> IIRC Sam Altman has explicitly said that their plan is to develop AGI and then ask it how to get rich.
There are still lots of currently known problems that could be solved with the help of AI that could make a lot of money - what is the weather going to be when I want to fly to <destination> in n weeks/months time, currently we can only say "the destination will be in <season> which is typically <wet/dry/hot/cold/etc>"
What crops yield the best return next season? (This is a weather as well as a supply and demand problem)
How can we best identify pathways for people whose lifestyles/behaviours are in a context that is causing them and/or society harm (I'm a firm believer that there's no such thing as good/bad, and the real trick to life is figuring out what context is where a certain behaviour belongs, and identifying which context a person is in at any given point in time - we know that psycopathic behaviour is rewarded in business contexts, but punished in social contexts, for example)
We always think things are unsolveable, and impossible to decipher, right up until we do, in fact, solve them and decipher them.
Anything is possible, well, except for getting the next season of Firefly
Edit: FTR I think that weather prediction is, indeed, solveable. We just don't have the computing power/algorithms that fully model and calculate the state.. yet
Then I don’t think you fully grasp the nature of weather. Sure, anything is possible, but some things are much more likely than others, and small changes in weather months away is very very far down on the list of things that are likely to be solvable.
I’d even hold out hope for another season firefly <3
Weather systems exhibit chaotic behavior which means that small changes to initial conditions have far reaching effects. This is why even the best weather models are only effective at most a few weeks out. It’s not because we don’t understand how weather works, it’s because the system fundamentally behaves in a way that requires keeping track of many more measurements than is physically possible. It’s precisely because we do understand this phenomenon that we can say with certainty that prediction at those time scales with that accuracy is not possible. There is not some magic formula waiting to be discovered. This isn’t to say that weather prediction can’t improve (e.g I don’t claim we have the best possible weather models now), but that predictions reach an asymptotic limit due to chaos.
There are a handful of extremely simple and well understood systems (I would not call weather simple) that also exhibit this kind of behavior: a common example is some sets of initial conditions of a double-jointed pendulum. The physics are very well understood. Another perhaps more famous one is the three body problem. These two both show that even if you have the exact equations of motion, chaotic systems still cannot be perfectly modeled.
I worked in weather for a while and the forecasters might as well have been betting on the horse races, the interpretation of the charts was very much the same psychology.
The model did its thing but there was still an aspect of interpretation that was needed to convert data to a story for a few minutes on TV.
For longer range forecasting the task was quite easy for the meteorologists, at least for the UK. Storm systems could be tracked from Africa across the Atlantic to North America and back across the Atlantic to the UK. Hence, with some well known phenomena such as that, my meteorologist friends would have a good general idea of what to expect with no model needed, just an understanding of the observations, obsessively followed, with all the enthusiasm of someone that bets on horses.
My forecasting friends could tell me what to expect weeks out, however, the exact time the rain would fall or even what day would not be a certain bet, but they were rarely wrong about the overall picture.
The atmosphere is far from a closed system, there only has to be one volcano fart somewhere on the planet to throw things out of whack and that is not something that is easy to predict. Predicting how the hard to predict volcano or solar flare affects the weather in a few weeks is beyond what I expect from AI.
I am still waiting for e-commerce platforms to be replaced with Blockchain dapps, and I will add AGI weather forecasting to the queue of not going to happen. Imagine if it hallucinates.
Will AI put bookmakers out of business? Nope. Same goes with weather.
Thanks for your anecdote, it's valuable when discussing the possibilities to start by saying that it's impossible because you don't know anyone that did it
How does flu affect the heart? The virus only rarely infects the heart directly. Instead, the adverse effects of the virus on the heart are due to atherosclerosis of the arteries of the heart. Many people over age 50 have atherosclerosis — and in some people it has not yet been diagnosed. Because atherosclerosis narrows the arteries and reduces the flow of blood, less oxygen reaches the heart muscle. When the effect of the flu on the lungs lowers the amount of oxygen in the blood, this further reduces the supply of oxygen to the heart. This can lead to a heart attack or cardiac arrest (sudden death).
Is this risk more than theoretical? Many careful studies have shown there is an increased risk of heart disease following a bout of flu. In one study of 80,000 adults with influenza, nearly 12% had a serious cardiac event, such as a heart attack, during or in the weeks after getting the flu.
> In one study of 80,000 adults with influenza, nearly 12% had a serious cardiac event, such as a heart attack, during or in the weeks after getting the flu.
That sounds really high
Okay I just looked it up and this was only among hospitalized individuals which makes a lot more sense because most people just stay home unless it's very bad but that is still surprising to me
In the context of the article, it's inflammation rupturing the 'fibrous cap' on plaque deposits leading to a heart attack, so I presume OP is talking about the inflammatory response to having the flu.
Even temporary stress on the respiratory system can cause long-term damage to the brain, lungs, and heart. Because of Covid, we started to learn that an acute, severe infection can affect people much later.
That research led to the beginning of an understanding that repeated flu infections can contribute to premature death even many decades later.
And people that are not in the "cool kids" group are economically disadvantaged because, even if their contributions are valued, they get on the offside with the powers that be?
When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.
People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.
Just, FTR, there's always been the problem of how much moderation is required to keep the discourse (in a group) flowing without being so restrictive as to only be about the moderators.
See IRC, which (IMO) can be over-moderated, channel ops used to be very much about themselves, vs Usenet, which had no moderation at all (and was "destroyed" by google groups making access trivial for troublemakers), through to current things like Reddit which have some moderators.
It's (IMO) exactly like governance IRL - some countries overdo it, and some underdo it.
When I first started using Usenet, a couple of decades ago now, I initially thought that everyone was like-minded, and polite, but then discovered that all the political noise that we now see on Social Media.
That is, there's not actually anything new in that political discourse (literally, it was all libertarians, gun lovers and free speechers threatening/bullying anyone that disagreed with them then, like it is now)
> I have often wondered why such a thing hasn't arisen again, on things like twitter.
We still have "flame wars" I think, they're just less intelligent, is more about spamming than insulting, and is often called "brigading" instead, basically one community trying to "overrun" another community one way or another.
Yeah, I think that you're right - Reddit is often referred to as being the Usenet of today, which is where I see the term brigading coming up the most.
> The problem is that people are addicted to tension
And some.
We've known that humans prefer to hear about trouble, strife, and tension for a very long time - that's why the evening news was always a downer, and newspapers before that.
I have a gripe with slog - it uses magic for config
What I mean is, if you configure slog in (say) your main package, then, by magic, that config is used by any call to slog within your application.
There's no "Oh you are using this instance of slog that has been configured to have this behaviour" - it's "Oh slog got configured so that's the config you have been given"
I've never tried to see if I can split configs up, and I don't have a usecase, it just strikes me as magic is all
There's a default logger that's used when you call package-level functions (as opposed to methods on an instance of slog.Logger). The default logger is probably what you configured in your main package.
In my opinion this is perfectly idiomatic Go. Sometimes the package itself hosts one global instance. If you think that's "magic" then you must think all of Go is magic. It helps to think of a package in Go as equivalent to a single Java class. Splitting up a Go package's code into multiple files is purely cosmetic.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “magic for config”. You create and configure a logger using slog.New(…). You can use the default logger instead, slog.Default(), which is just a global and has a default config. You can also set the default logger using slog.SetDefault(…).
mp3 players were commodity items, you could buy one for a couple of dollars, fill it up with your favourite music format (stolen) and off you went.
Phones too - Crackberry was the epitome of sophistication, and technological excellence.
Jobs/Apple didn't create anything "new" in those spheres, instead he added desireability, fancy UX that caught peoples' attentions
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