glenstein

Fun! One less than intuitive piece is that, as far as the game is concerned, evenly dividing a district 50-50 stops that district from counting toward anyone's majority.

So if Blue was only present in a single district where its the majority, you could have ten more districts all evenly tied between Purple and Orange, and Blue would still win.

There used to be a convention on reddit to respond to some comment bots with "bad bot" or "good bot" and the bot would use that feedback to assess if its responses were helpful. I think maybe wikipedia summaries or things like that.

Then I think it became a kind of put down and/or a way of saying certain inauthentic comments seemed insincere. In this context as reply to you, though, it feels pretty inexplicable.

Seems to be fine on my firefox with ublock enabled. Though the hexes sometimes are confused about which groups I'm modifying, which I'm not sure if that's a firefox thing or not.

Color also seems fine to me. Horse is bright blue and the other is lavender.

So my whole previous comment was a plea to not do exactly this, namely, treat the example of open models like they somehow negate the value or strategic significance of having a model that leads at the frontier. I would submit that it's the core confusion behind the "Deepseek moment" and what it supposedly teaches about the relative strategic positions of different actors in the AI race.

> whether you want to acknowledge that or not is not my affair.

I felt I acknowledged it pretty explicitly. I said the likes of Deepseek are "cheaper and open and that matters", but it's the rest of that sentence that I think went without acknowledgment.

>And just like there are still people driving Renaults and Volkswagens the latest batch of open models will be useful for a long time to come.

Walking is great too! But you're not filling an economic need by selling walking to the masses, and those companies are marginalized and the economic destiny of the world is being set by those who own the infrastructure to build out the world's next generation of electric vehicles (at least in the automotive space).

When you're not in the lead, your best strategic move is to neutralize trade secrets advantages of the leaders. I think a strategic approach is being misinterpreted as a demonstration of virtuous ethos, which is crazy given (as the other commenter mentioned) the norm of secrecy when it strategically suitable in basically every other context.

>They'll be just as useful as they are today

I mean how useful are GPT-3 weights today? That's the kind of useful they'll be relative to the frontier.

I feel like the so-called "Deepseek moment" broke too many people's brains and they've lost the ability to reason about why frontier advantages matter. I think we have to learn some new core concepts and rate of improvement over time is going to be a big one, and not understanding that causes people to exaggerate the significance of downstream distillation that's done in response to it. It's cheaper and open and that matters, but it's not the kind of mattering that replaces the relevance or advantage of the frontier, and I feel like I'm not seeing people demonstrate that they know how to really compare the relative merit of these two things so much as zoom in on one to talk past the other.

I think the vast majority of physicists have been perfectly able to avoid Penrose's error. I would also think the lesson would be simply to strive to avoid making errors or the kind he did, not necessarily to sacrifice realism about physical objects just to avoid the possibility of someone's mistake. Plenty of people, in fact I would say many more people abuse the observer effect in QM to make crackpot claims about consciousness. But it doesn't mean the observer effect is wrong.

I also think you can be a realist without having to make the jump to ontological irreducibility. You can say that our latest theory is a better approximation than the previous one and the previous one was an approximation as well.

When we say electricity is a "natural monopoly" what that means in the history of transmission utilities, states have stuck a bargain to grant monopolies in exchange for being tightly regulated, and so there's no version of reality where the state isn't already immersed in regulating them.

Every state in the country has a public utilities commission and they are constantly immersed in complex policy work from implementing legislation to working through an endless docket of cases that fine tune policy to specific tasked out responsibilities like getting a "standard offer". Sure it's complicated but I can't think of any reason that defaults to "don't regulate". We regulate healthcare too, and Medicare is always cheaper than private alternatives.

The problem with leaving private actors to their own devices when they have monopolies is that every conceivable grey area of judgment calls that impacts profitability will be subject to abuses of discretion, such as building out overpriced infrastructure, and investing in cheaper, unreliable transmission infrastructure instead of building for the long term.

So an open-source non-profit, ad-free search engine that's building its own index and tailoring it based on community feedback. And if I'm follwing correctly, this announcement is a paid membership program to support growing the index sustainably by offering paid program for additional URL submissions.

The notion of a "seed" appears to be a program for building out its index with a specified URL or handful or URLs as a starting point that are used to discover additional links. But also "uses external search results to find additional pages". So there's that.

I suppose I'm always game for additional independent search indexes. Independence is a good mission in and of itself, so here's another option outside of Kagi and DuckDuckgo if you're looking to DeGoogle. But beyond that I'm not sure what the motivation or mission is. Is it a better index, is it an anti-slop index? Is it a smol-web friendly or human content friendly index? Millionshort gets rid of "top" results, Kagi filters custom domains.

I suppose I don't disagree that the world could benefit from a thoughtfully curated and independent index and maybe the community input/feedback approach could be a new and novel secret sauce.

Also it was YACB (yet another chromium browser), as is the successor browser Dia.

I agree he wasn't able to anticipate technological changes or the impact they would have, but the response to that isn't to simply insist his theory is literally still true just because he tried his best. I'm not suggesting he could or should have done that, but I don't have to have that expectation to nevertheless note, correctly, that it's not a model of the population dynamics we actually see.

Shucks, you are correct, it's not a coincidence at all. I thought it was about the predicted population boom writ large but TFA's hook is about the specific predicted date.

Hard disagree, population forecasting is more rigorous now but the data stretches back to the origin of civilization, and it's more than a binary of having or not having data, it's having stronger and more predictive methodologies. The biggest risk is the false equivalence between predictions from 60 years ago and now.

It's like Isaac Asimov's essay the Relativity of Wrong, which, if boiled down to one sentence says (paraphrasing), "People who said the earth was flat were wrong. People who say the earth is round were wrong. But if you think believing the earth is round is just as wrong as believing the earth is flat, your view is wronger than both of those put together."

Same thing about equating 2020s and 1960s population forecasting.

Right, the racist part is equivocating between "demographic change" and "extinction event" and thinking in terms of hypotheticals and extrapolations that aren't supported by data.

And there's all kinds of value prejudging that is entirely external to the data about what cultural change means, what it implies, what effects it will have, all of which involve disputable and extremely politicized assumptions that are trying to borrow from the objectivity of population data for rhetorical momentum in favor of specific preferences of racial composition.