Americans are so used to racialized society that they tend to see "white" as a natural diversity/homogenity category, same with "Asian". And so they see "white Switzerland" as a homogeneous country.
That is absurd for anyone who lives in the Old World. Some of the worst wars in history were fought amongst people whom you wouldn't be able to tell apart in a sauna.
Heck, even Palestinians and Israeli Jews are physically very similar.
"White", "brown" etc. aren't meaningful categories in the Old World, with a few exceptions like South Africa. Most of the Old World is intensely tribal.
> apartments are rent-capped
> cheap social housing
> free university
> high paying job
> very cheap all electric state-subsidized rental car offerings
> affordable meat, dairy and vegetables
And here we can simply examine the tax structure and conclude that the problem isn't whether the country sucks, but whether the side you're on sucks.
After all, how can housing be affordable for ordinary workers if they have to subsidize from their own pocket free university, cheap housing, electric cars, high wages, and everything else for the privileged class?
> Maybe your country sucks?
And maybe your country sucks too. It is just North Korea is also the best country to live in (if you're Kim Jong Un).
I earn good money, but I pay 50% taxes on my income and another 20% VAT on almost anything I buy.
I'm okay with this, but don't try to tell me that I'm not paying for the privileges we all get to enjoy here.
High income earners are the net payers here who disproportionally pour taxes into the system, so everyone can take part in these subsidized schemes. How this basic concept eludes you is beyond me.
> Building solar panel installations in remote locations still requires linking that back to the main grid, and all the in-between infrastructure needed to transform and transmit that power
Some people actually have an idea of how electricity works and statements like these make them think that the whole renewable energy industry is one big scam.
In your opinion, what percentage of the total cost is involved in tapping into the existing grid from nearest wasteland?
As opposed me paying indirectly and directly for all the subsidies for the petroleum industry?
> Global explicit subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to around $1.5 trillion in 2022. […] The $7 trillion figure includes the social and environmental costs of fossil fuels.
The article you linked literally talks about fuel subsidies in the UK aimed at reducing the final cost of electricity for households and its vulnerability to rising of fissile fuel prices.
In the UK. A country that was one of the first to transition to renewable energy sources and which currently has one of the most expensive electricity prices. And then, to these "subsidies", losses from "road incidents" are added as other subsidies for fossil fuels.
Sorry, this is very difficult to perceive as an argument, it is literally designed for degenerates without education, who have difficulty understanding the meaning of words put together in sentences, and who, for this reason, evaluate any text by the presence of already familiar slogans in it
Why do you think anybody was operating under the assumption that this was free? But keeping your car topped up now is hardly free either, especially lately, so the question is really about cost comparison. And that's before you get into any externality costs.
But what if it becomes "good enough", that for most intents and purposes, small models can be "good enough"
There are some people here/on r/localllama who I have seen run some small models and sometimes even run multiple of them to solve/iterate quickly and have a larger model plug into it and fix anything remaining.
This would still mean that larger/SOTA models might have some demand but I don't think that the demand would be nearly enough that people think, I mean, we all still kind of feel like there are different models which are good for different tasks and a good recommendation is to benchmark different models for your own use cases as sometimes there are some small models who can be good within your particular domain worth having within your toolset.
Because the true goal is AGI, not just nice little tools to solve subsets of problems. The first company which can achieve human level intelligence will just be able to self-improve at such a rate as to create a gigantic moat
There’s no evidence that the current architectures will reach AGI levels.
Of course OpenAI wants you to think they will rule the world but if we’ve reached the plateau of LLM capabilities regardless of the amount of compute we throw at them then local models will soon be good enough.
> The first company which can achieve human level intelligence will just be able to...
They say prostitution is the oldest industry of all. We know how to achieve human-level intelligence quite well. The outstanding challenge is figuring out how to produce an energy efficient human-level intelligence.
There's no particular reason to assume a human level AI would be able to improve itself any better than the thousands of human level humans that designed it.
Sure, but: that single human with the intelligence of a top tier engineer of scientist will have immediate access to all human knowledge. Plus, what do you think happens the moment its optimizes itself to run in 2, 4, 8, 16, etc. parallel instances?
Well, A) "top tier engineer/scientist" is a significant step above generic human, B) the human engineers/scientists also have immediate access to the same database, C) The humans have been optimizing it for even longer, so what makes us think the AI can optimize itself even a couple percent?
For example, if the number of AIs you can run per petaflop started to scale with the cube root of researcher-years, then even if your researcher AIs are quite fast and you can double your density in a couple years, hitting 5x will take a decade and hitting 10x will approach half a century.
Regulations like these make the entire renewable energy sector seem like a crazy scam and greenwashing.
They might not have much of an impact on property values (certainly no more than the plethora of existing building regulations). But we shouldn't be surprised if as a result people vote for a candidate whose campaign promise consists of picking up a grenade launcher and blowing up windmills.
On the one hand, it's been obviously economically a good idea to require this for about a decade, both because PV is cheap and would pay for itself even at full price and also because doing it construction time is cheaper than doing it later.
Even moreso now, because PV is now cheaper per square metre than tiles or fences, even if you don't hook it up to the grid afterwards.
On the other hand, this is the UK so maybe. They did Brexit and somehow Farage hasn't been deported for the consequences.
That sounds dubious. The government's actual approval rating in Russia is, what, 5 percent? I remember watching a report about how people in Russia were literally jailed for giving the "wrong" answer to a street poll.
So, I suppose if they could somehow use money and influence to determine election results, they would use it in Russia, no?
So, I think the civilizational threat from Russia is about the same as from North Korea: nearly zero.
Russia's infinitration is long done. The brakes are cut and the cars moving down a steep hill. Putin can just sit back and watch the chaos ensue if he wants.
Spell it out: how do ID checks for specific services (where the laws I've read all require no records be retained with generally steep penalties) create an infrastructure for total surveillance? Can't sites just not keep records like they do in person and like the law mandates? Can't in-person businesses keep records and share that with whomever you're worried about?
How do you reconcile porn sites as a line in the sand with things like banking or online real estate transactions or applying for an apartment already performing ID checks? The verification infrastructure is already in place. It's mundane. In fact the apartment one is probably more offensive because they'll likely make you do their online thing even if you could just walk in and show ID.
I mean, we're talking about age verification in the OS itself in some of these laws, so tell me how it doesn't.
Quantity is a quality. We're not just seeing it for porn, it's moving to social media in general. Politicians are already talking about it for all sites that allow posts, that would include this site.
App and website developers having liability is an alternative to OS controls. Mandatory OS controls are OS/device manufacturers having liability. I agree that's a poor idea, and actually said as much like a year ago pointing out that this California bill was the awful alternative when people were against bills like the one from Texas. It's targeting the wrong party and creates burdens on everyone even if you don't care about porn or social media.
They're separate concepts. Clearly, obviously, mandating OS controls is creating liability for OS providers, not service operators. Other states do liability for providers without mandating some other party get involved.
California is also stupid for creating liability for service/app providers that don't even deal in age restricted apps, like calculators or maps. It's playing right into the "this affects the whole Internet/all of computing" narrative when in fact it's really a small set of businesses that are causing issues and should be subject to regulation.
It implies that the user has access to the technical infrastructure that supports age verification. Sucks to be you, if you can't afford a recent Apple or Android device to run the AgeVerification app.
There is also the problem of mission creep. Once the infrastructure is in place, to control access to age-restricted content, other services might become out of reach. In particular, anonymous usage of online forums might no longer be possible.
The EU Digital Wallet requires hardware attestation so only it only works on locked-down government-approved OSes. That opens the door for government control of all electronic devices.
OS-level ability to verify the age of the person using it absolutely provides infrastructure for the OS to verify all sorts of other things. Citizenship, identity, you name it. When it's at the OS level there's no way to do anything privately on that machine ever again.
I agree that a checkbox for if the user is over 18 opens the door to a checkbox for if the user is a citizen and even a textbox for the user's full name (which already exists on Linux so you better boycott Debian now!). I don't see how such input fields are "total surveillance".
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