DiogenesKynikos

The LHC is a massive experiment. Just to cite Wikipedia:

> The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008, in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists, and hundreds of universities and laboratories across more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva.

They give credit to everyone who built the instrument, wrote the software pipelines to analyze the data, etc. That's thousands of people. That's how large experimental projects work.

They're referring to the Huns, not the Hungarians. They're two completely different groups. The Huns invaded in the 5th Century AD, and the Hungarians invaded in the 9th Century AD.

Both groups came from Asia. The reason why the Hungarians seem "local" now is that they've intermarried with local people for so long. But the language they speak is not Indo-European. It's actually related to language spoken in Siberia.

With projects like the LHC, there really are thousands of people involved in "getting the work done."

All you have to do is to plug in at work or home once every few days. Even at <5kW, you can easily make up for a few days of commuting in a few hours.

Even the cheapest cars have ranges of around 400 km. That's several days of commuting. You can forget to charge for three days and you'll still be fine.

And if you really do forget to charge three days in a row, just drive to a nearby fast charger, wait for 10 minutes, and then you're set to go.

That's when you drive to the nearest fast-charging station, where you can charge from nearly empty to full in <10 minutes.

> Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter

No, that's actually the heart of the matter.

Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization. Full stop. This isn't even arguable.

Labeling them a terrorist organization and then arresting anyone who expresses support for them is a massive abuse of terrorism laws and an attack on the very heart of freedom of speech.

Both of which are unthinkable in a normal democracy.

They called PA a terrorist organization, which is an insult to everyone's intelligence.

Then they carried out mass arrests of people protesting that decision.

Democracies don't do that.

I don't know, but the UK has criminalized expressions of support for Palestine Action.

They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.

Israel has continually justified killing and capturing civilians based on extremely loose affiliation with anything related to Hamas or the government of Gaza.

For example, the Israelis have held a prominent Palestinian doctor / hospital director, Hussam Abu Safiya, under the flimsiest of pretexts. Like doctors in the civil service in many countries, he formally holds a government rank and has a ceremonial uniform that he wears once in a blue moon on formal occasions. Think "surgeon general" in the US. Israel has used this as an excuse to hold him for years now, to subject him to torture, and to brand him a militant. He's a neonatal doctor who ran a hospital, so the idea that he was involved in fighting in any way is absurd on its face.

The idea that Israel only targets the military wing of Hamas is simply not plausible to anyone who has followed the conflict at all. It's insulting to our intelligence.

If you look at how American cities are laid out, the cost on society of car infrastructure is massive. Roads and parking space use up a very significant percentage of the real estate in an American city. Public transit is far more efficient with space, so it saves society as a whole a lot of money.

Israel has heavily used AI targeting in Gaza as well.[0]

The pattern across both Israel's strikes in Gaza and the US strike on the Iranian girls' school is the same: complete disregard for civilian lives.

In the case of Gaza, Israel used an AI system to automatically identify tens of thousands of Palestinians who might be somehow related to Hamas. Then, it identified where they lived, and bombed their homes at night, when they (along with their families, and everyone else who lives in the building) were most likely to be at home.

Keep in mind that Israel considers anyone involved with any part of Hamas in any way to be fair game: police officers, civil servants who work in any part of government in Gaza, people who work for charities run by Hamas, etc. So the targeting is incredibly wide, which is why the casualty figures in Gaza are so high (over 70,000 documented deaths, nearly 20,000 children documented as killed by the IDF).

0. https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

Many people in this discussion have read it.

The only concrete action item in the blog post is a call to increase restrictions exports of GPUs and chip-making equipment to China.

If Amodei were serious, he'd be calling for a ban on investment in AI research. It reminds me of all the "land acknowledgements" by people who have zero intention of giving the land back.

Increased charging rate also means that fewer charging stations can serve more cars. One Megawatt charger can serve 4x as many cars as a 250 kW charger in the same span of time.

Sub-10-minute charging is going to be standard in new Chinese EVs very soon. There are already many new models on the market this year with charging times between 5 and 10 minutes. There will soon be cars with Megawatt charging speeds that sell for $15k.

As I understand it, Chinese manufacturers have optimized for a different set of parameters than European manufacturers. The Europeans emphasize range, but the Chinese are more willing to trade range for cost while optimizing charging rate.

This is a completely absurd comment.

I'm calling the AfD Nazis because that's exactly what they are.

Of course when people vote for a Nazi party, that's extremely alarming, and I have every right to say that they're wrong to do so.

If the AfD comes to power in Germany, it will be a disaster for the country, and not only for the country. Germany tried fascism once before in its history, and we all know how that turned out.

Deep Blue beat Kasparov fair and square. Kasparov was a bit of a bad sport at the end of the match, though the reasons are understandable. He was at the top of the human chess world. He wasn't used to losing, and he took it badly.

The fall of East Germany, which led to mass unemployment in the East (including Saxony-Anhalt).

The Thatcher-Reagan-style reforms that the Social Democrats and Greens pushed through in the early 2000s, which reduced the social safety net and created new types of less-secure temporary work. In particular, these reforms ended the Social Democrats as a mass party in Germany.

The 2008 financial crisis, which weighed heavily on Europe for years.

The rise in inflation, caused by Covid and wars in Ukraine and Iran.

As in the 1930s, right-wing parties blame everything on immigrants, foreigners and minorities, even though they're not responsible for any of the above.

20% of people in Germany were born abroad. A good share of them have naturalized and are now German citizens. The top countries of origin are Poland, Turkey and Ukraine.

Very few of them go to Saxony-Anhalt. Less than 10% of the population of the state is foreign-born. As GP said, anti-immigrant sentiment is strongest where there are the fewest immigrants.

> But I guess its easier to think that 44% of the inhabitants of Saxony-Anhalt are secretly Nazies

People have a hard time imagining that any person ever voted for the Nazis. 37% of Germans did. It's entirely possible for large parts of the population to vote for fascist parties. It has happened in history before.

If you're a foreigner who's rooting for the fascists, you're an idiot. They want to deport you.

> being told they're all nazis (I'm sure some of them are, but nowhere near all)

Many of their senior leaders are Nazis. The head of the party in the state of Thuringia used to write pro-Hitler articles under a pseudonym.

> ignoring and belittling a large group and ignoring their concerns entirely

The AfD doesn't address their problems either. It tells them that all of their problems are because of foreigners and immigrants.

What's the AfD's solution for affordable housing? Deport immigrants to free up apartments. What's their solution for creating jobs? Deport immigrants.

This is a party that wants to deport all German citizens who don't have a sufficient quantum of German blood. There's no need to pretend the party is anything other than what it is: a fascist party.

The Nazi party got 37% of votes nationwide (not just in one state).

Getting a lot of votes does not mean a party is not far-right. Germans of all people know that.

A lot of people don't realize that chess players peak around the same age as athletes do. Carlsen was at peak dominance in his mid-20s. Kasparov peaked later, at 36 years old, but still, it wasn't at age 50 or 60.

Chess requires you to be really sharp. Experience increases with age, but there's some cross-over point at which the decline in calculating speed is more important than increasing experience. Heck, I'm measurably better at chess tactics in the morning after a good night's sleep than in the evening after work.

Chess has developed significantly over the last 50 years. The best players now can be reasonably expected to be much more skilled than the best players of 50 years ago, even if you discount opening theory knowledge.

I agree that the drift in chess Elo ratings is slow enough that we can say Bobby Fischer at his peak would still be a strong grandmaster today (if he were given some time to study developments in opening theory). But I don't think we can say whether he would land at 2700 or 2800 in today's Elo scale.

The distribution of Elo ratings will not tell you how strong the average player is in an absolute sense.

Elo ratings measure differences in skill between different players. A player rated 400 points above another player will win 90% of the time. Only rating differences are meaningful. Absolute ratings aren't.

You can't compare Elo ratings over long stretches of time, period.

Ratings drift over time, based on the total population of people competing. I think the most accurate way to view Elo ratings is as a measure of skill vs. the average rated player.

If you want to compare Magnus Carlsen's peak rating of 2882 in the year 2014 to Garry Kasparov's peak rating of 2851 in the year 1999, you have to know how strong the total pool of players (including all the amateurs who compete at lower levels) was in the year 2014 vs. 1999.

The only way to actually anchor the Elo system over long periods of time would be to have rated humans occasionally play against a set of unchanging computer players, which could then serve as static rating calibrators. You could use those games to then calibrate Elo ratings from different time periods to a common scale, by asserting that the computer ratings don't change.

Before AI, there were tons of very bright researchers around the world who couldn't write English well. It was a major problem. It isn't anymore. Writing well is actually very difficult, even if English is your native language.

> There’s multiple tools to help in that none of which are LLM’s.

The first good tool I ever saw was an LLM. The tools before then just weren't very good.

> That is one of the dumber uses for LLM’s, complete waste of computing.

Allowing people who speak different languages to communicate is a very good use of compute, in my opinion.

> notice how I just backed up my arguments with sources from actual scientists

What do you think I am?

You seem to think papers being legible is not important. Fine. Who needs to actually understand what the authors wrote?

But AI is extremely powerful for scientific research, and is massively increasing scientific output. It has side-effects that will have to be dealt with, like an increase in junk submitted to the journals, but there are ways to deal with that (the simplest one would be to use AI to screen out obvious junk).

So no, science is not "shooting itself in the foot." AI is a massive boost for science, but like every new powerful tool, it has side effects. The biggest side-effect in the long term may be that AI does all the work for us, but we haven't crossed that bridge yet.

AI has been great for scientific research. It writes code, it can help solve difficult mathematical problems, you can bounce ideas off of it, you can learn background info on a scientific question quickly, etc.

I haven't noticed any uptick of trash papers in quality journals, or even on the arXiv. I know submissions are way up to all the journals, but peer review appears to still be working to filter out obvious junk.

And yes, papers being written in understandable English is important. Most scientists around the world are not native speakers of English, and now they can all suddenly write in perfect English.

> Sounds like your relatives excel at generalizing to millions of people from a few individual interactions.

You claimed that it's extremely dangerous for any Jewish person to enter Palestinian cities, based on nothing. When I inform you that not only do many Jewish people go there all the time, but I have family members who have done so (and were treated far better by Palestinians than by Israelis), you just dismiss it.

> Jews were 100% ethnically cleansed from Gaza and the WB in 1948

There were hardly any Jews in the West Bank and Gaza in 1948 to begin with. The ethnic cleansing was almost entirely in the other direction.

> They were also ethnically cleansed from other Arab and Muslim countries.

This happened years after Israel ethnically cleansed the 78% of Palestine it took over. Arab Jews were victims of Israel's founding. The creation of a self-styled "Jewish state" through mass land theft and expulsion of the native population generated intense anger throughout the Arab world, which led to Arab Jews eventually being expelled or pressured out of their home countries.

> The only places Jews can live safely in the Middle East are areas the IDF secures.

Not true at all. There are plenty of Jewish tourists in the Middle East. The only thing I'll grant you is that Israel pretending to act in the name of all Jews does generate a lot of antisemitism and make Jews less safe around the world.

> Arabs feel perfectly safe to live amongst Jews in Israel.

Tell that to the millions of Palestinians who live under Israeli military rule and who are constantly subjected to pogroms.