Sure, itâ(TM)s quite possible for two people to exchange offhand remarks about the local weather apropos of nothing, with no broader point in mind. It happens all the time, even, I suppose, right in the middle of a discussion of the impact of climate change on the very parameters they were discussing.
The thing to understand is we're talking about sixth tenths of a degree warming since 1990, when averaged over *the entire globe* for the *entire year*. If the change were actually distributed that way -- evenly everywhere over the whole year -- nobody would notice any change whatsoever; there would be no natural system disruption. The temperature rise would be nearly impossible to detect against the natural background variation.
That's the thinking of people who point out that the weather outside their doors is unusually cool despite global warming. And if that was what climate change models actually predicted, they'd be right. But that's not what the models predict. They predict a patchwork of some places experiencing unusual heat while others experience unusual coolness, a patchwork that is constantly shifting over time. Only when you do the massive statistical work of averaging *everywhere, all the time* out over the course of the year does it manifest unambiguously as "warming".
In the short term -- over the course of the coming decade for example, -- it's less misleading to think of the troposphere becoming more *energetic*. When you consider six tenths of a degree increase across the roughly 10^18 kg of the troposphere, that is as vast, almost unthinkable amount of energy increase. Note that this also accompanied by a *cooling* of the stratosphere. Together these produce a a series of extreme weather events, both extreme heat *and* extreme cold, that aggregated into an average increase that's meaningless as a predictor of what any location experiences at any point in time.
That's all well and good. You understand that. So do I. And probably so do the engineers at Microsoft. But that's not the problem. Let's be real, this is no longer the Swiss-cheese-security Microsoft from the NT/XP. As much as it pains me to admit it, their engineers, at least, have a clue. Moving AV out of the kernel was likely in their backlog. But I'm sure you're as aware as well as I am that engineering teams often have more work than time on their plates, and "nice to have" has a tendency to become "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And Windows AV wasn't broken... in part because those same engineers knew about the risk and used compensating controls to mitigate it; in this case, by locking down ring 0.
And all was well until some pinheaded pencil-pushing bureaucrat with not a whit of a clue about computers, operating systems, kernels, or InfoSec was given some power. And like all sad little people who are out of their depth but are entrusted with some, he or she decided to pull a "Respect mah au-thor-i-tah!" flex and ordered those engineers, about whose work he very obviously has not the smallest clue, to open up ring 0 to every random fly-by-night outfit with inflated ideas about their own competence, like CrowdStrike.
Yes. Making your kernel more micro and moving AV into userspace is the smart move. But the way this came about was unnecessary and profoundly, catastrophically, stupid.
Sure but the advantage of crops is you can easily scale your solar collectors by planting more acres. There are soybean farms with a half million acres out there that would produce significant amounts of biodiesel if used for that purpose. Now algae is a lot more efficient in a physics sense, but an equivalent algae facility would be on the order of 100,000 acres. The water requirements and environmental impacts of open algae pools would be almost unimaginable. Solar powered bioreactors would increase yields and minimize environmental costs, at enormous financial costs, although possibly this would be offset by economies of scale.
Either way a facility that produces economically significant amounts of algae biodiesel would be an engineering megaproject with higher capital and operating costs than crop based biodiesel, but an algae based energy economy is a cool idea for sci fi worldbuilding. In reality where only the most immediately economically profitable technologies survive, I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it being more than a niche application.
It isn't just fanboys. Tesla stock is astronomically overpriced based on the sales performance and outlook of what normal people consider its core business -- electric cars (and government credits). For investors, Tesla is *all* about the stuff that doesn't exist yet, like robotaxis.
Are they wrong to value Musk's promises for Tesla Motors so much? I think so, but it's a matter of opinion. If Tesla actually managed to make the advances in autonomous vehicle technology to make a real robotaxi service viable, I'd applaud that. But I suspect if Musk succeeds in creating a successful robotaxi business, Tesla will move on to focus on something other than that. Tesla for investors isn't about what it is doing now, it's about not missing out on the next big thing.
The real problem with biodiesel would be its impact on agriculture and food prices. Ethanol for fuel has driven global corn prices up, which is good for farmers but bad in places like Mexico where corn is a staple crop. Leaving aside the wildcat homebrewer types who collect restaurant waste to make biodiesel, the most suitable virgin feedstocks for biodiesel on an industrial scale are all food crops.
As for its technical shortcomings, if it even makes any economic sense at all then that's a problem for the chemists and chemical engineers. I suspect biodiesel for its potential environmental benefits wouldn't attract serious investment without some kind of mandate, which would be a really bad thing if you're making it from food crops like oil seeds or soybeans.
Just one point: "free love" actually has a historical definition. It means that sexual activity should not be regulated by governments. That would also, technically, include the right to practice celibacy.
I wonder at what rate they'll need to increase the pricing in order to maintain it. Ironically improved traffic may make driving more desirable.
They will have to increase the price eventually as demand for transport overall rises. The point of the pricing is to deter driving enough that the street network operates within its capacity limits; if driving becomes more desirable than status quo ante, they aren't charging enough and will have to raise prices to keep demand manageable.
Think of it this way: either way, traffic will reach some equilibrium. The question is, what is the limiting factor? If using the road is free, then the limiting factor is traffic congestion. If you widen some congested streets, the limiting factor is *still* congestion, so eventually a new equilibrium is found which features traffic jams with even more cars.
The only way to build your way out of this limit, is to add *so* much capacity to the street network that it far outstrips any conceivable demand. This works in a number of US cities, but they're small and have an extensive grid-based street network with few natural barriers like rivers. There is simply no way to retrofit such a street architecture into a city of 8.5 million people where land costs six million dollars an acre.
So imposing use fees is really is the only way to alleviate traffic for a major city like New York or London. This raises economic fairness issues, for sure, but if you want fairness, you can have everyone suffer, or you can provide everyone with better transportation alternatives, but not necessarily the same ones. Yes, the wealthy will be subsidizing the poor, but they themselves will also get rewards well worth the price.
If some government is spending $20 million to investigate this, that seems like an insane misuse of taxpayer money.
Oh please. Screeching out a "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?" has been the favorite tactic of bullies authoritarians literally for as long as I can remember. "Oh, the nerdy kids are making friends with each other and playing Dungeons and Dragons? Well now, we can't have that. I know, let's tell everyone that D&D turns kids into virgin-sacrificing, blood-drinking satanists so we can ban it!" was followed up only very shortly after by Tipper Gore's crusade against heavy metal (more satanic panic), rap (I really have no idea why. This was before it went all "gangster" in the 1990s. Maybe just because the artists were mostly black?), and Prince (Again, I can't fathom why, other than probably because he was black.). Around this same time there was a similar "Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children?" panic about video arcades being dens of inequity that lured children in to... what, I'm not exactly sure. Then it was MTV (Oh noes! Somebody might think Beavis and Buttheart are supposed to be role models for kids... BAN IT!!!") At some point in the 1990s (It definitely started when I was in high school but was still going on in my college years.) there was a move to ban anime because something something about those degenerate Asians "corrupting our youth." And then John Carmack wrote the first Doom and the Helen Lovejoys (Oh, and speaking of Helen Lovejoy... the Simpsons... yes, THE SIMPSONS... was the subject of a ban-it-for-the-children moral outrage crusade back in the day!) of the world flipped their shit about computer games continuously for most of a decade or so.
I could keep going... 'got about another 25 years I could cover and there's more I could mention from the years I have covered. But really, do I need to? All of this shit that the prigs, scolds, and authoritarian thugs of the world are doing now... the website bans, the social media bans, the book bans, the attacks on cryptography and privacy... it's all just more out the same playbook they've been using my entire life and undoubtedly since well before I was born.
And, suffice it to say, I grew up as a fan, viewer, listener, or participant of all of the above. And I didn't turn out as a blood-drinking satanist, gang-banger, degenerate reprobate, arsonist, psycho killer, or brazen hussy; but as a boring, middle class, middle age, engineer. The same thing's going to happen with "kids these days." They're nowhere near so fragile as the people pushing authoritarianism my pretending to advocate fro them would have you believe.
Well, yes -- the lies and the exaggerations are a problem. But even if you *discount* the lies and exaggerations, they're not *all of the problem*.
I have no reason to believe this particular individual is a liar, so I'm inclined to entertain his argument as being offered in good faith. That doesn't mean I necessarily have to buy into it. I'm also allowed to have *degrees* of belief; while the gentleman has *a* point, that doesn't mean there aren't other points to make.
That's where I am on his point. I think he's absolutely right, that LLMs don't have to be a stepping stone to AGI to be useful. Nor do I doubt they *are* useful. But I don't think we fully understand the consequences of embracing them and replacing so many people with them. The dangers of thoughtless AI adoption arise in that very gap between what LLMs do and what a sound step toward AGI ought to do.
LLMs, as I understand them, generate plausible sounding responses to prompts; in fact with the enormous datasets they have been trained on, they sound plausible to a *superhuman* degree. The gap between "accurately reasoned" and "looks really plausible" is a big, serious gap. To be fair, *humans* do this too -- satisfy their bosses with plausible-sounding but not reasoned responses -- but the fact that these systems are better at bullshitting than humans isn't a good thing.
On top of this, the organizations developing these things aren't in the business of making the world a better place -- or if they are in that business, they'd rather not be. They're making a product, and to make that product attractive their models *clearly* strive to give the user an answer that he will find acceptable, which is also dangerous in a system that generates plausible but not-properly-reasoned responses. Most of them rather transparently flatter their users, which sets my teeth on edge, precisely because it is designed to manipulate my faith in responses which aren't necessarily defensible.
In the hands of people increasingly working in isolation from other humans with differing points of view, systems which don't actually reason but are superhumanly believable are extremely dangaerous in my opinion. LLMs may be the most potent agent of confirmation bias ever devised. Now I do think these dangers can be addressed and mitigated to some degree, but the question is, will they be in a race to capture a new and incalculably value market where decision-makers, both vendors and consumers, aren't necessarily focused on the welfare of humanity?
BTW, the ascii glorp above is a unicode em-dash, proving that I am an LLM and hence not a disinterested party to the discussion.
At least that's what I heard skeeted on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/danbi...
And of course this is no surpriseâ"an inconclusive study that can be used to justify a controversial headline is gold in the infotainment biz.
You can now buy more gates with less specifications than at any other time in history. -- Kenneth Parker
