I wonder if this type this would have any use on the moon (or mars) where you want to travel light and use local materials?

Not sure what the use case would be though since any habitat needs to be air tight. A regolith-extruded building might usefully block radiation, perhaps, or help regulate temperature.

If they could create a transparent 3-D printable material, then could be used as a greenhouse too, although hard to see lunar materials being useful for that.

Yeah, I was thinking of something like a recommender system where one could jointly learn player attributes (strengths, weaknesses) and match-up outcomes, but certainly there would be little transparency/explainability.

It would be interesting though to distill these types of attributes into a scalar Elo-like number, predictive of outcomes, and see how closely that aligns with Elo ratings.

The goal of the Elo system is to predict who will win a chess game based on their difference in Elo ratings. There's really two components to this - 1) deriving the player ratings, and 2) predicting what outcome to expect for a given difference in ratings.

Nowadays with machine learning we could easily learn a rating system that directly optimizes the goal of predicting match outcomes. It'd be interesting to do it and see how much better at predicting it would be than the Elo system.

You seem to be talking about a different incident - the Challenger explosion shortly after launch due to failed O-ring. This story is about the Columbia which failed on re-entry due to heat shield damage.

Sure, but shouldn't the US government be in the business of protecting the quality of life of all Americans, not just auto workers?

What about outsourcing of software jobs to India, for example, something that people on Slashdot ought to care about if they are hoping to work in the software field.

How can a US citizen, with a US cost of living, compete with someone with an Indian cost of living?

Personally, I think our government should be concerned about people not corporate profits, and should make it illegal for US-based companies to not use US-based labor, but at minimum if they are going to allow outsourcing they please afford us IT workers the same protection as being suggested for US workers, and don't allow foreign countries to take US jobs by effectively using their lower cost of living as a subsidy.

Soon to become:

Answer: Because no ads ...

Related: Would a cool refreshing coca cola feel good after using perplexity?

This is really a multi-year plan and incremental ramping up. Even if full AGI is a ways off, AI is advancing and seeing more and more use cases, so this seems as much keeping up with demand as making any major bet.

Amazon also recently announced a $100B+ multi-year datacenter expansion plan (and are the compute provider for Anthropic).

The only aspect of this that seems a bit risky is perhaps the fact that it's somewhat tied to training costs of future "AI" (LLM) models. GPT-4 cost $100M+, and future generations may well go up in 10x training cost factors ($1B, $10B, maybe even $100B). But still, training is essentially a one-time thing, with AI datacenter use then switching to inference (customer use). At some point the spending will slow when the techs capabilities are levelling off, but for now the gains from one generation to the next (GPT-3 to GPT-4, etc) justify the growth.

Databricks puff piece in NYT on same day as DataBricks drops new model. I hope the "reporter" at least got a nice lunch.

Jobs lost numbers are real - these are actual layoffs.

New jobs numbers are government issued garbage that mean nothing, just as the official unemployment rate means nothing.

If new jobs were really > jobs lost they everything would be great, but they are not. Lot's of tech people have been out of work for a long time, applying to hundreds of jobs (many of which turn out to be fake "ghost" job postings).

Not only is Altman pre-announcing a new version of GPT, which everyone already assumed is coming, but on a Lex Fridman interview from a day or two ago he is also saying that their current GPT-4 sucks!

He doesn't even have anything that could be considered as good news. I think most people would have expected it by mid-year at the very latest, maybe before. People also expect each new version to be significantly better than the previous one, so saying that it will be "materially" better is saying nothing. Is that meant to reduce or juice peoples expectations ?!

What seems to really be going on here is a reaction to Anthropic's recent release of Claude-3, which in it's largest "Opus" form beats GPT-4 pretty much across the board in terms of benchmarks, despite Anthropic only being created at the same time GPT-3 was released! Anthropic seem to have the momentum in their favor and are outpacing OpenAI in rate of advance at the moment. It'll be interesting to compare the next generation GPT-5 and Claude-4 when both are out.

Not only are Anthropic advancing very rapidly, but they have already won many corporate customers, and per a recent interview with their CEO (Dario Amodei) work closely with customer to "skate to where the puck is GOING to be" and plan their products for at least one generation ahead of Anthropic's releases.

It seems that the purpose of this "GPT-5 is coming soon" non-announcement, and odd "GPT-4 sucks" (so Anthropic beating it is no big deal) comment are meant to detract attention from Anthropic and try to make companies think twice before committing to a multi-year product cycle with them.

OpenAI has nothing new to actually announce at this time, so the best they can do is wave a flag and say "hey, we're still here".

Yeah, I remember a program called "The Last One", released c.1980. that was meant to be what we'd now call a no/low-code solution to writing business apps, meant to put programmers out of business.

Needless to say, it wasn't "the last one", and people today continue to try to create these no/low-cod solutions, and developers continue to manually write crud apps etc that certainly don't need to be manually coded.

I think the issue is that all these tools ,"Devin" included, don't do the entire job - they still need a person in the loop to write the requirements, convert that into an input from the tool, run the tool, integrate and build the output, handle later bug reports and fixes, etc, etc. If you can't take the person out of the loop, then they are not a person replacement - they are just a productivity tool (and so far no-one seems to have written one that seems to have much generality and is widely adopted).

What *would* be useful is an AGI pair programmer that we could hand tasks off to at a high level ("you write the parser") and trust to get it right (i.e. test, debug and iterate until it's right), but I don't get the impression from current state of GPT-4 etc that this level of capability is coming soon.

We'll see LLMs improve of course, but it remains to be seen if they are even on the path to AGI (I have my doubts, for some specific reasons), and anyways a generic graduate-level AGI is still not a developer with 5 years of experience.... that would take 5 years of *experience*.

It seems pretty obvious that there was some sort of machinery in place (which by definition might be considered as life) to have created something as complex as RNA. This is basically the concept of assembly theory. If RNA is made in the lab, then humans are the assembler.

I agree with Stuart Kaufmann's "At home in the universe" that self-perpetuating "metabolisms" would be almost inevitable in the right environment, and this seems infinitely more plausible as the origin of life. RNA would be many steps later.

If you want stability then you should be running LTS (long-term support) releases, but 18.04 LTS expired in 6-2023.

You should at least be running 20.04 (expires 4-2025) or 22.04 (expires 6-2027) which at this point is already a couple of years old!

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releas...

What support does emacs have for remote development/editing ?

At work we use Windows laptops to log into remote linux dev servers, and I'd been using emacs running on the dev server up until a few weeks ago, using X11 forwarding to MobaXerm running under windows.

Unfortunately my employer just stopped supporting MobaXTerm, or any other X11 server, so I've no switched to VS Code with the remote SSH extension, which at least as far as remote file access goes is very good. Sadly VS Code doesn't have any decent macro record/playback support (can't record entering find/replace text, for example), which is a major productivity killer.

Does emacs have something equivalent to VS Code's remote SSH support, where I can configure an SSH connection then just treat remote files as if they were local ?

Well, that's quite an optimistic outlook - that a labor shortage will raise wages to point where quality of life improves.

I'm not so optimistic - why would the outsourcing of jobs and manufacturing stop, why would companies stop lobbing for cheap immigrant labor (H1-B visas) rather than paying better salaries to attract domestic talent and kids taking STEM/CS degrees ?

Our economy is screwed up in so many different ways - not just the direct effects of globalization, but also a crippling national debt seemingly beyond point of now return. We can't even inflate our way out of the debt since the interest on refinanced dept would just make it worse. Or what about lack of housing affordability (would cost me more than double - totally unafordable - if I had to buy my house at today's value with today's interest rates), looming retirement crises, college loan debt, etc, etc.

Sure would be nice to turn the clock back to the 50's when the Amreican Dream was alive and well, but hard to see a soft landing or reversal for the path we are on. I don't think it will end well.

In the meantime, the difference between the UK (where I am originally from) and US today vs in the late 80's when I cam here is startling and depressing. Back then, the US was booming, and software salaries were 3x that in the UK - the US consumer lifestyle was booming! Today, we can see what a mess the US is in where even two salaries will leave you struggling in many parts of the country, yet I have two sisters in the UK who are thriving - one is a single parent mother, a half-retired nurse, who owns her own home and has just got back from a month long vacation in Australia. My other sister and her husband have modest jobs but also own their own home, new BMW, latest Apple products every year for kids xmas presents, holidays abroad every year ...