WhatsTheBigIdea

100% agree. In fact, this issue of verifiability is not at all unique to AI. It was a profound and growing issue before the advent of useful AI. Perhaps the issue was best elucidated by Dr. Anthony Fauci when he suggested that we "Believe the science" as a rational for why people should follow his covid prescriptions. I side with those who feel that Dr Fauci was really just trying to do his best. Regardless, with that statement he cut the foundation out from under the whole scientific project! Science (and math) are not to be believed. They are to be tested!

We have moved quite a long way down the "believe the science" road already, and for good reason. Belief is much (!) faster and cheaper than proof, so those who are fed good science(math) and believe it tend to outcompete people who get stuck trying to prove things all the time.

But fraud is fraud regardless of the platform (meat or silicon) committing it. People who believe in frauds often end up worse off for it, though it hard to know which piece of BS has led you astray or who's to blame for it or how to deal with the fall out.

Obviously, we shouldn't believe AI any more than we believe humans. That said, the world was already suffering greatly under the weight of human generated BS long before useful AI came on the scene. Now that AI has reduced the cost of producing plausible BS by orders of magnitude, we may need some new methods for BS detection.

Yet another extremely long and winding "defense" of the mathematics status quo.

What's the tldr;?

What are the mathematicians arguing for exactly? And against? Totally unclear to me even after chomping through that massive word salad.

This all feels very John Henry to me. Why is it not a good thing that we have new tools that can accelerate discovery? Because it disrupts the current order?

If you can't make the argument in 100 words, you probably don't have one.

I'm down to buy some onions. But the interface lacks units. Are these big onions or small onions? Typically, I buy onions by the pound here in San Francisco.

I fully understand your sadness. The world is changing quickly and it is not clear how things will shake out. It feels like I can control or effect close to none of it.

On the bright side, you are clearly smart, literate, capable, thoughtful, high-functioning, analytical, caring and alive! You've got a lot to work with!

Adaptation is almost always driven by discomfort. It is sad to see the things and the life we love going away.

Keep your chin up, be good to yourself and the people around you, stay flexible, and just keep landing on your feet... over and over... and don't stop.

25 years ago I woke up from the sound of the first plane hitting. I watched people jump to their deaths. I watched, heard, felt, smelled the towers fall. I lost very good friends. One was an SWE working in tower 1. It sucked. It made me realize that each day is a gift. Even the days that don't go your way.

One foot in front of the other. Just keep working to bring your light to the world and you will be fine.

VC General Partners (managers of the VC fund) are already fiduciaries with responsibility to the fund's Limited Partners (people and institutions which invest in VCs). Their fiduciary responsibility is to maximize return on investment.

For sure pubs ran through prohibition.

McSorley's Old Ale House on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was definitely fully operational during prohibition. You can read about it on Wikipedia, but my preferred reference is Joseph Mitchel's "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon"

Can you cite a reference for this assertion? I'd like to read about it if true.

I think the point was that the poorly made luxury t-shirt has less intrinsic value than the well made generic t-shirt and the difference in the market values of the two is "coin sickness"?

What does "fair" have to do with anything? This is exactly the issue the author is writing about. Take the easy way, reap the profits, then someone suffer the obviously predictable consequences at some point in the unforeseeable future... likely not you! "Fair" is not relevant.

The original author points to the consolidation of military suppliers as a major issue, but the truth is that the economies of the western world have been massively dependent on this sort of consolidation and outsourcing for a large portion of the "growth" that they have achieved for a generation.

It would be convenient to think that the real question is "how do we climb back out of this hole?" but I feel the more pressing question is actually, "when and why will we start trying?"

The profit motive simply does not drive society in this direction.

The crises are catastrophic and perhaps even existential, but they are not profitable. You have to be a really lucky market timer to bet on crisis and win.

Avoiding crisis over the longer term is simply not investable.

"Fair" is not a relevant or useful conception in this context.

I wager you are not Finnish.

Perhaps it would be helpful to view the claims of this article through a cost/benefit analysis?

Clearly if the opponent had wanted to defeat this vehicle and take this ground, they could have.

That said, it seems likely that this vehicle substantially increased the expected cost of taking this ground, and it did so at very little cost/risk to the defenders.

This sort of device dramatically changes the equation of conflict. It seems this article does a pretty good (though unverified) job of making that case.

Your gut may be leading you astray?

I also find that firefox crashes much more than chrome based browsers, but it is likely that chrome's superior stability is better handing of the other 90% of crashes.

If 50% of chrome crashes were due to bit flips, and bit flips effect the two browsers at basically the same rate, that would indicate that chrome experiences 1/5th the total crashes of firefox... even though the bit flip crashes happen at the same rate on both browsers.

It would have been better news for firefox if the number of crashes due to faulty hardware were actually much higher! These numbers indicate the vast majority of firefox crashes are actually from buggy software : (

I like this definition of corruption, though there are many...

"The abuse of entrusted power for private gain"

Jaywalking is breaking the law, but it is not corruption.

Civil disobedience is also typically breaking the law, but is not corruption.

It is important to recognize that just because a system is codified in law does not mean that it is not corrupt.

Agreed that staffing the bureaucracy with good people costs a lot.

There is a large opportunity to simplify and rationalize the regulations. This would dramatically reduce the cost of both bureaucracy and compliance. In addition to massively reduced cost, it would enable people in CA to do more cool stuff faster!

But simplification, rationalization, and acceleration is not in the interest of the bureaucracy or the incumbents... so we are very unlikely to see change until there is an existential crisis.

The regulatory bureaucracy is a real hurdle. Even if you want to comply with the regulations, navigating the regulatory bureaucracy is a killer. Super slow, super expensive, quite opaque, somewhat arbitrary, and highly punitive.

Even if the bureaucracy didn't exist and everyone voluntarily followed the regulations, you could not run a globally cost competitive business without some sort of subsidy when competing with places where rampant pollution is allowed.

It's a real problem without an obvious long term solution that I am aware of.