Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

I think it may be evidence that Amazon has a shitty corporate culture that squeezes every penny it can out its employees.

Corruption can happen anywhere, but it's more likely to happen in totalitarian cultures where people feel like the system is rigged anyway. That's why countries like Russia and China have corruption problems. But I suspect the same feelings of me vs. the system occur in a capitalist enterprise like Amazon where employees are governed by dystopian, rigid, computerized metrics.

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

Um, if there's one group that's not lazy, it's farmers.

What were more likely to see is Congress passing a law to somehow ban this.

This has to be the most obnoxious demonstration of why open source software culture is the greatest impediment to mainstream adoption of open source software that I've seen in a while.

I don't quite agree with everything you said, but I'm willing to overlook everything because of your correct use of the word fecundity. 10/10, would reply again.

It's been a while since a comment on Slashdot made me happy. Thank you, sir.

Also, thank you for being a teacher. People say "thank you for your service" to military men when I'd rather say "fuck you for participating in the violent colonial exploitation of militarily weaker nations".

Thank you for your service.

I have kids too. I'm not going to pretend that I have all the answers. But parents have lost the ability to properly impart etiquette to their kids, in many cases because they have none themselves. So kids' behaviour in public has gotten worse. Simultaneously, adults have become spoiled brats unwilling to tolerate even the slightest discomfort, which is why you have people whining about having to listen to crying babies on flights. For fuck's sake babies are the literal future of our species.

Kids' etiquette needs to be improved.
Adults need to grow up.

I've travelled around the world, and it's only the so-called advanced Western countries that have this problem. For example, I was in Vietnam recently and kids' public behaviour was practically alien compared to kids back in Australia where I live. When kids did cry or make a ruckus, nobody even looked up. It was just understood that that is what it meant to live in a society that had kids.

Alternatively we fix that problem at both ends: we raise kids to behave well in public, and we as a society understand that putting up with kids who are in the process of learning etiquette is the price we pay for not going extinct.

Interesting that you feel that those are the only two options. Modern American society provides neither of those. In any case, the rest of the world finds it hilarious that no matter how often and how many of you dumbasses are driven to bankruptcy over mundane medical incidents, you STILL don't see the value in having a few social services provided at the government level. Don't mind me. You keep shrieking some shit about communism because I have to go. I have a doctor's appointment, because getting a regular checkup here in Australia isn't something I have to save up six months ahead for.

No, they use it because they feel that living in a fair society is a good thing. Fucking scumbags.

Sorry, I didn't mean to twist your panties. I was merely pointing out (pedantically, I admit) that the rules of logic are not identical to the rules of statistics. LLMs (and arguably all current generations of AI models) are inherently statistical systems. This can be pretty easily demonstrated by the fact that all current LLMs can be coaxed into saying things that are illogical. As you point out you can "approximate" logic and arrive at logical conclusions with these systems, but you are not doing so using a logic engine. You are doing so using a stochastic system.

At the philosophical level, logic exists outside of our neurons. Its rules are (as far as we accept anything in reality) independent of human existence. So just because our neurons are also subject to the imperfections of stochastic systems does not mean that ALL stochastic systems are logical.

Point of order. LLMs are not applying logic to a data set. They are applying statistical probability models to a data set. Not quite the same thing.