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Comment Re:Philadelphia is a grid pattern with wide street (Score 1) 35

There are some narrow/one-way streets in a few parts of the grid, mainly in the older parts of town toward the Delaware side, and a couple of oddities with active trolley tracks, but mostly it's a rationally laid out place where they took care to make surface transportation as painless as possible.

Suburbs are mostly a grid too.

Philadelphia is Northeast cities on easy mode.

Boston roads on the other hand...third world at best.

Boston on July 4: "You can't get there from here." When they shut down Storrow Dr., all those one-way streets become the tenth circle of hell.

Comment Productivity always had a bad side (Score 1) 87

You only need to make people more productive and then they need less people!

I've seen IT boost productivity for decades and the result is that it reduces jobs or gives more value to the owners while the wages stagnated.

Sure, people counter that existing employees can remain and they get more value out of them, I've heard that plenty. Well, you'd have needed to hire new employees to get those benefits and were able to avoid; perhaps the added expense was not worth paying more but it certainly then the productivity was worth the LOST savings of reducing employees. If any gains were made, they didn't go to employee raises; at least not more than the inflation rate.

Replacing entry workers creates a long term supply problem; which is solved simply by pushing entry workers up the chain! This results in upper workers who could be completely immune from AI being in over supply... So the "safe" jobs get screwed indirectly!

Comment Re:Sorry, but... (Score 1) 40

AlphaFold would absolutely have been "called AI" ten years ago.

What's confusing you and the OP is the popular use of the term "AI" to refer to a specific set of language-trained models. This is because humans have difficulty holding more than one concept in their brain at the same time and are also exceptionally susceptible to tech bros trying to sell them shit.

Comment Re: Drug delivery (Score 1) 40

More importantly we have hundreds of humans and plenty of animals edited with CRISPR and they haven't died or shown signs of cancer.

The vast majority (all?) of those have been editing cells that are removed, then reinjected. One of the benefits of that is you can discard any suspicious ones.

and they haven't died

Oh yes, people have died.

Comment Re:"AI" is good fit for drug discovery (Score 1) 40

we won't be at a level to skip vivo studies until around the same time as we can make "Real" Human equivalent AI.

The latter is probably considerably easier than the former. We know that "real human equivalent [A]I" can be created. There are ten billion examples walking around. We don't have an example of an oracle machine that can tell you what a drug is going to do when you put it into one of them.

We also have reasonable bounds on the amount of computation that goes into making one of those "real human" intelligences, and they're achievable. There are good reasons to think that figuring out all the interactions that make up a complex biological system is practically uncomputable.

Comment Re:"AI" is good fit for drug discovery (Score 1) 40

That's a nice story, but it's not true. Humans all make variations on the "standard" set of human proteins. Sometimes not important variations, sometimes very important. Proteins aren't one and done either; they're reused all over the place, in different ways. You can target the such and such a receptor on such and such a cell and your drug is going to have off target effects because that same receptor is used in a dozen other cell types to do two dozen other things.

Not to mention drugs don't stay the same in an actual biological system. They get broken down, built up, transformed, internalized, etc. Not to mention a bazillion other things half of which we don't even know about yet.

Comment Re:Illegal fireworks (Score 1) 111

VOTERS don't care about land management. politicians on some level always represent their voters.

Like how Americans are fat ignorant corrupt selfish greedy bullies who lie and have no idea why hypocrisy is shameful. They identify with their president for a reason; just distance themselves from a few characteristics they don't want to identify with. If you are the embodiment of every human flaw, everybody will have something in common with you.

Comment Re:Modern design (Score 1) 103

Ah, when in doubt jump to the racist conspiracy theory.

They didn't send the black boxes to Boeing because you don't do that. They didn't send them to the US transportation safety agency because they don't have anything to do with this, and India's equivalent just built a brand new lab for this exact thing.

There haven't been any airworthiness directives because they didn't find a smoking gun pointing to some obvious design issue. It's always pretty unlikely that would happen. The black boxes aren't oracles, they record flight information and what's being said in the cockpit.

Comment Re:Backlash or opinion drifting towards the scienc (Score 1) 134

The problem is the whole thing is trained to make output to please you. Simple old systems can fool people for a short while. As they get better, they fool more people longer. So at some point you will have a system able to meet everybody's expectations and do so for a short period of time until they find something to fool it.

So we'll have people thinking it's "alive" when it can fool enough people long enough. But the whole thing will really just be a better con than most people can detect. It will not be able to actually think.

Now the brain sims that are not just non-linear equation approximation machines, those might be smart someday... although the problem with modeling neurons is they've found quantum mechanics is involved. someday we may have a decent approximation that goes beyond the weighted averaging based design we have now which doesn't need to be a perfect neuron. I don't think there is some quantum magic that is required for "life" but maybe... thing is, will you know or will you just be good enough to fool your ability to measure success?

Comment Re:Backlash or opinion drifting towards the scienc (Score 1) 134

At the time I remember IBM had engineers playing with the computer during the matches and they shouldn't have been allowed to touch the computer at all. You take a team of experts helping the machine and you've created an augmented intelligence that could combine the work of many against 1 chess master. I'd say they had to prove they actually won by letting the chess master use a computer of historical moves as well as not allowing any human to touch the computer during the game.

Comment Re: Hiring only experienced engineers (Score 1) 136

Keep up the good work.

They manufacture the panic; many try things out and when something sticks enough they run with it. They don't even need anything to find and distort anymore; just make it up and if lucky, they can ambush somebody who will stay the wrong thing when responding unaware of the narrative setup around the absurdities. Trans has been a problem for some time with it being such a tiny nothing it hardly gets noticed but it resonated more at this time so it became a crisis.

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