Am I the only person to recognise his name and know that he has a decidedly mixed record when it comes to predicting future Apple products? He gets it right about 70% of the time, so a little better than a coin toss, but not something I’d use for making money.

Are you surprised? MAGAs are characterized by being loud, self-assured and clueless. Obviously, they will be strongly represented in any typical training data set.

One of the most important reasons that many people in European cities don't have cars is that there is great public transport in European cities. For the 20+ years I lived in Hampstead, St Johns Wood, South Hampstead, West Hampstead and Kilburn, I didn't need a car because I had such easy access to multiple tube stations, train stations and buses. Now I live a little further out and while I still have easy access to tube and bus, I do have a car, although we don't use it that often, because there's some journeys that are easier in a car. But I'll happily use tube/train/bus etc. This kind of mixed modal use of transport is super-common in Europe

You have not got a clearly resolved position on this topic.

Nowadays, that cool kitchen cabinet is made in a factory, ordered from a catalog and installed by your carpenter.

Does anyone whose net worth is less than a cool billion hire someone to make a custom cabinet onsite?

Solutions starting with "everybody in society must" have a long and celebrated tradition of going immediately (and often horrifically) pear-shaped, as it inevitably turns out that most of everybody doesn't want to, and therefore won't, and in many cases, can't.

For examples, see the Soviet Union's Communism, China's Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge's agricultural collectivism, North Korea's juche, etc.

No matter what, you're still going to need someone in a red shirt to duck into the circuit bays and reverse the polarity.

Indeed. And computers beating humans at chess is not a sign of general intelligence either and no serious researcher claims that. The thing is that we find out that some relatively complex problems have other working approaches besides general intelligence. Incidentally, general intelligence alone does not get you far in chess either.

But the other thing we are finding is that while supposedly typical humans have general intelligence, we also know that most people are not actually using it or are not using it much. The ones that do are outliers. "Independent thinkers" make only somewhere around 15% of the population. If a machine can do what the other 85% routinely do, it does not mean that machine has general intelligence. It does mean that machine is pretty useful, but also pretty flawed. And that while it cannot be used for anything requiring real use of general intelligence, it can be used to replace a lot of humans.

This is on the level of a typical advanced exercise questions. I expect something close or identical can be found in the training data of you just steal enough from the Internet and the published literature.

That is still my conclusion for LLMs in general and I have seen nothing that would strongly indicate otherwise. The real question is whether that is less than or on par with an average person. Keep in mind that only about 15% or all humans can fact-check competently ("independent thinkers") and that is clearly completely out of reach of LLMs. But much of what the rest of humanity can do might not be.

This is probably just a meaningless stunt, like so many done before to keep the hype running. A hard coding problem (but not a research problem) is one where somebody capable, experienced and well-educated takes a few days to think before coming up with a design. Obviously, easy coding problems can either be solved much faster by computers or not solved by them at all. For harder coding problems, the second case applies.

My experience from teaching CS matches that conclusion.

I call it a collision.

I don't call it an accident because it is a likely, forseeable consequence.

... this year. And next year, the same logic will have us getting rid of all of the entry-level employees, and the year after that, the mid-level employees, and some years from now, all employees. Yay, progress?

Comedians will do anything that works to get a laugh, but sourcing jokes from ChatGPT (or similar) is not an effective way to get a laugh. Comedy is based on surprise, and LLMs are based on summarizing old material, so there's a bit of a mismatch there.

Well, sure, in the same way a 747 is just a fancy mechanical bird. Which is to say, yes, but no.