matusp

I find it interesting how slow the spread really was after the initial burst. I am used to think about Christianity as a global religion. But before 16th century it was a pretty regional thing and its position seemed pretty precarious in handful of moments.

The problem is that AI is mostly yielded by the Silicon Valley caste that is as popular as bankers in 2008. People are sick of tech companies that are acting as parasitic as possible.

How exactly would you deploy 10,000 drones? If you start thinking about the logistics of it (you need to store them somewhere, somebody needs to bring them from the storage and prepare them for launch, somebody needs to navigate them, ...), you will quickly realize that you budget is not as big as you would like.

Dataset quality is a huge issue in ML in general. You can often list a few dozen random samples from any given dataset and you will find out something weird going on instantly.

It's like asking what if AWS starts doing it, they have all the infrastructure in place. LLMs are just one cog. There is a lot on the application side they are not doing at all.

Never heard the term Lusophone before. TIL

Before clockwork, human mind was a city (Plato, Marcus Aurelius, i.a.)

That's why we have state. There are many technologies that we, as a society, decided to control in various ways. You can't just build a nuclear weapon for example. There is no particular reason why we let tech bros control many aspects of our lives, apart from legal inertia.

LLMs can be "trivially" decentralized by expanding the concept intellectual property to also cover algorithmic processing. It's just about how we setup our laws and rules.

Oil is up by 100% in recent weeks. It might have to give, but probably not with these prices.

Cyrillic is probably a successor to Glagolitic. Glagolitic was the first Slavic alphabet, but when they tried to use it in Bulgaria, it had all the UX problems you mentioned. What they did is replace most of the characters with their Greek counterparts, while keeping the Glagolitic writing system and some of the characters with no counterparts. Bulgaria was close to Byzantium, and people were more likely to know and use Greek letters already. Nevertheless, Cyril and Methodius should still get some recognition, as the shape of the letters is not as important as having the system to write down the Slavic language into letters.

> There are no indications that Ukraine will lose this war.

Apart from not controlling 20% of their territory?

They are going to lose, the question is how much. I don't see Russians losing the territory they occupy right now, unless some black swan event happens. It remains to be seen how much more territory Russia is able to conquer until they lose their appetite.

AI is not trying to do anything. It's a technology and it does not have agency.

I think that the perception problem with AI is not about the technology itself. It's about the famously parasitic Silicon Valley companies that are the pioneers of the technology. I can imagine a society where AI is welcomed and celebrated, but the people wielding it would definitely need to be less psychopathic than what we have over here.

Despite all the AI hype, I wonder how much it only exists in the tech bubble full of terminally online folks. Unless you spend significant part of your day online, most of the AI risks mentioned in this series are probably negligible. The most affected demographic is computer nerds that grew up enjoying utopian Web that is now turning dark.

Illiberal democracy

Looking at the pictures in the article, the level of detail is not particularly great in some parts. It seems like many building have very simple shape and color. With some modeling skill, I can imagine carving and painting 100s of these in a day. Although I can't imagine doing it for 20 years.

I would however like to know what his research was like. Was he just following Google Maps/Earth? They were released in 2005 and 2001 respectively and NY has had coverage from the get go.

It's called terrorism only when it comes from a certain region. Otherwise it's sparkling military action.

One thing to consider is that Trump is publicly stating that the US are destroying the infrastructure as a punishment for non-compliance. That basically makes it clear that the motive is not based on military considerations.

Russia is actually gaining people in this war. The occupied territory they intend to keep has a prewar population of 10M.

However dilute the effect is, if they are able to hit a few gas/oil carriers with drones there, nobody is going to use that body of water.

Very much so. I wouldn't mind some interesting projects or results. But it's very basic opinions or parables all over again.

I enjoy working with it. I mostly just use it to define the input and outputs more programmatically compared to raw prompts.

It is very unlikely that Russia depends on Iran for its drone production. Iran is not producing any critical components that you could not get elsewhere. The export of Iranian drones was probably close to zero already after the last year's shootout.

Russia is still selling a comparable amount of oil as before the war (7 mb/d). The price going up (URALS was 50 at the start of the year, now it's more than double at 110) is definitely a great boon for them, as selling oil is one of the most important revenue streams for them.

Another interesting development is the ridiculous amount of background bluring in photos. Turns out you can find surprisingly large number of garages, warehouses, treelines, etc based on a single photo.

I have been in both academia and industry for years, and I don't think the model you describe is true anymore. It was definitely true 10 years ago, but the situation has flipped. Now, I see really ambitious and impactful research coming out of industry labs. Academia is often lagging behind the state of the art because they lack the resources (data, compute, and skills) to compete.

Academia is also incentivized such that everyone works on the same popular topics to secure grants and citations. This is currently LLMs, where academia needs to compete with multi-billion corporations on a technology that is notoriously expensive. In effect, many researchers work on topics that are pretty non-consequential from the get go (such as N+1th evaluation dataset), but it's the only way for them to stay relevant.

And the real punchline is that the deluge of papers barely matters, as the academic field is barely moving, and the most interesting innovations are happening on the product side.

I am not sure I understand what it is about

It's pure armchair psychology, but this type of project always makes me think about anxiety. Who really needs this level of self observation and control? At the same time, I really enjoy reading about it and I find the window into somebody else's world intriguing.

I tried using Gemini for some light historical research. It could not stop using tech metaphors. Lords were the CEOs of their time, pope was the most important influencer, vassal uprisings were job interviews, etc. The metaphors were almost comically useless and imprecise, and Gemini kept using them even when I explicitly asked it to not do that.