cyd

joined 2 years ago
[–] cyd 13 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

The Turing Test codified the very real fact that computer AI systems up till a few years ago couldn't hold a conversation (outside of special conversational tricks like Eliza and Cleverbot). Deep neural networks and the attention mechanism changed the situation; it's not a completely solved problem, but the improvement is undeniably dramatic. It's now possible to treat chatbots as a rudimentary research assistant, for example.

It's just something we have to take in stride, like computers becoming capable of playing Chess or Go. There is no need to get hung up on the word "intelligence".

[–] cyd 7 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (7 children)

How long will an independent Greenland possibly last if the US intends to swallow it up? All it takes is for the American establishment to whip themselves into a bipartisan frenzy over "national security", then the population follows like sheep, then it's game over.

[–] cyd 7 points 1 month ago

Deepseek trained their v3 model for $6M. That's the AI equivalent of building it in a cave with a pile of scraps. There's no longer any reasonable way to stop China from developing frontier models.

[–] cyd 12 points 1 month ago

Must be humiliating for the Mexicans to be condescended to like this. Agree to a trade deal with the Americans, stick to the terms of the deal, but now the Americans still aren't happy. They also want to micromanage what companies can do business in your own country, with your own workers.

[–] cyd 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

The trouble with all these schemes is that it's totally contrary to poweful real world trends. The surface of the Earth has an overwhelming abundance of rural land that is incredibly hospitable to life. And these places are depopulating because people prefer living in cities. How are you gonna get people to move to the bottom of the sea, or Mars, if they don't even want to move to West Virginia?

[–] cyd 2 points 1 month ago

LLMs aren't capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection,

Eh, maybe, maybe not. 99% of the human-written stuff in IM chats, or posted to social media, is superficial fluff that a fine-tuned LLM should have no problem imitating. It's still relatively easy to recognize AI models outputs in their default settings, because of their characteristic earnest/helpful tone and writing style, but that's quite easily adjustable.

One example worth considering: people are already using fine tuned LLMs to copilot tabletop RPGs, with decent success. In that setting, you don't need fine literature, just a "good enough" quality of prose. And that is already far exceeding the average quality that you see in social media.

[–] cyd 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Fair enough. I think the "Taliban are moderating" narrative was also helped by the fact that the Taliban were being compared against fricking ISIS.

[–] cyd 8 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Not really analogous, I think? The Taliban are and continue to be wackos, and the US-supported government in between the Taliban regimes was always obviously made up of incompetent crooks and grifters.

[–] cyd 6 points 1 month ago

Fears about persistent deflation in China are relatively recent. It's come up now because of the live question of whether the government should engage in a big fiscal stimulus (the same debate the US went through in 2009).

[–] cyd 23 points 1 month ago (10 children)

Weirdly enough, the Islamist formerly-labelled-as-terrorist militant leader is making quite a lot of sensible moves and well thought out public statements. Maybe it's illogical, but I'm getting somewhat hopeful about Syria's future.

[–] cyd 21 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I mean, it's a fair question for a political leader to ask his economic advisors, no? Pretty sure Obama would have asked his advisors the same question back in 2009.

The issue, by the way, is a lot less settled than a lot of people think. Macroeconomics still seems to do a surprisingly bad job at understanding the links between inflation, interest rates, and economic activity, beyond giving some rough guidelines.

 

Archive link: https://archive.ph/Rug68

3
Reality Check on US Manufacturing Jobs (conversableeconomist.com)
submitted 1 year ago by cyd to c/[email protected]
7
Gambling on Development review (brettongoods.substack.com)
submitted 1 year ago by cyd to c/[email protected]
 

Economic development is dependent on the deal between elites of a country. In most poor countries, elites choose to extract resources from the economy because the policies that lead to development can endanger their political position.

When elites decide to have pro-growth policies, they’re taking a risk that it will work out and benefit them personally. Most elites do not want to take this risk, and would rather enjoy the spoils of corruption instead.

5
Hail Lord Tharman (www.channelnewsasia.com)
submitted 1 year ago by cyd to c/singapore
 

Presidential candidate Tharman Shanmugaratnam is in the lead with 70 per cent of the vote, according to a sample count published by the Elections Department at about 10.40pm on Friday (Sep 1).

 

In this preprint, the authors synthesize samples based on the claimed room temperature superconductor LK-99, and observe half-levitation similar to that seen in other recent videos, which has been ascribed to the Meissner Effect (a signature of superconductivity).

However, they performed a careful magnetization measurement and found that the sample is ferromagnetic. They also did a resistance measurement on a larger sample, and found that the majority of the material is a semiconductor. This points to a simpler explanation for the half-levitation phenomenon: it is a consequence of ferromagnetism (+ mechanical effects due to friction and sample shape), rather than the Meissner Effect.

Unless someone can demonstrate full levitation or better resistivity data for LK-99, this is arguably fatal for the claims of room temperature superconductivity.

 

In this preprint, the authors synthesize LK-99-like samples, and observe half-levitation similar to that seen in other recent videos. However, they perform a careful magnetization measurement and conclude that the sample is ferromagnetic. They also did a resistance measurement on a larger sample and found that the majority of the material is a semiconductor. This points to the half-levitation effect, which is mostly what got people excited, being a consequence of ferromagnetism (+ mechanical effects due to friction and sample shape), rather than the Meissner Effect.

Unless someone can demonstrate full levitation or better resistivity data for LK-99, this appears to be fatal for the claims of room temperature superconductivity.

 

This replication by Huazhong University includes PPMS data, showing a strong signal of a diamagnetism transition at around 320K. It does not include a resistance measurement, however.

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Current combat event (self.genshin_impact)
submitted 2 years ago by cyd to c/genshin_impact
 

Anyone else getting smoked by the current combat event (at dire difficulty)? My abyss A and B teams (which can get through floor 12) can't clear the last wave before the timer expires, and the event calls for dipping into the C team 😬

1
submitted 2 years ago by cyd to c/singapore
 

GIC reports 20 year real rate of return (its reporting metric) of 4.6%, compared to 4.2% a year ago. For comparison, Temasek posted a $7B annual loss a couple weeks ago 🤔🤔🤔

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