Ancient China had a monotheistic religion where they worshiped Shang Di, a monotheistic God without idols, who could not be drawn, and they made yearly sacrifices to at a single Temple.
There are schools that say Hinduism is monotheistic, where Para Brahma is God, and the different "Gods" like Shiva and Vishnu are different avatars of Para Brahma. But there are a lot of schools/philosophies of Hinduism and I only have a surface level understanding.
Global Warming does have a knowledge gap of sorts. Yes there is a viable solution to Global Warming, drastically cut back carbon and methane emissions. Where the knowledge gap is: drastically cut back on carbon and methane emissions, whilst maintaining or even improving quality of life in developed countries, having no economic issues, maintain industry, and keep developing countries developing. That is the hard part.
Terrance Tao's chatgpt conversation is really interesting for a variety of reasons:
1. The counter example wasn't just a brute force selection, the polynomial is structured in a very specific way that ends up getting the result.
2. Terry Tao's questions are very specific and prompts the AI in a useful way, that without high math training you are not going to get the same information out of it. Terry seems to see some aspects of the problem and counter example and uses AI to brute force some parts of it.
To be more specific, I dont think owning a sfh to rent out should be good. But building an apartment complex should be a good investment. Unrestrict building, and tax underutilized land.
Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't really an issue, morally, ethically, or with regards to people buying houses. The issue is when there are limited number of units, and people turn them into investments.
Defense and Military you can want to work there for such nebulous ideas such as serving your nation, protecting your loved ones, security, etc. This would require you to actually believe in said abstract concepts like nationalism, community, family, culture, or truth, so that you actually want to defend your homeland though. This is easier to believe for me than the innumerable start ups that were making the world a better place via ad placement click through rates.
AI is useful. But the amount of people that are simply offloading all of their thinking to AI and blindly accepting the answer is absurd. Kaggle is most likely using ai to assess the submissions and are not using any common sense by blindly accepting the results.
The mayor of NYC froze rent... rent controls are the opposite of building more affordable housing, since it disincentivizes building and renting units.
Deindustrialization in the west is imo largely due to this. Pollution was bad. Trying to clean things up was good. But you can't increase the cost 10x, and then allow a company to set up shop across the border and ship things in doing those practices still. The local environment becomes cleaner, so you export that toxic part, but the global impacts are still bad AND you hollow out your industrial core.
The same graph also shows a corresponding -3.5 STDEV below the mean temperature as well. It actually seems rather balanced. This year is hot, but we see similar abnormal jumps in other directions.
I've pitched this idea before. But instead of something like the Paris Climate Accords which were an agreement for people to self-regulate and reduce emissions. What is needed is an agreement that is a sort of cartel. Nations a,b,c agree on these policies (carbon per person, environmental regulations, etc), and any nation that wants to export services/goods to a,b,c they must enter the agreement or be subject to tariffs.
I am torn by these announcements. On the one hand there is the infinite potential on what we can disover, when AI prompts are solving outstanding problems. On the other, something is lost in an aesthetic sense when it wasnt a man working through this or with a novel insight. If an AI prompt runs on a data center for two weeks and then prints out p=np, it feels a little empty.
The founding myth was not talked about at all in new york state high school. They were clear it was about western expansion, and taxes, and led by the local american aristocracy. Every single period emphasized labor, women, and minority treatment. Perhaps this was because I did AP, but this was pretty consistent even in middle school american history also. Its in my opinion that they should have focused more on the founding myths and righteousness of the cause, as that builds civil engagement more.
jfc are you kidding? They teach how bad America is in public schools. A People's History of the United States has sold millions of copies. This must be satire since if anything the discourse is much more about how America is fundamentally corrupt.
Tax subsidies for jobs is a bad practice in general. Land should be taxed, if a Data Center is the most profitable use of a land, then thats what should be built.
Water usage is overblown, its brought up because one shitty policy paper 1000x their numbers due to incompetence.
Noise is only an issue where they fly in generators and gas turbines. Normal data centers are plenty quiet.
Minsky, in the 60s, thought that object detection / classification with a camera was worthy of a summer research project for undergrads. Maybe there is a classical algorithmic way to do so (I personally don't believe there is). But I would file that under optimism, since that problem realistically took massive amounts of data (PBs? XBs?) and Machine Learning to get decent at. IN the 60s I doubt there was enough compute in the world to solve that. Which is why I put it under optimism.
The politicization of AI has been a huge damper. NYS put a 1 year moratorium on datacenters with some municipalities doing so as well. My town did a 1 year ban, despite us being a retarded location for a data center (more expensive land than surrounding areas, less water access, far from power). US has also been lagging in power capacity, because of the anti-growth segment of politics. More nukes.
This is a good point that shows the weakness in a lot of these comparing military budgets. Imagine an example where one country spends $1000 per soldier and another spends $100k per soldier. IF they both field 100 soldiers. One budget is 100x the other, but by PPP they are equal.
A practical example is health care. US Gov gives free healthcare to service members. This is in the military budget. A different gov which already gives free health care to everyone, would have this in a different budget even if its effectively still supporting the military for each service member.
US Soldiers/Airmen/Sailors/Marines are incredibly expensive each.
Early computer scientists were so optimistic. They beleives with a few kh of ram and a mhz of cpu they could do anything. Ai, consciousness, ml, language, text to speech. Now we spend gigs of ram on web forms. So gibson saying yeay 3MB of ram would probably be enough for a consciousness in cyber space, is very optimistic but fitting.
I got the word BAITH on like turn 5, and I only chose that because I couldn't figure anything out. I thought it was a nonsense word. But mixing in a scottish slang word in the easy section was a surprise.
Beach, pier and flyby shots might be done with a combination of stock footage, or a single day shoot for filler. Theres a term for it, not sure what it is.
Youth Soccer is popular, but at least in my experience, most of the top athletes in school will leave soccer for the big 3 as a focus sport Football/Basketball/Baseball. If they are very good, those are much more likely to give scholarships as well. Soccer is much more popular with the middle to upper middle class suburbia kids, who might also be playing other sports, but are not treating it as a career. Maybe theyll play soccer in college, but their Major is still Finance.