If some government is spending $20 million to investigate this, that seems like an insane misuse of taxpayer money.

BTW, the ascii glorp above is a unicode em-dash, proving that I am an LLM and hence not a disinterested party to the discussion. :)

At least that's what I heard skeeted on Bluesky: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fbsky.app%2Fprofile%2Fdanbi...

And of course this is no surpriseâ"an inconclusive study that can be used to justify a controversial headline is gold in the infotainment biz.

How would an LLM accurately determine which cases were "easy"? They don't reason, you know. What they do is useful and interesting, but it's essentially channeling: what is in its giant language model is the raw material, and the prompt is what starts the channeling. Because its dataset is so large, the channeling can be remarkably accurate, as long as the answer is already in some sense known and represented in the dataset.

But if it's not, then the answer is just going to be wrong. And even if it is, whether the answer comes out as something useful is chancy, because what it's doing is not synthesis—it's prediction based on a dataset. This can look a lot like synthesis, but it's really not.

I was hoping for football fields, but no luck. :(

Queen's English is "has got." "Has gotten" is U.S. English. Presumably author is from the UK.

There's actually a solid history to show that being a late adopter isn't always a bad thing. There's clearly some value in LLMs, but at this point most of what we are hearing is speculative hype intended to kite stock prices. Basically a ponzi scheme.

I'm sure that some value will drop out of this in the end. I am not at all sure what it will look like, except, probably not much like what the hucksters are promoting.

When things are clearer, it will make sense to invest. Right now, it's probably best to let other people burn cash. Particularly since one of the things they're doing is completely destroying copyright law, so when they're done, we can just copy whatever they did with impunity.

The obvious question that comes up for me in this survey is, did they correct for the possibility that men actually have it better than women, and that's why men grew more? E.g., did they check heights of women in countries where women's rights are better? I'm not saying the result is wrong, but I didn't see any reporting that answers this question, and it was the obvious question that occurred to me. E.g. in some countries included in the survey, women take a huge caregiving burden on average compared to men because the social safety net is so compromised. How does that affect their ability to thrive? This is not discussed.

Note, for example, the following weasel words from the study:

The reasons for the different cross-country and within-country effects are not yet clear but might be explained by greater noise in the across-country data due to variation between nations and will require follow-up studies.

In other words, they do see variation in different countries, and they have not analyzed it to see if it contradicts their hypothesis. Doesn't mean their hypothesis is wrong, but it's sloppy work. And of course the Guardian article is clickbait, as is the title of the study. Sigh. So I would take this result very much with a grain of salt.

Not that it really matters that much, of course... :)

I don't think he's acting, if that's what you mean. Of course a lot of what's on the surface is guided by deeper impulses, as it is with anyone, but that doesn't mean that what's on the surface is fake. How real is my geek-ness? I need it to survive, or at least I believe I do. Doesn't that make it a bit fake in the sense that you mean?

It feels like both Musk and Altman share the problem that nobody is (can?) call them on their bullshit in a way that they will actually pay attention to. And so it gets extreme. And of course because they have so much money and influence it causes a lot of harm. But I still think Musk has a better chance of actually accomplishing what he's talking about than Altman. It would still IMO be suicidal to go on one of his Mars trips, but there might be such a trip at some point. Altman's AGI seems a lot less possible.

I feel like Musk is still legitimately a geek who's read too much science fiction and wants to live it, so he's pretty motivated to go to Mars, and I think it's physically possible to do it. Of course, it'd be sort of like when a dog catches a car. Whereas we don't even know how to do AGI. It's not even on a basic level a physics problem. Lots of people smarter than Sam Altman have been trying to do it for years. What's changed is that we now have "AI" systems so complex that we can't mentally model their behavior, and so it's much easier to make wild claims about what they are doing under the covers.

All right-thinking persons know that pineapples on pizza are the bomb. It's about time someone settled this.

That's okay, hardly anyone reads Slashdot, so the load isn't significant. :)

Are you saying you have a good relationship with someone who has no respect for you?

Or do you have no respect for them? I suppose that might look like a "good" relationship from your perspective...

Dang, that's my problem - I only didn't buy one of them! I guess I'll just have to keep paying my mortgage until the Vision II comes out.

You've got to wonder - since they've got a cord running down to a separate battery pack already, why didn't they just put all the heat and weight of the computer in the "battery pack" instead of the headset?

The only reason I can think of is that if it was in the "battery pack", then it wouldn't be terribly difficult to someday upgrade the computer without buying an entirely new expensive headset too.

I mean heck, it worked great with all the suckers that bought premium-screen iMacs over the years...