sarchertech

Yes they could starve them out and maybe they will. But China is certainly preparing for an amphibious invasion, so they think it might be necessary.

> is to just win Taiwan over politically over the long term.

That was their plan until Xi became ruler for life and decided that he wanted Taiwan sooner rather than later.

You can’t run expensive, time consuming, and potentially harmful tests on every patient. Someone comes in with a headache, you tell them to go home and take an aspirin. You don’t send them for a a CT scan.

If it doesn’t go away and they come back, you start considering more serious issues.

It’s expected that uncommon non-emergent diseases will be diagnosed over multiple visits.

There’s a fair amount of viruses that have no animal reservoir.

Either they evolved from a different human virus, or from an animal virus.

Measles for example evolved from a livestock virus called rinderpest and lost the ability to infect cattle as it became a specialized human virus.

Are you just going to hop around every thread on this article and be snarky?

Humans are the only reservoir for polio, so that’s not true. We could theoretically wipe out polio just like smallpox because there are no animal reservoirs.

We haven’t even managed to wipe out polio, and that is a cheap, lifelong vaccine.

Microservices mostly exist to solve the problem of over hiring that existed during the era of cheap money.

You’re the one that said it’s a 100x productivity increase, so I assume you meant compared to a software developer writing without AI. What else are you using as a benchmark?

So it can’t 100x writing an OS even though it has tons of OS code in the training set. It can’t 100x a compiler. Based on personal experience (and number of games released on Steam compared to last year) it can’t 100x game development.

At my very large tech company it can’t 100x development of any of our customer facing products (and we still have a huge backlog). Judging by the fact that the vast majority of us still have jobs and big companies are still paying for Jira, Slack, and Teams, it doesn’t seem like it can 100x anything useful.

Yeah 100x is definitely still controversial. 100x means you should be able to whip up a new OS in a week.

Looking at something like Anthropic's attempt to write a C compiler in rust. That definitely wasn’t 100x. It took 2 weeks to build something that wasn’t a viable c compiler. And that was best possible scenario. A very comprehensive spec, an existing implementation to act as an oracle, and existing compilers in the training data.

I haven’t checked in recently but a couple months ago there was an increase on the Apple App Store, but not on Android.

And when I did a spot check, most new apps were just wrappers around LLM APIs.

The reason we have data is because of all the biases that come with “just looking around”. Confirmation bias and selection bias are very powerful.

I strongly dislike Donald Trump, and he has done some terrible things to our country. But my dislike of him also makes me more likely to notice the bad things happening around me.

It happens with conservatives too. Ask my conservative family about how frequently men pretend to be trans and go into women’s bathrooms to get a peek. Ask them how often non-citizens vote. Ask them how the current crime rate compares to when they grew up.

> The Republicans have utterly failed to offer any alternative at all to Obamacare after 16 years

That’s because before Obama picked it up, it was the Republican free market compromise plan in the face of a growing for socialized healthcare.

And now the Republican Party has been taken over by Trump. To the extent any political party has real principles they have given up theirs completely. Their principles are whatever Trump says they are this week.

So the question is “why hasn’t Trump pushed for separating healthcare from employment?” And the answer to that could be as simple as because he doesn’t think it’s exciting enough.

I agree we need to do more. I do wonder if just providing a public option to compete against private insurance is the way to go though.

>profit caps

We have profit caps on health insurance. It has many downsides though. The first is that it removes incentives for health insurers to reduce healthcare costs. It actually incentives them to want higher healthcare costs because 15% of a bigger number is more money.

Second, it incentives things like spinning out your insurance division into separate company and then buying an urgent care clinic to run as a sibling company to the insurance company.

Then when the insurance company spends their required 85% on healthcare costs, they just make sure a big chunk of that is spent on services from the sibling provider company.

United Healthcare does exactly this.

Of course functional regulators could stop this, but it’s hard and they don’t. Which is why I think offering a public instead of some of these direct regulations of private companies might work better.

You can deduct some of your medical expenses. I think it’s over 7.5% of your AGI.

But tax deduction or not isn’t what makes individual health insurance so expensive. When you have employer provided health insurance you’re in a completely different risk pool than people buying on the open market.

I’m not making any argument about what China should do. I’m saying that the argument that China is ruled by an enlightened despot who “believes in science” and believes in the existential risk of climate change is bullshit.

> but its a little rich to hear from westerners, who emit more CO2 per person, that the Chinese

1. Most western countries don’t emit more per capita than China.

2. I’m not saying what Xi should or shouldn’t do. I’m telling that what he is doing indicates that he doesn’t believe climate change is an existential threat.

> Xi could theoretically reduce GDP and associated emissions with the stroke of a pen

He showed he was willing to do that during Covid. If he was really convinced climate change was a problem he could clearly do more than he is.

It’s not a prisoners dilemma issue with Xi like it is with most countries. He controls 1/3 of global emissions. He is probably the only person on the planet who can personally reduce future temperatures.

Sure they are building solar infrastructure. But they’re also still increasing co2 emissions. If you are the autocratic leader with almost total control of 1/3 of the worlds co2, and you believe that climate change is an existential threat, you wouldn’t be increasing co2 emissions. Xi could reduce co2 emissions with the stroke of a pen.

So he obviously doesn’t think it’s that much of a threat.

It is just barely out of the top 10%. 27 out of 207. If you remove counties ahead of with tiny populations like Palau with 40k people, Iceland with 400k, and Greenland with 50k, it is in the top 10%.

Since they produce 1/3 of the co2, 1/3 of the reduction the world needs, needs to come from them. And they are still increasing their emissions. This is not the action of an autocratic leader who believes in climate change.

I took Mandarin in college. I don’t hate China. I don’t think the US is a good country to emulate with respect to climate change mitigation.

But if you believe climate change is real, and you have authoritarian control over 1/3 of the entire world’s co2 emissions, you wouldn’t be increasing your green house gas emissions, and you wouldn’t have a co2 emission per capita higher than almost all of the developed world.

No those include maritime shipping.

This report from Eurostat is where I got my EU numbers.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/3217494/5711595/KS-D...

Maritime is around 37% if you only include domestic and intra-EU shipping.

Your report include all shipping that passes through any EU country’s EEZ. So if a ship coming from Africa headed to the US passes by the Azores. A portion of the tonne-kilometers of that ships voyage will show up in your report.

If you do the same thing with the US, the percent of maritime freight movement would also skyrocket.

I said large developed countries.

No one cares if Iceland emits more co2 per capita. They have < 400k people.

This isn’t about fairness, this is about whether the actions of the leaders of China care about impacting climate change.

With respect to performance that’s true. But I’ve probably spent thousands of hours in my career on performance issues caused by small SQL changes.

And LLM chaos is unimaginably worse. A single white space can result in a program that has zero overlap with the original.

The rest of that is true but the US moves a much higher percentage of its freight by rail than almost any large developed country.

Just in comparison to Europe “46 percent of European freight goes by truck while only 11 percent goes by rail, while in the United States more than 40 percent goes by rail while just 30 percent goes on the highway."

This is in ton-miles, so it’s the metric most directly relevant to emissions.

The non-determinism is theoretical solvable. Chaos (prompt instability) isn’t. When you change a single word in the input, you get a completely different output. Because of this LLMs will never be compilers.

Determinism is the wrong thing to worry about. As you say an LLM could theoretically be deterministic.

Chaos (prompt instability) is the problem that isn’t solvable if you want to treat an LLM like a compiler by doing something like checking in the prompts and rebuilding the code each time.

In general if you change a single line of source code, a compiler will not produce a completely different program. If you change a single word in a prompt, you will get output that likely doesn’t match a single line of the original output.

Chaos is what leads to unpredictability, and there’s no solution to this on the horizon.

> There are plenty of large (depending on your definition of large) countries above it. Not just US, Australia and Russia that you are excluding for some reason, but also Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Canada

None of those countries have more than 50 million people. Most of them have fewer than 10 million. None of them are going to move the needle on climate change.

The US is clearly not a country to emulate when it comes to co2 emissions. I don’t think China is any more “evil” than the US when it comes to climate change.

But their actions are clearly no the actions of a country who “believes in climate change”.

> ahead of every large developed country

Because those are the only ones that can move the needle on climate change.

China produces 1/3 of the world’s CO2. They already produce more per capita than all other large developed countries except Australia, the US, and Russia. And their rate of growth is higher than all of those countries except Russia.

There’s no way to force them to do anything, but this is not that action of a nation that “believes in climate change”.