A suggestion : is there any info to provide in diffs that is faster to parse than "left" and "right" ? Can the system have enough data to print "bob@foo.bar changed this" ?
> China has, however, been relatively insulated from the crisis due to its ample emergency oil reserves and high rate of electrification, with EVs representing more than half of its domestic new car sales and its grid more than 50% powered by renewable energy sources.
In the U.S., by comparison, EVs are less than 10% of the market, while renewable power is around a quarter of the nation's electricity generation.
My favorite quote from "Studio 60 on the Sunset Street" (an antique show from the late 2000s) is from the CEO of a fictional media conglomerates, coming back from a trip to Macau with disbelief:
"Tell you kids to learn Mandarin."
The USA is either handing the future on a plate to the Chinese Empire ; or acting like a "chaos monkey" in an anti fragile system, giving just enough scares to the rest of the world to get their act together.
Maybe climate change could not do that because of the long timescale and unpalpability of the issues.
Maybe the first few oil shocks were not enough because you could hope for better days.
Maybe market pressure was not enough because incumbents fossil fuel industries could always buy the right élections to set up the right incentives ; and also, people don't want to change.
Maybe the perfect storm will nudge it ?
That, or we'll just have to speak Mandarin. They do that in Firefly, after all..
Asking money to people in order to read stuff, and promoting the one people are actually ready to part with real money to read, is a first interesting step. (See: substack, Patreon,etc...)
I know this is going to sound horrible, but : how about asking money to contribute, period ? Maybe have a free tier of a couple comments, etc... But if you want to build a troll factory, sure... Show us the cash ?
I do believe that charging for it is one way to create some friction, but it's not enough.
Twitter is full of blue checks that are just bots and automated reply guys.
I'm treating now all these bots as a stressor on our defense systems, and we will end up having to learn how to build a real Web of Trust, and really up our game on the PKI side. We also need some good Zero Knowledge proof of humanity that people can tie to their Keyoxide profile, so that we can just filter out any message that is not provably associated with a human.
Instead of building a Web of Trust, a better solution might be to find efficient ways of clustering people.
Look how civil and insightful this discussion is. Why? Because people have different "quality", even if it's not politically correct to talk about it, we all know it intuitively.
Imagine a forum, where all the HN-level people are gradually clustered together, all the rednecks with conspiracy theories, all the leftists dreaming of communism, all form their own independent echo-chambers.
Yes, echo-chambers are bad, but let's face it, you won't be able to change most people's opinions anyway. Don't agree with me? Go on reddit, try saying something "controversial", like "men can't get pregnant", see how many people you would be able to convince :)
> magine a forum, where all (...) form their own independent echo-chambers.
That would be a horrible nightmare. You are falling for the same identity politics trap of the ones you are implicitly criticizing. You being on HN makes you no better than the "others".
> you won't be able to change most people's opinions anyway.
Who cares about "changing most people's opinions"?
It's a short and quick blog post. Bloggers used to do that once in a while (before twitter made it the only allowed mode of expression to please the advertisers.)
Other posts from G.Marcus are much longer. Go read them, but be prepared for some "adversarial thinking" if you strongly believe in the scaling hypothesis. Might border on "bubble popping ". You're all for free speech and the free market of idea, so it won't be a problem.
However, he has a low threshold for bullshit. And SamA is probably not getting any higher in his esteem this week.
I think, in the middle of all the grandiose proponents of "AGI is coming any time soon", "AI is going to cure cancer", "LLMs will fix climate change", "ChatGPT will bring back your estranged lover", etc... Some critique has to be a bit harsh. "The data center has no clothes", in a way ?
I agree that the author gets a bit childish when he goes into name dropping of people who used to disagree with him and don't any more - there's probably some background drama that I'm not particularly interested in.
Still. I believe having both Gary Marcus and Dwarkesh Panel in a timeline, in chronological fashion, whiteout and algo to tell me who's right, is one of the perks of substack.
The USA were pretty clearly on the "better side" of conflicts in 1941-1945, during the Cold War (at least as far as Europe and the Marshall plan was concerned). In Koweït and central Europe during the 90s. You may even argue for Afghanistan post 9-11 (although the state building was botched.) in the 2000s. ISIS is a footnote in history because of US intervention (from Trump first term, of all things.) And Ukraine would not be against getting the support it had in 2022 back under Trump.
Does not mean that very bad things were not happening at the same time.
But it's definitely easier to find some "supportable" interventions from the US than, say, Russia or China.
I now realize that terminator 3 would have been even funnier, and even less credible, if the people plugging skynet to atomic weapons were sounding like the current US administration.
Anyway. I really hope I'll get close enough to the accidental nuclear armageddon to not be alive when the model acknowledge error.
"You're absolutely right, it was a very bad idea to launch this nuke and kill millions of people ! Let's build an improved version of the diplomatic plan..."
So, the next version of Jurassic Park will have a talking velociraptor ?
(More honest question: is there enough info in the skeletons / fossils that we have to exclude the possiblity that birds ancestors could modulate sound enough to have "something" like a language, which would have been "lost" after extinction events ?)
This is already sort of in Jurassic Park 3, which features a 3D-printed velociraptor larynx that can be blown into to reproduce vocalizations remniscent of the velociraptors in the movie. At the end of the movie Alan Grant blows in it, confusing a pack of velociraptors.
There's a specific call that the movie has established as velociraptors in distress calling for help/backup from the pack, and Alan attempted to reproduce it when cornered at the beach to basically bluff/intimidate the pack into avoiding a fight. It coincided with the arrival of a helicopter, and the combined effect made the raptors run away.
Not explicitly a language as such, but specific calls with understandable, relatively complex meaning to the dinosaurs, that can be (sorta) understood and leveraged by humans.
Or they communicate in languages we cannot understand.
Even among human languages the sounds of some languages sound all the same to humans who are not native speakers of that language.
Chinese for example has a million words that all sound like "shi" and other tonal languages like Vietnamese are also indistinguishable to English natives etc. Japanese people treat R/L the same.
Elephants and dolphins have been known to assign unique names for each other.
Octopuses and other cephalopods communicate by changing the color of their skin, EVEN WITH SOME OTHER FISH! BBC's Blue Planet has an episode where an octopus and a grouper fish coordinate via color to trap prey.
Ants and other insects communicate via pheromones and "smell".
Are you seriously going to stick to a human-chauvinistic stance that only we have a "language"?
"For over two decades, Professor Toshitaka Suzuki dedicated his life to studying the Japanese tit — a small songbird native to Japan’s forests. Through years of careful observation and experiments, he discovered something incredible: these birds use grammar-like rules and combine sounds to form meaning, much like how humans use language."
I'm familiar with this case. The "language" of the birds is so profoundly primitive (it's limited to 2 word combos where the meaning is just the meaning of both words). Here's a good blogpost about it.
If we're going to be able to have a meaningful discussion on this, first you will need to provide for me the definition of language under which you're operating.
I mean there are space physicists who don't understand dark matter, etc.
I think this is a "qualia" issue: Like for example biologists can find out what kind of light frequencies the eyes of a mantis shrimp can receive, but we'll never know what it FEELS like to be able to see a zillion times more colors.
You can see this happen with human languages too: Ever walk around in a different country? your brain doesn't even register the sounds other people are making.
It turns out that the fact that mantis shrimp have 12 different color receptors in their eyes means they can see... 12 colors. They can't combine the input from the different color receptors into a spectrum like we and other vertebrates can. Their eyes even perceive different things in different regions of the compound eye. It's a surprisingly limited visual system for all its supposed extra capabilities compared to ours, which to your point makes "seeing like a mantis shrimp" even more inscrutable from our POV.
For anyone else whom the above awnsers absolutely nothing without googling what defines the boundary - A more verbose version of the above comment is that they communicate only simple, situational signals (like warning cries or information for action) and not using a symbolic, rule-governed system capable of abstraction, past and future tense, and infinite combination.
Of course, with all generalizations, this is sort of a lie, but no - whales, chimps and cephapods don't meet the official bar.
Is anthropic using ads ? Is mistral using ads ? Is déepseek using ads ?
Google, meta, and amazon, sure, of course.
It's interesting that the "every company" part is only open ai... They're now part of the "bad guys spying on you to display ads." At least it's a viable business model, maybe they can recoup capex and yearly losses in a couple decades instead of a couple centuries.
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