viscanti

> I think we can already see AI replacing junior developers.

Even if this is the only effect we see, it still has pretty major consequences for the future. How would one become a senior developer in the future if there are almost no opportunities for junior developers?

If China didn't support Russia the war would have been over by now.

Presumably this is for people who don't like that idea. Hopefully Google doesn't force everyone to use this, even if they preferred to just meet somewhere and walk together to look for a place.

93 of the top 100 highest viewed TV shows in 2023 were NFL games. It is almost entirely football now.

That'd still be a bit too tolerant for my tastes. It should have some kind of reinforcement signal that's stronger than just preventing the code from compiling. Some kind of shock therapy to help users learn and internalize things might be more appropriate here.

The places where they use the same methodology seem within the error bars of the cherry picked benchmarks they selected. Maybe for some tasks it's roughly comparable to GPT4 (still a major accomplishment for Google to come close to closing the gap for the current generation of models), but this looks like someone had the goal of showing Gemini beating GPT4 in most areas and worked back from there to figure out how to get there.

After hearing for years how Uber is a scam and will never be profitable, I guess it makes sense there's some moving of the goalposts here.

Presumably this tenant who is staying for a year would be staying elsewhere in the city if they couldn't stay at the Airbnb. How is it adding to the housing crisis?

> Real understanding of concepts has been replaced with step by step methods that allow you to arrive at a solution without needing to understand what you are doing.

Maybe this raises the floor of math education? The majority of US high school graduates are not rated as proficient in math and a small minority are actually ready for college level math. That's been true for a very long time now.

It appears that there's a belief among educators (or whoever comes up with the curriculum decisions), that it's better for society to raise the floor than the ceiling on math. Given how poorly math education outcomes have been for a long time now, I'm all for them trying something new (it would be insane to continue to do what clearly hasn't been working for a long time now). That said, I'm pretty conflicted on it meaning that more gifted students lose out on access to learning anything more than the floor level. I don't understand why they need to make that tradeoff at the expense of those who have above average mathematical aptitudes during their school years.

> But the characters have to be recognizably human to us, or it quits being a book about human characters.

It seems like there could be considerable distance between "likable" and "recognizably human". Lots of complaints are around the characters being "unlikable", when they're doing completely human things that are just not nice. If an author is forced to only include friendly and likable characters, there's a pretty substantial limitation on the types of human behavior that can be covered.

> These standards will likely make officers go after more genuine LARPers than before. These tips are very problematic if police officers start to follow them.

It sounds like it might be a dangerous time to LARP about and plan terrorist acts. That could be very problematic for those who enjoy that as a recreational hobby. But in some ways there's a precedent for it with flying. Lots of people used to love to LARP about taking a bomb on a plane and that recreational activity has been significantly curtailed. Maybe we're heading for a world where it's no longer safe to plan the kidnapping of state or national government officials and then practice the steps necessary to carry it out, and where we can no longer joke about a bomb look-alike device that we want to take on airplanes.

> By the time a pilot ejects they’ve exhausted EVERY other option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain control at that point.

It seems like they probably bail out when they've exhausted every option of being able to land it and survive. There are likely some scenarios where there's limited controls remaining, that wouldn't provide high enough odds of guaranteeing someone's survival, but that could optimize for something when it eventually makes contact with the land. In fact, it seems like there could be quite a bit of capabilities between where someone would want to bail out and where there are zero remaining controls.

And it's not just needing to buy the ASML machine. There's a ton of proprietary knowhow to actually get it integrated into a fab so that yields are reasonable.

Meth, heroin, and fentanyl haven't been decriminalized either. So it's difficult to understand the point they're trying to make.

Not if you're using ANN. In some cases that will be very similar to exhaustive search but in other cases you'll get results that you don't want. You also need embeddings that distribute things mostly evenly across the embedding space (not all will).

No, because the facts don't fit the narrative unfortunately.

> Gaddis nails the 80s in JR back in the mid-70s.

That's the thing with Gaddis. He's always a decade or two early. Only in retrospect can you really appreciate what he was doing.

The Recognitions by Gaddis gets you the 1950s in similar fashion (and it's clear he was a major influence on those postmodern tome style writers who came later). Pynchon has pretty good coverage of the 1960s. Then DeLillo and Ballard get you through the 1970s. It's fascinating how much history and culture you can pick up through some of these fiction writers.

If you're really lucky, they'll sell the product to someone else and then you get to have a relationship with a new company (like google domains). That seems to be the very rare exception though and you should expect to have to find your own replacement for any Google service you use because it's unlikely to last very long.

Well part of acquisition costs are giving out 3.5 for free hoping to convert people to paid ChatGPT. It's possible they're even subsidizing the paid ChatGPT for additional data (they believe it helps them improve their product and build a moat) and to convert people to Enterprise. For all we know, all their current revenue is considered acquisition costs for Enterprise use, where they might think the real money and profits are.

I understand they probably don't have any solid idea on LTV yet. The point is that looking at quarterly numbers doesn't tell us if any VC backed company is lighting cash on fire or making smart investments.

We'd need to know acquisition costs and lifetime value (difficult to project with such a new product and with Google and Facebook coming up with potential competitors that might cause users to churn). The idea of looking at quarterly P&L and determining if a business is legit or not doesn't really make sense. Are they profitably buying growth (if acquisition costs are lower than LTV, you're buying future profits that don't show up on that quarterly statement) or just burning money? We'd also want to understand if there's any value to subsidizing things. Perhaps they're able to fine tune and improve based on what users are doing and that's helping them build a moat - or maybe there's no value there.

Neutrinos from cosmic sources are incredibly rare. If you want any real chance of detecting them you need large detectors. The neutrinos from this CERN experiment are much more concentrated. That allows them to use much smaller detectors.

After that you'll be able to pay for it for a year or two until they realize that running a business is a whole thing and then they'll just deprecate it and kill it off.

Sure. I'm not saying Blockchain fulfilled it's promise. I'm just not convinced that every major new thing will be immediately adopted by kids. It seems like it's an orthogonal thing.

Anyone can create and monetize their content in a world where a user's character can access all of the content. MMORPGs generally seem to be built by a single developer who controls the whole experience. They're also generally a single game instead of thousands of mini games.

If blockchain did fulfill the claims of it revolutionizing the world of finance, it's still unlikely your kids would have become obsessed and regular users of it. If room temperature and pressure superconducting or nuclear fusion became viable, your kids might also be unlikely to play around with them on their own. Kids apparently love Roblox and most adults think the metaverse is dead. What kids like seems pretty orthogonal to what is legit or snake oil.

> The only moat openai has is their financial resources to pay for training and their vast troves of data scraped before reddit/twitter/etc started trying to lock things down.

Do we know that there's zero benefit from the user generated data they're getting now? They know when someone clicks the button to regenerate, and in theory they can have GPT4 review all the responses and classify if they're good or not. I don't know how beneficial that data is, so I'm curious if it's been proven to be completely worthless or not. If it's valuable at all, and openai is using it to continually improve the performance of ChatGPT, then maybe it will be difficult for a competitor to ever get traffic and data to their alternative.

Maybe the well-off want things like paved roads and landscaping?

The 'state' they're talking about here isn't about the left/right-handedness (chirality) of the molecules. It's more about the quantum properties of the system. Think energy levels, spins instead.

I guess it depends what you mean by LK-99. They didn't have any luck with their early batches and it wasn't until after an extended break in adjunct professorship and industry that they got back together. A happy accident happened where they bumped it part way through trying to synthesize it and they got a sample with some of the properties that kept them going. So in 99, they were just following the advice of their mentor who was a professor. The NYT coverage is misleading in that they weren't really sitting on room temperature and pressure superconductors for 20+ years.