skyechurch

>And employers cannot simply hire people right out of high school without providing specialized training programs to bring them up to speed.

So, this is a self-inflicted problem, because American companies have been spoiled for decades to the point that they consider training their own employees something that they shouldn't have to do.

As the article mentions, this is (or was, it's been a while) at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, along with other computing milestones and ambitious dead ends. They even have an apparently-functional Babbage Engine.

https://computerhistory.org/ https://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/

The most straightforward way to measure the pace of AI progress is by attaching a speedometer to the goalposts.

>A lot of white western adult men fantasize about being female Asian children.

I have questions/concerns.

I am not a traditional anything, but the usefulness of the concept of "demon" - as the personification of a vice, or misfortune, or cultural problem, or even mental illness - is shown I think by its durability across traditions as a useful explanatory model (and a metaphor.) They exist like an uncollapsed wave function - you will never meet one, so the validity of its existence" is always somewhat unclear, but it can be very useful to act as if it is quite real.

My experience is the opposite - kids have a natural sense of fairness, which is of course heavily bent by self interest. Assuming you yourself are not transparently full of sh_t, you can usually get them to appreciate your position if you can explain it to them on their level.

Adults, having the advantage of decades to cultivate our twisted bonsai tree neuroses, can be literally impossible.

This has been the winning strategy so far, as using the map (theoretical model) leads to excellent agreement with experiment, while the territory (ground level reality) steadfastly defies common sense interpretation.

>Some legitimate references were also lost, meaning they were not present in the metadata.

It's possible that some of the inconsistency between metadata and text could just be due to incompetence - it's harder to find a profit motive for dropping legitimate citations. Why wouldn't this sort of metadata auto-generated from the text (aside from enabling fraud, of course)?

... not the ones involving the rent check.

I was being glib, of course. Presumably there's some legitimate technical philosophical issue, and actual philosophers are capable of using answering machines and even landline telephones without having all their assumptions about reality collapse around them like a PKD novel (those born prior to 1980, anyway). But, like Jay Z, I've got problems of a more pressing nature, and legitimately don't see how this matters.

(See also the 'Problem' of Induction, which I had to spend a great deal of time on in college, and even after reading centuries of debate about it, is the least problematic 'problem' I've ever encountered. Maybe this is a linguistic issue, and philosophers should stop calling things 'problems' when the rest of us have to make rent.)

Alternatively: placing finger on the peak of Olympus Mons on Martian map

"I am not here now". I'm not seeing the problem.

There are a lot of philosophy 'problems' like this, which leads me to think philosophers lead blessed, problem-free lives.

>But what this simple experiment demonstrates is that Llama 3 basically can't stop itself from spouting inane and abhorrent text if induced to do so. It lacks the ability to self-reflect, to analyze what it has said as it is saying it.

>That seems like a pretty big issue.

I would argue that LLMs are artificially _intelligent_ - this seems an easier argument than trying to explain how I am quite clearly less intelligent than something with no intelligence at all, both from a logical and an self esteem-preservation standpoint. But nobody (to my knowledge) thinks these things are "conscious", and this seems fairly uncontroversial after spending a few hours with one.

Or is the subtext that these things should be designed with some kind of reflexivity, to give it some form of consciousness as a "safety" feature? AI could generate the ominous music that plays during this scene in The Terminator prequel.

The (public) debate is not about the science, and hasn't been for a while. It's maneuvering to avoid getting stuck with the check.

"NPR goes woke, loses listeners" is a great viral narrative, but I think it's causally backwards. NPR, like every media entity, is now in constant completion with endless social media influencers pretending to be rich, videos of every possible permutation of interspecies baby animal cuddling, tweaking Minecraft streamers, logorrheic racists and paranoid schizophrenics with enormous research budgets, an infinite amount of disturbing pornography beyond the nightmares of de Sade, ISIL/Los Zetas beheading videos ... all of this I can personally attest to, and rumor has it that on the very darkest corners of the web there exists video of Ben Shapiro rapping. There is no such thing as "the news" anymore, it is just one niche in the monolithic media marketplace in ferocious completion for your drooling, doomscrolling attention, and "sober presentation of the facts" has never gotten anyone to bang that subscribe button.

Now, I don't listen to NPR anymore, and it is for exactly the reasons described, but my media consumption at this point is limited to 3blue1brown videos (veritasium can sometimes get a bit sensationalistic). Outrage politics and in group/out group signalling is a perfectly valid competitive strategy in the modern media monomarket, and the Old Media graveyard is littered with previously esteemed names in journalism who were too principled to let trending Twitter narratives drive their reporting.

Marius and Caesar were populists. Having leaders (who are frequently themselves of the elite class) is almost a prerequisite, or else you've drifted into anarchism.

Since no one knows what dark matter is, there's no known connection between it and real matter, so 1:5 seems coincidental if it's free to be anything within the range 0 .. infinity. But there's no reason to think there is or isn't any connection, since nobody knows what it is.

Cosmology error bars can be very big, depending on the measurement. 500% difference is certainly bigger than some, but since the vacuum energy density appears to differ by a factor of 10^60 from prediction, it's not necessarily a show stopper. Arguably the biggest discovery in cosmology in the last few decades is how much we do not understand at all.

Not exactly a great piece of cinema, but a veru enjoyable one. Not exactly a parody of an action movie, but one that took itself only as seriously as necessary.

Carl Weathers was great in everything he did, and being a football star/action hero type made his surprising sense of humor and egolessness that much more effective. He was the anti-Steven Seagal, in a way.

Here's a good synopsis of the Smothers Brothers and their importance for that generation of comedians: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/smothers-brothe...

Comedy, in general, ages very badly, but the Smothers Brothers are still very funny. They were politically "controversial", but they were the furthest thing from shock comics, and I think that's what makes their comedy translate 50+ years later. Nothing is as dated as last season's transgressiveness, but their routines were sharp but welcoming, you could watch them with your grandparents and your children and everyone would have a laugh. They were well before my time, but I remember seeing them brought out on Letterman, etc, expecting a dire nostalgia act, and they just kill. A great act for any decade.

The opening chapter of Underworld is one of the greatest things I have read, I can't even explain it because there's almost nothing like it, it's the literary equivalent of a spectacular movie chase scene. Iirc it was excerpted in the New Yorker years ago, I can't find it now there or anywhere, but it made me buy the book despite having sworn off 800 page American novels. The first chapter was still great, but I gave up in boredom ~30 pages later in boredom and have not read another word by him.

It would probably be beneficial if someone could explain what I am missing, or what I should read by him instead, because it just can't end like this.

... You can read most of it here[1], probably doesn't have the same impact missing the first few pages, but maybe get a flavor of what he's doing it. I don't know what the correct analogy is, but it's definitely something cinematic.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=Ug3ArDMHLnQC&printsec=fron...

>Curious that Auschwitz was established fully 18 months prior to the Wannsee Conference

No, it's not curious at all. It was established to exterminate Soviet and Polish POWs, only after Wannsee was it involved in mass extermination of Jews and other "undesirables", because that was the point of the conference. It didn't come out of thin air, there were certainly signs that something like this was going to happen, but it didn't actually happen until it actually did. This is all completely uncontroversial and a matter of historical record.

The point of the Holocaust is its exceptional nature, and the Nazi treatment of Jews prior to Wannsee was not "exceptional" by the standards of the time. The atrocities of the USSR and the late Ottoman empire had established the European benchmark. In 1937, in the Dominican Republic, tens of thousands of civilians were massacred by the government[0] and nobody did anything about it, despite the fact that it would have been orders of magnitude easier than winning WW2, because it was not considered exceptional. You can tell this is true because no one remembers it. What separates the Holocaust, what makes it exceptional, is the scale. And it is Wannsee where that begins.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsley_massacre?wprov=sfla1

This is a really good question. Wittgenstein himself didn't think much of it, and it is generally believed he didn't really understand it:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein-mathematics/...

Talking about the Tractatus, I would suggest that Godel's work would be considered "nonsense", in that it attempts to use (mathematical) language to describe language, which is an invalid operation. This opinion went very much out of fashion, I suspect because computers do these operations with great success, but I believe he is saying something deep about meaning here, not about symbolic manipulation at all. But Wittgenstein didn't publish anything after the Tractatus (except a spelling dictionary for rural Austrian schoolchildren), and what has been published posthumously is extremely difficult, so this is probably a question for a very small number of subject matter experts. So not me. I'd ve very interested in better-informed opinions.

Progphobia is the last acceptable prejudice and is tied up with people's fear of being silly, which is a silly thing to be afraid of, as being silly and being awesome are two sides of the same concept album LP. Led Zeppelin is deeply and profoundly silly, but everyone kind of ignores it because they are great. Going bankrupt putting on a King Arthur-themed ice skating opera[0] is deeply silly but also a pure example of artistic commitment which transcends petty aesthetic criticism and can only be understood spiritually, perhaps as a Werner Herzog movie. And no, I won't ever listen to it because give me a break, but it's still a completely awesome thing to do.

Punk etc which came afterwards was also very silly, and also mostly wasn't very good at all, because it was fashion and performance art and social criticism and musically quite conservative and dull in addition to being amateurish. None of which stopped it from being awesome in its own way, which explains why Robert Fripp played guitar with The Damned while King Crimson was on hiatus, because fun is fun and genre wars are just publicity stunts and you would have to be a rock critic to fall for it. Prog rock is really wonderful and there's more fun stuff than anyone could ever listen to, and that's why 50 years of music critic complaining has failed to kill it.

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/the-stranger-than-f...

The outcome of the Wannsee Conference was Auschwitz, an intensification by a factor of 1000 of what had gone before. The point is not that this represents the absolute beginning of German attacks on Jews, just that it represents the beginning of turning a death count in the 1000s to one in the millions, which is what we call "the Holocaust". All of this, and the serious strategic deliberations in real time of what to do about it, is a matter of historical record, which has been gone over quite thoroughly over 80 years.

>The allies did not care about the Nazi genocide until after the war had begun in earnest.

The Wannsee Conference was January 1942, all the allies were quite fully at war with the axis powers. I'm not aware of any further steps they could have taken aside from total war and industrial incineration of cities (which, as OP's article bemoans, they 110% committed to.)

>Stopping the Holocaust or the Japanese crimes against humanity was, for the most part, a consequence of accomplishing their other strategic goals, not a strategic goal unto itself.

Not true. Ending the Holocaust was a war aim and plans were considered for operations specifically to disrupt it, but nothing was ever proposed that would be as effective as simply winning the war.

The risks with pot and psychedelics are less easily quantifiable than with opiates, meth, etc. There are no bodies, which of course is good. But, leaving aside the acute or chronic psychosis cases, people who overuse these substances often end up depleted in characteristic ways.

I'd talk to neighbors with kids in school, or with people who work there, graduates, go to public forums, etc. You may be entirely correct about Berkeley public schools, it would fit all my stereotypes of the area. And I'm sure Asian international schools are very good. But the point of articles like this is to dig up the worst examples one can find, and so extrapolating from this overview of worst-case debate club stories to everything about your education environment is not a good methodology.

As a public school teacher in the US, I would strongly suggest you look into the real conditions at your public school and weight those observations much more strongly than viral takes in the outrage economy.

(Not to suggest that there is or isn't nonsense going in in your district - really do get involved - think of this a Kritik of the very bad incentives which exist in substack world.)

I didn't survive the first paragraph of the Da Vinci Code, so I can't vouch for accuracy of the satire, but it is awfully funny.

>Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

At the present moment the human voice online is none of these things, as the market pressures which led to the hated 80s corporate speak are now felt by everyone - the risk one might "lose subscriber" or that one could be "cancelled". If you want a real human conversation now you have to use the abandonware IRL protocol.