tomohelix

Comments or opinions like yours are the reasons why I think my hypothetical scenario is possible.

It is too easy to view everything as "nothing new, already done in some way" and ignore the slow boil, especially when they are not directly affected or ideologically opposed to it. That is how we get people clamoring for the government to post pictures of chained people marched into extrajudicial prisons without due process.

All I can say is that while some people will be insulated from the consequences, if the situation keeps escalating, do not bet on you being one of those privileged few.

Wait until they declare nonresidents are not entitled to properties in the US and seize all bank accounts and 401k, USSR style.

The scariest thing, and most absurd to me, is that even though I made that joke just 1 minute ago, now that I think about it, it is not completely impossible in this current political climate...

I dread to think about what the US will be 10 years from now. Trump is not the problem. He is a solution, or claimed to be, to the ailments that plague the US. The people here want change, they know something is rotten but they don't even know what is the problem with so many lies and misdirection and days to days burdens they have to bear. So Trump become their cry for help. It is just sad and tragic. Truly something for the history book, if we ever get there.

It is social engineering.

The art of manipulating the public through social media is a very developed field by now. It is made even easier through the abuse of "volunteer moderators" on social media.

A bit of push here and there, some sowing of ideas, suppression of "disruptive" opinions, promotion i.e. normalization of fringe characters, add in a dash of specific attacks based on the target's internet history, and a small group of folk, with the assistance of technology, can effectively steer public opinion.

It is not easy to defend against this, especially to a populace who consider themselves living in a land "free of propaganda".

It is ironic, that a country who prides itself on its exceptionality, fall into a crisis because it is, in fact, unexceptional.

Long, thin strands of polymer are the backbone of life, which is one of the most, if not the most, complex forms of matter the universe has ever created.

Spaghetti is the same type of polymer so a pretty good abstraction.

I predict this will be flagged...

The fact that it was officially invoked at all is already a point of discussion. This is an act that can suspend the constitution as the executive branch see fit. Nobody has ever tried to use it since WW2, and even then it was a controversial act.

It has only been 2 months. How much further can it go in one year? In 4 years? At what point would there be real consequences? I think these questions are important enough to warrant some serious discussion.

I think the common reasons are: Not worthy of HN discussion; (claimed to) likely to devolve into unrelated/heated arguments, and against HN rules.

Just that I don't agree this topic fit in any of those categories, so just want to state it first.

Before flagging, please consider how this act has not been invoked since WW2. Therefore it is a novel and worthy of discussion, regardless of how "not technology related" it is.

When the legal system is setup to rely so heavily on money that even the government can't go against it, you know shit is bad, yo.

Also, say what you will, but the US situation right now, this matter included, is definitely "novel and thought provoking" so if this thread is flagged, I am not convinced the people flagging it are doing it just because of HN rules.

One way to interpret the results here is that all the building blocks of life can naturally be formed right here on earth or anywhere that has conditions similar to where Bennu came from.

The fact that the components on the asteroid is racemic meant or heavily suggested that they were formed using non-biogenic means. And if so, it also means that Earth could have had the same thing happened a long time ago, leading to the seeds of life.

tl,dr: this discovery weaken the panspermia hypothesis.

It can be easy to forget but bacteria is omnipresent in everywhere human can ever be, and even beyond.

It is not possible to scrub every trace of bacteria if the goal is ever to have a living human there. The human itself is the carrier of germs. Remove all the germs from the human and that human will not be very happy or very healthy for long.

Not to mention it is ridiculously hard to fully sterilize everything, especially in places where lots of nooks and tiny crinks exist like a space station. All it take is one bacteria and you will have a thriving and diverse ecosystem in a decade or two, complete with niche subspecies and unique populations[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_ex...

Nobody would fire themselves or their close friends/colleagues. But they would also want less work and delegate responsibilities. So if left alone, admins would have all the incentive to hire more reports and try to cut cost elsewhere instead of themselves, which lead to reduced revenue and bloated institutions.

It is a vicious feedback loop.

It is a trust fund basically. From what I uderstand, the principal is nearly impossible to use/withdraw and you can only use the interest/returns generated from investing the principle.

Even that portion is also restricted. The purpose must be strictly academic and some part must be paid to the university, some must be reinvested, and then the final pieces can be used at the professor's discretion according to the rules set when the endowment is established.

So generally, you are looking at 1-2% of the total amount that can be spent annually. Still a lot, but for research, tens of millions would still not be enough for something like Penn.

Nah, we will just have cyberpunk dystopia. It is the next social structure that can scale higher.

What do they mean by "fight"? The original text is very vague about it. How did they fight? Is there any other independent record of such a large scale event? Any resulting discussion or acknowledgement from official authorities at the time?

If not, then this is likely unreliable and likely as good as fiction.

I would argue that is the optimistic scenario, where there are effective efforts or attempts to mitigate the problems.

I do not see such effective efforts in the US.

This is interesting with some quite prescient predictions especially on the date they could happen. But it is also wrong on some call outs. Still, it is sobering to see how there had been signs all along.

When giants like the US are falling, often there will be signs. These initial signs are never taken seriously and by the time the issue become obvious, the momentum has already built up. At this scale, once events are set to motion, no single entity can change its course. The time and specifics may differ slightly, but the outcome is, imo, inevitable.

People will struggle and attempt drastic measures. Yet I doubt it will help. If anything, the combination of pride and desperation is more likely to hasten a violent end.

Long ago, I sometimes pointed at the fact that China installs a "party-approver" on every committee they have as a stark contrast to the democratic, meritocratic US and one of the reasons why the West had been ahead in innovations.

I never thought I would live to see the day the US itself is having one of these. Wtf is this "DOGE team lead"? They will have power over newhires and policies at every federal agency?

I literally can't believe it. It is almost unreal. Sometimes I fantasize about what would happen if the world turn upside down tomorrow. I guess I now know how it actually feels...

I once saw a manager proudly put on a presentation that her team has a 5:1 ratio of female to male employee, as if it is something to be celebrated.

Nobody raised a concern. Nobody dared to say a single thing about that. And that ratio is unfortunately not rare in that company.

This is a large multinational corp in a highly technical field, as in STEM master and PhD are normal requirements.

That event gave me a shock and made me realize why there is such a huge backlash against the DEI folks these days. It is easy to have a perception of "the pendulum has swung too far" when these things happen often enough.

Because right now the major reason people still deny LLM as "intelligent" is because it has no connection or understanding to the things it is saying. You can make it say 1+1=2 but it inherently does not have a real concept of what is one thing and what are two things. Its neural network just perceived the weights to give the most statistically correct answer based on what it was modeled on, i.e. text.

So instead of training it that way, the network can potentially be trained to "perceive" or "model" the reality beyond the digital world. The only way we know or have enough experience and data to do so is through our own experience. An embodied AI is what I think is required for anything to actually grasp the real concepts, or at least as close as possible to them.

And without that inherent understanding, no matter how useful a model is, it will never be a "general" inteligence.

I think those factors you mentioned are important but ultimately additional context to the main data, i.e. "rose smell". They certainly can add additional meanings and alter how the main data is processed, but they are just "context" added on, just like how the word "lie" is very context dependent and by itself it is nigh impossible to know what it means. Is it a verb? noun? Which verb, lying to someone or lie on a couch?

But an LLM has no problem at all deciphering and processing and most importantly, responding meaningfully to all the ways we can use or encounter the word "lie". I contend that if a model large enough is trained on enough data, the concepts will automatically blend and explain each other sufficiently, or at least enough to cover your example and those similar to it.

As mentioned above, olfactory data can be just chemical fingerprints. Mass spectrometers already do this and provide very distinct signals for every chemical component.

Touch and such can have some approximation done through various sensors like temperature, force, humidity, electromagnetic, etc.

Sight, sound are quite obvious.

Taste and olfactory are matters of chemical compositions. It will take an incredible effort but something similar to a mass spectrometer can be used to detect every taste and smell we can think of and beyond. How fast and how efficient they can be is probably the main challenge.

Touch is difficult. We don't even know fully why or how does an itch "work". But force, temperature, atmospheric, humidity sensors, etc are widely available. They can provide a crude approximation, imo.

Just off the top of my head. I am sure smarter people can come up with much more suitable ways to "embody" a machine learning model.

On a bit of a tangent and hypothetical, but what if we pool eough resources together to do a training that includes everything a human can experience? I am thinking of all the five senses and all the data that comes with it, e.g. books, movies, songs, recitals, landscape, the wind brushing against the "skin", the pain of getting burned, the smell of coffee in the morning, the itchiness of a mosquito's bite, etc.

It is not impossible I think, just require so much effort, talents, and funding that the last thing resembling such an endeavor was the Manhattan project. But if it succeeded, the impact could rival or even exceed what nuclear power had done.

Or am I deluded and there is some sort of fundamental limit or restriction on the transformer that would completely prevent this from the start?

A society where people can trust each other and each individual has enough integrity to not violate that trust is, in my opinion, the closest we can get to a thriving utopia.

The US was close to that back in the days. Maybe it was just nostalgia speaking but I felt a few decades ago, people were so much more "refined" and had respect for each others and themselves.

Then some people took advantage of that. And it devolved. Now we have a country where the presidential candidates insult each other live on TV with straight up lies and deception. And the people cheer on.

So yes, indeed we are having a breakdown of trust and a new paradigm is shifting in. Just that I don't think it is a good one.

I mean, he isn't wrong though. America back then was truly the paragon of the world and most Americans took pride in that fact and strive to live up to it. Nowadays the public is so divided half the country can't agree with the other half even on critical issues. Asylee now would certainly get treated with much more institutional hostility than back then.

I mean, this is like telling an obese person to just exercise and lose weight. Fact is, while it is that simple to those who are already doing it, to them, it is not that simple. The activation energy to the hobby can be immense and may require the person to change their entire lifestyle to accommodate it. For example, an obese person who suddenly exercise may come to work the next day worn out and less productive. They will also feel hungry and more irritated since they are not yet used to it and this can affect their social interactions. Eating becomes difficult and less enjoyable as they have to watch their calories intake and food type. Sleeping is harder with the hunger, etc.

I can fast almost everyday and I feel nothing even if I skip breakfast and lunch for the whole week. But I came to know many healthy people who hate to do the same to the point they can't do it even if they want to. Extrapolate, I understand what is easy and feel low effort for one person is not the same to someone else who is accustomed to the exact opposite. It takes more than just stating the obvious to help them.

Technically, the models can already learn on the fly. Just that the knowledge it can learn is limited to the context length. It cannot, to use the trendy word, "grok" it and internally adjust the weights in its neural network yet.

To change this you would either need to let the model retrain itself every time it receives new information, or to have such a great context length that there is no effective difference. I suspect even meat models like our brains is still struggling to do this effectively and need a long rest cycle (i.e. sleep) to handle it. So the problem is inherently more difficult to solve than just "thinking". We may even need an entire new architecture different from the neural network to achieve this.

First, are we talking about the green card or H1B? There is no quota on H1B and we already see a shift in culture and demographic in many companies.

Second, an immigrant can take their spouse, have kids, sponsor their families' visas, etc. Any one of these will double their demographic's representation, and they are not mutually exclusive, i.e. it can easily be triple or quadruple, or more.

Not saying it is the actual reason, but one rationale is that you don't want a sudden influx of a single demographic taking over the nation and disproportionately affect policy making and culture.