oceanofsolaris

I don’t think you can really accuse the lesswrong crowd of being in it to hype up OpenAI.

They don’t profit from it (well at least the current doom crowd), they have been saying that this is super-risky since “forever” (15 years), they strongly argue against e.g. OpenAI going private … I really don’t understand where this whole strand of thinking of hidden ulteriour motives for AI doomers comes from, AFAIK there was never a single clear case where this happened (and the arc of people invested in AI is they they become less of a doomer the more financially entangled they become with AI, see Elon or Altman).

I am not saying that you shouldn’t build trust with your kids (it’s important and only fair to them … they rely on and usually adore you, you should in turn be kind and reliable to them and love them back).

But: the null hypothesis for anything which correlates childhood behavior, childhood environment and adult behavior should be that everything is 100% genetic. From my glance at the studies, the marshmallow experiment was instead always done with the null hypothesis that kids and their parents are only connected by living in a common household (aka “shared environment” in the sense that it’s shared between siblings).

I would still imagine that some effect of the household on the “delayed gratification” would persist, but it would probably be weaker and I am not sure it would predict much about outcomes as an adult.

Also interesting: Kreisky totally didn’t resign after the vote ended against Zwentendorf…so the whole thing was for nothing in the end.

The operator of the plant assumed that the politicians would get to their senses at some point and kept it in operational shape for some years even though it wasn’t producing any power. Then they went bankrupt because pretend-running a nuclear plant is expensive.

Can‘t you do it the old-fashioned way and call the phone? If it’s on silent, it might make it harder, but it still makes a buzzing sound since it vibrates.

Basic health insurance in Switzerland is “private” but very regulated:

All companies offer completely exchangeable plans and are only allowed to take age, municipality and desired copay into account when calculating your premium. Every resident of Switzerland is also obligated to have this basic health insurance (if you don’t, the government just picks a random insurance for you and signs you up retroactively).

I would say it’s a great system…but Swiss health care costs are also among the highest in the world (and rising steeply), so it’s not a silver bullet.

To be fair, this particular system is probably not to blame for the high costs, but it also didn’t prevent them (though it leads to a bit of innovation around e.g. telemedicine, which is great).

If a lack of capital investment (or skilled companies) is the problem, that’s a great solution.

But that’s not the reason for expensive rents in big cities.

It’s because many (rich) people want to live there … and due to physical and regulatory limits you can’t build more housing, even for piles of money it would be worth.

I don’t totally get this point. The main problem in big cities is the quantity of housing as well as the distribution of it.

For a train system, a non-state actor will have a hard time getting one of the ground (huge upfront costs, will often make a loss, cooperation of politics super important) and if they do … they will have a monopoly (which also sucks). So having transit publicly owned in some way makes a lot of sense.

But for housing, none of that is true. It’s being built (the amount built mostly depends on government approval, there is no shortage of capital investment), there is no monopoly… what is the problem that more public housing would solve?

The (admittedly outrageous) rent prices in Zürich come from a mismatch of demand and supply. And since Zürich has a lot of rich inhabitants, enough of them are willing to bid up the market rent prices to the current level.

Having a non-market solution for this might lead to cheaper rents, but introduces a lot of other losses and crucially also strangles the supply even more (look at what happened in Berlin when they introduced their moronic rent control law).

But SF is a damn rich city (due to all the tech companies and their employees). Why didn’t they solve or at least tackle these problems?

It’s not like Cruise / Waymo could change city planning against the cities will, even if they wanted.

It is true that heating should be electrified … but it’s important to note that this makes the Dunkelflaute problem more serious, not less.

Because now your inflexible base-load has increased. And while spreading generation over a wider area helps, it rapidly reaches limits (unless your power grid extends close to the equator).

Also „Fiasco“, which is depressing and great.

For a more recent take on a similar theme, see also „Blindsight“ by Peter Watts.

And if they are wrong (and this sells well) … they might just go bancrupt, leaving you with only a small part of the upside.

What do you hedge your 100 year financial vehicle with? AFAIK there just isn’t anything that allows you to hedge against interest rates 50 years in the future.

So while this probably works out (especially if there is high inflation or high interest rates for some of the 100 years), I think the upside as a borrower is very limited, especially if this ends up being popular (if interest rates fall to 1% next year and stay there for 100 years, you didn’t get a great deal…you most likely just have a CD in a bancrupt institution).

But that’s not the default behaviour of these models at all. Instead you have to work pretty hard to extract these original images.

When using the models normally, they do generate new content, even if the style and subjects are of course interpolated from training data.

The “3d object that changes with a variable (like time)” metaphor helps a little bit, but doesn’t really help to e.g. understand how a rotation of a 4d object plays out.