"Impartial news"? Here is a fringe position of mine which I'll be happy for you to turn to shreds, or at least illuminate: rational consensus is being stabbed to death.
If we are to live in democracy, we need consensus to be able to do important things. Without those important things, "bad things" happen. Say, you don't get medical care. Or a pandemic of a preventable disease kills a lot of people who don't have access to a vaccine or who don't want to be vaccinated. Here, you may say, "hey, my definition of bad thing is different than yours. Who are you to decide?". And now you are starting to see the problem.
So, we need consensus. And a good way to reach consensus is for people to have access to facts and to be able to make sense of those facts. But in an increasingly complicated world, both things are very difficult. Making sense of facts requires advanced mental tools: previous knowledge, reading skills, mathematics and logic. Those skills are under siege by forces that compete to engage people with dopamine-inducing content: social media, cable-news, video-games, politicians in campaign trails, etc. You as an individual may perhaps have enough reason, but at a group level, the critical mass for rational consensus is not there.
The endgame of that train is lack of social trust and anarchy. But "fortunately", before getting there, people turn to strong figures and/or to violent ideologies that suppress the "other".
The worst part is that I don't think there is a democracy-preserving solution to this problem, at least not for societies which are already incapable of reaching rational consensus. USA should prepare for its age of stabby emperors[^1].
[^1]: Please don't take this last statement seriously, I'm just goading you with dopamine-inducing content.
You want to block subjectivity? Write some formulas.
There are three questions to consider:
a) Have we, without any reasonable doubt, hit a wall for AI development? Emphasis on "reasonable doubt". There is no reasonable doubt that the Earth is roughly spherical. That level of certainty.
b) Depending on your answer for (a), the next question to consider is if we the humans have motivations to continue developing AI.
c) And then the last question: will AI continue improving?
If taken as boolean values, (a), (b) and (c) have a truth table with eight values, the most interesting row being false, true, true: "(not a) and b => c". Note the implication sign, "=>". Give some values to (a) and (b), and you get a value for (c).
There are more variables you can add to your formula, but I'll abstain from giving any silly examples. I, however, think that the row (false, true, false) implied by many commentators is just fear and denial. Fear is justified, but denial doesn't help.
If you're gonna formulate this conversation as a satisfiability problem you should be aware that this is an NP-complete problem (and actually working on that problem is the source of the insight that there is such as thing as NP-completeness).
I certainly don't understand enough of economics, but:
- If everything overnight costs 20% more for the American consumer, it equals 20% less disposable income and less purchasing power.
- US companies, even the few ones not directly affected by tariffs, are going to be hit by less demand, and that in the aggregate is going to affect the performance of all American companies.
- So, it makes sense to dump as much American stock (and perhaps other instruments) as rationally possible.
The rest of the world is also going to feel the shock, though at this point is unknowable to what extent, and it also depends on the policies governments outside USA enact. In Sweden for example, we react to imported USA inflation by increasing central bank rates and catapulting the country into recession, and I totally see that happening in the next few weeks. Even it does not, it is what the public expects, and already many may be reigning in on consumption and investment. And dumping American stocks like crazy.
I guess depends on the task? I have very low expectations for Gemini, but I gave it a run with a signal processing easy problem and it did well. It took 30 seconds to reason through a problem that would have taken me between 5 to 10 minutes to reason. Gemini's reasoning was sound (but it took me a couple of minutes to decide that), and it also wrote the functions with the changes (which took me an extra minute to verify). It's not a definitive win in time, but at least there was an extra pair of "eyes"--or whatever that's called with a system like this one.
All in all, I think we humans are well on our way to become legal flesh[].
[] The part of the system to whip or throw in jail when a human+LLM commit a mistake.
>I guess depends on the task? I have very low expectations for Gemini, but I gave it a run with a signal processing easy problem and it did well. It took 30 seconds to reason through a problem that would have taken me between 5 to 10 minutes to reason. Gemini's reasoning was sound (but it took me a couple of minutes to decide that), and it also wrote the functions with the changes (which took me an extra minute to verify). It's not a definitive win in time, but at least there was an extra pair of "eyes"--or whatever that's called with a system like this one.
I wonder if you treat code from a Jr engineer the same way? Seems impossible to scale a team that way. You shouldnt need to verify every line but rather have test harnesses that ensure adherence to the spec.
I had a great college education. The professors were good, and we were all piss-poor and wanted to move up in life. Our college was (still is) in a corner of the world you never think anything good about, not in general, less so academically. So we knew that our college title was essentially worthless, at least the part of it made of paper. But some of it we could wear, in the way we spoke and treated others, and in the way we faced professional settings, and in how we faced life in general. Two decades down the road, I think it turned out great. Mine it's not a unique story; later in life I've met people with similar backgrounds, from completely different parts of the world.
Looking at it now, I realize I had the immense privilege of externalities to keep me laser-focused, and none of the shortcuts, the-quick-money-ways-out that tempt so many.
The part about no good definitions of micro-services is a bit far-fetched. I have one that is perfectly functional, though it requires an architect who is enthusiastic about micro-services, hasn't written any code in at least ten years, and who has no operational responsibilities nor experience. Getting one of these is not too hard; they abound. After that minor hurdle is cleared, the test is simple and has two parts: first, the functionality must fit in an ordinary function of some programming language, even Fortran will do in a pinch. Second, the architect has said that this must be a micro-service with its own git repository and independent database. That's it. If these two conditions are met, then this piece of functionality qualifies as a micro-service.
The point isn’t that there are no good definitions. The point is that there are many definitions.
I also have a working definition of a microservice, which is that it is a functional part of a system which exposes its functionality to other parts of the system via HTTP. This works for my team.
In general, we shouldn’t fetishize any particular technology, idea, or phrase. If a term obfuscates more than it clarifies, it’s not very useful.
> I also have a working definition of a microservice, which is that it is a functional part of a system which exposes its functionality to other parts of the system via HTTP.
How do you differentiate service and microservice?
I really want to learn Houdini. Their pricing model is not even that bad (just 200 USD/year if you are indie), but even that is a hurdle when the alternative (Blender) is free and so good (or just plain better) for the 98% of what I want to do. Also, I do manage to crash Houdini more often than I manage to crash Blender, so there is that....
Different tools for different purposes. Blender is in the Maya paradigm, and doing pretty well in that. Houdini is more like a DSL for computer graphics and can end up being both the most low level and the most high level tool in the industry. There's no mystery about why the industry has mostly settled on Houdini + one other complimentary DCC.
Anything procedural works so much better in Houdini I find. I was excited about the geometry nodes in Blender and had some fun with them, but always hit a wall where things in Houdini are much better designed and much more powerful and flexible. But it's a steep learning curve and I forgot most things again because I don't really have to use it regularly.
I had the indie license for a while (purchased privately) and just making things shatter and explode was satisfaction enough. I did this mostly for learning and fun
No, across history and geography people are caught doing "unexplainable" things--and I use this word because I don't want to sound offensive--time and again.
Here are a few examples:
- The expulsion of the English from Havana in the 18th century
- The European inquisitions, and while we are at it, some elements of faith in general.
- Hitler's fascism (Hitler was elected)
- Fidel Castro's Cuba
- North Korea
- Italy's demographic problem
- Japan's demographic problem
... and so on. In all cases, you need the cold clarity of hindsight and a lot of detachment to see that people were acting foolishly. But during the time when the events are ensuing, stoked passions and outright manipulation prevent people from acting rationally. It's not like people act irrationally because they want to. It's simply too difficult to accept the right information, since each argument opposed to one's own beliefs is interpreted as a move from the enemy group.
He wasn't elected. By the time he became chancellor his party was losing ground and couldn't form the government. Under pressure of the rich Hitler was appointed chancellor (not elected) because communists/socialists/unionists were bad for business and they were gaining ground.
It's true that the NSDA lost 4% between the July and November 1932 elections, but they were still the strongest party by a clear margin. Hitler was appointed chancellor under a minority government because he could not find a coalition with a majority in the Reichstag. In this sense, he was indeed "elected". You are right in the sense that other parties provided the necessary 2/3 majority to pass the Enabling Act of March 14, 1933 which eventually gave him absolute power.
Side note: in a way Trump has it much easier because he can already govern with executive orders without requiring a 2/3 majority from the Congress...
Some editors want to simplify everything a lot. I can heard the hypothetical editor in this case: "aerobic life" -> "what's aerobic? Too complicated Joe. I'm gonna red-pen it. Write just 'life'. See? Better, right? Now, Joe, does everybody know that organisms are clumps of church organs? Maybe you want to put a footnote somewhere?"
After three years working with them, I think that AWS is an ok-ish business to work with... they are expensive, and things "mostly" work, and you start noticing all those other digits after the "99.999" or whatever of reliability that they market. But you (mostly) pay for what you use.
But they are the next economic recession waiting for Europe. It's my understanding that there is no legal basis any longer to transfer personally identifiable data to AWS servers. With the cooling of relations between USA and Europe, and the budding trade war, it's just a matter of time before cloud services become the next weapon. And huge European enterprises depend on American cloud businesses in hyper-critical ways.
If we are to live in democracy, we need consensus to be able to do important things. Without those important things, "bad things" happen. Say, you don't get medical care. Or a pandemic of a preventable disease kills a lot of people who don't have access to a vaccine or who don't want to be vaccinated. Here, you may say, "hey, my definition of bad thing is different than yours. Who are you to decide?". And now you are starting to see the problem.
So, we need consensus. And a good way to reach consensus is for people to have access to facts and to be able to make sense of those facts. But in an increasingly complicated world, both things are very difficult. Making sense of facts requires advanced mental tools: previous knowledge, reading skills, mathematics and logic. Those skills are under siege by forces that compete to engage people with dopamine-inducing content: social media, cable-news, video-games, politicians in campaign trails, etc. You as an individual may perhaps have enough reason, but at a group level, the critical mass for rational consensus is not there.
The endgame of that train is lack of social trust and anarchy. But "fortunately", before getting there, people turn to strong figures and/or to violent ideologies that suppress the "other".
The worst part is that I don't think there is a democracy-preserving solution to this problem, at least not for societies which are already incapable of reaching rational consensus. USA should prepare for its age of stabby emperors[^1].
[^1]: Please don't take this last statement seriously, I'm just goading you with dopamine-inducing content.
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