The thing about adopting evidence-based policy is that you also need to review and if necessary change policy when more evidence becomes available. The kind of situation you're describing would surely qualify.

Compared to what was available before, it is quite impressive.

The negative feedback is prompted by the fact that AI is constantly being shoved into every one of our orifices 24/7 by every vaguely tech-related company as if it was the second coming of Jesus. To justify that amount of social pressure, it would indeed have to be quite a bit better than it actually is, and that's why people aren't impressed.

Modding me down doesn't make me wrong, mods.

My opinion as a pragmatist is that most western institutions do a passably good job most of the time, but are imperfect and need to be constantly scrutinized to make sure they're serving the interests of the taxpayers. But what I'm talking about here is trust. There are many things that institutions could do to communicate in a way that doesn't do so much harm to their trustworthiness. I think that's an area where people are still learning how to do it "the right way." We're not there yet.

Wait, I thought Tylenol caused autism. Is there Tylenol in the vaccines? What's going on? LOL

First of all, trust in institutions is falling everywhere across the western world, not just in the US, and that drop in trust is bipartisan in the US. Secondly, there are real reasons for a general decline in institutional trust. In medicine, but also in economics, with the 2008 financial crisis that was caused by a failure of the institutions that are supposed to regulate such things. The rush to label anyone who questioned the origin of the COVID-19 virus as racist, only to have most authorities eventually admit that a Wuhan lab leak was not only possible, but likely, was another example. Again, the falling trust isn't a left or right issue. Does it help when RFK Jr. is running the CDC? Obviously not. But do you really think the state governments are immune to this falling trust? Definitely not.

What's funny is that the CDC still publishes measles data but I wonder how long that will continue.

While I count myself among the tribe of people who think we should govern ourselves based on evidence-based logic and reason, I have to admit, my tribe is a rather small minority. If the majority of the people in a democracy will not buy into an idea simply because you've provided a sound and well-reasoned argument, then we're going to have to fall back on practical lessons. You'd think measles coming back would be a pretty good object lesson, but apparently not.

Another article where we see that things started getting worse in the 2012 to 2014 timeframe. Which just happens to be when a lot of teenagers started to get smartphones. It's not a coincidence.

You don't understand the problem. The LLM won't "rip off" content from a website like GoodFood. That's now how it works. It doesn't copy stuff wholesale. It's a text generator that tends to generate text that looks like its training data, in a similar way that a person retelling a story or a joke will retell it from memory, but the memory isn't a facsimile, just like our memory isn't verbatim. When outputting the text, it'll be similar, but it won't be identical. I mean, it might be, but it might output something completely different just due to a neural net weight that was affected by some other training data that was kinda similar.

Exactly. As technologists, we need the output of computers to be precise and accurate. LLMs might be precise, but they're very often inaccurate, and that's not acceptable to us.

The average person doesn't live in a world where accuracy matters to them. A colleague said she used AI all the time, and I asked her how. She said she often tells it the contents in her fridge and asks it for a recipe that would use those ingredients. She said, "yeah, and it's really accurate too." I don't know how you measure accuracy on a test like that, but it doesn't really matter. If you're just mixing some ingredients together in a frying pan, you probably can't go too far wrong. As long as you don't ask it for a baking recipe, it'll work out.

And I think that's what's going on. The people who love AI don't know enough to realize when it's wrong, or are just asking it open ended questions, like you would ask a fortune teller, and it spits out something generic enough that you can't disprove it anyway.

I agree. Where I can find data to backup his claims, I generally accept what he says. Otherwise, I'm like, "hmm, ok, maybe."

You mean, why does Linus keep agreeing to be interviewed, and then reply to straightforward questions with the obvious answers?

What would you rather he do? Refuse to be interviewed, or maybe make up unexpected answers just to be edgy?

Because interstate marine and air cargo volume is within the margin of error of no volume whatsoever in this country thanks to an extreme overinvestment in aviation and highways and abject neglect of marine and rail transportation infrastructure.

Trucks are ideal for last mile operations from the long-distance trains to destination and kinda crap at long distance operations anyway.