ClarityJones

I know that's true for reading glasses, but is that also the case for distance?

Yeah, in the US, customers need permission from an optometrist.

Edit: When buying for nearsightedness.

You raise a very worthwhile topic, because both fields have expanded, and they have expanded along very different paths.

The medical field has splintered. Osteopaths kind of invented their own thing and broke into medical doctors' monopoly. Registered Nurses can do some things, but not others. BSNs. CNAs. Nurse Practitioners. Physicians Assistants. Chiropractors. etc. The strength of their cartel has led to attacks by new and novel qualifications, and the compelling need for more medical providers has allowed these attacks to successfully carve out roles.

Some can prescribe medications, others can't. Some are limited to specific medications. Others can perform surgery, others can't. Some can diagnose diseases, etc. Moreover, some qualifications are a step toward a higher qualification, others are traps that don't progress you to an MD/DO at all.

The legal field seems far more egalitarian in that any lawyer can practice any area of law (except patent law), and people can generally represent themselves and their minor children without any qualifications. Folk don't need a lawyer to contest tickets, or to draft contracts that they're a party to, or to negotiate their own settlements, etc.

However, appallingly, the general public is not allowed to prescribe medicine for themselves or their children. Folks cannot buy contacts / glasses on their own, etc. Folks shouldn't need a nurse to get antibiotics for ourselves, and yet we do.

> Lawyers being lawyers have immediately reached to "make it illegal" and setting up protections for their trade like they always done.

The legal field does not have a strong cartel at the moment.

In 1940 and in 1970, the population of lawyers was about .13-.16% of people in the US. Currently, it's 3x higher at .39%... after 3 years of declining numbers.

The market is saturated. Large numbers of lawyers can't find enough work, or have moved to other fields.

Edit: Link to report: https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...

> Plenty of places will suspend your account if discovered you have done this.

And yet that's not the route Apple chose to take.

I think it's a distinction without a difference. In this context, where this is no pending legal proceeding, a subpoena is just a request with no legal authority. The function of a real subpoena is to punish the recipient for failing to respond (i.e. held in contempt of court), because the request is made on behalf of the court and the court has the authority to compel production. Here, where there's no court case it's not really possible to have a real subpoena. I could equally issue a subpoena in the authority of my own name, and it would have just as much power (none).

Or, they simply left the door unlocked when they left, allowing unknown third parties to also access.

The problem with parallel construction is that it implies the defendant is guilty. However, when individuals have secretly accessed the source of evidence, there is a potential that they planted / altered the evidence that they subsequently "find" through a parallel construction. The prosecution inevitably then suggests that the defendant had sole custody of the resources (which is no longer true) and that anything found there must be theirs.

A Model 3's battery is 82kWh, a Camry Hybrid's battery is 1.6kWH.

In terms of battery, you could produce (82 / 1.6 = 51.25) hybrids per fully electric car.

The total fuel savings of replacing 10+ ICE cars with hybrids is an order of magnitude larger than replacing 1 ICE car with a fully electric car.

Perhaps this is naive, but in my mind it can be useful for learning.

- Hook LLM to VMs

- Ask for code that [counts to 10]

- Run code on VM

- Ask different LLM to Evaluate Results.

- Repeat for sufficient volume.

- Train.

The faster it can generate results the faster those results can be tested against the real world, e.g. a VM, users on X, other models with known accuracies.

This relates very well to AGI.

There can be long periods of minimal quantitative progress, even quantitative regression, before a massive qualitative leap that's the result of making a few small changes.

Planes either fly or fall.

The difference is that a super-intelligent AGI could provide immense value in secret. It's somewhat hard to keep a plane secret. It's value is largely in moving people, so people have to know about it and they fly right there in the sky for everyone to see. Also, massive rockets are hard to hide, and a lot of the value was publicity.

I expect that somebody somewhere is going to have AGI for a period of time when the rest of the world doesn't know they have it... and right now feels like that time. People are openly publishing LLMs that float awfully close to those motorized gliders that decidedly, definitely didn't fly... until suddenly they did. It's only a matter of time until someone figures out how to make these fly, and the question isn't when, but when we'll find out.

> would not meet the legal standard to win court approval;

That is to say, they're targeting individuals who they have no substantial reason to believe actually did anything wrong.

Oregon's move is exactly backwards. If anything, they should cancel the law school requirement and allow the public to sit for the bar exam. Schools are notorious for graduating incompetent students who's only ability was to take out loans to pay the tuition. Allowing the public to sit for the bar exam without going to law school would be a much better DEI initiative because it would directly address disparities in the ability to finance a law school education.

I appreciate that they used the least original means of criticism that was never-the-less sufficient to agitate the Fed into threatening legal actions.

It's easy to agitate a federal agency if you do something novel or extreme. The fact that this was sufficient really highlights how petty the Fed's actions are.

> meant

by whom?

To blindly listen to anonymous reports on the internet is not good faith. Shopify has a duty to handle these in good faith and it’s infinitely foreseeable that this bad faith conduct could result in serious damage to their customers (as you explain).

I don't think it will be as ubiquitous as smart phones for the same reason smart watches are not as ubiquitous as smart phones.

The reason I do not wear a smart watch is not because they're not useful, but because it's simply not comfortable for me to be wearing something on my wrist. It's not a big deal, but I prefer to not wear rings, watches, bracelets, etc.

Similarly, I prefer contacts over glasses because of a 1) glasses reduce your field of view / quality of vision, 2) the touch / feel of having something on my face, and 3) them inevitably falling off or being grabbed by my baby.

Smart watches got as ubiquitous as normal watches, and smartphones got as ubiquitous as wallets (and other things you might keep in a pocket or purse). I expect smart glasses will become about as ubiquitous as regular glasses.

You're assuming that medical science is capable of providing an explanation in every case, when the whole point of this article is to say that these symptoms are insufficient to diagnose SBS. The author is saying if we have no alternative medical explanations, then we have no medical explanation at all. In order to diagnose SBS, the author suggests that you need additional evidence suggesting trauma such as bruising, broken bones, etc. Indeed, that seems to be what the SBS lobby is now saying as well, they just haven't communicated that to front-line providers.

Yeah, bankruptcy generally exists to protect creditors.

A guarantee is just another promise. So, you have a promise from the bank and a promise from the government.

Yes, fractional reserve banking should be reformed, and that's a reasonable preference. However, my point is that it's also reasonable for people to want to have physical possession of their assets.

Cash is money. Cash is immune to bank runs.

If you have $10,000, then you have $10,000.

If you deposit $10,000 in a bank, then you have $0 and a promise from a bank that has $1,000 and a promise (from somebody else) for $9,000.

Thanks.

Allowing the UN to enact sanctions (or conduct armed warfare) does not prohibit or preclude UN member states from doing so on their own.

> Sanctions are literally war and illegal unless approved by the UN.

Are you saying that war is illegal unless approved by the UN, or this specific means of war?

> It doesn’t work. In the time it takes to refute one lie with facts and data, the world has moved on and uncountable additional lies have been spread in the meantime.

Great point, free speech is bad. We should repeal the 1st Amendment. /s

It sounds like you're simply arguing against free speech.

Should people be allowed to purposefully disseminate false information? Or should speech be regulated? What regulations do you propose as to the speech that people should and shouldn't be allowed to make?

That's not really relevant to my point, which was that new means of spreading information are capable of spreading both true and false information, and that history has shown that the ability to spread false information does not prevent the positive impact of true information.

So instead of a papal bull, how about a stack exchange with links explaining how (even if the church did not oppose the press itself) the church did attack its users for publishing information that the church was opposed to (i.e. claimed was false). https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/42677/why-did-th...

Or an article about how Luther was excommunicated for what he did with the printing press. https://www.history.com/news/renaissance-influence-reformati...

Perhaps the Church's complaints were more directed at the dissemination of information that the Church considered to be false... like the Wired article's complaints about AI's potential to spread false information. My point is that free speech is good. Free speech may include lies, but people are smart and even lies help listeners learn.

I think AI will give broader and more convenient access to much of the same information that is technically already available, but requires additional work to discover.

For example, the books printed by the printing press disseminated information that was already known to tutors, scholars, etc. and often existed in handwritten manuscripts. Today, we wouldn't call that accessible, but that was the standard for accessibility (or word of mouth) before the printing press.

AI makes it more likely that people will find informaiton because it can do much of the work of searching billions of sources and synthesize the information far more convenient way.

That's not to say the information will always be true, just as the information in books is not always true. However, readers currently have far too much faith in authors. People believe claims because they're made using professional-sounding words, and published in a respected newspaper, by a human author, and accompanied by photographs. None of that is particularly good evidence if truth.

The last time this happened on this scale, people became more sophisticated consumers of information, with a healthier level of skepticism, and simply came to have less confidence in claims that they did not have personal knowledge of. That was a good thing, and probably will be again.

The church had the same complaints when the printing press undermined their monopoly on Truth. However, it's now clear that the technology gave rise to the renaissance, and the greatest discovery and propagation of truth that humanity has ever seen.