throwaway2474

See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldcoin

There is an enormous amount of skepticism towards the US TSMC deal in Taiwan, in the sense that Tsai Ing-wen “sold out” Taiwanese IP and top engineers due to political pressure.

And in fairness, the US does not have a strong track record wrt its overseas military shenanigans actually helping locals, to put it lightly. A lot of people in Taiwan are anti-CCP, but at the same time, not pro-US because they see the US as an untrustworthy or at least unreliable military ally.

Exactly this. I recently wanted to gift my sick mother something to let her watch the shows she likes while she gets better. I check all the major streaming sites, genuinely wanting to buy a subscription because it would be way easier. I considered buying her subscriptions to all the major companies but decided the hassle of managing the logins would be too difficult for her. So in the end I reluctantly ended up torrenting everything onto a single usb stick for her. There is currently genuinely no other way to watch all the things you want in one place other than this. Netflix has accelerated the problem by making their catalogue nothing but shitty self made shows, every year it just gets worse.

Ok come on, this has gotta be a regulatory capture stunt. None of this is surprising or particularly dangerous.

You can do this for literally any topic. Choose something lawmakers are scared of, write a scary paper showing how GPT (“research preview only” of course) can assist with it, and make big vague statements calling for an urgent need for more safety work in the area. Since uncensored GPT will talk about everything, this works for every topic!

Make no mistake folks, the OpenAI “safety” budget is entirely about PR and squashing open source AI.

Controversial take: why not teach your daughters to embrace and win at the social media game? It’s not going away, and being able to successfully navigate that world is going to be a tangible advantage to them later in life. Self worth and happiness, despite what we might want to believe, are largely tied to social status. As parents it may be kinder to help our kids succeed at the game rather than pretend it doesn’t exist.

So here’s a conundrum. The longevity literature consistently reports that caloric restriction and in particular minimising protein intake, including eg the BCAAs found in protein powders, leads to a longer lifespan. Other things like mTOR that are associated with muscle growth also lead to shorter lifespan.

Basically it seems like you have a choice - live a long life, or get muscular.

Amazing stuff. It’s unfortunate that you have to be a famous blogger to get access to this. It’s been said enough at this point but it really goes against the spirit of OpenAI and what they ostensibly stand for.

This is unsurprising. Every tech company does this. Pretty much all maps apps redraw boundaries of places like Taiwan and Crimea to suit local sensitivities. Search engines selectively censor content, etc.

When I was at university, all the physicists loved to humblebrag about the “crackpots” that came to them, and how much dumber they were than real physicists. They had a similar but less pronounced snobbish dislike for students from other faculties, like engineering.

The thing is, most of them (with a couple of exceptions) weren’t actually any smarter. They just “knew the language”, exactly as this article says. Sadly, their attitude turned a number of people off physics I think.

The tone of this article is similar. The author kindly took the time to talk to the unwashed masses because he felt sorry for them, or something. But, as he said, he never learnt anything real from them, except how to communicate better with idiots.

I wonder who these well-spoken, educated scammers are and how they’re recruited.

Pet theory: voice recordings will be the next fingerprints/DNA, at some point it will be trivial to identify the person based on old recordings. At which point we can retroactively convict these people years or decades later, when they thought they were out of the woods.

Serious question, for those with more experience than me “in the game” running big successful companies: are dirty tactics like this (and worse) par for the course and generally expected, and it’s sort of understood that the outsiders/general public are shielded from it? Or is it actually shocking?

It often seems like there’s two “worlds” operating at the same time. In one, there’s outrage and indignation at this sort of thing. In the other, that public outrage is just another item in the chess game, to be weaponised against your competitors as appropriate. But maybe that’s too pessimistic of a view, and not all industries are like this? I’m genuinely curious.

For a laugh, I tried the query from the other trending GPT thread:

Is it safe to walk downstairs backwards if I close my eyes?

Thanks for your question. Let me research that for you. Give me a minute please

I found this deep answer on cdotrends.com:

Yes, there is nothing to worry about. It’s safe because the spiral stairs curve outwards, it will make your descent uncomfortable.

It’s the author, and I also find it tiring. There seems to be a slightly sarcastic undertone of superiority and entitlement in every post. I would not choose to employ such a person.

On the topic of Jekyll, can anyone recommend a reliable GUI that a non-technical content team can use that integrates nicely with Jekyll? I’ve tried a few “headless CMS” options but the editing experience isn’t great, and integration is hard.

I would be interested if anyone else with lingering myo/pericarditis could offer advice on what treatment has worked. I still have pain and am unable to exercise 6 months after the shot. I’ve tried long term ibuprofen and colchicine but it hasn’t worked.

Delta and previous strains saw horrendous, mass casualties in many countries. I don’t think that’s really happening anywhere with omicron. It may be that enough of the world is vaccinated at this point (or had covid) that there’s no way to properly compare. Or maybe it’s just not being reported anymore? But it definitely doesn’t feel anywhere near as bad as previous waves, even in the unvaccinated population.

As a disclaimer, I have ongoing cardiac side effects. Several doctors from general practice and in cardiology have separately told me that they all generally accept the published numbers much lower than what they see first hand. In a previous comment I hypothesised this is because the reporting systems are not good.

I think that’s largely because omicron is less serious. I think the vaccine helped against past strains, and maybe a bit against omicron, but it was vastly oversold.

I hope that at some point we get to see an in-depth business case study of Pfizer and how they’ve been so successful out of the pandemic. They seem to have an unbelievable grasp of the science-marketing game and how to navigate it successfully at scale.

Without getting too far into controversial territory, I’ve observed that

- Out of many competing vaccines, Pfizer was always the “cool” one, in both scientific and lay circles

- The vaccine has caused a significantly higher number of cardiac side effects than initial studies reported, which has just sort of been swept under the rug

- It’s failed to stop the pandemic in any meaningful way

And yet

- You still won’t read this in most mainstream media, and still can’t mention these things in many social contexts

- Governments around the world are still pushing Pfizer/Moderna over all other vaccines (hear about AZ recently?)

This article is another example of how their marketing machine is working for them.

If I ran a multimillion dollar company in a highly regulated industry, I’d be taking very careful notes of him how Pfizer is playing this one.

I have always been fascinated by ideas that are heretical but also likely to be true. Unfortunately, like you say, they’re hard to find and therefore a lot of them I feel like I’ve “discovered” myself.

Can anyone recommend places to discover more of these (books, forums, or thought patterns)?

In my (quite extensive) experience with the company, one should only ever use PayPal as an extremely temporary means to accept payment for clients who can’t pay any other way, and then immediately withdraw the funds to a real bank account.

The company absolutely cannot be trusted, and will do everything in their power to take your money and not give it back. I do not know a single person who uses PayPal regularly for a business who doesn’t absolutely hate the company, because they do this type of thing so regularly.

Recently, when you log into a business account, there is a giant alert that looks like an important warning, that actually says you’re “eligible for a business loan”. You have to dismiss it every single time with the little non-default no thankyou button. And then beg them to give you access to your own money, because apparently you can’t be trusted.

I for one would love to see a lawsuit like this land.

Australian with pericarditis here. Both my cardiologist and GP told me they’ve seen a flood of patients (mostly 30-something men) and both told me separately that the published numbers are obviously wrong.

What I think is occurring, at least in the case of myo/pericarditis, is that nobody reports cases unless the outcome is really bad. GPs do not habitually report to the TGA, and most specialists don’t either. So the official numbers are really only those who went to hospital and it was bad enough that someone bothered to fill out the TGA form.

> Nice Foxconn supplier you got there, would be a shame if something happened to your contracts

More like “nice market you got there, would be a shame if a PR disaster turned the whole country against you”

Writing a piece called “Beyond Smart” where you literally equate yourself with Einstein in the first paragraph is a special level of arrogance. His essays used to quirky, interesting and surprising. They have increasingly become predictable rants about how he’s uniquely great, and (ironically) contain less and less actual new ideas.

Can someone explain how we know these “announcements” are real? What’s to stop me setting up a company and announcing random dormant address ranges that I don’t own?

Imagine the outrage (from the same groups advocating this) if this were China, deleting books about, say, traditional Western Chinese Muslim culture.

It’s very different. The West begins with privacy as a basic expectation, and is surprised when it doesn’t exist. In China it is never assumed in the first place (between individuals and the state). People accept the surveillance and mostly trust the state to act responsibly, or at least don’t see it as a major problem the way it’s seen in the US. Companies proudly display this kind of censorship and surveillance tech, and get very little social pushback.

How do you imagine the ISP/VPN gets your browsing history for https traffic beyond domain names?

It seems to me that Kalanick was often “aware” of things but conveniently avoids scrutiny. How is this? Uber did so many questionable things under his leadership. And he managed to totally dodge the Levandowski saga.

> If you want to reach out to someone in China, you have to use a Chinese company's app

If you want to talk to someone in China, you have to use WeChat and have your entire conversation mined by the CCP. There’s no encryption and no alternative. The writing has been on the wall for years that the US will be left with no choice but to blacklist Chinese apps in the same manner.