That's kind of the point. This is a headline grabbing piece of bullshit for you to engage with as content. It is not the final word or even a serious word on the topic. It is meant to be a useful piece of information for somebody who might do more research on the topic that is all.

One of the major problems we have is that we don't have good science communication because everything depends on eyeballs and clicks so that you can get attention and put advertisements in front of people. So a study like this which is really just somebody collecting a bunch of data for somebody else who might be doing work in the field gets blown way out of proportion by the headlines

That's how scientists talk. You don't see news stories about well understood research because that's boring and it's not headline Worthy. You see news stories about early stage research that has some findings. Those kind of things get a lot of attention from your eyeballs and a lot of clicks and engagement which is what you want if you're running a website that depends on advertising which is most websites.

The issue here is that you haven't been taught these things. All the little tricks that go into making newspapers and magazines and whatnot. We really should teach journalism as a mandatory class with an emphasis on those nasty little tricks. But even if you take a journalism class in high school it's mostly going to be about ethics and process and not about the actual work that goes on or how to avoid being manipulated by propaganda.

I suspect if we put serious effort into preventing people from being fooled by propaganda the billionaires would step in and shut it down. Get toward also cause all sorts of problems with various fundamentalist religions. One of the big complaints among parents is they send their kids off to college and they come back atheists. Or at least diests

Microsoft has had dog shit software in the past. But it wasn't necessarily because of evil it was incompetence. There is some problems with Microsoft Office where the format is intentionally overly complex to make it difficult to reverse engineer and other bits of nastiness like that. But for the most part when an entire operating system from Microsoft sucks like Vista or 8 it's because Microsoft screwed the pooch by accident.

Typically Microsoft intentionally bloats their operating systems so that oems have something to sell new computers for. That's a long standing and not terribly secret thing and it's why every new iteration of windows gobbles is much RAM and GPU and CPU as they can. But that wasn't really a factor with Windows 11 or even Windows 10 because we had just gotten to the point where computers were fast enough.

With Windows 11 it's the spyware. It's grinding the computer to a halt so they can monitor what you're doing to train their AI bullshit to replace you at your job. It's also a fuck ton of nasty DRM and other associated nastiness so that corporations can spy on you and control your computer. This makes your computer increasingly unusable. That's a relatively new thing.

Adoption is a function of existing adoption and existing availability of resources.

Extremely good OS' and truly amazing computers have failed, not because they were too expensive or had issues, but because they were perceived to be unpopular OR simply lacked enough software that could run on them.

Extremely bad OS' and truly awful computers have succeeded for the opposite reason.

Linux has an extremely good architecture, at least for machines that are mostly operating with CPUs. When most of the work is done by the GPU, it's less obvious that Linux provides the necessary mechanisms to manage resources and abstract away the hardware specifics. That doesn't mean I expect Linux to start fading, but I don't think a centralised OS is necessarily where things will go. However, the reason it hasn't done better so far is simply because potential users and potential software houses had a negative view of it (even though actual users were almost invariably loving the system).

Windows is crashing now not because it is a slow, bug-ridden piece of spyware (which it is, but users have never cared about that in the past), but because it is perceived in increasingly negative light.

It's not narcissism, it's entirely rational: we are all working because of self interest, not because we care about the company.

They can get vertical samples from space and the ground. What they can't get from space or the ground is how the internals of a system evolve.

The problem with "models" in the abstract is that there are a lot of them and some of the time the thing you want is to know the same point relative to the system and not to the mudball.

Lots of people have gut feelings about AI, positive or negative.

Most of the AI research I can see people doing is focusing on single-element problems (such as finding counter-examples to a mathematics hypothesis) or solving very simple engineering systems (at most a dozen or so components). Most of the benchmarks are even simpler (write a short story at the level generally asked in English classes of primary school kids).

As a result, I think that people have developed either a very cynical outlook or a very optimistic look. Neither of these is entirely realistic, for the simple reason that no actual useful problem fits any of those descriptions.

Digging much deeper, I'm finding that when problems get into the hundreds or thousands of elements, even ChatGPT Sol 5.6 and Claude Fable 5 struggle badly to keep track of accurate relationships, let alone any level of detail.

If you want to solve a relatively simple coupled system (whether to use solar panels or direct solar heating, and which side of the house to place them), I'm sure AI is fine. If you want AI to write a five hundred word story detailing a conversation between Kim Possible, Rufus, and a smoked herring, I'm sure it could cope. Just.

If you want it to do anything hard enough that a human could do with an assistant, the tests I've been using (meaningful rather than synthetic problems) suggest you've developed a fantastically expensive blue smoke generator. We are going to need to see the inference engines developed for previous generations of AI, and the reasoners developed for the semantic web, and perhaps tools that haven't begun to be imagined yet, before AI can do anything non-trivial.

And you learned economics from a handful of right wing propaganda Mills.

You would have been better off going with Saturday morning cartoons. Scrooge McDuck had a lot of money but in the magic world of duckburg it never actually hurt the general population. In the real world Scrooge McDuck would have been more like his namesake causing massive social problems from his greed and lust for power and money

Or rather who that matters actually cares?

Return to office was about commercial real estate property values so that a couple of billionaires who are heavily invested in it didn't lose their investments. Every single credible study has shown that work from home improves productivity and is universally beneficial because it gets people off the roads so if you are somebody who genuinely has to go into the office you have less traffic and cleaner air.

Nobody is going to care whether employees are happy or not anymore. Not broadly. Automation has been devouring jobs since the late 70s and by all accounts the pace is going to accelerate. So employers don't need to be nice to you anymore.

I like the commandline. I even open my browser by typing the command in the commandline. Who needs buttons?

But I admit almost everything I do these days (when I'm not programming) is done in a browser window. The need for local software is almost gone.

Ok, so this headline is a bit misleading.

Why did they ever trust the official story? Lying has been standard in SV for a long time. Obviously longer, but I can't find older links. A lot CxOs lie for no reason, in a transparent way that kills morale. I'm starting to think they intentionally kill morale.

Pointing out someone's logical fallacy is not ad hominem.

You are not trying to understand the situation, you are trying to show that what OpenAI did is correct. But there's no way to do that: they broke the law.

Maybe YOU would, but most people can't even be bothered to set their optimization flags correctly.

Insightful distillation.