https://www.quantamagazine.org...

FTA (from This article):
"They proved that origami is 'Turing complete'"

Regarding the "hockey stick" graph. (Taking absolutely no position on whether Mann was honest or not, competent or not, etc.)

I was under the impression that the Hockey Stick graph had been shown to be defective as an indicator of warming, primarily because it took tree ring data as one of its proxies for temperature, but carbon dioxide concentration increases alone have been shown to substantially promote tree growth even in the absence of temperature increases. So how much of the sudden rise in the graph is from temperature increase (if any) and how much just from increased CO2 levels is unknown.

But I don't have any links to reliable scholarly articles examining this issue. Do any of you?

That's the moment that got me! The whole thing went from preposterous to magical.

I wonder about two meetings. The first, committing to the idea of an online toothbrush (WTF). The second, the decision to use Java to power the idea (WTF^2).

And then the events. First, people bought the thing, millions of people (WTF). The second, someone thought to target the toothbrushes (not surprising really).

It's a fantastic story about an idea where crazy people (everyone involved) realize their whims creating and exercising a most unlikely attack vector.

The show would be called "True Brains", about zombies finally being accepted into society thanks to a technological breakthrough for feeding them...

The Police wrote about this back in 1983.

There's a little black spot on the sun today
It's the same old thing as yesterday
There's a black hat caught in a high tree top
There's a flag pole rag and the wind won't stop

This.

Even if you aren't training, running open source LLMs at speed requires non-consumer hardware, either purchased or rented.

At that point the paid offerings by OpenAI and MS Azure OpenAI Services can look reasonable (or the entire concept of setting up the open source LLM AND the expenses look unreasonable).

Weaker hardware can provide a proof of concept, but it will be slow (although, compare the result to a human, per word, 2-3 tokens/second is faster than you over the long run...).

And that 128K token "limit" for GPT4 is rather fantastic.

Training? Yeah, you will be renting a ton GPU time for considerable $. With proper data prep a RAG solution in front of the LLM is a) faster, b) cheaper, c) far easier to maintain/alter, and d) (potentially, it's about data prep, chucking strategy, metadata, etc.) very competitive against fine tuning for results.

It's just not making the news much.

Relocate or quit.

https://coincodex.com/article/...

https://www.thelayoff.com/t/1q...

It's a shit show. I don't work there but know someone that does (until pension benefit date if they can make it).

Damn, he already covered that in some manner... Thanks for that.

RIP Mr. Carlin.

What if I wish to ONLY be represented, now, and in perpetuity, by ACTUAL images, writings, and recordings (recorded / created by myself or other parties).

What if I do not want any representation of MY PERSON in an AI fashion?

Live action representations are a different story and have an existing legal framework. And can be very respectful, see Val Kilmer being Mark Twain as an exemplary example of this.

I believe Carlin would have chosen to not have AI representations of himself. But he can't make that decision.

Quality of the content is probably also a factor.......

Here's a lighthearted take on it (if that's possible), with Danny Devito.

"Dupont: We're already in you!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Yes, it's called Autogen. You setup different personas and let them discuss things, with or without one or more humans also involved.

It's open source. Imagine setting up personas for a team, say a web designer, project owner, and a marketing type. Give them an idea and they will pass it around from their particular point of expertise (and they maintain individual memory or state).

It's nothing that's production ready, but it's very interesting.

Matthey Berman on YouTube covers it extensively.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://microsoft.github.io/au...

"changing perceptions" through marketing? that sounds like an arms race with the other side. Long time ago we thought the right way to change perceptions was through good education and development of critical thinking skills.

Where did it all go wrong :)

It all went wrong when each sides of the discussion concluded that scientific papers supporting the other side were marketing fake-news, trying to gaslight them into supporting a scam to let the opposing side acquire money and/or power, rather than actual science.

Warmists think evidence against any aspect of their side's story is akin to smoking research sponsored by tobacco companies. Skeptics think any evidence for a global warming story has been corrupted, ala early drug war research on psychedelic drugs, to feed government power grabs and attempts to put rent-seeking taxes on commerce (e.g. Gore's carbon-credit exchange).

Now neither side believes academic papers on the subject. We'll just have to wait and see what the climate does.

Following this paper's prescription, of course, would just put the nail in the coffin on any remaining hope of convincing the population to pay attention to the sort of propaganda it prescribes. (Assuming the very existence of the paper hasn't already done that.)

The overshoot hasn't caused failure due to functional limits, yet.

Water will fail first, it already is. Read up on aquafiers, at least snowfall can replenish annually (if it falls in the right places).

https://www.wri.org/insights/n...

Aqufiers will fail. Subsidence is when the land sinks from water (or oil) extracted from aqufiers. The California's Central Valley has sunk about 28 feet since the 1920s. I'm sure that's sustainable...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In other news, 2-3 billion people experience water shortages:
https://www.unesco.org/en/arti...

(this is the current minimum overshoot in my opinion)

Food:

Worst food crisis since 2007, about 200 million face food ermegency or famine globally.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/n...

Political Problems: I won't even get into that.

What's the result of this? Migration.

There will be a lot of untracked migration and a ton of migrant deaths. Locals will resort to violence.

The bloody edge of all of this will be far away from the "first world" countries, where our politians are forced to promote endless growth because the other person will.

That bloody edge is called "global population control". We keep that out of sight, and wind turbines, I don't want to see that either!...

Flight time is about 20 years. (Proxima is about 4 light years away and the swarm is averaging about 1/5th lightspeed.) I suspect even some of us boomers can hang in here that long - even if life-extension treatments don't become available.

Oops. Maybe not. They're talking about 75 years before getting around to a launch.

I'll be surprised if the project stays funded, since even without delays everyone funding it will die before there's any payoff.

Flight time is about 20 years. (Proxima is about 4 light years away and the swarm is averaging about 1/5th lightspeed.) I suspect even some of us boomers can hang in here that long - even if life-extension treatments don't become available.

Also, I wonder what it will cost to fund the laser for half a century.

The launch and acceleration of the whole swarm is over in about a year. Individual elements are up to speed in much less than that.

(You HAVE to do it fast: Once they're moving they're out of range darned quick, so you have to get them to cruising speed before you can't hit them any more. Fortunately the little motes are really sturdy so you can give them a BIG big push.)

Read The Paper.