timmg

> most people who are keen on making such an argument, or who are identifying racial genetic differences as the primary takeaway of studies like this, are doing so to justify racism, either implicitly or explicitly.

That may certainly be true.

(Not OP, but) I always shutter when we want to deny scientific results because it might be "helpful" for someone making a racist argument.

My personal belief is that truth is the goal of science. Even in cases where the truth is uncomfortable.

> the fairly vague conclusion that some SNPs possibly linked to traits were selected for

Interesting. I find that part of the paper the most exciting. We always knew selection would happen for valuable traits. But seeing demonstrations of it in the timelines we have is pretty important.

FWIW, there is some controversy around the “methodology” and honesty in that film. Not saying you should change your view of McDonald’s, but possibly of that movie.

Actually pretty interesting to think: in a few years you might buy a raspberry pi style computer board with an extra chip on it with one of these types of embodiment models and you can slap it in a rover or something.

Props for the great name!

Doesn't this lawsuit (essentially) prove otherwise?

> Keep in mind that this case is about about a minor, not an adult.

This obviously means that tech is going to have no choice but to do "age verification". And I don't think there's much of a way to do that that wouldn't be uncomfortable for a lot of us.

I just watched my "weekly limit" get used while I ran a claude code command.

I'm not sure how to square that with the quote you gave.

I’m trying to figure out how this affects weekly limits, since those overlap peak hours. My observation is that it doesn’t. But I could be wrong.

If they are doing it “right” I think any off peak usage should count 50% toward your weekly limits.

Edit: it does look like they are doing it the "right" way.

Somewhat orthogonal but: when do we expect "volunteer" groups to provide training data for LLMs for [edit: free] for (like) hobbyist kinds of things? (Or do we?)

Like wikipedia probably provides a significant amount of training for LLMs. And that is volunteer and free. (And I love the idea of it.)

But I can imagine (for example) board game enthusiasts to maybe want to have training data for games they love. Not just rules but strategies.

Or, really, any other kind of hobby.

That stuff (I guess) gets in training data by virtue of being on chat groups, etc. But I feel like an organized system (like wikipedia) would be much better.

And if these sets were available, I would expect the foundation model trainers would love to include it. And the results would be better models for those very enthusiasts.

I'm one of those people that goes by the "all models are wrong, but some models are useful" saying.

I'm sure the "elite overproduction" model is mostly wrong. But I also think it is an interesting/useful way to look at some things happening in society recently.

Certainly, you can think of the recent "cancel culture" phenomena as a great way to remove elites to make room for new ones. (Maybe you could argue that some of the effects of MeToo were similar.)

DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites.

Kinda neat, I think. But probably not super-explanatory.

This is so cool. I think I had read that some mathematicians were trying to formalize all(?) known math in Lean. Expecting it to be a long term project. And I was recently wondering how long it would be before they turned LLMs loose on the problem.

Seems like plenty of people are already on the path. So cool.

I don't really have anything against OpenAI's stance here. If that's how they want it to be, they have that choice.

But Sam pretending that he wanted the same restrictions as Anthropic *and* seeing how quickly they swooped in and made a deal with the DoD really skeeves me out. (But Sam always gave me the heebie jeebies).

Anyway, I've always preferred Claude, so I'm going to happily stay a paying customer there. This may end up being a big "branding" differentiator.

> If we want to speed up the US EV transition, we push refineries into retirement faster, pushing up refined gasoline prices.

Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.

My guess is that it is more: the people that are concerned are posting about it. And those that aren't, aren't.

So you are just seeing a biased subset of the (relatively) mainstream reddit.

Sorry, I'm not saying the far-right isn't (whatever) anti-climate change.

I just meant that I don't think the lack of concern is necessarily due to them. I think it may have more to do with the reality that we are already on a good path.

Bill Gates famously wrote a "note" about it last year: https://www.gatesnotes.com/work/accelerate-energy-innovation...

> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right

Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?

Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)

Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.

And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.

I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.

It's true but also (could be) innocent. In the sense that if you A/B test things and look for engagement, you will almost certainly end up with "addictive" systems.

I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.

I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.

What I find very interesting about it is how much data they have (and are able to collect).

I'm personally someone who is less worried about "privacy" for this sort of data. But I know lots of other people feel differently.

To me, this is a great example of the "greater good" for data sharing. But it is also a great example of responsible use of data.

If the tool generates it automatically or spuriously, then yes. But if it is the users asking it to, then I'm not sure there is a big difference.

But if electricity prices go up, doesn’t that motivate new generation? Like, it is pretty common to see prices go up, then supply increase, then prices go down.

I find it strange how data centers are getting (sorta) vilified. I keep hearing stories on NPR that are kinda subtle fear-mongering.

Like data centers are probably the least bad thing to build nearby. They take in power and produce computer. No pollution, no traffic, no chemicals or potential explosions.

They do take power. But, like, we know how to generate electricity. And solar is getting really cheap.

Do data centers in space actually make sense? I can’t figure out how that’s possible. But some people seem to believe they do(?)

> Dividends are totally fine (from my perspective)

FWIW, companies are now opting for buybacks because it is more "tax efficient".

Stockholders have to pay taxes on dividends (immediately) but only pay capital gains on share price increases and only when they sell.

My wife will be heartbroken. We moved recently and she loves shopping at Amazon Fresh. (Though part of the reason was that it was never busy :)

For those in the know (in the fintech space): does this mean anything about fintech in general -- or just this sub-space?

[I've been watching Revolut and wondering what's going to happen with it.]

I just had a fun conversation with Claude about its own "constitution". I tried to get it to talk about what it considers harm. And tried to push it a little to see where the bounds would trigger.

I honestly can't tell if it anticipated what I wanted it to say or if it was really revealing itself, but it said, "I seem to have internalized a specifically progressive definition of what's dangerous to say clearly."

Which I find kinda funny, honestly.

I agree that this is more of a justification than a reason. I also agree that social media can be dangerous.

But I’m not sure I agree that Twitter is any worse than the rest of them. (Unless you think that only one side is dangerous.)

I wouldn’t be opposed to an under 18 ban on social media. But I’m not sure there is much else than can or should be done. Society needs to evolve enough to be able to live with social media now that the world is connected as it is.

Arguably, China is subsidizing everything with a low currency, though. It may cancel out (or maybe more than cancel out) those tariffs.