markwkw

You trim, yes, but AI content surely invades (all?) areas of written material. People are increasingly using AI to assist their writing. Even it if's for slight editing, word choice suggestions.

Even AP doesn't ban the use of LLMs, its standards prohibit direct publishing of AI-generated content. I'm sure its writers leverage LLMs in some ways in their workflow, though. They would probably continue to use these even if AP attempted to ban LLMs (human incentives).

Mechanical engineering interviews seem to do the same as software: "Engineers always ask about beam bending, stress strain curves, and conservation of work. Know the theory and any technical questions are easy."

Basically an equivalent of simple algorithmic questions. Not "real" because it's impossible to share enough context of a real problem in an interview to make it practical. Short, testing principles, but most importantly basic thinking and problem solving facilities.

You can easily demonstrate that an LLM does know certain fact X AND demonstrate that the LLM will deny that they know fact X (or be flaky about it, randomly denying and divulging the fact)

There are two explanations: A. They lack self-reflection B. They know they know fact X, but avoid acknowledging for ... reasons?

I find the argument for A quite compelling

I wish they tried to solve the 1989 4x4 crossword puzzle optimization with a modern solver, but a small memory limit (~8MB) and perhaps a severely underclocked CPU to showcase the algorithm improvements.

I think there is something special. Some special coupling of emotional states between us (manifests as empathy, feeling of community, feeling of connection). Not saying that this connection cannot be replicated or faked, this remains an open question.

Perhaps building an AI vastly smarter than us will conflict with replicating this coupling. Perhaps we will prefer artwork from an AI with which we do feel this type of connection. Perhaps this will make us build an AI that is really close to us in terms of experiencing feelings an emotional states, even if it means it's less "smart". This wouldn't be a dull outcome...

I sometimes wonder how people managed in the 19th century. Many went from villages to increasingly crowded cities. With no savings, minimal or no education. Industrial production was ramping up, but with crazy demands on workers, long hours, no safety standards. Couldn’t get a mortgage and wait for a nice corporation to build an apartment for you. Couldn’t look for a place in suburbs (how would you commute). Somehow our grand-grand-grand ancestors managed. Seems astounding.

On the other hand, in coming times of global depopulation, what will housing situation look like?

I don't know. Look at hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations, many layered regions and municipalities, meddling politicians; agencies and bureaus involved in US market (or EU market).

If you wrote down all the rules of Google app store, including all their sweetheart deals (I'm sure there are many), and accounted for all departments within Google that influence AppStore, it would be massively smaller and way simpler conceptually. The scale of bureaucracy, inconsistency, bad incentives and accumulated cruft is just not comparable.

Sonny: Yes! Rapidly and repeatedly. [then add the actual quote:] Can you?

Human: ...

Oh how the tables have turned.

These two effects are not similar in scale. Fertility across the globe is falling by a lot. Africa went from 6.7 to 4.2 in a span of 50 years. Asia went from 6 to 1.9.

Anywhere but least developed countries child mortality is low, such that fertility replacement level is estimated at 2.1 (vs 2.0 if everyone survived until reproductive age).

We used to have 5-6 kids, with one dying if you were a bit unlucky (statistically speaking). Now we have 2 or less.

Isn't the utility of the cycler that it can be a massive object with a lot of shielding for humans and permanently installed life support systems? Like a big space station for whole crews to live safely and comfortably while in transit.

You (incrementally) build up a large cycler in parts, each part accelerated to the orbit once.

Once the cycler is large, it seems infeasible to burn fuel to periodically adjust the orbit since it's massive. Unless propellant less stuff like light sails can be used over long periods.

I think the root cause is increased abstractness of jobs.

A job where you cut and plane wood to make planks that are used to build houses has a straightforward connection to basic life.

A job where you are trying to influence a group of people - so that they organize themselves to efficiently - make a change to a software tool - that affects a process for measuring of a collective endeavour - of a bigger group of people who are trying to optimize the selling and buying - of complex derivative financial contracts that are used to - increase the efficiency of a market of another financial product - which is a virtualization of actual trading of real world goods - so that incredibly complex entities (corporations) can get various and hard to grasp benefits - so that ultimately planks are cheaper ... such a job is virtually impossible to appreciate.

We are transistors in a byzantine supercomputer of global economy.

Good health -> athletic ability + mental ability + good outcomes all around

In this video, a cardiologist from UK directly addresses the problems that full body scans cause for both individuals and healthcare systems on aggregate level. I think this answers questions on how additional information could be detrimental to peoples health. He talks about several biases that are involved in measuring the effect of medical screening.

On the other hand, looking at lived experience the story is quite tricky.

From the perspective of an individual it is very hard to detect this level of climate change. I can't tell how much warmer any given month was compared to even 20 years ago. We're talking about 28 vs 28.5°C average for a month. (and July and August made news because of pronounced anomalies, other months were probably even murkier stories due to natural monthly variability). This is not perceptible. And no one has an experiential reference point of Average Global Temperature of the 20th Century.

How hot was May of 2003 compared to May of 2023? I could attempt a guess but have zero confidence in it. Do you remember the average temperature of your teenage years summers? "It was hot", "between 25-30..." is all I can give without looking at data.

This is something we should keep in mind when advocating for climate measures, otherwise sceptics have another easy attack - "it feels basically the same, what are you talking about"