a great thing about LLMs, if there’s not already a literature that supports your position, there can be one pretty quickly!
in business and in France, ROI is king.
if the muzzling of US public health agencies is making you anxious, try a cool glass of raw milk to calm your nerves.
(nb: please don't!)
@GhostOnTheHalfShell i don't want to! i think there were proxy services? i'll try to , find get better at that, find out about those.
if you know anything about Einstein… i know the dead can't file defamation suits, but i feel an exception should be made. https://x.com/ElonClipsX/status/1882075236272595181
first DeepSeek, now a new set of models from ByteDance. hopes the US had a moat it could maintain around AI dominance seem dashed, despite the extraordinary scale (and ecological weight) of US investment and attempts to retain advantage in GPUs and advanced microchips. https://www.aibase.com/news/14931 1/
these Chinese models are much, much lighter and cheaper to run than US frontier models.
will we really need to invest half a trillion dollars in AI and build special power plants (maybe due to Jevon's paradox), or might we just enjoy greener, cheaper applications? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox /fin
when you are pandering to people they can see you are pandering to them. who you are, what you stand for, will not seem powerful, valuable, aspirational, “real” to them. because it is not to you.
live and profess your values like they matter to you and they might start to matter to someone else.
declare the (always right-wing) “vibe shift” and think about how we are going to accommodate ourselves to it might not, in fact, be the best way to do politics.
re #MattYglesias https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-vibes-they-are-a-shiftin
“we’re replacing your oncologist with someone fully aligned with the Trump movement.”
Do not open this thread in public.
i’m not flipping you off. it’s an etruscan salute.
we need strong leadership to keep us safe. https://flipboard.com/@cbsnews/politics-fcotvfd4z/-/a-W0vhZh1YRXKsXueEwzYhjg%3Aa%3A2476075171-%2F0
we are going to have to do better than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
the world’s status hierarchy is built on top of stock/token prices.
both AI and crypto present opportunities for fast run-ups of market capitalization for those with ambition or grievance to contest the higher echelons.
AI:
Great US champions do it with great fanfare, exorbitant finance, yielding either vapor or some bloated, uncompetitive thing.
China: Some firm you’ve never heard of, one of probably a zillion such firms, does it on a shoestring, it works well, costs a fraction of what anyone thought possible.
“if Trump wants your opinion, he’ll tell you what he wants it to be.” @pkrugman https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/voodoo-trade-policy-comes-to-america
Suppose Elon Musk’s, um, hand gestures, his support of AfD, and promotion of replacement theory have persuaded you he has some interest or fascination with the historical Nazi movement. 1/
Musk has been fascinated by the number 420, which (4/20) is Hitler’s birthday but also a marijuana signifier, for many years. https://observer.com/2024/04/elon-musk-number-420-tesla-twitter/ 2/
Is your inference he recently became Nazi-curious, and previously had fetishized 420 solely over marijuana, or that he had some interest in Nazism for a long time and enjoyed the ambiguity and plausible deniability that 420’s marijuana associations afforded? 3/
If the latter, is it plausible that the wealthiest and most influential figure in “tech” would have remained supportive of the Democratic Party and its racially, culturally, and sexually progressive values if only partisans had been less mean to tech? 4/
Or is it more plausible that any apparent progressivism was always feigned and as Musk’s wealth and power grew he would become emboldened to openly advocate for his views? 5/
We can’t know! In some counterfactual universe where the racially, socially, and culturally progressive party was also the low taxes on rich people and deferential to monopoly party, maybe Musk’s material interests would have overwhelmed his, um, “playful” fascinations. 6/
But in anything like the actual universe, I think the evidence suggests there was little hope the party both more economically and culturally progressive could have retained this person’s support if a more materially friendly, more racially “realist” party could champion his interests. /fin
@_dm it was unprofitable capex, but not wasted, it was ultimately used.
i’m not sure the same will be true of whatever too much money thrown at less efficient AI. they actually laid fiber. sometimes cash travels fruitlessly from one pocket to the next.
@_dm just when a chinese firm trained a model that performs near the current frontier, that was trained and runs much more cheaply. i’m sure this will be money well spent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeepSeek
if you were to observe the world through infrared goggles, would it be visibly more hazy now than 40 years ago?