Frieren

> As much as I don't like the cryptocurrency ecosystem, I don't think facilitating and encouraging kidnapping and torture is the way to go.

The cryptocurrency ecosystem is used to not only avoid taxation but to enable criminal activity. How many people are being held hostage and the ransom will be payed thanks to cryptocurrencies?

I do not like the cryptocurrency ecosystem either. And I totally agree that it should be abolished. It is just a way to finance crime and terrorism.

> back in 1988, when we first introduced Mathematica, there was also some of the same kind of talk about math being taken over, and made pointless. Of course that’s not how it worked out at all.

Makes sense.

> For me, its greatest use in mathematical pursuits has been its ability in effect to thematically mine the knowledgebase of human mathematics. ... Modern AI is, first and foremost, a way of leveraging the existing corpus of human knowledge.

AI is more a database of knowledge (stolen knowledge but let's leave that discussion asside) than a thinking machine. You can query a compressed version of millions of books.

That is very useful. (Are we already StarTrek-communists?

> generating useful mathematics is a much more exacting activity than generating language.

This is something that most people forget. Generative AI is mostly LLMs, and they are chatbots not mathbots.

> It’s a frustrating feature of modern times that someone like me gets sent many AI-generated documents every day that have the “statistical texture” of math papers, but that one at least expects have a very low probability of being meaningfully correct

And here is the trick. A million monkeys with a million typewriters may write a Shakespeare masterpiece. But they would not be able to differentiate it from garbage text.

> So, yes, there’s every reason to expect a bright future—now with some additional help from AI—for that most rarefied of human pursuits: research in pure mathematics.

Happy to hear that.

> His answer was that half the papers in a field are written by the square root of the number of authors.

This is a joke, not a number to base any calculation on, to start with.

> Look at the commit history of almost any important open source project and you'll see Lotka's curve, with a long tail of people who fixed a typo once and a few people who wrote the thing.

I am the guy that fixes just 2 lines. I was the only one that knew which to lines to change, it took me days to find (it has been like that for months).

> VP of Engineering

Yep. It checks. "Elite" is very subjective and it’s easy to take credit when someone else did the work. Some "Elite" engineers I met were really good, some were all talk and no bite but their managers would believe them fully. I really hope that he does not treat his employees based in this kind of bullshit thinking.

> and interests.

That part is very important. I have seen very smart people failed to understand how truly software developer works. They just do not care. They try, as it is a good profession, but deep inside they cannot care less.

They do well. It is not like they cannot do the job. But here is no passion, they know the basics, and were they shine is in solving business problems even if their code/architecture is not very good.

In Sweden companies sometimes forbid employees of doing passion projects. They kill that same drive from the inside, but their desire for controlling workers is bigger than to actually have a successful company.

Passion is hard to come by, enjoy it.

For me, the easy one is books. I love books, both for their content and as physical objects.

I love my pdf folder with a million papers, documents, etc. Sorted and easy available. But mentally it does not compare with my library.

In a trip I will bring my tablet to read books. It is practical and if a book does not click I have many more. At home I prefer the physical thing.

None of them comes, at least directly, from algorithms. I add books to my list of purchases when they get mention on YouTube, another books, news, or even here.

Many years ago I used Amazon book store suggestions because they were extremely good. But that was the time before enshitification when they were trying to give you the book the you will like the most not the one that will give them more profit.

The US has become a very short-term individual interest focused country. There is no long term vision for the country, there is no care for their own citizens, only today's president's interest matter. Tomorrow doesnt exists. screw-the-future is their warmongering motto.

This goes beyond the price of diesel. It is an attack on basic survivability of the nations that may depend on that reserves in the future.

Never vote for a death cult.

All Americans are subsidizing AI data centers. If the gambit works then billionaires will be come trillionaires. If it fails Americans will still be the ones to pay the bill. Privatize profits, socialize costs.

Billionaires are not capitalists they are aristocracy.

> what need did they have of outsiders

People sometimes needs a push to get onboard an idea. When you have been inside a system for along time it is difficult to see to what extreme is not just and how very possible it is the change it. Looking at you USA.

The U.S. is not the police. Sad, that it needs to be pointed out.

That is why the ICC needs our help and support.

Rightful people supports the week. Only the depraved laughs when a person without power is being abused.

> HPV vaccine hesitancy in Europe: side effects, uncertainty, and mistrust > When individuals mistrust those communicating about vaccines, perceiving, for instance, that they are not being fully transparent about the potential side effects of the vaccine, it can affect their confidence in the HPV vaccine even if they have received information confirming that the vaccine is safe and effective > This was seen with the rapid spread of You-Tube videos of young girls believing to have been affected by HPV vaccination in Denmark, Japan, Colombia, Ireland and the UK.

Governments around the world are losing citizens trust. And that has terrible consequences. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. And the rise of far-right contrarian governments that use fear to destroy trust in institutions and gain votes are the main cause. Billionaires financing far-right governments end costing the lives of their citizens that will have poorer physical health.

We may know how to reduce the risk of cancer. We may have vaccines for that infections. But if governments care more about power than serving citizens all that knowledge is for nothing.

- https://www.hpvworld.com/articles/hpv-vaccine-hesitancy-in-e...

The cameras in UK are there to remember citizens that they are watched. They are there for when there are peaceful protests to remember citizens that they are watched. Surveillance state created by cameras on the streets and tracking on everybody's phones is perfectly ok for our rulers.

I hear again and again that China is "bad" but I see that western countries copy everything from them... except going after big corporations. We will gather personal data and have files for each citizen, punish peaceful protests, use social media to control the masses but punishing the rich like China does is unacceptable. That seems to be the red line that the West will not cross, the one that protects billionaries.

I can give a control to the gas stove to my dog and let it control the flame.

That is not only irresponsible but illegal as it is not up to regulation for a residential home. And it is also comically stupid.

If it blows up it is not a dog going rogue but irresponsible behaviour on my part that may end in bodily harm or even death for me or other people.

AI needs regulations. But not the stupid ones that keep competitors away but the ones that limit damage before it happens and sets clear responsibility of the AI companies. "Going rogue" is not a description of what has happened and there needs to be legal costly consequences to the perpretators.

"rogue AI" is making a lot of heavy lifting there.

If you drive drunk and you have an accident that alcohol may be a factor but you are at fault.

There are no "rogue AIs" just irresponsible corporations.

> To get the extra work done, Jones and his crew secretly shaved a couple weeks off other, easier films and faked their time cards. It was something they did on occasion. (The mysterious price increases angered the managers, Jones said, but they were “not very bright” and didn’t figure out the trick.)

How many companies work just because the average worker is the one making it work? In my experience a lot of them.

It is sad that the money always accumulates at the top even when so often that same people at the top are an impediment for doing better work.

> pay is far below market rate for cybersecurity professionals. T

And there is no glamour on sense of duty when your main job is to make sure that the Epstein files are not revealed so USA citizens are in the dark about who were the rapists and criminals in the list. An awful job.

> f you can't get anyone to sign up perhaps you'll realize it's not so easy as scapegoating addictive social media.

Regulations, we need regulations for it to work. Capitalism is not going to solve a problem that capitalism has created.

> It's a consumer software product.

Please read: How Facebook contributed to genocide in Myanmar and why it will not be held accountable. - https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...

> Why is that?

I value human live, I have morality and I try to be a good person and help society.

Who pays you to defend Facebook? Do you have shares? Do you have interests?

We need a new non-commercial version of the internet. Free of bots, free of ads, ... you pay to access social media optimized to be interesting enough to be worth paying instead of addictive enough to keep you scrolling to show you more ads.

It may look impossible right now. But what is impossible for real is to continue as we are. The damage that internet does to society is increasing by the day while its value is reduced (economic value, social value).

> Winning a war comes with great cost

Invading a country and wanting to steal their resources at any cost, a cost as large as needed, is a crime against humanity.

The USA is not defending itself, it is just trying to control Irans oil to increase the power of American economic elites. Billionaires want more power, children, women and men die indiscriminately because of that.

And, you are totally right. Billionaires does not care that winning a war comes with great cost, because the cost is for USA service men and for all Iranians.

> I generally see my legal system create severe delays

Better a delay that getting your account closed without recourse. But you are right, years of conservative governments have starved the government and its services are slower than they should around the west world.

This is why goverments have appeal processes and layers of tribunals. To be judged and found guilty by a corporation takes away all your rights.

If libraries didn't exist could not be created today. People tend to say that "it is impossible" when it actually only needs to be well organized.

Splitting git tech-monopolies it is a survival need. Or we do it, or we will end up with a collapsed society. Entities that spy on all citizens and gatekeep access to news and services are contrary to basic human rights and democracy.

That is already a requirement in any civilized country. You cannot run a business without a registered ID, address, etc. for tax purposes.

For free (like for real no microtransactions) that is different. For the rest, they already have that.

> data on what insurance a healthcare provider accepts is notoriously unreliable

To fix the health care system is possible.

To use AI to circumvent it just creates an incentive to make it worse. You spend more on AI, insurance companies spend even more money in surveillance to know who you are and to make things more complicated. It is a escalation that just ends making you spend more money to stay the same.

This is how it works in Sweden: https://www.unionen.se/in-english/notice-to-termination

"Even if an employer does not have a collective agreement, they must negotiate major changes to working and employment conditions of employees who are members of a trade union as if the employer had a collective agreement."

Negotiations include getting the lists of positions that will be terminated, number of employees affected, new positions that may be opened during a reorganization, etc.

That seems a very USA problem. It seems a very adversarial society.

Are the ads for layers on buses and benches for real or just a TV trope? I have never seen anything like that in Europe...

> We've kind of just allowed technology to start making us all irrelevant.

That accelerated when big tech companies became advertisement companies. Suddenly, there was a push to increase time on the screen thru mass data gathering.

As far as it is profitable to keep people's noses glued to a screen there is going to be an increase on people that is alone and disconnected.

Even dating is done thru apps that promote looking for the perfect inexistent partner. The more you look for a partner and the less you get one the more profits they get. Something should have never been a business.

To some extend I hope that the Republican party wins the next election. They should be the ones fixing the economy, raising taxes, and doing something responsible for once.

If Democrats win they are going to be blamed for being the "bad guys" for increasing taxes, controlling inflation and trying to get the economy back to shape.

For Republicans to burn down the economy during their mandates has paid of as the next government needs to focus on firefighting instead of doing the good that it could have been done.

> but you stick out like a sore thumb to people

Good point. When I pass by the security at the airport they force me to take off my hat. Something covering my face would not be taken lightly.

> and by having a second one (with a different context) check almost entirely eliminates the problem.

You solved one of the largest problems with current LLMs. How is it possible that nobody tried that before?

Because they do. There are already LLMs checking outputs of other LLMs, the bullshit answers that you see are the results of failures on that checks. If you remove all checks LLMs will create hallucinations even more often.