caditinpiscinam

We have various methods of measuring individual intelligence (which are pretty sketchy imo). But do we have any way to measure or quantify the intelligence of the larger structures that mediate our thought? How do you measure the intelligence of a university, or a business? How much intelligence is contained within a collection of books and papers? To what degree do the tools we use amplify our intelligence?

I see students obsess every day over their SAT scores, which to some is a measure of individual intelligence. But what SAT score would a pair of students working together on a single test get? Or a dozen students working together? Would it be higher or lower? What sort of strategies would maximize their ability to collaborate? What would be the effect of giving/removing access to a calculator on a student's score? Access to scratch paper? Access to textbooks? Access to a dictionary? Access to unlimited time?

If we want to claim to understand intelligence, these are the sort of questions we should be able to answer. Can we?

Generative AI is the average of all human knowledge

UI note in case the creators of this site are reading: having a right-click on the site logo open a special logo-download menu is probably the wrong choice. If I right click on your site logo it's because I want to open your homepage in a new tab while keeping the original blog post open. The current behavior is unexpected and makes it hard to navigate the site.

A whole new type of "vacuum tube"

That data center is in the Memphis suburbs, 5 miles from the airport, in the third largest city in the state. Wouldn't call it rural

That's still assuming that they're competing as consumer tools, rather than competing to discover the next miracle drug or trading algorithm or whatever. The idea is that there'd more profitable uses for a super-intelligent computer, even if there were more than one.

Was "emptional" intentional, or a typo? Apparently it's a real word.

> From emption + -al Adjective (obsolete, rare) Capable of being purchased

I think a lot of developers look at Typescript and come away thinking that a static type system is something you can retrofit onto any language. These devs ask why anyone would still want to use a dynamically typed language, as though static typing is something that can be had for free. But the reality is that a robust type system ends up profoundly shaping the design of a language, and introduces these sorts of thorny design questions, with each option bringing its own tradeoffs and limitations.

We want our languages to make it easy to write correct programs. And we want our languages to make it hard to write incorrect programs. And trying to have both at once is very difficult.

That seems like too much for a single person to do, but I can also see how having too many controllers all trying to coordinate amongst themselves could be bad. How do airports determine the optimal number of controllers to have at a given time?

Damn that's awful.

I read elsewhere that the plane was only going 24mph when it hit the truck, and I didn't understand how the collision could have been that damaging, but I wasn't taking into account how much momentum a plane would have at that speed. From the video, it seems like a plane moving on the ground acts less like a car or truck and more like a very delicate freight train when it hits something.

Surely all of behavior and consciousness are encoded in the connections between cells. I think the question you want to ask is how much those connections are determined by DNA.

Am I right in thinking that even if you had all of the connections and weights mapped out for a brain, the specifics of synaptic plasticity are still pretty poorly understood?