It’s possible that a nuclear response would have prevented the ground warfare that dragged on in the war on terror. Possible, in the way that it’s possible that a meteor will land on my head tonight.
One of the reasons the wars in the Middle East dragged on for so long is that for every terrorist we took out in an attack, multiple more civilians were killed. And every dead civilian potentially creates another person with nothing to lose to turn to terrorism.
Nuclear weapons are even more indiscriminate, and they have the additional problem of risking alienating basically all of our allies. Plus it drastically changes the nuclear calculus for near peer enemies.
If we’re willing to launch a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear nation with no ability to threaten us militarily, then why wouldn’t we launch against Russia, China, etc the second we see an opportunity to take them out? That’s what they’d be thinking, anyway, and so their motivation for launching a first strike against us if the opportunity arises goes up dramatically.
There’s a reason Russia has only talked about nukes in their invasion of Ukraine. They know that actually pulling the nuclear trigger is crossing a line that sets them on a dangerous and irreversible course.
I went from an 11 pro max to a 13 mini last year because I was sick of having a brick in my pocket, and I feared that the 13 mini would be the last small non-budget phone. Hopefully Apple will go back to making small phones, but in the meantime, I will be hanging on to my 13 mini for as long as I can.
This is why I don’t accept that any crypto is currently acting as a functional currency. Who is out there actually pricing things in bitcoin? You’d have to be a fool since you would have little to no control of whether or not you could possibly make a profit.
Honestly, it makes sense for any business off of a highway that sells things to provide fast chargers. They still take several minutes at a minimum to charge, so you have a captive and probably bored customer. Seems like a gas station, restaurant, whatever would quickly make back the money spent on charging infrastructure in increased sales from people who’d rather shop or eat than sit in their car for a half hour.
If you’re good at building hype and have some connections, you can attract all sorts of investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing.
Dan Olsen’s NFT video from a year ago summed it up well, I think (link). People with money to invest today want to repeat the insane growth in wealth brought about by computers, the internet, social media, etc. So they will basically gamble on any new ideas that have an air of plausibility to kick off the next boom.
“Looks right” in a human context means the one that matches a person’s actual experience and intuition. “Looks right” in an LLM context means the series of words have been seen together often in the training data (as I understand it, anyway - I am not an expert).
Doctors are most certainly not choosing treatment based on what words they’ve seen together.
She’s Ms. Extra because she’s resisting bullying by an incompetent employer?
It’s not wholly unreasonable for a business to have some kind of appearance standard for front-of-house employees. But it is unreasonable to hire people for those positions literally sight unseen, and it’s a stupidly written policy if pink hair violates it while ridiculous wigs do not.
Besides, it’s 2023. Brightly colored hair is hardly an outrageous and rare sight to see. No one is going to stop frequenting a business because they were greeted by someone with pink hair.
The way my brain rationalizes it (inverted y, normal x) is that the closest analog to my hand on a mouse is my hand on top of my character’s head.
To make that head look up I pull my hand back, which is the same exact motion as pulling the mouse back. So it feels natural.
To make the head look left, I would rotate my hand counterclockwise. Rotating a mouse doesn’t do anything, so I have to translate that to lateral motion, and left to look left feels more natural.
Of course the real explanation is that the first mouselook games I played defaulted to inverted y and normal x, so that’s what I got used to. And even before mouselook became a thing, I was playing flight sims, which default to inverted y. Still, it’s fun to try to rationalize something that ultimately boils down muscle memory.
See any advancements in automation from farming to manufacturing.
See, this is the kind of thing that makes my bullshit detectors go off. The comparison elevates this new tech to the same level of importance as past revolutionary shifts in industry. But this only seems justified if you can assume the rapid advancements in LLMs will continue at the same rate going forward, which not a given at all. Fundamentally, these models are trained to produce convincing output, not accurate output. There is no guarantee that high accuracy will be achieved with this approach.
For programming, I don’t see these LLMs any differently than previous advancements in tooling and in high level programming languages and frameworks. They will make it easier to rapidly prototype and deploy (shoddy) apps, but they will not be replacing devs who work at a low level high performance, or critical areas, nor will they be drastically reducing the workforce needed - at least not any more than other tooling advancements.
I don’t know. The speed that these things blew up in becoming The Next Big Thing™️ kind of sets off my bullshit detectors.
I’m certainly not an expert in machine learning topics, but I suspect that the output of LLMs will never be able to output complex code that doesn’t require a lot of modification and verification.
Honestly, there should be laws against full self driving modes unless they can be proven to be good enough to not require driver intervention at all, and the manufacturer can be legally considered as the driver in case of an incident.
Requiring a driver to be alert and attentive to the road while not doing anything to operate the car runs contrary to human psychology. People cannot be expected to maintain focus on the road for extended periods while the car drives itself.
I don’t know exactly where the line should be drawn between basic cruise control and full self driving, but either the driver should be kept actively involved in driving or the car manufacturer should be held liable for whatever the car does.
In hindsight, that’s about the least surprising thing for me. The smart contract system (like everything around cryptocurrency) was not designed and implemented by legal or financial experts. It was designed by tech bros who think they’re smarter than everyone else because they’re competent at programming and/or math.
That’s the generous interpretation, anyway. The less generous interpretation is that the people who designed the system knew it was all bullshit and just wanted to scam people to make a quick buck.
You’re just not thinking like a narcissistic billionaire.
You see, the financial system didn’t make him a billionaire. His innate genius and talent did. All the system has done is prevent him from truly achieving greatness, with its laws and regulations.
But post-apocalypse? All that is swept away. He can be more than a mere billionaire. He can make the world the way it should be, directly, without the slow, imperfect process of buying politicians and funding think tanks.
And, of course, he will be one of the ones to rise to the top. He’s a billionaire. The cream of the crop. He didn’t just luck into his wealth through family or gambling investing. His inherent greatness placed him at the top, and it will obviously do it again when society collapses.
Account passwords have never had the purpose of protecting data from physical access - on Linux or any other operating system that I’m aware of. Physical access means an attacker can pull your drive and plug it into their computer, and no operating system can do anything to block access in that scenario, because the os on disk is not running.
You need disk encryption to protect your data. The trade off is that if you forget the encryption password, your data is unrecoverable by you. But that’s what password managers are for (or just writing it down and putting it in a safe).
Depending on what games you played, mac was a decent alternative for gaming. Blizzard treated mac as a first class platform for many years, indie games using multi platform engines often targeted it, and porting studios like aspyr would bring over a few big titles here and there.
Linux was in a similar boat before proton really opened things up, but with even less support than mac from game devs.
It’s possible that a nuclear response would have prevented the ground warfare that dragged on in the war on terror. Possible, in the way that it’s possible that a meteor will land on my head tonight.
One of the reasons the wars in the Middle East dragged on for so long is that for every terrorist we took out in an attack, multiple more civilians were killed. And every dead civilian potentially creates another person with nothing to lose to turn to terrorism.
Nuclear weapons are even more indiscriminate, and they have the additional problem of risking alienating basically all of our allies. Plus it drastically changes the nuclear calculus for near peer enemies.
If we’re willing to launch a nuclear first strike against a non-nuclear nation with no ability to threaten us militarily, then why wouldn’t we launch against Russia, China, etc the second we see an opportunity to take them out? That’s what they’d be thinking, anyway, and so their motivation for launching a first strike against us if the opportunity arises goes up dramatically.
There’s a reason Russia has only talked about nukes in their invasion of Ukraine. They know that actually pulling the nuclear trigger is crossing a line that sets them on a dangerous and irreversible course.