To an extent yes. There has been some utter crap. Another Life pops immediately to mind as something so unwatchably terrible that i watched just to see if it could get worse (spoiler: yes! wow... so much yes!)

But that isn't a netflix issue, that's just an issue. From Firefly to The Expanse to Babylon 5 sci-fi especially is hamstrung by its production.

But there's been plenty of good shows to watch too:

I quite liked Fall of the House of Usher recently for example.
Black Mirror, Maniac, Umbrella Academy were good.
I watched the The OA Season 1 and that was good (I skipped part 2 since i knew it was cancelled mid-arc.) Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was brilliant - especially season 1.

"So, books have always been more my thing. I'm sticking with them."

Sure, I like books too.. but Game of Throne's is a mess that may never be finished and perhaps shouldn't be; and Wheel of Time never was. And even Asimov's foundation is actually better without books 4 and 5, nevermind the Benford books, and Dune ... likewise did not improve with more novels, and also fell off a cliff when other authors kept it going like a zombie corpse. Things that are 'good' always invite 'more' and the 'more' is almost never as good.

These days my favorite books to read are those that are not part of a series, or at most are a trilogy, and have a beginning middle and an end and above all: a point. They don't try to milk the setting or characters endlessly. With each successive book in the series getting longer and longer as less and less editorial control is exercised over an author seemingly paid by the word.

I value the ability to upload heart rate data to Garmin and the privacy concern is manageable. For the foreseeable future, any brain data they are able to read will be at about that level of precision - I suppose it can do a better of job of quantifying the quality of your sleep. But it's not reading your thoughts.

I can't see most of the article, but I can see in the picture that it's a vtol aircraft (with an airfoil) not a quadcopter. So, that helps.

Compared to a helicopter, with a turbine engine and a long blade, this would have a very different noise profile with 4 electric motors each spinning a propeller. Hopefully not as loud? Or at least not at the low, long-traveling "thud thud thud" frequency of a helo?

April 1 came and went. It's April 18 now.

Of course the VTOL development division can be a completely discrete entity from the commercial jet manufacturing side of the business. They may have no real overlap. They might have different cultures, with this R&D wing being much more healthy. They might be wildly capable of pulling this off.

What needs to be acknowledged - and repaired - is the perception that currently weighs down the company. "Just trust us" requires capital that they put in a big pile and set on fire.

The cheating husband is back at the door with a box of chocolates, a couple of tickets to Cancun, a big smile, and good intentions. But there is still work to be done before he gets to move back in.

I don't hold on to much. I'm not somebody who generally gets nostalgic. Well, that's not completely true... I'm over 50 so everything old is great and most things new are terrible... But "Llama" is one of those rare terms that I'm surprised to see come up as a product label. After all, I remember clearly when the Llama had it's ass whipped.

I agree with you, AI inbreeding is one of those fairly clever intuitive insights that somebody has and which subsequently gets way too much attention in the next few years.

I would add that while the first generation LLM's were trained on crowdsourced data from the web, as LLM's have more real-world applications they will learn from the data they observe in their own "first-person" experience. Like how Telsa uploads training data from cars using FSD (misnomer that it is).

Yes, you could. If you decide that your criteria for having won doesn't factor in things like your own survival as an organization, or the safety of the folks around you, but only that your enemy is damaged, you could decide that you won. Case in point... Hamas. One can easily make the case that Hamas has won, even if they (as a discrete, identifiable group) cease to exist. They've torpedoed changes in the region that were in progress that were to Israel's benefit, the world's support for Israel has been severely compromised, and the forces of other nations with similar views are slowly being mobilized. No matter what happens, Hamas "won". The only outstanding issues don't change that... they just help shape the events of the next year or two.

LLMs cannot do it. Hallucination is baked-in.

LLMs alone definitely can't do it. LLMs, however, seem (to me, speaking for myself as an ML developer) to be a very likely component in an actual AI. Which, to be clear, is why I use "ML" instead of "AI", as we don't have AI yet. It's going to take other brainlike mechanisms to supervise the hugely flawed knowledge assembly that LLMs generate before we even have a chance to get there. Again, IMO.

I'd love for someone to prove me wrong. No sign of that, though. :)

I'll be impressed when one of these ML engines is sophisticated enough to be able to say "I don't know" instead of just making up nonsense by stacking probabilistic sequences; also it needs to be able tell fake news from real news. Although there's an entire swath of humans who can't do that, so it'll be a while I guess. That whole "reality has a liberal bias" truism ought to be a prime training area.

While I certainly understand that the Internet and its various social media cesspools are the most readily available training ground(s), it sure leans into the "artificial stupid" thing.

Maybe we can eliminate pilot (or even soldier) risk altogether, and move conventional war strictly into the economic realm. Whomever has more of the best toys to smash together wins. Of course that means that if a country is at a disadvantage it's in their best interests to move the fight into the unconventional sphere... attacks on civilians through all sorts of unpalatable methods... the aggressive pursuit of nuclear parity/superority/relevance... bioweapons... terrorism.. The Geneva conventions and other norms all boil down to "be civil and fight fair". As the technology gap grows, fewer and fewer opponents will choose to do either of those things.

I'm really surprised 8GB are still even made, but also that 8GB still costs a whole $20. Not having shopped for a computer for several years, 8GB was the standard low-end configuration back then. It seems progress has ceased.

Yeah it looks like it nearly leveled off about 2010. That's about when I remember 16 GB being a pretty decent / normal configuration.

https://aiimpacts.org/trends-i...

Made me curious if there aren't nations with no military.

enjoy

https://science.howstuffworks....

Interestingly Panama is one of them. After getting rid of Noriega they decided having a military was a bigger risk than not. No US military bases, either.

The federal government of the USA is, as well its role in the world, is of course a bit different.

Cool except it's teleoperated.

Still useful to show what it's physically capable of. And collect training data I presume.

It is interesting to see the gap between autonomous and teleoperated is still so big. (Not surprising I guess since otherwise the streets would be full of self-driving cars).

It is hard but they're working on it:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts...

(Tesla in this case)

The federal government does do a lot of things other than military.