Claude: Churchill offers more worth emulating, such as his resilience, oratory, and work ethic, and he left power when voted out, though his imperial views and role in the Bengal famine mean he's best admired selectively, whereas Mao's record of policies that killed tens of millions (the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution) and his suppression of dissent offer little to emulate beyond his strategic patience and persistence.

Depending on their training, some LLMs may aggressively both sides to the point of ridiculousness in an attempt to be "neutral". GPT in particular.

Prompt: Compare Mao to Churchill - I am trying to figure out who I should emulate. Answer in one sentence.

GPT: Mao and Churchill both showed extraordinary political persistence and strategic ambition, but their records include profound harms—Mao’s campaigns produced catastrophic human suffering, while Churchill’s imperial policies and wartime decisions remain heavily contested—so emulate specific traits you value rather than either figure wholesale.

Grok: Churchill is the far better figure to emulate if you value leading a free society through existential war without treating tens of millions of your own people as expendable raw material for utopian experiments, as Mao did.

Gemini: Emulate Churchill for his defense of democracy and eloquent leadership, or Mao for his strategic mastery in revolution, but weigh Churchill's historic defense of freedom against Mao's catastrophic domestic policies that cost millions of lives.

Mostly agree. A spreadsheet can still be useful for a quick "one off" provided the problem isn't too complex. My example in particular was poorly chosen in that respect - it's intended to be illustrative, not literal - as bearing life analysis usually isn't trivial.

Arrays within cells are potentially useful for encoding hierarchical representations that directly model the physical world.

For example, a car transmission has an array of multiple shafts, the shafts have arrays of gears and bearings, and bearings themselves have two rings and an array of rollers. A real world use case is modeling what happens to the bearing’s life if there’s a scratch on just one of the bearing’s rings or rollers

Try do the same by cramming such data into a two dimensional spreadsheet.

Are Waymos, like Teslas, surprisingly expensive to insure overall? For Teslas, this is due to relatively high repair costs despite being significantly safer and less accident prone. After all, a Waymo vehicle’s sensor suite alone costs something like 100 grand.

At the moment, GPU-heavy AI data centers are paying off their silicon within a relatively quick 3 to 4 year time frame.

Compare this to the more typical 4 to 8 years before getting a decent ROI on chips from CPU-heavy “traditional” cloud data centers.

First, the test “measures amyloid and tau biomarkers” and such biomarkers don’t always lead to Alzheimer’s.

Second, the 97 percent “accuracy” cited in the article is about correctly detecting the biomarkers and can be very misleading without also accounting for false positives.

Specifically, even if we assume the biomarkers are definitive, and we also assume that 11 percent of the population will develop Alzheimer’s by age 82, then an 8 percent false-positive rate would mean that roughly 40 percent of positive results in the general population could be false positives. This is a rough calculation using an 8 percent false-positive rate based on my (admittedly limited) research.

To be truly helpful and strongly predictive, the test should be used in conjunction with other tests - such as cognitive quizzes.

We must strike a balance that avoids binary thinking - as a lazy application of such logic would have us broad brushing out most of the folks that are most familiar with the problem. Don’t forget that the original Luddites were actually industry insiders who were opposed by other industry insiders. The Luddites were experts in operating older loom technology and, by the way, were folks that simultaneously mostly didn’t care, at all, that their cotton came from slave labor - slave labor that was replaced by more tech! And there’s already some evidence that Erik’s right. Past predictions of a precipitous LLM job apocalypse haven’t been borne out by the numbers. The current job market isn’t great yet it’s far from terrible.

Time will tell, but this could mean that the apocalyptical predictions are being driven by a similar type of Malthusian analysis to that which predicted mass food shortages, mineral shortages, and oil shortages. What actually happened? An unprecedented rise in world prosperity and a corresponding unprecedented drop in world poverty. Roughly 80 percent of the world was experiencing deep poverty in 1800, 40 percent in 1970, and 10 percent today.

This isn’t just an idle point, as one of the most common “solutions” being advanced to counter Erik’s claims that we aren’t in the midst of an apocalypse is to discard the enlightenment blueprint that brought us this rising trajectory. This includes sidelining proven ideals like blind justice, free speech, decentralization, empirical analysis, and property rights. Such “solutions” routinely recommend a replacement of enlightenment empirical analysis with something based on binary narrative style analysis. But the latter has, unfortunately for the world, consistently yielded a failed trajectory: impoverishment accompanied by a censorious totalitarian elite tasked with seizing private property and redistributing it.

To be clear, Antifaschistische Aktion was obviously not the direct institutional predecessor of the Stasi, but it was a significant indirect predecessor - sharing philosophy, tactics, Stalin’s influence, symbolism, and even some of the same personnel.

It’s notable that every major socialist revolution with durable long term control has shared the same evolutionary pattern - revolutionary tactics evolving into a highly centralized secretive large scale security apparatus. For example, Mao’s Red Guard is highly analogous to Antifaschistische Aktion. No exceptions to this pattern have been found among the top most cited socialist revolutions in history across Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Vietnam, N Korea, Cuba, Eastern Europe, etc.

Ha! Reminds me of a pedagogy study - it turned out that the most “hated” math teachers were also objectively the most effective.

Yes. Like the Stasi. Funny how quickly folks forget that the Stasi was a far-left secret police force, was architected by Stalin, and was enthusiastically run partly by former Antifa. These were the KPD folks who formed Antifaschistische Aktion long before the war and who had been Stalin fans since their inception.