In a movie, I'd definitely involve Ötzi as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96tzi). Ötzi was found like 30 km from the impact site. And could have been a contemporary.
E.g., he cursed the guy who shot him and whose village is struck by a meteor in the end.
The plot thickens: a commenter here posted this link, which indicates Ötzi might have been roped in to this story in quite an imaginative way:
"Despite this new evidence, curiously in 2008 the impact hypothesis was revived by some pseudoscientists in connection to supposed observations of a meteorite by the Sumerians or to explain the death of the Iceman as a human sacrifice to prevent a nuclear winter after the impact."
Ötzi and his killers might have been up there looking for the impact site, there might have been a mad rush to find the impact, they might have seen it as some sort of holy item worth killing for.
There was after all a sun cult in Europe at this time.
And we have recovered an iron dagger made from a meteorite in the 14th century BCE. So this phenomenon of tracking a meteorite impact site and finding it might go much further back in human history.
Hrm. Maybe. Though I have to wonder from how far afar, considering the energy of this thing. Be it scorched by its heat, blinded by its light, or ruptured lungs from the sonic boom it must have made over a long and wide track, leaving not that many survivors in that track. Try to find a 'best of' of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor from 2013 on YT, or elsewhere, and watch what that little thing did.
Some witnesses are speaking of the heat they felt on their faces.
Now compare the size of that thing which is assumed to be schoolbus-like at the most, with what's assumed for the 'Köfels impact'. I think it was about one kilometer.
I don't understand: if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor? Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?
I don't think people are afraid of doctors using imperfect tools. That is the easier part. But that will not solve the problem of too many patients for a single doctor and what leads to the lack of empathy. This was a problem even before AI. It seems society does not have empathy for these kind of "professional problems". Offering tools instead of humans is an even riskier approach, not for that particular individual, but for how society tends to build trust and empathy.
We tend to see everything now as a problem with a technical solution because we only have confidence in solving technical problems.
Shortages of doctors have many causes that differ based on the country. While paying them more may help in some countries you also have to figure out how to convince doctors to live in smaller towns and cities and in less desirable provinces/states within a country. The source of the problem is that doctors are people and people have their own preferences and motivations for doing the things they do. Trying to convince even a handful of above average competency doctors to live in a remote region with bad weather and few amenities for more than a few years will be extremely difficult even if you offer them large sums of money (which aren't generally available anyways) because they have to weigh their own health and happiness in the balance when deciding where to live and practice.
I don't see how this is possible with the use of the state or not. I mean, I can throw out some ridiculous sci-fi ideas like geo-engineering and megaprojects that give every region the perfect balance of temperate seasons, agricultural productivity and variety, access to functional and esthetically pleasing waterways and pastoral landscapes that would make them all equally attractive places for people to live but that's just the definition of a utopia that will never exist.
You're also just copping out by saying "the state should handle it", who and what do you think the state is? It may come as a surprise that it's just a bunch of people who are just as imperfect and limited in their abilities as the rest. They can't simply wave their hands and make everyone happy. It make about as much sense as saying "Microsoft should handle it" or "the Catholic Church should handle it".
There are lots of places that are "desirable" to a large-enough-to-be-relevant portion of the population, but not as large a portion as the portion of the population that wants to be doctors. And they may like living there for reasons that someone who is drawn to a career in medicine might be unlikely to share.
>Is it impossible for highly advanced societies like ours to pay more for people to get trained as doctors, nurses or whatever is missing? Or to convince them to choose a profession that deals with other humans instead of UBI?
This is the point where it becomes important to distinguish two senses of "advanced", i.e. advanced in technological sense on the one hand and advanced in social/societal and especially large-group-long-time-horizon coordination terms on the other. In the former we are quite advanced, in the latter quite primitive and regressing by the day, it feels like. (But sorry to end on a doomer note, take it with a grain of salt.)
> if there is a shortage of doctors, why are we trying to solve that by training AI models modelled on influencers that spits out (hopefully improving) advice at 10x the rate of a human doctor?
The crucial part is the training. AI may very well be the solution for underserved communities, but not if it is trained on internet rubbish. Train an AI on curated state-of-the-art, scientific data, imagine the expert systems of yore on overdrive, and you will see much better results, including knowing when to call in a human doctor.
Making new doctors takes decades, lots of policy changes with uncertain outcomes, and demographic shifts nobody controls.
Using ChatGPT takes... nothing, it's already here.
Not too surprising to see one and not the other.
Also, the kinds of changes that result in more doctors don't tend to get media coverage. That's that boring, keep the lights on, politics that modern rage-bait driven media abhors, so it may even still be true that the changes we need for more doctors are also already happening. We'll find out in another decade or two.
I remember as a kid being ill, you just called the doctor and they came to your house the same day, and you could just go to the doctor's practice hours without an appointment and sit their waiting your turn.
Now, I have to book an appointment online and the first available slot is in 2 weeks if lucky.
Who is “we” here? Your healthcare needs are fulfilled by corporations, they are by design looking for scalable solutions with less human involved as possible.
Losing brand control (IP) and lack of control over your sales channels is a big problem for traders who want to comply with dozens of regulations, exclusions and restrictions required by manufacturers, other sellers, trademark owners etc. The article also mentions means tax and customs compliance problems, but this also affects other trade law related issues, like competition law problems (antitrust). It is surprisingly easy to breach these even for tiny sellers. You don't want exposure to these kinds of sales. It is never just selling, it is always also complying with lots of new laws, And rest assured, Amazon bots will not work that out for you.
And now, these guys have to scrutinize the email orders as for their source because all the compliance process they have built in their webshops or wherever they advertised, will simply be bypassed by Amazon bots.
Terrible idea.
It's not about invalidating your conclusion, but I'm not so sure about law having a right answer. At a very basic level, like hypothetical conduct used in basic legal training matrerials or MCQs, or in criminal/civil code based situations in well-abstracting Roman law-based jurisdictions, definitely.
But the actual work, at least for most lawyers is to build on many layers of such abstractions to support your/client's viwepoint.
And that level is already about persuasion of other people, not having the "right" legal argument or applying the most correct case found. And this part is not documented well, approaches changes a lot, even if law remains the same.
Think of family law or law of succession - does not change much over centuries but every day, worldwide, millions of people spend huge amounts of money and energy on finding novel ways to turn those same paragraphs to their advantage and put their "loved" ones and relatives in a worse position.
Zucman taxes rich individuals (100m€+), not Mistral. AI Act rules are not that difficult to comply with by GPAI model providers as long as the model doesn't become systemic risk... They have to spend a lot more time on PR and handshaking with French politicians than on AI compliance. They probably don't even have a single FTE for that... So that's just prejudice I believe.
Socrates said no such thing, no writing of Socrates has survived. He was just a character is Plato's book, Phaedrus.
Please do find the original paragraphs before accusing Socrates of this. https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/plato/dialogues/benjamin-j...
Of course, you can read and interpret that same book a thousand different ways, like he was talking about knowledge not being the same as writing things down, or whatever you want. But we don't even pretend to read the things we talk about. We just repeat nice narratives we have supposedly read somewhere else, digested by someone else, somehow.
Digital Spaceport is a really good channel, I second that - the author is not sparing any detail.
The cheaper options always use CPU only, or sharding between different cheap GPUs (without SLI/switching) - which is not good for all use cases (he also highlights this).
But some his prices are one-off bargains for used stuff. And RAM prices doubled this year, so you won't buy 2x256 GB DDR4 for $336, no matter what: https://digitalspaceport.com/500-deepseek-r1-671b-local-ai-s...
Yes, there seems to be lots of mistakes and no easy way to mark it. Highly endangered: Malayalam (=35 million speakers), Hungarian (14 million), Uighur (11 million), or Swedish as endangered... These are quite obvious mistakes even for a layperson.
I agree that this is a very exciting and really crucial research and I'm glad there is funding for this.
But it's very strange that Hungarian is marked as "highly endangered" at https://aidemos.atmeta.com/omnilingualasr/language-globe
Highly endangered is supposed to mean "The language is used by grandparents and older generations; while the parent generation may still understand the language, they typically do not speak it to children or among themselves."
Then why is Hungarian marked as such? Obviously not true with 14 million active speakers and being the 20th in terms of the most language resources published on the Internet.
Additionally, the feedback mechanism seems also broken ("There was an error submitting your feedback. Please try again.")
The Ethnologue link in footnote 7 of the paper has utm_source=chatgpt.com at the end, so I suspect whoever was tasked with listing languages and determining their status thought this wasn't important enough to do it themselves and just had ChatGPT give them a list. FWIW, Ethnologue does say that Ghari is "Stable" https://www.ethnologue.com/language/gri/ Meanwhile Swedish is "Institutional," the highest possible level of vitality https://www.ethnologue.com/language/swe/
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