My naming convention for C++ is that custom types are capitalized and instances aren’t. So I might write User user;.

So far “more data” has been the solution to most problems, but I don’t think we’re close to the limit of how much useful information can be learned from the data even if we’re close to the limit of how much data is available. Look at the AIs that can’t draw hands. There are already many pictures of hands from every angle in their training data. Maybe just having ten times as many pictures of hands would solve the problem, but I’m confident that if that was not possible then doing more with the existing pictures would also work.* Algorithm design just needs some time to catch up.

*I know that the data that is running out is text data. This is just an analogy.

What occasions are you referring to? I know people claim that Israeli use of white phosphorous munitions is illegal, but the law is actually quite specific about what an incendiary weapon is. Incendiary effects caused by weapons that were not designed with the specific purpose of causing incendiary effects are not prohibited. (As far as I can tell, even the deliberate use of such weapons in order to cause incendiary effects is allowed.) This is extremely permissive, because no reasonable country would actually agree not to use a weapon that it considered effective. Something like the firebombing of Dresden is banned, but little else.

Incendiary weapons do not include:

(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

(ii) Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.

The issue I have with referring to the current situation as a bubble is that this isn’t just hype. The technology really is amazing, and far better than what people had been expecting. I do think that most current attempts to commercialize it are premature, but there’s such a big first-mover advantage that it makes sense to keep losing money on attempts that are too early in order to succeed as soon as it is possible to do so.

Multiple studies are showing that training on data contaminated with LLM output makes LLMs worse, but there’s no inherent reason why LLMs must be trained on this data. As you say, people are aware of it and they’re going to be avoiding it. At the very least, they will compare the newly trained LLM to their best existing one and if the new one is worse, they won’t switch over. The era of being able to download the entire internet (so to speak) is over but this means that AI will be getting better more slowly, not that it will be getting worse.

I don’t disagree, but before the recent breakthroughs I would have said that AI is like fusion power in the sense that it has been 50 years away for 50 years. If the current approach doesn’t get us there, who knows how long it will take to discover one that does?

It would be odd if AI somehow got worse. I mean, wouldn’t they just revert to a backup?

Anyway, I think (1) is extremely unlikely but I would add (3) the existing algorithms are fundamentally insufficient for AGI no matter how much they’re scaled up. A breakthrough is necessary which may not happen for a long time.

I think (3) is true but I also thought that the existing algorithms were fundamentally insufficient for getting to where we are now, and I was wrong. It turns out that they did just need to be scaled up…

The important thing here isn’t that the AI is worse than humans. It’s than the AI is worth comparing to humans. Humans stay the same while software can quickly improve by orders of magnitude.

This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:

1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.

2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.

4. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.

Ok but then who exactly is the World Bank propagandizing to on Twitter?

Why was the World Bank advertising on Twitter (or anywhere) in the first place?

Note that the retraction happened in 2015. I had heard of the original study but not the retraction. (I expect that I would have heard of neither the study nor the retraction if the study wasn’t about a politically charged topic).

People who left the study were actually miscoded as getting divorced.

At least it was a stupid mistake rather than poor study design.

What we find in the corrected analysis is we still see evidence that when wives become sick marriages are at an elevated risk of divorce … in a very specific case, which is in the onset of heart problems. So basically its a more nuanced finding. The finding is not quite as strong.

This on the other hand… I haven’t read the corrected study but I suspect this does not account for the fact that four different classes of illness were looked at, both because that’s a common mistake and because it makes no sense to me that men would divorce women with heart disease but not with cancer, stroke, or lung disease.

(The probability that at least one study out of four would have significance > 95% simply by chance is 1 - 0.95^4 = 0.18549375.)

Edit: Now I’m scared that I didn’t do the math correctly. That tends to happen when I try to be pedantic. Also there were eight categories, not four. (They also looked at women divorcing men.)

WD, Seagate

Has Seagate improved? After having multiple Seagate drives fail, I did some research on failure rates and Seagate was way worse than every other brand. Since then I have only been buying enterprise-grade WD drives. However, I did my research almost ten years ago and a lot could have changed since then.

Maybe Meta doesn’t want to get the Google treatment.

I think the more like explanation is that being able to filter out AI-generated text gives them an advantage over their competitors at obtaining more training data.

Netscape Navigator is spelled “Firefox”.

I think IBM was different because its lunch was eaten almost entirely by other American companies (chiefly Microsoft). That probably wouldn’t be the case if Intel were allowed to declined in a similar manner.

I think they’ll recover. Letting them fail would be a national security problem.

Bring back Internet Explorer.

Oh, I just assumed he had bluish ejaculate.