tuatoru

The challenge is, really, just that we are very early.

I liken AI to electric motors in terms of their impact.

The change from factories driven by steam engines, one per factory, to factories where each machine has its own electric motor, changed an enormous number of things. But it also took several decades to figure out how to best arrange work.

With AI, we are currently at the stage of "replace messenger boys with telephones".

Besides changing existing industries, electric motors made skyscrapers possible and so changed the size of cities and the nature of life in cities in all sorts of ways.

Humans aren't any smarter now than then, nor is the life of structures any shorter, so it will take take decades this time around, too.

Arguing from what most people do is a category error. Progress comes from the 0.01%. Always has.

My two cents: If strings are a significant feature of your application, C is not the right implementation language for you.

I say that as someone who likes C and these days writes more of it than anything else. C's niche is systems programming and embedded, areas where strings are secondary at best.

Knowledge of demography.

The story here is not the decline in net immigration but the decline in "natural increase", i.e. births.

Private companies can do as they choose within the law.

You can choose not to use their products.

I haven't done the math but I would expect that more than all of China's decline is due to two effects:

population aging -- older people use less fossil fuel.

reduced household formation, in part driven by increased youth unemployment. It's impossible to get figures for this.

Modern Russian Roulette, using LLMs for dose calculations.

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

... and?

Company finds business environment has changed and complains about it. More at 11.

Good. No-one yet believes in climate change, because everyone still flies. (Aristotle: "to know, and not to do, is not yet to know.")

Maybe this will cause people to believe.

80 percent plus of economic activity is domestic: all its inputs are entirely unaffected by tariffs.

This is a Premier Cru Red Herring.

I read news media, and look at advertising. And I occasionally do some investigation. Have you not heard of Gell-Mann amnesia?

There are a lot of jobs which don't require meticulous accuracy - coming up with marketing plans, press releases, writing HR policies, reading and summarising reports, etc.

Even in accounting I am sure you could use AI at times to help write or read your emails or summarise legislation or IRS rulings. Have it drive Excel or your financial systems directly? No, not yet.

I like this. I had a rule of three: figure out three qualitatively different ways to solve the problem - different in kind, not just in choice of tools. Once you have three you start to understand the trade-offs. And you can come up with others quite easily.

If you widen "bloodshed" to include long duration imprisonment and mysterious disappearance from public view, I think China falls in the "other regimes" category.

So.... what? LGB, etc., is bad now, because Trump supports gays? What??

Democracy isn't really about the people having a say. Especially not having to be correct. That's window dressing on the core advantage, which is regime change without bloodshed. Under other systems of government, prominent supporters of the old regime generally lost their lives or were exiled.

Regime change without bloodshed changes the incentives for rulers enough that it's worth them building anad preserving things rather than just extracting as much as possible for themselves and their families and supporters. There's the chance they can come back.

For a fully laden truck at 65 mph in ideal conditions stopping distance is 600 feet. Higher in worse conditions.

A good LIDAR can range 1000 feet in ideal conditions. Less in worse conditions.

No, it's not an easier problem.

I don't know why people are doing these kinds of studies. It's too early.

The historical parallel, for me, is the transition from steam engines to electric motors for driving factory machinery.

When factories were powered by steam engines, they were multi-storey buildings with a steam engine in the basement with leather belts running everywhere to power the individual machines. It took about thirty years for people to realise that with electric motors factories could be laid out completely differently. And the production line was born. Factory work changed a lot.

It's the same with AI--in the best case, anyway. It'll take us a while to figure out how to rearrange office work now that AI is here.

>I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation.

Moral: Journalists are stupid and ignorant, and you should always keep in mind Gell-Mann amnesia, and go to the source papers.

If only it were that easy. Austria and Switzerland have nerly identical birth rates, but in one, childcare is almost free and in the other, it is very expensive.

South Korea and Hungary (among many others) have tried paying people to have children, without success. It pulls a few births forward in time, but then the birth rate declines again.

There is something more fundamental going on.

No, the Black Death is not a good analogy, because it killed all ages indiscriminately.

Our "plague" "kills" the young and productive - by their never being born in the first place. We are headed for something we have never seen, ever: a society dominated by old people in pure numbers terms.

The worry is that it is a design for stagnation and decay rather than greater strength. (There won't be money or people to maintain infrastructure because the elders will demand healthcare.)

I don't know what will happen and nor does anyone else really.

Interesting that this is worthy of comment. The inference I draw from the use of the words "Google engineer" is that Google and/or the tweeter now have a culture of deferring to authority, the job title, not measuring merit.

Doesn't bode well for Google.

I suppose remarkable in the sense of "worth marking" == making a note, but not in the sense of "interesting". We have always known they were closely related.

1, Porn. 2 Military.

Word salad.

On the other hand, it could promote the rise of objective measurement, as in the Objective Structured Clinical Examination tests for wannabe Emergency Department medical personnel.

1, https://geekymedics.com/what-is-an-osce/

The actual paper (thanks, p_ing!) seems more measured than most, and consistent with what economists like Acemoglu have been saying - possibly up to 1% per year improvement in productivity, all going well.

I've been trending towards "C with namespaces" for Arduino on AVR-8.

With namespaces you can have globals and few collisions. At the expense of more typing, of course.

You do know about the "register" storage class/keyword, I am sure. Sometimes it works.

Edit - the tooling for AVR assembler seems to be avr-gcc and make. Check out Nerd Ralph's "ArduinoShrink" library for an example of blended C and assembler:

https://github.com/nerdralph/ArduinoShrink/tree/master