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Comment Re:Rent-seeking (Score 5, Informative) 371

That design assumed a dispersed network. The networks have gotten increasingly concentrated. If there's only one connection, you can't route around it.

OTOH, SpaceX might reap large increases in business, because they would be the only route that wasn't broken. (I don't think Iran has orbital capability.)

Comment Re:Everyone knows these are bad news right? (Score 1) 58

You're assuming that everyone is one extreme or the other. And not only is this wrong, there aren't only two sides, no matter what the news says.

OTOH, Flock *seems* to be an example of the "benefits of the surveillance state". I.e., we only hear about the generally approved of uses. If you were to believe that those were the only uses, I'd think you a simpleton. And it's impossible for me to make a decision that they're a good thing without knowing what those other uses are.

Comment Re:Training data (Score 2) 109

Your post was quite reasonable, and probably true, until you wrote "AIs aren't capable of reasoning". There *are* definitions of reasoning for which that it true, but they aren't the ones in common use. Cicero would use that kind of definition in his "school of rhetoric", where he taught people how to win arguments". Socrates would not. He was trying to find truth.

Clearly AIs have limited reason. They can (at least in principle) do perfect logic, but the difference between that an reason is not well defined. (And logic can prove that you can't prove algebra to be self-consistent.) To me reason is evaluating a set of data and a goal, and using logic to plot a nearly-optimal path to achieve the goal. I think where AIs are generally most deficient is in their goals, though obviously they also have an imperfect understanding of the current state. (Well, so do people.)

That said, there are many areas where current AIs seem deficient when compared with people. This doesn't mean or imply that they don't have a modest amount of the features that they are deficient in, but merely that we expect them to have more. Think of capabilities as being gradients rather than boolean variables. This is commonly called "jagged capabilities". They're better at some things than most people are, and worse at other things than most people are.

Comment Re:Synthetic (Score 1) 109

How do you know?
I will grant that there are definitions of "feelings" that would make your statement true by definition, but I will guarantee that most people don't use those definitions.

If you want to claim "it's synthetic, therefore it can't be a feeling", you've deprived your mind of a tool for thinking in this space. Submarines don't swim, but airplanes fly. Perhaps it's not useful to think of submarines as swimming, and perhaps it's useful to think of airplanes as flying. And perhaps it's useful to think of LLMs as having feelings. (Also perhaps it isn't, but just asserting that isn't useful, you need to demonstate it. My wife found it useful to attribute feelings to her car. The model didn't work for me, but it worked for her.)

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 65

A quick search didn't provide an answer, but the indications were that the cosmic voids are much of the universe. The search of turned up things like https://link.springer.com/arti... , but didn't actually reveal the proportion of the volume of the universe that is contained within cosmic voids, but did *indicate* that it sure wasn't trivial.

Comment Re:Good (Score 5, Interesting) 65

That the universe is not uniform at the large scale is blatantly obvious. Just consider the cosmic voids. And that implies that "time" should be running faster within those voids (because general relativity).

This isn't generally dealt with by global theories because it's computationally intractable...but it's inherent in relativity. So unless you want to break relativity, areas with low mass have time running slower than areas with high mass. And the cosmic voids are HUGE.

OTOH, This is a different argument as to why the universe isn't globally uniform at the large scale. But it reaches the same conclusion (to that question).

Comment It's all about definitions. (Score 5, Insightful) 177

Seems like this all boils down down definitions. What does a grade mean?

If a grade means understanding the material, there's no reason every student couldn't get an A. Sure, many won't, but when we're talking about Harvard students, especially at lower-level courses, the barriers to get into the school are so high that it makes sense most students would be able to master the material.

If grades are relative to other students, even if every student understands the material perfectly there's still going to be the curve, some A's, B's, C's, and some must fail.

Comment Re:Self-selection (Score 2) 81

Turning the link purple to go to the report, then following that link to the actual study, you can look at those concerns.

Oddly enough, the post-doc researchers at University College London doing research in behavioral science and psychiatry, published through Oxford University, do indeed answer the questions.

The paper shows is something they noticed and want to investigate further, presented as "the first evidence" not a final conclusion. They started from the UK Household Longitudinal Study data, data going back to 1991 and publicly available to any registered researcher, and cross checked against a few others with related sampling information. They looked at ages from 16 to 90, marital status, children, education level, employment status, household income, area deprivation index (living in poor areas to rich areas) and reported disabilities.

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