taeric

Apologies, I didn't mean that at a personal level. Obvious the conversation here is happening. I was more gesturing at the national media which is basically eggshell walking around this admin.

My understanding is that more than a few of the things it planned were thrown into chaos. The new TSMC stuff is still planned, but it isn't hard to imagine that will hit more problems with how tantrum driven the current admin is. And tariffs and general posturing on trade wars is hurting everything.

Some of it is also just political fighting making it inconvenient to sign contracts and do work specifically right now. Even places that have favorable build out plans for data centers have strong fears on moving forward with them with how much political ads are using them as a focus.

Good news on that front is that political fighting typically evaporates with the campaigns. Bad news, of course, is that it typically comes back with them. So contracts have to be executed stupid quick.

Which flat out makes some things like the CHIPS act non-starters as long as we can't trust the next administration to give a good faith attempt at executing and honoring what came before.

How much of this is the current uncertainty over politics in the US? With the incredibly frustrating aspect that we can't really directly discuss exactly how corrupt a few of the main actors have been, to date.

And the oddest fear is precisely what will happen if we start trying to ramp up a bit of what used to be normal accountability?

Agreed. I have no doubt I could throw curveballs at it, but it has been getting things mostly correct for a while. And the fact that I can follow up with a direct challenge is kind of nice.

I think I could be ok with it, as long as I can query it. Preferable if I have a way to directly interact with it that isn't just moving things around; though honestly this is no different than many physical machines. Consider, what does the accelerator pedal do in a car that is not in gear? And consider that changing gears is done on a completely separate input mechanism.

(Really, people don't engage more with physical machines to consider programming. We insist that everything has to be distilled down to symbolic functions. Preferably limited inputs and a single output. If only life was so accommodating.)

This is a silly comparison. Dip pens are a novelty, and predate every other pen type.

Records are largely a novelty. And predate streaming services.

I'm fairly sure originals are almost universally novelties compared to things that came after.

AI promised less work for given output. Same as any technological change ever. And same as any previous advancement, it immediately increased output of existing/known things.

And it largely seems to be delivering on that?

Right, I guess I'm largely swayed by the argument that responses and likes were heavily impacted. Something responses down thread of that post seem to corroborate.

It is also hard not to see the obvious response from Musk and Putin as indicative that something worked.

Does anyone have the numbers on social media participation? I don't think anyone thought that their ability to execute media influencing activities was completely shutdown, but it did seem that social media was a lot quieter for a time.

Easy hypothesis would be that they were (probably accidentally) reliant on the news scraping bots to find where to focus responses and such. Would be like realizing a lot of US things do down when AWS' us-east goes down. It isn't literally where everything is hosted. A lot of things have accidental dependencies that go through there, though.

While this is true, there is a gaping hole in how foreign agents can amplify influencers on youtube and twitter. Probably even facebook, at this point.

My favorite thing like this is when Scrooge McDuck has made it into legal proceedings.

Yes, constraint learning is a huge deal. And there is a fun trick to solving sudoku that is basically this. Someone realized that you can essentially build an extra ring around the board that has the same constraints as elsewhere. Phistomefel Ring is the name, I believe. (This may be a different one, I just reached for the first thing a google search found for my vague description.)

Agreed. I don't know if I would be shocked, but I would be surprised.

This is one that is hard for people to really internalize, I think? The SAT solvers many are likely to use today are not at all the same as the ones they would have used 20 years ago. They have made some amazing advances in how to approach those problems.

There are also probably some very poorly conceived models that people use to adapt a problem to some of these solvers.

Absolutely this. The game is a prime example of how characters can drive engagement.