Most interesting novel ideas originate at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Profitable trades could be found in the biomedicine sector when the knowledge of biomedicine and finance are combined. That's where I see LLMs shining because they span disciplines way more than any human can. Once we figure out a way to have them combine ideas (similar to how Gwern is suggesting), there will be, I suspect, a flood of novel and interesting ideas, inconceivable with humans.
Your suggestion basically amounts to: digitize and centralize welfare. There are already electronic cards for food. If the money is drawn directly from the central bank as credit instead of from the state welfare fund, it won't make it any more efficient. In fact any experimentation among states will disappear. Also, if CBDCs become a thing, you could see a slow slide into behavior control. What people eat, and where they live becomes a concern for the central bank, because they get to decide who the approved vendors are for those things. "Central" anything is a design smell in most cases.
Getting rid of cash also requires proper paper work and identification so you can sign up for the CBDC wallet. In that case you're excluding the very people from the system who need it the most.
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
Why do you imply that the fun, constructive environment for homeschooling a long shot, but the weird religious or abusive environment is more of the norm?
Most CEOs, yes. But founder CEOs normally don't care about stock price that much. Zuck turned down yahoo, remember. Bezos kept taking losses in Amazon in the beginning for the sake of future growth despite the stock being punished so hard. Steve Jobs was like that too. Your cynicism is misguided. VR is a very long call.
Why do you doubt Zuck's foresight? I am not a fanboy, but he timed the pivot to mobile really well, acquired instagram, and anticipated how crucial messaging would be. All pretty good calls. The VR stuff is still playing out. In fact I think he is one of the few who do a better job of looking ahead.
When I look back on my 45 years life, there are spans which feel like a different life altogether. I thought differently, and made choices that I won't make today. I'd say "in my former life" as if that life ended and a new one began. I suspect youthful immortality would be a sequence of many deaths and rebirths. If you had the neuroplasticity of a 25 year old and the experience and wisdom of a 50 year old, I imagine it won't get boring, and perhaps new ideas and modes of living won't require a generation to die, and a new one to be born.
Those hundred years won't exist for the dying. I would personally find comfort in knowing that I will feel waking up right away into a technologically much more advanced world
The idea of "intellectual property" is anti-productive as well as immoral. Open source software is a very good evidence of the utilitarian benefits of doing away with software patents. And IP is immoral because it's impossible to grant and secure "intellectual property" rights without violating physical property rights. Please read Stephen Kinsella's "Against Intellectual Property" for a good treatment of both the utilitarian and the moral dimensions:
I didn't go to film school or had any training in creative arts. I love the fact that I will have an outlet for creative expression where my text can generate image, video and sound. I can iterate over them, experiment with visualizations, and get better without technical barriers. Generative AI is making everyone an artist as well as a coder
I have fantasized about a secular technological possibility for reincarnation (or afterlife). It's not outrageous nowadays to consider a future tech that allows taking a backup of your brain and restoring it later in a compute substrate other than your brain. The effect would be you waking up with your memories and personality in some other place out in the far future. Now, perhaps, our brain is being constantly backed up in the nature. Perhaps, if physics gets to the bottom of everything, we can travel far enough out into outer space in an instant, and look back at the brains of people on earth as they were an arbitrarily long time ago when light bounced off of them to reach that far out, and that with insane optical zoom and perfect neural resolution, so they can restore them? Whether you wake up in a hell or a heaven, is another question.
Competition is the natural state of affairs. Nobody has to enable it. IBM/Microsoft weren't forced by the EU to give up market dominance in PCs. And if the EU tried, it couldn't ever do a better job than Apple did. It's no surprise that EU lags so much behind the US in tech innovation.
This may be true, but perhaps benign. Technology in general has made the world a smaller place. This is quite obvious in the context of travel across distances. But consider living in a small village where everyone knows everybody else, and also what is going on in the lives of other people in the village. This village is effectively a surveillance society but we don't frown upon it. AI makes it possible to do it on a global scale.
Do we worry about the distribution of oxygen in the atmosphere, so everyone has equal chance of breathing? I know it's hard to comprehend massive abundance of everything, but please try.
Wouldn't this be simpler if everyone was an insider? A public company releases a significant amount of internal financial and operational information every quarter. What if it was real time? Live stream everything from the boardroom.
it'll take roughly 1.5 million mature trees to sequester 315,000 metric tons of CO2 over 10 years. The "Billion Tree Tsunami" in Pakistan aimed to plant a billion trees from 2014-2017 and surpassed its goal. Similarly, India set a record in 2016 by planting more than 66 million trees in a single day.
I have been using Scala. I have found that it can give you the best of both worlds. You can reason algebraically, and often after a refactor, if it compiles, it works. Type inference and monads works great too. You also get to benefit from being in the java ecosystem. In instances where it gets too esoteric, I can break rules and code more like java. I am curious what others think.
"Prior to the long peace, there’s little question what happens to a country like Venezuela, which is essentially a giant pile of barely guarded wealth: one – or several – of its neighbors would move in, oust the government and seize the territory and its valuable resources (oil, in this case)."
While I don't advocate war and violence, I can't help think that such a hostile takeover of a poorly run country by another better run country can be perceived as creative destruction in capitalism. War is too costly now reassuringly, but the incentive of leaders to keep the country strong, economically as well as militarily, is much less. The fear of being wiped out by a neighbor may have kept leaders in check. Now that fear is gone, and nothing has replaced it yet. The optimist in me hopes that states abandon the pretense of being above markets. The fear we desire in those who run states, the fear that we hope will keep them in check, will be that of losing paying customers, their citizens, to other competitive jurisdictions.