Morromist

That's true. It seems like those states where its mandatory and free are going the right way. No doubt stuff like this will be more and more important with AI making it so easy to fake other stuff.

Fee waivers are great. A lot of poor parents are too busy / don't have their shit together enough to learn about them & use them. A lot of poor parents won't even have their kids take the tests at all even if they are free, especially if it means taking an entire day to drive them to the test facility. They might not even know what an SAT test is.

I did very well with my SAT

but to get to the city we had to take it was a 2 hour long drive through twisted roads that made me carsick. I lived in a small town far away from the city. By the time I got there my breakfast I had quickly eaten gave me a stomach ache, I had woken up far earlier than usual and not gotten my 7 hours too. I certainly would have done a lot better if I had lived in the big city.

Another factor: if you wanted to pay the fee you could just take the test over and over again until you got a great score. So kids with poor parents obviously had a huge disadvantage. Also kids who had the time and money could study for it with prep books - I did, while some of my friends were flipping burgers while still in highschool. Its not surprising I got a higher score than them, but it said nothing about my intellegence or understanding compaired to theirs.

I love how this article has 3 sentences and then stops to quote the first two sentences.

Also peppered with a lot of bad, redundant writing: "That’s the shape I’m watching for. That’s the shape I think wins." - those sentences both say the same thing and you didn't need either of them.

I feel like that indicates they may not have understood HOW to write a coherent and professional article here, or, indeed, an article worth reading. They clearly understood WHY - they wanted lots of attention and to show how big of an AI booster they are but WHAT they wrote was a lot of gibberish because they didn't know HOW to write.

From what I could tell a man was stabbed, didn't die, a minor event that happens every day in cities everywhere and always has - and then the locals decided to have a pogrom.

I recently talked to a brit who expressed their fear of... knives. It blew my mind. The UK has one of the lowest murder rates in the world, 5 times less than the US, but they're so incredibly afraid.

They are just plain embracing a culture of paranoia, cowardice and extreme surveillance. I wouldn't care because I don't live there except the dystopian tech and business models they're developing ends up crossing the seas.

I'm sure when this law goes through they won't stop and will shortly be lining up some even crazier surviellance tech.

I'm thinking something that automatically scans your computer for porn or other things, like ripped film mp4s and sends it to the goverment to be analysed.

Or perhaps little gps trackers that children are mandated to wear at all times.

Yeah, although I suspect the study isn't taking account major economic factors involving ai and remote work jobs - the fact is society is built around jobs you commute to and it takes a little bit of time for society to change.

People have understood suburbs are designed for commuters since they first started popping up, this isn't like some bizarre thing that needs careful understanding. It would be like if people stopped using boats, everyone in Venice would be like "people who once used boats are now having trouble getting around town and the streets are too crowded. How curious."

One of my favorite dynamics: Warrior class that really kicks butt, takes control over the state and then slowly becomes obsolete but is so embedded in the social structure that it just sticks around sucking up vast resources for hundreds of years.

I've read the Ottoman Empire had this happen with the Janissaries, but there are lots of other instances of the military becoming a colossal useless but dangerous parasite, even lots of current-day ones.

I still do, honestly.

Scout sounds like an excitable little dog that runs headlong into trees when trying to catch a frisbee.

Given Microsoft's long history of failure with personal assistants I'm looking forward to this one! Clippy, Cortana, Copilot! Wasn't an animated dog called rover one of these way back? The best of all was unquestionably Ms. Dewey for Microsoft Windows Live Search who is almost forgotten.

That could be. I'm thinking of the Chu–Han Contention and the Warlord Era in China as times that it was probably the case - In both cases goverment control collapsed and there was not just one rebellion but a whole bunch that all sprang up at once and then proceeded to fight eachother! Arguably some of that happened during the Russian Revolution too.

Its by Augustus F. Lindley and called Ti-ping tien-kwoh; the history of the Ti-ping revolution Volume I and II. And its actually 955 pages. Its an account written by one of the generals fighting for the rebels, who was also a British guy. Its part history part memoir. Kind of a weird book.

I suspect those other books people mentioned are probably better if you want a good understanding of the war that's not one sided and written in 1866. But its one of the very few contemporally written first-person works available.

Edit: you can find it on Project Gutenburg for free if you want to take a look at it. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39180/39180-h/39180-h.htm

That's pretty wise. I never considered that. During the very late part of the edo period China had the Taiping Rebellion, the deadliest religious civil war in human history by some meansures.

I've read that it was caused by a very complicated mix of things, one of which was resentment of the northern Manchu ethnic group which ruled China, combined with terrible floods and famine. Perhaps that's a case where lack of dignity helped cause war. People were starving, but in addition they felt disgruntled. I have a 1000 page book on that which I've been meaning to read for a year, so I'm sure I'll look back on this analysis and cringe when I finally get around to it.

Smartglasses, NFTs, getting ai to write your emails, always talking to Alexa, taking photos of everything constantly for social media.

People who do these things must think the tech makes them more likable and interesting. But, in fact, I immediately deeply dislike these people and would never want to be friends with them. Its a paradox.

Its actually like watching a dude pissing themselves in public and thinking "Ah yeah, I'm covered in pee now! I'm so cool, look how jealous those non-pissers are!"

One thing that I find interesting about this is that "samurai lived in dignified but extreme poverty" but never really did anything to threaten the state and take its riches for themselves for hundreds of years, despite all of them being crammed together with lots of opportunity to organize an enormous rebellion right in the city where the king lived.

Perhaps they didn't think of it as poverty. Anyway, great read.

Person: I prefer food cooked at home, even if the chef isn't a professional.

You: Do you? even if the chef is covered in bleeding pustules and cooking with rotten food?

No? That's clearly not what they were saying.

I mean I can write a non-llm program that "has better reading comprehension than an average human" depending on what you think reading comprehension means. Today I went to ask an LLM some very simple questions, stuff you can google and "do these lines have X word in it" and it failed to answer pretty spectacularly several times in a row, so I'm just not feeling the LLMs are superior intellgence today.

those insulting graphs Microsoft put out with no labeled axes just shows how serious they are about all of this.

I don't see anything in SOMA that's implausable, so I don't see how it fails to tell us anything about the real world, any more than any other prediction about the future. And we pretty much have to make predictions, its both in our nature and a smart thing to do.

Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that. One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.

The best sneaking experiances I've ever had in games is actually in modern Multiplayer games. Dayz and Squad are fantastic sneaking games, its hard, its fun and there's no need for a "You're in a shadow now" indicator - although I always thought those were great.

I'm hearing from you: "People shouldn't have the right to determine how their country is run - I should - because I'm a technology-man, so I'm better than them."

Imagine the political implications of this if it actually worked.

AI is useful for programmers and a few other groups of people to do their jobs faster.

For most people it is just a thing that produces crappy facebook memes, has made certain parts of life more dystopian - like job interviews, and people keep saying is going to take away your job and the jobs of your children. And energy prices keep going up.

If you can't see why AI is unpopular you're just very out of touch.

I've heard this is now most of some CS jobs now. Just writing documentation for AI.

I've gotten this too a lot. If you ask AI to cite where it got info you can lose a lot of confidence in it pretty quickly.

One thing that SO had was you could see multiple solutions and implementations for something. Sometimes the "best" solution isn't very readable code, sometimes you are able to understand the problem better when you see a bunch of people solving it in different ways and arguing about it like angry monkeys.

It really could be bad though.

Yeah. I wonder if the question "Did OpenAI steal a non-profit worth what is now maybe hundreds of billions of dollars?" will ever be answered. If not it will be one of the biggest heists in history.

It is a LOT better than 2 years ago, but there are flaws and its unpleasant to watch. The most easy to spot is their shoes (which they weren't wearing 1 second ago) flying off their feet without being kicked off in the first 10 seconds.

But if progress keeps going I'm sure it will get to the point where my brain doesn't feel sick after watching it. I hope so, because I'm sure there's a lot of AI videos in my future, whether I want them or not.

I would actually love taking a class like that.