Yup. And TBH the shares haven't declined that much. $600b sounds like a lot of money, but Apple is trading at $200 ATM and peaked out at something like $230 or $240 when the market was hot before people realized Trump wasn't just talking shit about ruining the economy, but was actually going to do it. The fact that Meta is spending stupid money on AI at the moment ought to be frightening Meta shareholders, not Apple shareholders.

#clickbait

If some government is spending $20 million to investigate this, that seems like an insane misuse of taxpayer money.

BTW, the ascii glorp above is a unicode em-dash, proving that I am an LLM and hence not a disinterested party to the discussion. :)

At least that's what I heard skeeted on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/danbi...

And of course this is no surpriseâ"an inconclusive study that can be used to justify a controversial headline is gold in the infotainment biz.

How would an LLM accurately determine which cases were "easy"? They don't reason, you know. What they do is useful and interesting, but it's essentially channeling: what is in its giant language model is the raw material, and the prompt is what starts the channeling. Because its dataset is so large, the channeling can be remarkably accurate, as long as the answer is already in some sense known and represented in the dataset.

But if it's not, then the answer is just going to be wrong. And even if it is, whether the answer comes out as something useful is chancy, because what it's doing is not synthesis—it's prediction based on a dataset. This can look a lot like synthesis, but it's really not.

I was hoping for football fields, but no luck. :(

Queen's English is "has got." "Has gotten" is U.S. English. Presumably author is from the UK.

There's actually a solid history to show that being a late adopter isn't always a bad thing. There's clearly some value in LLMs, but at this point most of what we are hearing is speculative hype intended to kite stock prices. Basically a ponzi scheme.

I'm sure that some value will drop out of this in the end. I am not at all sure what it will look like, except, probably not much like what the hucksters are promoting.

When things are clearer, it will make sense to invest. Right now, it's probably best to let other people burn cash. Particularly since one of the things they're doing is completely destroying copyright law, so when they're done, we can just copy whatever they did with impunity.

The obvious question that comes up for me in this survey is, did they correct for the possibility that men actually have it better than women, and that's why men grew more? E.g., did they check heights of women in countries where women's rights are better? I'm not saying the result is wrong, but I didn't see any reporting that answers this question, and it was the obvious question that occurred to me. E.g. in some countries included in the survey, women take a huge caregiving burden on average compared to men because the social safety net is so compromised. How does that affect their ability to thrive? This is not discussed.

Note, for example, the following weasel words from the study:

The reasons for the different cross-country and within-country effects are not yet clear but might be explained by greater noise in the across-country data due to variation between nations and will require follow-up studies.

In other words, they do see variation in different countries, and they have not analyzed it to see if it contradicts their hypothesis. Doesn't mean their hypothesis is wrong, but it's sloppy work. And of course the Guardian article is clickbait, as is the title of the study. Sigh. So I would take this result very much with a grain of salt.

Not that it really matters that much, of course... :)

I don't think he's acting, if that's what you mean. Of course a lot of what's on the surface is guided by deeper impulses, as it is with anyone, but that doesn't mean that what's on the surface is fake. How real is my geek-ness? I need it to survive, or at least I believe I do. Doesn't that make it a bit fake in the sense that you mean?

It feels like both Musk and Altman share the problem that nobody is (can?) call them on their bullshit in a way that they will actually pay attention to. And so it gets extreme. And of course because they have so much money and influence it causes a lot of harm. But I still think Musk has a better chance of actually accomplishing what he's talking about than Altman. It would still IMO be suicidal to go on one of his Mars trips, but there might be such a trip at some point. Altman's AGI seems a lot less possible.

I feel like Musk is still legitimately a geek who's read too much science fiction and wants to live it, so he's pretty motivated to go to Mars, and I think it's physically possible to do it. Of course, it'd be sort of like when a dog catches a car. Whereas we don't even know how to do AGI. It's not even on a basic level a physics problem. Lots of people smarter than Sam Altman have been trying to do it for years. What's changed is that we now have "AI" systems so complex that we can't mentally model their behavior, and so it's much easier to make wild claims about what they are doing under the covers.

All right-thinking persons know that pineapples on pizza are the bomb. It's about time someone settled this.

That's okay, hardly anyone reads Slashdot, so the load isn't significant. :)

Cry me a river. I've never enabled this. The way email works, it's dead easy to associate the message you sent with the image your mail application downloaded, and there really is no way to prevent this. The idea that blocking tracking pixels is saving you is naive. Every commercial email message you get with images in it has trackers in the URL string to see who got the mail. Tracking pixels are just a way of doing that without showing you an actual image. If you don't want to be tracked, disable image downloads.

Bandanas are fairly useless because the weave is so loose. Masks aren't virtue signaling—they prevent your outbreath from carrying droplets. You are signaling virtue in the sense that people can see that you are protecting them, and this will tend to make them think you aren't a complete asshole, which is always good. But you're signaling virtue because your action is virtuous—wearing a mask is not performative virtue signaling.

The mask doesn't really protect you much at all, although it's better than nothing. But if everyone wears masks, then we are all protected. So please, keep up the good work, and don't second-guess yourself.

I would not count on sunlight as a solution unless they're on the dash for a good long time.