogs made way for nuclear families? Why would it be impossible? In India for example pet ownership is very low. Much lower than prevalence of nuclear families
I don't think anybody understand how bad it really is. Forget about Greenland. Trump can say "give me Germany or I'll shutdown Azure ID" and we will have to give him Germany. At this point we are just praying that neither him or any of his hawks realize this.
I agree that many countries are indeed very vulnerable to this, but you somehow managed to overstate the case by some orders of magnitude.
Silicon Valley flipping the switch on a country would sure cause short-term chaos and longer-term significant inconvenience. But when push comes to shove, bureaucracy gets moved aside, creative workarounds pop up, and people make do, somehow. We've seen that happen during COVID-19 lockdowns.
And after some time, the boycotted regions will find themselves with a healthy independent software industry. Silicon Valley's global impact would be greatly reduced, because any mildly sensible country would want to reduce its exposure and some serious competition will finally get traction.
I think the hawks realize all this. Though it's of course impossible to predict what the Chaos Monkey in Chief will do.
I've been working with paper sizes a lot for the last year, and I've rarely thought about the square root of two ratio and when I've, it has been just to amuse myself. However, knowing that to get an A5 piece of paper I just need to cut/fold in half an A4, and that I can get to A3 and A2 by adding A4s, has been really useful. If I were in USA, didn't have that, and instead would have to install yet another new size system in my head[^1], I would despair.
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