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In the biomedical sciences, we typically use a tool called BigStitcher [0], which is bundled with ImageJ [1]

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-019-0501-0 [1] https://imagej.net/plugins/bigstitcher/

Is it possible for the military to be too "strong"? Each warship, fighter jet, tank, and soldier costs time, money, and effort to produce and maintain.

That a military is necessary for ensuring the security and continuing stability of the US is of little importance when the real issue is based on a tradeoff, an equilibrium. What are we gaining and what are we losing?

The current situation of the military industrial complex is complicated, but it is nevertheless clear that is is extremely inefficient (and thats by design). I'm not sure if incorporating AI tech into the military is going to change this, when the fundamental incentives remain the same.

While the game-ability of prediction markets is a major concern, I believe that the potential of prediction markets to further exacerbate inequalities may be a greater threat. It is important to keep in mind that while markets optimize for total value, it doesn't guarantee that it will optimize for things we as individuals want.

Free markets tend to lead to a positive feedback loop. Someone who has a lot of money will be able to predict the market better than someone who has less. Their advantage generates more wealth which helps them to predict the market better. Wealth generates more wealth.

In theory, this is offset by the notion that the market is not a zero sum game. The person may be generating new, previously unavailable, wealth. But while stock performance is tied to the success of a company (which can generate new wealth), prediction markets are tied to transient questions (where intrinsic value diminishes the closer you get to expiry). In this sense, how "predictions" might generate "new value" is unclear.

Depends on what you consider winning. Consider that out of the 20% of internet users that have adblock today, only a fraction will be willing to turn to illicit means should Google get serious, especially if it requires anything more complicated than installing an extension.

Also keep in mind that pirate groups are able to crack L1 Widevine only because some companies let the keys slip in a breach. The keys are burned as soon as they are discovered, making it impractical to disseminate them for public use.

It's only because individual movies/tv shows have a high enough value (versus the cost of cracking it, the risk of your keys being burned) that pirate groups are able to thrive. This wouldn't work well with Youtube as it's value is primarily derived from having a large quantity of content.

I don't think many people would be willing to pay per Youtube video as they do for a movie.

What makes you think that Youtube will "lose"? From a technical perspective, they have been rather conservative in their efforts so far. It can get so much worse, they could bake ads directly into the video stream or automatically randomize their API.

Don't forget that Google also owns Chrome, which by its dominance over the market can be used to effectuate DRM (such as widevine, or web integrity). They also own the Chrome Web Store, and they can ban any extensions that bypass Youtube ads (they already ban extensions with the ability to download Youtube videos, strangely they allow downloaders for any other site).

Google has a lot of money, and a lot of fingers in critically important pies, to make their wishes a reality should they deem to do so.

I love the idea of humanity expanding out into the cosmos, it feels like space exploration is "the Future." But I can't see how SpaceX's Mars colonization plan makes economic sense in the current day. No matter what technical advances they come up with in getting people to Mars, it doesn't change the fact that it is an inhospitable planet. What unique resources are on Mars that makes it more profitable than say, colonizing the Sahara desert?

Fair enough, I guess it doesn't really matter if someone hacks a drawing/building game. But people love competitive games.

I guess you can prevent most overt hacks through server-side validation. But still, that doesn't stop more sophisticated users from creating and using subtler hacks (such as aimbots).

This is so cool! Though, how do you ensure that people are playing fair? When I dabbled in web-based games a year ago, I noticed that it's pretty difficult to have a good anti-cheat system for games that runs on browsers.

> this is luckily not a big enough of a dot on their radar for them to care.

Funnily enough, Google doesn't allow yt-downloader extensions on the Chrome web store. They will cite you rule #4, and send you a rejection letter for "Facilitating unauthorized access to or download of copyrighted content or media, specifically, YouTube." The irony of course is that they allow downloader extensions for other websites. That they specifically prohibit youtube downloaders while allowing downloaders for almost any other website smells suspiciously like anti-competitive behavior to me.

On the other hand, Firefox's addon store is free from these restrictions, so you can find tons of yt download extensions there.

Transferable objects have been part of the spec for a while now, making it possible to send data back and forth contexts with no copying.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/transferable-objects-light...

Emergent phenomenon can also produce "laws of nature". For example, the laws of thermodynamics are explained by statistical mechanics.

When it comes to the question of when strong AI will come, I think our society's reaction to ChatGPT is more worrying than the technology itself. Namely, because of ChatGPT, we see major companies, governments, etc clamoring over AI today like never before. The magnitude of this hype and its resulting funding rush is unprecedented. Nobody could have predicted that this would have happened so quickly.

I cant imagine that such policy will be popular because GPUs are useful for many important things besides AI.

> They can’t point to an existing system that poses existential risk, because it doesn’t exist. They can’t point to a clear architecture for such a system, because we don’t know how to build it.

Inductive reasoning is in favor of their argument being possible. From observing nature, we know that a variety of intelligent species can emerge from physical phenomenon alone. Historically, the dominance of one intelligent species has contributed to the extinction of others. Given this, it can be said that AI might cause our extinction.

In other words, companies raise prices because they can. Businesses being profit-maximizers are hardly anything new. What is novel about "greed"flation is that it introduces the notion that companies are taking advantage of people's expectations that prices will rise, causing inflation. The question is, is this a short-term phenomena (as with most inefficiencies caused by information asymmetries), or will these abnormal increases last? it's hard to say, as it is dealing with behavioral economics.

I think it will be helpful if it discusses internal fragmentation, where the payload is smaller than the allocated block. I observed that this was important in understanding the purpose of various memory allocation algorithms when undertaking the malloc lab in college.

This one has subtitles and a parade. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpupc4zxlTo

That is a great point. The laws of thermodynamics exist as a logical consequence to fundamental statistical principles. It is statistical mechanics that gives rise to entropy, not the other way around. (hence the beautifully elegant equation S = Kb*ln(Omega) where Omega is the number of microstates)

I realize that programmers are not always good scientists. Yet some claims are absurd in ways that I now believe this phenomenon necessitates rigorous study.

> Zero probability does not mean an event cannot occur! It means the probability measure gives the event (a set of outcomes) a measure zero. [0]

[0] https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/273398

Indeed, the original claim treats mathematics as a modeling tool, not philosophy. Nevertheless, it is my belief that untestable hypotheses about True Reality (should it even exist) are not debatable without causing migraines of epic proportions. There's no physics without mathematics -- as physicists say, shut up and calculate.

Please elaborate.

A probability of zero does not mean that the event is impossible. When we refer to probabilities we are talking about probability densities. Infinite precision is a useful modeling tool in the same way that approximations of pi are useful.

The number of possible states asymptotically approaches infinity, so we can model it as such. You can get a more "accurate" model using more math (with measure theory), but the terms will coalesce such that they are negligible.

The statement is mathematically correct [0].

[0] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/142730/px-x-0-when...

With enough marbles, the discrete distribution behaves like a continuous distribution. The point probability of a continuous distribution is infinitely improbable -- in other words it is 0.

(0.00..0..1 = 0 just as 0.99 repeating equals 1)

While cracking the hardware is an interesting technical challenge, it is certainly not the only method. Security is only as good as the weakest link -- the human factor. Thus, piracy groups are able to use social engineering to crack Widevine without relying on advanced laboratories. See [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29702110

L1 has been bypassed by piracy groups for years (through social engineering). They just don't share the keys publicly because it would give their opponents an advantage. See [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29702110

> In the DVD commentary, Stanton said that he has been asked if it was his intention to make a movie about consumerism. His answer was it was not; it was a way to answer the question of how would the Earth get to the state where one robot would be left to continue the cleanup by itself. Nevertheless, some critics have noted an incongruity between the perceived pro-environmental and anti-consumerist messaging of the film, and the environmental impacts in the production and merchandising of the film [1]

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Themes)

Perhaps when we have sufficiently capable OSS models, but as it stands GPT is a paid service and not a public good.

For this to remain true for the indefinite future we must assume that strong AI is strictly impossible. Our scientific knowledge today does not suggest that this is the case.