That's ironic, because Google has apparently decided it doesn't want to be a search engine anymore.

Wave function collapse implies that the wave collapses to an actual state at the point where the photon hits the screen after going through the slits. But what if it didn't collapse? What if the wave just starts interfering with the wave of the screen itself (combining into a single, far more complex wave)? And then that wave, which includes the wave function of the photon being absorbed and re-emitted continues propagating until it interacts with the wave of our detection apparatus (or our eyes)? What I'm describing is generally called quantum decoherence. Can't this explain the effect of an observer without any magic? The only downside is that the wave function now includes the results of what would happen in all the different possible locations where the photon interacted with the screen, which is just the many worlds interpretation, which is admittedly very wasteful, but is also a valid explanation. (Not my idea... I heard this from Sean Carroll.) The question then becomes, why do we seem to only experience one projection of this wave function (the projection of our universe)?

The thing is, our observations agree with quantum mechanics to as many decimal places as we can measure, and we can measure to a lot of decimal places now. So there's a lot of evidence that the wave function describes the behavior of reality. And since reality really seems to behave this way, we're left to ask interesting philosophical questions, like whether there really is no free will, or if reality is non-local. These are fascinating and important questions.

It's not even doing that. It's more like... if you studied hundreds of thousands of Chinese books and meticulously worked out the probabilities of certain characters following other characters, and used that knowledge to repeatedly choose the next character in an ongoing "conversation" with someone who knew Chinese. That person might actually think you knew Chinese, but you really don't.

I've been trying to use AI for coding, and I've been following a bunch of people who blog about AI coding or make youtube videos about it. The consensus is that it doesn't actually help you very much, and in some cases it actually slows you down. Most of what we're hearing about it in the news is hype, and the media is complicit in it. Think about it... if you owned a newspaper wouldn't you like your journalists to think they were on the verge of being replaced by a toaster? It makes salary negotiations so much simpler.

Being a middle manager is an interesting exercise in strategy. You spend most of your time trying to position yourself close to projects that might potentially succeed... close enough to take some credit when they're successful. But you also need to keep yourself far enough removed from each project that you can claim you had almost nothing to do with it if it crashes and burns. It's a lot of work, honestly.

Except that people don't review the AI generated text they're sending out. Lawyers are getting in trouble for submitting hallucinated precedents to judges. The US health department got busted for releasing a report that cited papers that don't exist. Journalists have published AI-generated articles of top 10 books containing books that the cited authors never wrote, or that don't exist at all. My wife is a psychologist. The industry is switching to a technology that takes recorded audio of a session, uses speech to text on it, and then uses an LLM to summarize the session into notes, and then it deletes the recorded conversation for patient confidentiality reasons. The psychologist is responsible for reviewing the summary for accuracy, but we all know there are many who won't do it out of laziness or naivety. That means the summaries of sessions are going to be saved with inaccurate information. LLMs are thus rewriting history. This is very dangerous, and it's going to take several years before regulators are going to react to all this nonsense.

The number one use case is to write high school essays and otherwise cheat on homework.

If I search in google for "job description for a sql developer -ai" then the top result is this. That's information that's curated by an actual human being who knows what the job entails. And I got there really fast. Why would I want to take the extra time to get an LLM to generate the content for me when I know that it's likely to hallucinate the wrong information? Seriously, LLMs are for people who are too stupid to use a search engine effectively, which I am sorry to learn is a lot of people.

This summary seems to assume that AI adoption is a good thing. There's ample evidence that claims of productivity increases are overblown and mostly hype. And the energy consumption that AI systems use is really, really high. Maybe lower adoption rates is a good thing? I learned recently that you can put "-ai" at the end of your Google query and it stops it from including AI summaries in your search results. The bonus? It's much faster.

Shut up Eloi /s

First you need to learn enough to understand if what the AI generated is correct or not. Which means you still need to know everything we learned.

I can't speak for Siberia, other than the fact that it's not great farmland and it's cold. However, the main problem with Canadian land north of the Great Lakes is that it's mostly Canadian Shield. This is a geological feature where the bedrock is exposed. There's not much soil to speak of, and you can't really excavate for foundations, etc. It's very expensive to build on, and food mostly has to be trucked in from elsewhere. It's still worth building there if you have a mine nearby, but most people settle where there's food and waterways for transportation. Climate change might warm up the Canadian north a bit and lengthen the growing season, but it's not going to suddenly create topsoil.

I think the novel "Termination Shock" is a more accurate portrayal of what's going to happen. Countries and organizations that have something to lose from sea level rise will fund geoengineering efforts to keep the arctic and antarctic from melting, and they will need to either do it secretly, or have a large enough military force to defend whatever it is they're doing. I can't see an agreement to reduce fossil fuel use... not in this political *ahem* climate anyway.

The ocean level varies during the seasons, and even throughout the day. So when the average sea level rises 4 inches, what matters more is the extreme weather events. How high does it get in the worst case, and how often? A good example if the number of days that Venice shops are flooded per year. It's now up to 100 times per year, and it was a lot less in the past.