Comment Re:Plague is a problem in Russia? (Score 1) 25
We have bubonic plague infections every year in the United States. Very, very few, admittedly, but it's not like it's been eradicated. So there's still benefit in studying it.
We have bubonic plague infections every year in the United States. Very, very few, admittedly, but it's not like it's been eradicated. So there's still benefit in studying it.
The SF Democratic machine is all in on Flock [missionlocal.org]. That might have something to do with the Flock being in the SF Democratic Party.
The more I hear about this so-called "SF Democratic Party," the more I'm convinced they don't speak for the majority of SF voters. Seriously. They seem to be some strange, centrist organization that no voters belong to and nobody knows where they get their money from.
Don't have to be a profit^w prophet to see that coming.
IQ measurements keep going up.
Autism diagnoses keep going up.
The price of food keeps going up.
People get a year older every year.
Something fishy is going on.
Are they going to chip you, or control your brain by more direct means?
Yes, but think how great the fire sale is going to be for everyone else.
How does the AI risk compare with the risk of allowing regimes like the IRGC to have nuclear weapons?
Well, some people think AI will extinctify us within four years, whereas if the IRGC gets nukes they'll figure out like everyone else that they can't actually use them except in self defense without getting erased, so the only difference will be that we won't be able to try crush them anymore.
You'd think common sense would make you want to go after the easy and obvious things first.
Yes, tell us how easy the current effort is turning out to be. Someone grabbed a tiger by the tail and can neither subdue it nor let go. The IRGC is probably laughing its ass off.
Save that a single human putting in actual effort can't turn out several dozen PRs a day, every day. That throttles the PR volume to a manageable level for the maintainers.
The answer is a simple "No.". Don't allow them. The vast majority will fail to meet reasonable criteria for acceptance, which is enough of a reason to reject them. For the rest, even if they're acceptable in terms of quality, the sheer cost of reviewing every pull request in detail and sorting the minority of acceptable requests from the swamp of slop will itself damage the project, diverting maintainer time away from feature work and fixing bugs, badly enough that it's not worth it. I think this sums it up nicely:
Why should I spend my time reading something you didn't care enough about to spend time writing?
At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.
This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.
AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.
This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.
Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.
But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.
Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.
In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.
The government told social media companies to silence people who were critical of Biden.
When did this happen? Citation, please.
You are aware that Joe Biden, while seemingly a nice enough guy, was wildly unpopular as a leader, including among the left? It was the Democrats, after all, who convinced him not to run for a second term.
Nothing what is being accused of here covers the act of monopolising. Following a common standard approach is not anti-trust, in fact whole bodies exist to standardise how things are done, and whole industry bodies self regulate the way industries operate.
What's being alleged here is closer to price fixing, which is also an antitrust violation. Hypothetically, let's say four major automakers got together and said, "We all know we have access to the latest in brake technology, but we collectively agree not to deploy it until two years from now," presumably for business reasons. That kind of collusion is illegal.
Everybody seems to be complaining
So I ask you (everybody): Is anything good? Cuz we ain't gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop without a UI. Do we all switch to Enlightenment?
America doesn't need infinity immigrants.
Said every Native American ever.
"Consequences, Schmonsequences, as long as I'm rich." -- Looney Tunes, Ali Baba Bunny (1957, Chuck Jones)