7,528 karma · joined September 28, 2021
Good luck ordering supplies for a hospital or grocery store today without the Internet. Paper catalogs are gone, fax machines are mostly gone, landlines are mostly gone, etc. etc. All the ways that used to be there for running things are gone, it’s all online.
It’s apparently still not ready to be used as a browser engine (and may never be), so what exactly is it for?
That’s an interesting question. I thought about it for a minute and was surprised that I came to the conclusion that the answer isn’t obviously “yes”.
An analogous question is “isn't it nice to have a society where at least some people are rich?”, and I think that question should make it clearer to many people why that is so.
What? That’s not how criminal law works, at all.
It absolutely does, you just believe you can decide for others what’s harmful for them.
“And the next time you feel your heart going out of rhythm, just hold your breath, and remember I will see you again a couple of weeks from now.”
Ah wait, no they don’t, because “resilience” is a worthless concept in emergencies, both mental and physical.
Ironically, that’s how I always imagined actual space exploration to turn out once the initial wonders are exhausted.
Space is huge, yes, and everything is kinda unique, but also not in a meaningful sense. Most of the continued amazement we associate with the idea of space exploration comes from human-written stories that fill space with a human variety that just isn’t there.
I’ve read many ancient texts with great delight, and not once have I tried to “build a mental model” of their authors. It’s a dimension of literary analysis that has never interested me, even for authors (such as Kafka) whose personal lives are generally considered inseparable from their works.
The work stands on its own for me… or doesn’t, in which case learning about the circumstances of whoever wrote it won’t save it in my eyes.
That describes most Western countries today.
Then the value of many ancient texts must be close to zero, because we often know nothing about the people who wrote them. In many cases even our guesses for where and when they were written differ by multiple centuries or thousands of kilometers.
There isn’t, and has never been, a nation in human history where regular people have meaningful recourse against random targeting by the government. This is as true in Sweden as it is in China.
The best you can hope for is that a court eventually rules in your favor, after years or decades of spending all your money and energy on it, having your life utterly destroyed in the process, and at the end you get a half-hearted apology (very often not even that), plus a tiny fraction of your expenses back if you’re really lucky. The shame and desperation will be with you until your last day.
This happens all the time and absolutely everywhere in the world. I’m not even convinced it happens more frequently in China than elsewhere, though people in the West certainly like to pretend so.
Most Western countries have 2-3 times as many police officers per capita as China and Russia. Many people in China have had not a single encounter with authorities in their lifetime (other than basic administrative tasks).
Meanwhile, in some EU countries, you need government approval to add a roof window to your own house, and you better believe there are inspectors and fines enforcing that.
A strange framing, given that a gaming PC can now run models that absolutely crush frontier models from 18 months ago.
You can do whatever you want with those, and 2 years from now, you’ll be able to solve Millennium-type problems on your own hardware.
Because people desire owning ancient pottery and are therefore willing to pay for it.
That’s not universally true. Some conjectures are renamed after being proven. For example, Fermat’s Last Theorem is now sometimes called the Fermat-Wiles Theorem, the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture is often referred to as the Modularity Theorem now, etc.
Think about it. The Internet runs on tens of thousands of massive datacenters. Thousands are being built as we speak. Obviously a single datacenter cannot hold an appreciable fraction of that.
BTW, the total budget of the NSA is less than the R&D budget of a FAANG company, so if you find yourself believing that they might have alien-level technology far beyond Google and AWS, you’re watching too much TV.
FWIW, the Burrows-Wheelers transform is also used by bzip2, so this isn’t a new feature even though that quote kinda sounds like it is.
That’s easy to calculate with, and almost certainly cheaper than compliance.
Nonsense. I’m not sure whether this was ever an appropriate description of what LLMs do, but either way, they have obviously moved way, way beyond that.