fwungy

There are cultures that never invented the wheel, written language or permanent buildings. They are highly intelligent in their own ways, but they are as unlikely to fit into elite academic as elite academics are to survive in a jungle on their own.

You can't improve that much on the SAT. Anyone can buy the online test prep courses and study them. They aren't going to turn a knuckle dragger into a genius, they're just going to maximize an individual within their band and remove the penalties for lack of familiarity with the test context.

Ever notice how it's a small set of phenotypes among dogs that are chosen as high level working dogs, e.g. police dogs?

Some dogs are highly intelligent and readily trained and some dogs aren't. You can guess by looking at their phenotype, i.e. breed, although not every dog of a preferred phenotype is capable.

Someone may be gifted at dancing. Someone may be gifted at singing. Someone may be gifted at hunting.

Why do we insist academic pursuits are equally available to everyone if we only throw enough resources at them?

Any selective program, music, athletics, military has a minimum entry level they're willing to accept. They know you can't turn a random person into an elite musician, athlete, or soldier.

Why does academia have to pretend that academic talent is evenly and randomly dispersed?

It's all so tiresome.

There are always ways to trade precision for speed in computer statistics models.

Reduce the parameter count. Increase the acceptable error.

The more parameters on a curve fit the better the fit will be, but the compute power increases too.

latency = f(fit_quality, fit_algorithm)

An LLM can be thought of as a curve fitting function where the query is a set of points and the output is the curve that runs through those points with the minimum of error.

You can increase a fit by increasing the number of variables in the fit function. In statistics this is can lead to overfitting, which will lead to an imprecise model, but in an LLM overfitting is a good thing, because the modeled domain in specific to the set of prompts.

But that comes with a cost, compute power and latency. I suspect what's happening is they're turning down the fit quality to save money as demand increases. Most people aren't paying for AI access. As a side effect it's also lowering the hype factor that was attracting unwanted regulatory attention.

Batteries are a mature technology that must work under the constraints of a)safety , b) cost, and c) energy density. With all the money and time put into battery research it is highly unlikely that a radical new battery technology that is cheap, safe, and energy dense will be discovered. Battery advancements are in the incremental phase.

When Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the drugs our politicians were on, he wasn't completely fabricating. DC is high on prescription pharmaceuticals and the actual legislation is coming from lobbyists hired by people who are also highly medicated.

They don't care what the people want after campaign season is over, however they will back off from anything that generates genuine outcry, for a while, then they'll try it again later.

>make agreement with company in developing world >how do we get the payment?

> a) accept their local currency? where? what then? what will it be worth by the time we exchange it? > b) take btc. transaction registers publicly on the blockchain. smart contracts can execute if desired, e.g. when payment x is received to address y initiate a sequence that starts delivery. currency risk is now in btc and that can be instantly mitigated by converting to your chosen currency, as the btc market is liquid. > c) require counterparty to pay in your currency, which means they pay exchange fees, increasing their costs.

It doesn't need to handle much to be a large market because international trade and foreign exchange are so huge.

If btc replaces 1% of fx it's doing $50B/day of transactions. Market cap of btc is only about $600M, so 100x btc is not crazy.

Is a p2p transaction system with an auditable record attractive to 1% of fx transaction parties? Seems reasonable, especially when corrupt states are a counterparty.

There are plenty of developing countries where people don't trust the government currency and use alternatives. It's quite common in Africa where many transactions were done in USD.

I'm able to make legal purchases that payment processors will deny pr otherwise aggravate with btc. The fact that a third party isn't involved with with transactions is important and serves as a reminder to payment processors to not politicize transactions lest they lose more of them to btc and other cryptos.

Btc is a genuine intranational and international currency in the developing world. It is more trustworthy than many sovereign currencies. The fx applications of btc alone are enough to grant it legitimacy and fx is a the biggest of all the markets. In a de-dollarizing world btc is a genuine factor.

The stable coins are an issue but stable coins aren't a necessity for btc transactions, they're a utility for traders. Btc's biggest danger is its price volatility. As it increases in value and market cap it will become more valuable to large players who will in turn be motivated to protect its integrity.

I haven't read anything beyond True Grit, but that is one of the funniest books I've seen. I should check out the rest of his work.

It's all so tiresome.

What if Group X has their own country where they will get that preference but Group Y is native born and gets a taint? The top class of Group Y will be fine. It's the lower ranks of Group Y who lose out to Group X and the higher ranks of Group Y who cement their own status by cutting off their native competition.

Set targets like Canada dies.

It's all stat juking. They can write bigger budgets because they are allowed to assume $x per immigrant in the economic plans, so increasing immigration means more budget funds.

The problem is that that assumption is highly dependent on who is immigrating. A highly educated healthy person will make a net contribution, others will cost the government and the governments will turn to subsidizing their employment in the private sector to reduce the cost. This becomes wage lowering pressure. Businesses that rely on mass labor get a government subsidized labor force that keeps their local labor in check.

Aggressive immigration without proper planning raises rents and lowers wages. It is exploitation under the guise of benevolence.

Understand that if Russia wins the Ukraine war the BRICS will take the lead on global energy policy. It's the G7 who prioritize carbon reduction, not the BRICS and BRICS adjacent.

If the G7 nations cut their fossil fuel usage they just make it cheaper for the BRICS.

Electrify when it's better, i.e. cheaper and cleaner, not to try to influence a complex and intractable global issue immersed in uncertainty.

Is there an existing framework for building what the author proposes?

I've seen the "queue mess" architecture many times myself but it's been too embedded to easily migrate to something else.

If there's a scientist on TV I do what they say.

Likely generated and then edited.

This is absurd. It makes no sense. I'm calling psyop.

It's sad the people who need the lower cost vehicles are people of color, and the people who push for these regulations are people of privilege. As I've learned in my courses from work, racism is pervasive and surfaces in manners conscious and unconscious.

Anyone who questioned the covid vaccine because of 5G mind control factors was not rational.

Questioning the covid vaccine because it was not fully tested and the technology has had a history of issues was completely rational.

It would demonstrate to the public what a real expert like Peter Hotez or Paul Offit is next to an ambulance chaser like RFK. RFK is the most prominent anti-vaxxer around. Humiliating him would cut the legs of the movement.

This was also a huge loss for charity. The $3M could have helped a lot of people.

I did some modeling of the future auto market in graduate school.

My model came up with a huge demand for low priced, simple ICE vehicles as a response to increased energy costs and lowered disposable income levels for many consumers. EV demand came from the high end of the market as consumers willing to spend a lot of money were more open to switching because they were spending a lot of money anyway and it was another option, and ROI on the EV is based on the consumer's ability to overcome the frontend costs, which wealthy consumers are more capable of.

My big stumble in math came when I stopped being able to self-prove everything I saw.

At some point you must memorize in math.

The world was better when personal sex lives were not a discussion topic of casual acquaintances.

The thought of the average person having sex is repulsive to me. I don't want to know anything at all about it, especially if they're into weird stuff, but even if not.

Most people feel this way. Why is it so hard to understand?