ethanpailes

AlphaStar was absolutely dominant. I don’t know if it played exhibition matches after it got its view restricted, but surely it still performed at a very high level. The APM restriction they put on is actually a handicap in favor of the human since humans are allowed to have 2k APM, just incapable of doing so.

If you just mean general LLMs can’t beat humans yet that’s one thing, but it’s not the case that no system can do so.

A lot of the reason Chinese goods are cheap has to do with their technical competence, low labor costs and a streamlined industrial system, but they also use a lot of subsidies, currency manipulation and forced investment so you can’t really say that just letting in Chinese goods is in accordance with free market principles without considering their domestic situation.

In the Haskell community I’ve seen the second kind called “space leaks.” I don’t see it used much outside that community but I like the term and use it when talking about other languages as well.

Server costs actually matter quite a bit at the scales of the incumbents in this space. Also, speed can be an important part of UX. Scaling horizontally won’t help if the engine itself is slow enough that there is noticeable lag even with just a single document getting edited by a dozen people.

I will absolutely eat a whole bag of oranges in a sitting.

Sperm whales arguably farm by always dedicating at the top of the water column and measurably increasing the fertility of the seas they swim in. It seems possible that is deliberate given how much of their time they spend in the depths.

China turning the corner on emissions has far more to do with their desire to get out from under the possibility of an oil blockade locking up their economy than green pressure from the west. They also organically have an environmental movement, though not one that they are willing to kowtow to at the cost of growth.

TPUs do give Google a unique structural advantage on inference cost though.

Since the financial crisis the US economy has kept on trucking, while the EU has stagnated. This isn’t all because of the euro, but it’s definitely a disaster and I think it is reasonable to hold the euro at least partially responsible.

Since the pandemic, enforcement of traffic laws has fallen off a cliff, with a corresponding increase in traffic deaths. That is the result of a specific policy choice. Women who get pregnant experience potentially fatal complications somewhat randomly, just like victims of driving accidents are killed somewhat randomly. You probably can’t eliminate either category of death entirely with policy, but it is clear that there are policy levers that could reduce deaths in both categories. They actually seem almost exactly equivalent.

Yeah reconnecting from different terminals is a pretty tricky problem to solve (and in fact can't be solved in general because of potential skew between the terminfo db on the client machine and the remote machine). The big problem is that once you launch a shell, there is no great way to change environment variables from outside that shell, so you can't change the value of TERM for a running shell. I have thought about trying some LD_PRELOAD tricks to try to be able to call setenv() from within the shell process itself, but this always struck me as something that would require a pretty big hack.

Yeah I was expecting a lot of that, which is why I found that survey data so surprising.

Not trying to be a window manager is pretty much the reason it exists!