The only way to have a better democracy is to have better people.
Education is the entire slow, painful game.
2,932 karma · joined December 17, 2017
Education is the entire slow, painful game.
To an expert communicating with a layperson is a form of compression. You must turn some very complex idea into one that you suppose the other person can grasp given their limited frame of reference. It's always lossy, and you have to guess how much you can remove without sounding patronizing or being inaccurate. It's tough, and the more you know the tougher it gets.
Ever done that "explain what happens when I visit Google in my web browser" interview question?
A sales guy will answer in a sentence. An engineer might be able to talk about it for several days and still not be sure they didn't miss anything important. That much knowledge can actually be detrimental to communication.
However, if I want it to DO something then Gemini is in absolute last place. I don't trust it for anything more than renaming files that I don't care about very much or extracting data (though it's too expensive for data extraction at scale).
Sometimes that's what being smart sounds like.
I'm not sure I would class Youtube as social media. It can be, but some people just watch it on their TV's and never engage in a social way at all.
Our society has come to equate contrarian thought with independent thought, but the aren't the same thing. Worse we've simultaneously stopped training young minds to think properly.
Telling someone to think for themselves without first teaching them HOW to do that, doesn't just halt progress it puts it into retreat.
We need to start teaching young people to trust those who know more than they do, and how to tell who those people are. Further, we should teach them how to reason before we admonish them to do it for themselves.
Until we manage those two things we will be a society that distrusts everything we can't understand, and understands very little.
For example, I'm a nerd. I'm bad at baseball. I lack that kind of intelligence, even though it's more common than the ability to program. That doesn't also imply that you can't trust my Python code.
GM did show that the devices scan for open wifi networks, and users in the comments have claimed that it connects without their permission.
Gamers nexus did not make that claim about them actually connecting though.
I'm not sure that's entirely fair. OpenAI recently discussed this at length in a blog post after some accusations around Astra and the trade-offs. The grown-ups are definitely thinking about it, and making tough choices about the trade-offs.
It's reasonable to debate whether ENOUGH is being done here, and I doubt that even the most rabid AI advocate would argue that more couldn't be done, but everyone in the industry is very much actively thinking about it.
Check this out if you haven't read it: https://openai.com/index/an-alien-mind/
They discuss recent choices they made specifically for that reason.
> The ones who do discuss these ideas are confrontational about LLMs and not effective spokespeople.
Very much this. I'm very open to reasonable debate on the subject, but 8/10 times when I try someone who is rabidly pro/anti jumps in. It turns from a debate amongst reasonable people who reasonably disagree into some kind of political/religious battle of belief systems.
I think part of my problem is that a lot of peoples careers very much depend on them not understanding it and spreading misinformation intentionally.
I'm not sure it is always possible to verify when human comprehension is the limit though. Most of research is done an the frontier of knowledge where we don't know what we don't know.
There would need to be a great deal of nuance in any law, and nuance in practical terms tend to just mean "loophole." Still, you're right that we should try to build explainable systems where it is possible/reasonable to do so first.
Human comprehension sets a ceiling on progress.
It reminds me of those schools that can only teach as quickly as the dumbest kid in the room can follow. We don't want that for our entire species.
2) You replied that it was saltwater and desalinating it was expensive.
3) I pointed out that saltwater evaporates fine. You seem to have assumed that cooling can only be done with freshwater for some reason.
4) You now seem to believe that I'm a simpleton who is suggesting that the people who live near large amounts of freshwater should also import salt water for some reason? Honestly I'm lost. They don't need to, they have fresh water which will also evaporate fine.
If water is scarce where you live, you live in a bad (and relatively rare) place that humans aren't meant to live. You should be talking to your representative to make sure data centers don't waste your imported water just because it's cheaper.
Everyone else will be fine.
You realize this means insisting on terrible tech that humans can understand right? It essentially caps human progress at some point about 4 years ago.
If you are old and happy with the way things are this might sound like a good idea. It does not to me.
Maybe if you live in a desert. I'm not going to. We don't all live in the same place, and different rules are necessary. I suspect that much of the talk about evaporative cooling comes from treating places where it is sensible to do as if they are places where it's not.
There is a lake not far from that it would take about 3 days to cross on foot at it's SHORTEST point. Walking the full length would take about TWO WEEKS, someone would probably die of dysentery along the way.
Water scarcity is a regional problem that's being passed off as a universal concern for all of human-kind. It isn't. Earth has water, lots of it. Some places are just crummy places for humans to live.
The demand for paintings did not disappear when photography was invented. Though many Luddites claimed it would. There were even those who wanted cameras outlawed to protect the artists livelihoods. Do you think we should have listened to those people?
Is this situation different from that one?
If you live in the desert, stop doing that... or get them to laws for your specific place in the world. Where I live we have something close to an infinite supply of fresh water.
That's not what the founding fathers said, and it's not what they wanted.
Madison thought that the two things were really the same saying: "The utility of this power will scarcely be questioned. The copyright of authors has been solemnly adjudged, in Great Britain, to be a right of common law. The right to useful inventions seems with equal reason to belong to the inventors. The public good fully coincides in both cases with the claims of individuals. The States cannot separately make effectual provision for either of the cases..." — Federalist No. 43 (1788)
Whereas Jefferson, who not only helped draft the consititution, but was the first patent examiner, was deeply suspicious of them and wanted a restriction on length directly spelled out at length in the constitution itself.
"I like it [the Constitution], as far as it goes; but I should have been for going further. For instance, the following alterations and additions would have pleased me... Article 9. Monopolies may be allowed to persons for their own productions in literature, and their own inventions in the arts, for a term not exceeding — years, but for no longer term, and for no other purpose." — Letter to James Madison (August 1789)
They all agreed that the purpose was progress for everyone, not one mans enrichment. They disagreed a bit about how best to accomplish that.
That's ridiculous and untrue.
Where the heck does it go? Space? You're talking about the entire planet here. There's nowhere for it to be lost to, unless you're cracking it into hydrogen and oxygen or something.
> Because you're the only person on earth who matters, clearly.
As I said elsewhere in this third 2/3rds of humans live near large bodies of water.
We reached that point with humans long ago. There's nothing new under the sun. Only remixes of dead peoples greatest hits. The pentatonic scale, for example, was not invented by the people who use it.
Science and art would have to start over from scratch if you expect things to all be genuinely new from first principles.
> who will make it if it means it's going to be consumed by data centers immediately
People who enjoy making it.
Some people just live in places that aren't suitable for human life and survive only through technology. Those places need to have different laws about water.
For example, I shouldn't be forced to use a low flow showerhead when I'm 100 miles from 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water. If you aren't next door to lake Michigan then maybe you should be.
The 1/3rd that choose to live in arid places where droughts are a concern should probably just pass laws that require closed loop cooling.
No, but that needs new laws. Not an abuse of the old ones justified under the thinnest of pretenses.
I don't think that folks stop to consider what bending copyright law into these weird shapes to meet their ends will do to other aspects of copyright.
For example, sampling in music. How is that different from AI generated music? If anything AI uses LESS of any individual song. You can't just say "no derivative works." That would fully halt progress on many fronts.
Copyright exists to encourage progress in the arts and sciences. Not to enrich artists or scientists.
Ai is progress. Further, the works it creates are fully transformative. It isn't just spitting out Harry Potter verbatim, it's making new things from it.
To me, this argument is like staying that if you read Winnie The Pooh as a child then Milne owns your artistic output for life, because one of your many influences might have been his work. It just seems obvious at face value.
Earth is two thirds water, and it rains. The water I drank this morning is million of years old. It will be around for millions more.
So, they pump some water out of the earth and it evaporates... It will come back down, and we aren't running out anytime soon.
Why do we care? Are they building these things in deserts? If so that's the problem. They should use closed loops if they want to build in the desert.