joe_the_user

Meh, no amount genius would have helped someone fix Afghanistan given that it was controlled by drug dealers abetted by the US state. I had a friend who was an urban planner, went Kabul on a grant and advised the state to put in sidewalks. Sure it would have improved things but naturally it didn't happen 'cause the state had corruption to do instead.

Question-closing was a big complaint through-out SO's history. My guess is that the top people were unconcerned because someone who complained about it was by the way the system defined people, a bad user (since they were lumped-in with those who really did ask already answered questions).

That's rhetorical, right? Of course mathematicians built on what older mathematicians built and OpenAI's machine built on that. The real question whether OpenAI's machine has contributed something others will in turn build on.

The closer you get to the real or plausible "omnipotent genie", why would the person in possession of such a thing respect the rights of the formal owner - and why the engineers and operations managers respect the right of the management - this along with the question why the maybe-conscious super-intelligent machine itself would respect the rest of the hierarchy?

For now, these structures actually need massive resource inputs and that doesn't look to change soon but naturally one should be on look-out for the possibility of the tide shifting.

The benefits of public transit derive to all of society not necessarily those immediately riding it. That's true of a multitude of state spending, education, social services and so-forth.

The US doesn't directly charge for many of the costs of roads, certainly it doesn't charge for the drawback in the form of pollution and urban sprawl. But when you get to buses, suddenly "you're not a charitable problem..."

You need a state or other body committed to fixed routs and seeing their long term benefit. The American ideology that public transit must directly support itself with revenue is what has resulted the miserable transit system that we see today.

Edit: I should add that the ideology of transit supporting itself also corrodes the key idea of fixed, scheduled routs, high-lighted in the article. I know in the US that even if a town I'm happens to currently have a decent public transit system (an occasional though uncommon occurrence) I know it will be crap in a couple years as revenues fluctuate since local transit is a political football, so I'd never count on public by selling my car or other decisions.

Which is to say the Internet can be "dead" without being filled with undetectable or detectable fake posts, not that fake posts help things.

AI's spottiness is exactly what describes this era. AI can create amazing code/image/video/article exception XYZ really annoying qualities that somewhat hobbles its ability to be autonomously.

And sure, maybe those problems will go away once we're at month X of the madness but we're still at month Y so are going to going remain for some moment.

The bulk of the safety should come from AI doing better job of reviewing tricky bugs since humans refuse to spend effort on writing more formal specifications.

But that part is the key point. We've had many years of networks building inherently insecure structures with security tacked as feature and the primary security process being more ad-hoc stopgaps.

I mean, the various supply-chain exploits we've seen said "we allow a dubious third party to blindly update our server 'cause it saves us admin money" and that speaks to how much other shoddiness a significant portion of companies allow on their servers.

It would be better if grant distribution relied on something saner than the effort to write a grant application, if education didn't rely the effort to write poor quality essays and servers didn't rely on the effort required to find the bugs you know are there. But those ships have sailed and I guess we're all just at sea.