elefanten

The capitalization makes it a Tesla reference, which has notoriously been promising that as an un-managed consumer capability for years, while it is not yet launched even now.

This is feeling like a retread of climate change messaging. Serious problem requiring serious thought (even without “AI doom” as the scenario, just the political economic and social disruptions suffice) but being most loudly championed via aggressive timelines and significant exaggerations.

The overreaction (on both sides) to be followed by fatigue and disinterest.

The third one is the only correct way to interpret the title.

Plenty of room for equivocation with words like "endorse", so depends what you mean by it.

I mean, literally in the first video he makes the standard argument that terrorist designations are politicized but you have to "look at who's right". And it's all in the context of defending Hamas and Hezbollah etc

And that's immediately followed by a clip of saying "America is biggest terrorist organization".

Obviously, the streamer is taking a "critical IR" type of standpoint.

So, I'm not sure what standard you're looking for. I never said anything about who's right or wrong, either among the streamers or the underlying sides of the conflict.

But the statement that he "endorses" Hamas etc doesn't seem so farfetched in the overall context.

And I apologized for the snark in my comment providing the link -- that was motivated by pointing out how readily available information is for self-assessment of the claims vs. calling for the original commenter to cite their claims (which most people are not doing in most HN comments).

Fair enough and sorry for the snark. Certainly it's worth aiming for, but I don't think the standard here is that every claim has to be cited.

A better version of my post would be to point out that it took 3 seconds to get some initial info with which to do a quick pass of self-assessing the claims.

I agree with your original point that rhetoric gets stretched a lot on these contentious topics.

Browsing some of the clips myself, I think it's a bit less than a slam dunk on the narrowest interpretation of the streamer "supporting" various groups... but a pretty convincing display of a strong bias wrt said contentious topic.

And to zoom back out to the context of the original comment vis a vis the posted article, it provides some useful context about why this person might be targeted for additional screening by domestic security organizations -- regardless of what one thinks about the validity or wisdom of those particular decisions.

Edit: And to your original framing, I think it's very easily apparent that this streamer is not a simple case of "concern for civilian deaths" -> "endorses Hamas". He's very consistently making the claim that they (and others) are emancipatory groups which are being maligned as terrorist.

Or just implement vastly more automated ticketing systems. They are standard in many countries. They could be implemented with limited-purview privacy preserving architectures where that aligns with expectations and values.

But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.

As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.

So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.

Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.

Does it though? Maybe in absolute terms it spends "a lot" of thought on these things, but in relative terms it borders on nothing.

Measure it by VC dollars invested and what actual orgs at tech companies are assigned to. It's almost ALL on a 1-10 year horizon.

So, as gp notes... is it really that harmful to allocate <1% to "sci fi" ambitions, especially when most of what they actually produce is short-horizon, immediately-usable stuff?

Putting aside the nebulous notion "contribution to hard science"...

She became famous for adopting a strain of strident and problematic activism, using it to attack her colleagues and making claims just as wild as some of the ones she cherry picks to critique.

It's not at all surprising that she ended up an extremely divisive figure. And meanwhile, the state of the art sped far ahead of where she drew her line in the sand.

It's hard to find discussion of her that isn't strongly biased in one direction or another (surely, my own comment included). In my experience (sample size 1), when she gets brought up (or involved), the quality of the discussion usually plummets.

Various parts of their corporate structure and previous business/financial relationships are tied to the notion of “AGI” being achieved — which is poorly defined and likely to become a semantic/legal debate more than a scientific one.

So them pushing that language in their pr/marketing activity is not a surprise and not really even meant to be scientifically meaningful.

And as advertisers get declining human views on their ads, the value of the business model will dwindle until it needs to be replaced by other forms of revenue. Content that can't shift business models and requires revenue to continue will die off.

Edit: Maybe that's fine, maybe that's bad. Maybe new models will emerge and things will reshape. But I'm just supporting the case that AI agents will pressure the current "free" content economy.

I didn’t take that to be his point. I assume he says “economically efficient” because he means their strongest skillsets don’t have (m)any other uses and they wouldn’t be realizing their potential by leaving those skills unused.

He probably overstates that case, especially talking to early career interns that haven’t yet narrowed their specialization and could pivot to other highly quantitative roles that use other high level math.

He’s also probably flattering his audience, to whom “math research” is more likely to be status-bearing.

Doubt he’s saying they’d suck at anything else.

GGP referenced US accusations against China

“When the only tool you have is a hammer…”

Stoller’s their tool of choice, pun entirely intended

This is a pretty wild claim, you're gonna need better evidence than strident rhetorical posturing to back that one up.

Yeah, I agree, this is a cool demonstration of growing capabilities in quantitative social sciences, probably soon leading to analyses that have been imagined for a long time but not (easily) possible until recently.

It'll take time to understand and integrate, but I imagine it should make theory that used to depend on small numbers of examples (glued together with rhetoric and charisma) richer and more sophisticated. Exciting.

Concluding "who's worse" wasn't the point of this paper, it was to implement some automated analysis based on old social science models.

But, I'm surprised you conclude what you do because the high level findings seem to indicate that Russia war bloggers are more prone to the more extreme forms of "otherization" per the 4 degrees laid out in the model -- e.g. figure 7 shows Russian war bloggers significantly (but not massively) overindex on the 3rd (Villainization) and 4th (Dehumanization) degrees, which are the worse of the two, compared to Ukrainian war bloggers, who only overindex on the 2nd degree (Survival or Security).

Additionally, Table 4 shows Telegram channels that are more prone to otherization are more central (more influential) in the Russian blogger network than they are in the Ukrainian blogger network, as summarized by the line: "The results, shown in Table 4, reveal statistically significant correlations for both degree centrality and eigenvector centrality and the use of othering language by both groups of war bloggers, with a stronger correlation among Russian war bloggers."

You presume too much about which “us” I represent here.

But the posted piece is a (deeply polemic) piece about a policy intending to warn the international community about CCP influence ops. And your take is “woah, let’s look out for America though”

Sorry, but that points in a silly direction for Europe. But time will tell. Yet again.

Thoughtful and insightful reflection, thanks for sharing. I think that interplay between personal sense-making, personal strengths and the addictive/rewarding aspects of belonging to a specialized/esoteric community are a very common combination driving the creation of new narratives, new factions/interest and, ultimately, all kinds of change in general… for better or for worse, usually only time and intervening chance can tell. It’s cool how meaningful it is to the participants, and also cool when you can zoom out and connect it to the experiences of others across space and time.

Fair point, though the post is written in gender neutral language, perhaps to shield privacy. In that context, “child” is probably the most natural word to use?

Holy hell...

"2 - "Cookie cutter" - make it easier to add monetization to other Google O&O properties

While some O&O properties are already monetized, many others are still just thinking about it (e.g. Google Now), or are totally untapped (example: Android on OS level). We can bring on more O&O inventory, faster, by investing to develop a scalable way to onboard new properties with a consistent offering to advertisers (charging models, type of buying, formats, models for organic vs. ads tradeoffs). Examples:

Calendar: Promote local events that a user is interested. Miley going on tour in Seattle next month? Awesome! Thanks for showing me, Google Calendar!

Allo: Working out where to go to dinner tonight with your buds? Allo can interject and recommend a new local restaurant. It'll even make the reservation for you!

Chromecast: Tired of watching uninterrupted content on your Chromecast? Not anymore! Welcome to pre-roll ads built directly into the Chromecast - across all streaming applications.

Android: Locked screen ad/assistant to anticipate services and products before you even need to ask."

First time I’ve seen such a hand-wringing and apologetic attempt to celebrate Vannevar Bush. Despite openly observing the hindsight-based view of consternation, this author skips any deeper consideration of contextualizing Bush to the state of the world he actually lived in.

I agree that this name should be much better known. I don’t think that should be pursued so heavily drenched in shallow, contemporary “optics”. If you must put such focus on the “critique”, at least provide some interesting and plausible counterfactuals.

Interesting to hide behind the defense you’re just stating facts while being so imprecise about everything else you’re saying.

Some vague, associative geographic vibes you experience are totally irrelevant to the detailed discussion of what various alcohols are called across (present day) countries.

And gp didn’t mention “Russians” in some vague accusatory sense, they clearly said “Russia” marched. A historical fact as it turns out. And the comparison was also precise: Russia’s pretense to march involved a wishful assertion of how many self-identified “Russians” inhabited the area.

Assuming this is the case, is there some kind of meaningful penalty for a contractor blowing up an entire mission like that?

I mean... beyond just not getting another contract?

The competitive, zero-sum conquests of two empires were very real, as were the sphere of influence negotiations.

But that’s not the point either way. As I’m reading gp, the point is that if the leaders of the international order want to prevent nuclear proliferation (a worthy goal), they’ll have to do better to protect Russia and China’s neighbors from their territorial aggression. Else, the border states won’t have a better choice than deterrence if they want to survive.

How many Ukraines and Taiwans will it take before a dozen new hands hold their own red buttons?

You should take a breath and make your complete argument somewhere all at once. Your reactive fragmented answers up and down the tree of comments are still terminally unintelligible, as of this comment.

Was sugar consumption halving every year for over a decade? Whatever the mechanism (seemingly up for debate), a halving post-tax is an outsized change.

In many cases, you need to understand the concepts to conceive of applying them beneficially to a problem at hand, whether you apply them or outsource the application.

Assuming this is sarcastic, it will never be realistic to pursue less bloodshed by allowing bloodthirsty conquerors to go about their business without opposition.

So, yes, unironically: slava ukraini

> their rareness convinces certain kinds of (shithead) people that they "must"

A complementary strategy is to relentlessly name and shame the backward cultures that compose this shitheadedness.

So say it with me: Chinese* traditional medicine is backwards and primitive. Chinese ivory buyers are a shameful stain upon humanity.

* The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) reports that nearly all of the current demand for elephant ivory comes from the Chinese market. -https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/economics-...