I'm currently enrolled in a US PhD program and my stipend is 40,000 per year. We are going to be receiving a raise to 47k-48k soon. Not sure when the GP did their PhD but times, prices, and stipends change quickly.

As to your other point, the US spends over twice as much as Canada on R&D as a fraction of GDP. In fact, in absolute numbers it is the world's greatest spender, and very high in relative terms as well. While I dislike the GOP's spending priorities as much as the next person, let's not jump onto every single issue with the same axe to grind.

Cloudflare is something you sell to dumb CIO's monthly can pretend they took some initiative.

Cloudflare makes up numbers and installs their bloatware on your servers.

It's basically McAffe anti-virus for your infrastructure. :(

Daniel Galouye published Simulacron-3 in 1964, before PKD ever explored the subject (Ubik, 1969). Let's give credit where credit is due.

Galouye explored his simulation as implemented entirely in hardware and software, and gave lots of details on the implementation. Many things in the Matrix come from Simulacron-3, like breaking out of the simulation, glitches when the simulation is being changed, agents, even the use of telephone booths as portals to the level above. The tech is from the 1960s, but everything about it is recognizable to us today.

PKD's Ubik instead depicted it as some kind of chemically-induced group hallucination, happening inside people's heads, in a world where telepaths and precogs were common, with all details handwaved away or attributed to psychics, eventually devolving into a typical PKD surrealistic fantasy.

I thought Simulacron-3 was by far the better book. It was directly adapted into the Thirteenth Floor, and inspired The Matrix. PKD's ideas got turned into movies like Minority Report instead.

That's objectively not true, given that 3 million more people voted for her than Trump.

She was unpopular, no argument there, but Trump was even more deeply unpopular. Just not in the right places.

But if you get enough weak sauce perceptions aggregated, then by the central limit theorem, they tend to the normal. And with this many measurements, comparing those averages is certainly meaningful. We can debate what that means, but it's a real finding. To me, it's actually more interesting than benchmarks. It means that people in the real world find Claude's answers ever-so-slightly more helpful. That's significant.

Actually, it's very likely that we would not be detectable as having existed a few million years after our extinction, which is still a blink of an eye on geological timescales. Look back tens or hundreds of millions of years, and there could easily have been intelligent, planet-spanning civilizations on Earth that we wouldn't be able to find conclusive evidence of at all.

https://nautil.us/could-an-ind...

Gravity is a side effect, like sound.

I agree with your premise completely! No job is beneath us. That is why I consider myself very fortunate, having had to learn the principles of my disciplines from the ground up. I studied everything up from pure mathematics through boolean logic, algorithms and data structures, operating systems, and programming languages from assembler up. Out in the real world, I similarly worked my way through every task a novice, then a junior developer, and finally a senior developer has to deal with, from tiny bugfixes to larger and larger projects, to projects that I designed and had increasingly larger teams over longer time horizons execute. I am only in the PhD phase of my scientific career, but I am taking on the same progression in that field.

Where we disagree is that it's precisely that training that allows me to supervise the outputs of an LLM. On their own, they make many mistakes, and again I completely agree with you. Sometimes they produce nonsense. It's precisely the decades of experience that allows me to supervise that work, make corrections as needed, or sometimes reject the first pass entirely and do my own. This is what allows me to produce more in the same amount of time without a drop in quality.

Great points, I just have a different take on the end result.

Depends on what your job is. If your job is exclusively the production of highly crafted artefacts with no repetitive, tedious, or rote elements whatsoever, then sure.

But in the real world, there are very very few people like that. Those that do tend to have executive assistants already.

In practice, most knowledge jobs benefit from software that encapsulates, well, knowledge.

As a software engineer, LLMs help me produce boilerplate code, hook up interfaces I don't need to bother to learn, do first-pass coding that I would otherwise have a junior engineer do, write documentation, and turn outlines into full-fledged design docs. As a biomedical researcher, they help me polish up my writing, write tedious administrative responses, and act as documentation for PowerPoint and Excel. As a medical student, they help me do first-pass research on new topics, as well as quickly answer things I would need to look up in long-winded reference databases. As a private individual, they help me draft boilerplate emails, recommendation letters, and in general turn outlines into text.

If LLMs aren't making you more productive, then you have a job in which every second of your day requires your fully engaged intelligence, with no repetitive or boring responsibilities. If so, good for you! For the rest of us, LLMs are a godsend.

I would put it to you that you could also benefit from LLMs, if only to draft tedious emails, documentation, or design docs. We tend to have a pervasive attitude on Slashdot that LLMs are too stupid to help us. I think we are missing out on many benefits because we're too proud to find how they can fit into our workflows. They are not AGIs, but that doesn't mean they aren't helpful.

Having tried to roll my own journaling and task management system in both Drupal and Wordpress: yes, anything is possible in those tools, but clunkily. If you want a smooth experience, a purpose-built tool will beat those two hands down for anything except their intended purpose of blogging.

I would not recommend those two again unless what you're trying to create really doesn't exist and you're OK with a subpar implementation for the benefit of not having to write code.

I think his objection isn't to the leader of a country getting security, but to the leader being unelected and hereditary, and getting the best education and opportunities on that basis.

Sure, the reverse is usually true, that the people with the best education and opportunities become leaders of their country. But at least that's more meritocratic, because the leader doesn't always come from the wealthy class. Whereas under a monarchy, it does, by definition.

The even bigger problem with the British royals is that their constitutional role is not purely formal. They have the power to meddle with legislation and have used this power hundreds of times to protect and enhance their own massive fortune. THAT is the real scandal. The British monarchy is a parasitic institution far beyond the scale and imagination of even the Russian oligarchs; and their image is so craftily managed that the public only gets worked up about petty soap opera drama like what names one brother calls another.

Nothing succeeds like a full rewrite.

Guaranteed success, can't fail.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Unless you're Oracle, then you're the villain who becomes more and more evil as time goes on, bwahahahahahaha!

That is hilarious. While there are a few software engineers who made their big bucks in America then moved to somewhere like Switzerland for the lifestyle, the vast majority are migrating in this direction, and an order of magnitude more would like to but can't.

Simply don't trust Russian, Chinese and other untrustworthy sources that can't be verified. Or at least make content from places like that really obvious (visual notification that it's from an untrustworthy source).

On the flip side, just only allow authenticated signatures from good sources or make content notify you that the signature was verified from a legit source.