What I hate is there is an issue with the way big academic research is done. Anyone involved has to have seen at the very least cherry-picking all the way to outright fraud. Has been for probably 30 years.
The solution is stronger pre-registration requirements, open data mandates, and funding replication studies - not politically-motivated journal cancellations that cut researchers off from the very information needed to advance knowledge.
This is the thing: if RFK Jr were acting in good faith, and this had anything to do with a serious interest in scientific integrity rather than avoiding scrutiny of his antivax conspiracies, he would be setting rigorous standards and then directing NIH to meet those standards.
Cutting off access to journals for vague unspecified vilifying reasons doesn't increase integrity.
This is a preemptive action aiming to justify why they don't have to subject an upcoming deluge of junk research to rigorous review. It's the MO of this administration: discredit investigatory transparency bodies, and then engage in unethical behavior that would be subject to investigation by those bodies. Foxes running the henhouses, etc.
This is classic playbook for this administration. Is air force one out of date, is replacing it a boondoggle? Yes and yes! Should we take a garish bug ridden pile of expense second hand from foreign sources? No! Does America somewhat subsidize the 'free world' with its military spending and asymmetric dollar? Sure, yeah. Should we fucking tank the economy and ruin our standing with every ally to address it? Probably not!
This pattern is pretty common when you look for it.
"Apple does have a traditional advertising business, and it does appear to be growing: The folks at Business Insider's sister company EMarketer think it will hit $6.3 billion this year, up from $5.4 billion last year.
And that's not nothing. For context: That's more than the $4.5 billion in ad sales Twitter generated in 2021, its last full year before Elon Musk bought the company; it's also more than the $4.6 billion Snap generated in 2023."
The article goes on to specify it's only 6% of Apple revenue. But 20% comes from Google and looking at how the antitrust trials are going, that source may soon dry up. The logical conclusion is Apple will aggressively move to make up for the loss by exploiting their captive audience.
Interesting. This phys.org article is authored "by Singapore University of Technology and Design"
So they take paid PR directly now? I guess it's better economics than paying a person to rewrite a low-quality summary and not as bad as an AI summarizing the original PR...
This is pretty common for websites to just re-post the university press releases. When my papers got media coverage this was widespread, only a few places would write their own copy.
Counter-counter : there is nothing as intellectually miserable and antisocial as large corporations and institutions replacing Helpdesks with draconian automated systems.
Also, try to come up with a less esoteric example than Discord Help channels. In fact, this is the issue with most defenses of LLMs. The benefits are so niche, or minor, that the example itself shows why they are not worth the money being poured in
> there is nothing as intellectually miserable and antisocial as large corporations and institutions replacing Helpdesks with (...) automated systems
Should be fairly obvious, but I disagree. Also I think you mean asocial, not antisocial. What's uniquely draconian about automated systems though? They're even susceptible to the same social engineering attacks humans are (it's just referred to as jailbreaking instead).
> Also, try to come up with a less esoteric example than Discord Help channels.
No.
> The benefits are so niche, or minor, that the example itself shows why they are not worth the money being poured in
Great. This is already significantly more intellectually honest than the entire blogpost.
Self-driving cars are cool but I'd rather have good public transit. These vehicles clearly have utility beyond just public transit, but I'd rather they be an edge case rather than considered a main solution. So yeah, from my perspective the problem is being focused on profits instead of trying to solve the real problem with solutions that have already existed for decades.
If you zoom out a bit, your argument would be more-or-less the same when regular automobiles were replacing the functioning transit systems in the USA, specifically in LA.
I've never really understood this "improve public transit instead of autonomous vehicles" argument. They're two entirely distinct funding sources. Nothing is preventing us from improving public transit except the same things that always have.
Obviously funding public transit is good, but people usually phrase funding arguments as zero sum tradeoffs. You wouldn't write "bookstores are cool, but I'd rather have public transit", because there's no trade-off there. I'm assuming the OP actually meant something by writing their post the way they did.
People funding autonomous driving will obviously lobby against increased funding for public transit and they will also fund demonizing public transit.
Look at Musk and Vegas. The vast majority of mass transportation in Vegas should be handled by actual public transit, most likely high speed rail from LA and light rail along the Strip to downtown Vegas and a few other places.
Instead Vegas has a silly monorail, a few buses that don't even get dedicated bus lanes on 8+ lane stroads and something stupid like, dunno, 20 daily flights from LA. Plus Musk setting up tunnels or hyperloops or other stupidities.
I've worked on autonomous vehicles for 16 years and my largest philanthropic effort is improving public transit. The common theme is being really interested in transportation and wanting it to work well for people.
Cruise was also the top funder of one San Francisco's recent MUNI funding ballot propositions (which just barely failed). You can certainly have a cynical take on that, but they still did it.
Musk doesn't need autonomous vehicles to derail public transit. Hyperloop predated FSD, to use your example. Moreover, the objection applies equally to taxis and Uber/Lyft.
It's also not an actionable objection. Let's say we go and ban autonomous vehicles. Why wouldn't the same billionaires simply continue lobbying against public transit improvements and for the repeal of the ban? They have the money to do both.
We haven't failed to invest sufficiently in public transit for 50+ years solely because of billionaire lobbying. That's not the blocker.
It seemed to me to always have been a goalpost relocation. The talking point wasn't even a fringe view beforehand and if anything would be taken as an obvious diversion from those who are big-oil aligned. Instead it was first seen when electrification of transit was achieved by capitalism.
The watermelons simply couldn't accept that, it went against their article of faith that capitalism is responsible for all of the world's problems and could not provide any solutions. IF there is one thing that makes them the most angry it is solving problems without going to their preferred political alignment. So they all downloaded their latest talking points and reprogrammed themselves and declared that electric car's only purpose is to save the auto industry in spite of 48% of global transport carbon emissions coming from cars and vans.
> Self-driving cars are cool but I'd rather have good public transit.
Last mile is a PITA in the US. It is difficult to take the train from San Diego northward if you don't get there at 7AM because the parking will fill up.
At some point, Waymo can cross over into replacing a personal car for the last mile task. Right now, it's a bit expensive: $20/ride 2 ride/day 5 days/week * 50 weeks = $10,000 per year. Purchasing your own car still makes more sense. If that were $1,000 per year? No brainer--I'd dump my car in a heartbeat.
> Self-driving cars are cool but I'd rather have good public transit
False dichotomy.
Good public transport would be self driving cars as a feeder network to mass transit once the self driving tech is cheap enough.
It could only work well as work habits change to stop having peak hours (peak usage for low-utilization self-driving cars doesn't seem likely to be economical).
For many of us "good public transit" would make zero difference in our daily lives in the US. We just don't live somewhere that there will realistically be a bus stop or train stop within easy walking distance. I'm not even a long drive from a train station but it's absolutely unworkable as transportation for most purposes aside from going into the big city 9-5.
I didn't say it was easy. And I'm not talking about individual action. Governments should incentivize and force different things. Conceptually simple example: construction projects should require sustainability and aesthetics reviews, including, for example, use of better materials and green and walkable spaces. For example I find the butt ugly and cheap American solutions for sidewalks (I think continuously poured concrete cut into slabs with circular saws) much worse than the European ones (paving stones, often natural stone). The US is the richer country and it frequently looks cheaper and poorer.
What a terrible idea. I don't want my government to "force" things. Nor should idiot government bureaucrats have any authority over something as subjective as aesthetics.
Paving stones are terrible for skates, and not great for running either. Poured concrete is much smoother. And it's not cut with circular saws so I have no idea what you're referring to there.
And it doesn't hurt to plant more trees. American cities, especially in the South, seem to be utterly allergic to trees. Which makes even less sense in hot climates.
Or huge billboards. Lack of general greenery and hedges to block noise. Stroads. I could go on an on. The average built environment in US cities and suburbs is awful and again, cheap.
When I moved from country where I had to use public transit to a country where I could drive, my happiness (re transportation) increased by a large amount.
I am not sure how this relates to the whole "public transit vs cars" argument though.
Why? Why is not "everyone has access" and "wellbeing for everyone" the reward for inventing the future?
Why is "that person gets to be extraordinarily wealthy" for inventing the future rather than "we all chipped in so we could all benefit" for inventing the future?
If Waymos make the world better and safer and more convenient, why are they not simply something we figure out how to make a public good?
In Star Trek you didn't have to pay to take the turbolift or transporter around large spaces, everyone got the benefits of the technology.
> Why is "that person gets to be extraordinarily wealthy" for inventing the future rather than "we all chipped in so we could all benefit" for inventing the future?
Well obviously we want a lot of the benefit to be the latter. But if you don't have some of the former, then almost no multi-billion-dollar-cost inventions get made in the first place.
Yuri Gagarin was the first man in orbit, and that was absolutely a multi-billion dollar invention.
Alan Turing didn't pursue his ideas because he wanted to get wealth beyond imagining.
Mondragon makes billions of dollars annually, and strongly limits executive pay.
I think it's very reasonable to assume that we can, we have historically, and currently do, make multi-billion dollar investments for the good of all. The idea that it requires some profit incentive is, imo, a pernicious falsehood.
> Yuri Gagarin was the first man in orbit, and that was absolutely a multi-billion dollar invention.
That was government-funded. Most projects aren't that lucky. And are any governments funding self-driving cars?
> Alan Turing didn't pursue his ideas because he wanted to get wealth beyond imagining.
I said multi billion dollar cost. Not multi billion dollar benefit. He's not an example.
> Mondragon makes billions of dollars annually, and strongly limits executive pay.
Have they made any inventions that required a billion dollars or more? Ten billion?
But you saying "makes billions" is exactly what I'm talking about. It's great that they don't pay a lot of money to executives and the workers own things. But the company invested money and the company profited. It didn't all go to making the world a better place.
You avoid particularly wealthy people when a coop can self-fund, but the coop is still trying to profit off the result of the research. And if a risky research project ever can't be self-funded, then whatever/whoever makes the loan might make a huge profit. If that incentive isn't there, the loan doesn't happen and the research doesn't happen.
> I think it's very reasonable to assume that we can, we have historically, and currently do, make multi-billion dollar investments for the good of all. The idea that it requires some profit incentive is, imo, a pernicious falsehood.
It doesn't require it, but if you make it possible to profit off research then you end up with much more money spent on research.
You are referencing fiction unironically as an argument which is a rather worrying sign for your connection to objective reality. You also don't have to worry about logistics in RTSes, but that isn't an argument for revolutionizing military strategy.
As for why it isn't something you can figure out how to make a public good? In order for it to truly be a public good you have to either make it as one in the first place via the public sector or at very least pay a large sum of money in order to buy it out (which you have already objected to). Otherwise it is just plain stealing.
Well it depends on their competition and what the market will bear. If they have competitors with a similar-quality product that is undercutting them on price, Waymo will have to lower prices to compete.
And regardless, there's always a ceiling when it comes to what people will pay. In the case of a robotaxi there's of course significant marginal cost to expand the fleet of vehicles, but if they can make more money with more cars at a lower price point (than fewer cars at a higher price point), then they'll do so.
In my experience, most price increases are in labor-intensive industries. Construction, etc.
Compare with tech, which is what a Waymo is like: computers, TVs, etc are insanely cheap compared to their equivalents in the past.
I had to point out to a Gen Zer complaining about how video game companies keep jacking up prices ("this game for the Switch is $80!") by pointing out that when you adjusted for inflation, a Super Nintendo game cost over $100 in today's money.
What do you think is happening, now that the hyper scalers stopped growing by more than 20-30% per year? We're just entering the maturity stage of the tech world. 10-20 years from now all these subscriptions will reach and exceed cable levels.
I found the entire first sentence nearly unreadable:
"Large languagenference time compute Scaling for Writing models have demonstrated remarkable improvements in performance through increased inference-time compute on quantitative reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics and coding"
Am I just out of the loop on the current jargon, or is that indeed a terribly-written first sentence?
At that time and it's what got them the market share. Once they achieved monopoly status "Don't be Evil" was quietly replaced by "You call that an acceptable margin?!"
Are you talking about the management team that moved to DC, because why does management need to bother itself with the widgets or be tied to, you know, their product, they need be focused on the grift?
People who don't come from a hardcore engineering background, often fail to understand what goes behind making good engineering deliverables.
This problem has complicated since MBA types people have taken over. Everything is a cost center, and goes into some model in a spreadsheet. The 'What If' feature gives you all kinds of fairly tale cost savings and optimisation options, as you turn the dials and knobs.
There is also a failure to understand that some amount of extra investments in people, quality and training is needed to keep the profits going. It might appear like they are not contributing to profits directly, but as it often happens eliminating them causes loss.
You are basically trying to modify a highly complicated and delicate process, optimised over years of lessons, changes and far sightedness. Trying to optimising entirely from a cost perspective leads to all kinds of counter intuitive results.
However this is not the way to go about fixing it