iainmerrick

At current US prices that would be, what, $150-$200 in gasoline? So the electricity is 2x cheaper. That’s a great saving, but you could save that much with a hybrid as well. It still seems worth making the EV as efficient as possible.

I'm no fan of Teslas but they do still have one distinguishing feature over other EVs: last I checked, they were still by far the most efficient, in terms of kWh per km. It's as if nobody else even bothers streamlining their cars, they're too busy making chunky SUVs with massive grilles.

It's weird that for petrol cars, most people are really concerned with miles-per-gallon (maybe not so much in the US, until recently), yet for EVs all anyone seems to care about is range. I guess electricity is cheap enough that efficiency doesn't really matter, except when it gives you more range?

Not multi-touch gestures.

Why not? Plenty of actors working today got started in the 80s or 90s, and they'll have worked with actors who got started in the 40s or 50s.

I'm sure I saw a version of this that had Rod Steiger at #1, via a very long career as a mostly supporting actor.

It looks like it's very sensitive to the choice of dataset, so I guess there's no one "correct" answer.

Both this new one and the Oracle of Bacon seem a little suspiciously weighted towards living actors, which makes me think their data is skewed towards modern movies. But Hollywood has been around for a long time, so if there were a correct answer I would have thought it would be likely to be somebody very old or dead.

Is that from San Andreas? I’m sure it was around earlier than that.

I think PoP: Sands of Time has that kind of camera control, and apparently that was 2003.

I always assumed it was even older than that. If it wasn’t GTA or PoP, who did pioneer that camera control style?

I’d say it’s just about the only (arguable) flaw in the Mario 64 controls, everything else is absolutely spot on.

There was a good discussion about that here recently. I think people are misinterpreting the bitter lesson a bit.

It tells you that you don't need to craft special strategies for pinning, holding the centre and so on to make a program that's good at chess; you just need general-purpose search, general-purpose optimization and tons of training data.

It does not say that a fully general LLM or similar will necessarily be better at chess than a neural net trained against the chess rules and nothing else. There's no reason to think that any of the non-chess knowledge encoded in the LLM will be of any use in playing chess. To the contrary, the bitter lesson says that absolutely nothing besides the chess rules is needed. That's exactly why human-crafted strategies turn out not to be helpful.

An LLM on its own will never ever beat Stockfish, pound for pound. (Of course it doesn't need to, it can just use Stockfish.)

So I'd say problem-specific models will always beat general models, as long as the problem domain and scoring are completely defined, like chess and go are. It's CPUs versus ASICs. As soon as the problem is open-ended, a general model probably wins. Driving is in that category, although maybe on the borderline -- driving in very specific environments is close to fully defined. OCR is another good example, that's mostly well-defined but not completely so.

That's because "cool" is cool. "Swell" is only groovy.

It's mostly about laptops. Most people use laptops. Apple laptops are good and all the other ones are bad.

Nifty! Out of curiosity, how much different is that from taking several partly-random streams and XORing them together? I always assumed what was going on was essentially a fancier version of that.

Oh, I guess you have to ensure the inputs aren’t correlated, or they’ll cancel out?

I don't think we are ever going to see eye to eye, but thanks for trying to explain.

You're hanging a lot of weight on birth rates to assert that they are wrong and therefore we are right. A birth rate above replacement isn't endlessly sustainable either, right?

And "the west" isn't really homogenous for these purposes. Most western countries don't have a school shootings problem, only the USA does. The parts of the west most heavily criticising Israel are not the USA, it's places like Spain and Ireland (both of which have interesting historical parallels!) I think the USA has a higher birth rate than the EU, so maybe you'd prefer them on that basis, but then you don't want school shootings, so maybe you prefer the EU. You can probably find a reason to dislike everyone if that's what you want to do.

In the most charitable interpretation, the filmmakers chose to make this film as Western liberals trying to influence the Israeli government to adopt more Western liberal values

That's hardly the most charitable interpretation! Maybe they're trying to influence Israeli citizens, or maybe they're trying to influence Zionists abroad? There's no need to assume some insidious outsider conspiracy.

Surely people are allowed to disagree non-violently with their current government! If that's the kind of "foreign ideology" that you're dismissing out of hand, well, that certainly clarifies things.

Okay, one viewpoint is that it's broadly true, maybe with some exaggeration by the filmmakers and/or interviewees. It's very understandable that soldiers would want to stay anonymous in that version.

I don't think many people would buy your "more logical for them to just go on the record" claim -- in this situation, people are scared! And they have conflicted loyalties as well. They want to blow the whistle, but don't necessarily want to directly accuse their immediate colleagues to their faces.

Another viewpoint is that it's partly true but misleading -- the filmmakers and whistleblowers have blown things entirely out of proportion. That sounds entirely possible. But wouldn't the "logical" response then be more transparency, rather than accusations of treason and a witch-hunt for the collaborators?

And another viewpoint is that it's all completely fabricated, malicious lies. Possibly an extreme crackdown might be an appropriate response in that case? That seems very counter-productive to me, as an outsider, but again cold logic doesn't always apply.

Which of those viewpoints do you find yourself agreeing with?

To me, the broadly true one seems most likely from the available evidence; the hiding of evidence and the attempted crackdown support that one too. It also seems like some people genuinely believe (or pretend to themselves) that it's all malicious lies. To me that smacks of sheer paranoia. Understandable after the October 7 attack, sure, but not rational or productive.

Yes - this is a very important story, but the "Reuters Connect" page is completely awful.

Hey, let's present our story as a series of soundbites over emotive imagery and ominous music, that definitely evokes serious journalism.