That's exactly what it is. I didn't intend to sugar coat it.
There are certain functions that are so critical that people who work there are not allowed to strike and disrupt the economy. Railroads are one of them. Democrats tried to get them the best deal possible while also preventing an enormous economic recession which would have been the inevitable result of a freight shutdown.
I personally think those critical functions should be nationalized under government control, rather than having private companies reap the benefits of their special control, but that's a conversation for another time.
At some point people just quit and go work for McDonalds. Unless you literally force them at gunpoint to work the rails, you eventually have no rail workers.
So far the working conditions haven't got that bad for enough to be noticeable, but at some point you'll have no new employees and the old ones will quit or die off.
This is also why Republicans fight so hard against safety nets, nationalized healthcare, unions, worker rights, etc. The more desperate and struggling people there are, the more workers for these horrific, anti-work life balance jobs there are. The Fed purposely pushes for an economy with a set minimum of jobless people, purposely encouraging desperate out of work people who will take anything to put food on their plate.
I also think Democrats are happy to let them be the bad guys, while they make a lot of noise and token efforts to make things better, but never enough to hurt profits.
The consequence of an illegal strike is that the workers in question may lose their jobs. This happened to a rather large number of air traffic controllers in 1981 and the union in question was decertified. They didn't just lose their jobs, most were barred from federal service (i.e. working for the federal government) for life.
Let me don my nightmare goggles for a moment and ask: What are the odds that this was a domestic terrorist attack caused by a group of maligned workers who were angry about the rail strike bill?
Unlikely. Trains derail all the time. Poor maintenance, old tracks, mistakes by operators, random breakage. Just unlucky that this one had a lot of toxic cargo.
I thought that too but it turns out the axles were glowing hot and the signals from detectors built to prevent this thing were either malfunctioning or ignored. Keywords: ohio derailment hot box detector
Hey Bill, looks like these detectors are reporting an issue. If I wasn't so overworked and underpaid, I might notice it.
Yeah John, I don't notice anything either, on account of me being forced to work and having no autonomy in this industry. Would be a shame if something bad happened as a result.
These kind of safety whistleblowers (literally) are totally unprotected.
If Bill were to have put the train into emergency, checked everything, let it cool off, and then resumed travel, there would have been no disaster but Bill would likely have been yelled at at best or written up at worst for delaying a train, causing disruption throughout the system.
From 1990, the first year the BTS began tracking derailments and injuries on a yearly basis, to 2021, there have been 54,539 accidents in which a train derailed. That’s an average of 1,704 derailments per year.
I agree, so much hate for innocent mega-corps in these threads. It has to be the evil workers at fault. If you think using objectivism, it makes perfect sense.
Suspicious? If it makes you suspect anything, it should be the suspicion that the rail workers were right about it being dangerous to overwork rail workers.
Imagine a truck driver complains about being worked too hard, then a week later he falls asleep at the wheel and crashes his truck. Is there a connection??? Gee, I wonder.
I've hit this in software. Someone - not me - gives an estimate, a deadline is created, then... when I say the deadline can't be met... I'm 'negative' or 'confrontational' or 'not a team player'. When the deadline isn't met, I've been singled out as the 'cause' because I was trying to 'prove a point' or related language. Doesn't happen every day, but has happened more than a few times, and has happened to colleagues I've heard recount similar stories.
But yeah, in that example - totally the driver's fault. He's willing to break company property just to try to get himself some more sleep every week, without even considering the shareholders who've already taken out margin loans against their stock. Can you imagine how crappy it will be for them if next quarter comes in below analyst estimates?
In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service.
They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. They implement the most bureaucratic nightmarish processes for vetting brands which are impossible to do via the UI, and must only be done through broken/bizarre API calls that were clearly cobbled together without any design considerations. Maybe you get it all to work, but then after deliverability customer complaints a month later, you hear from Twilio that something broke on their end and you need to re-submit the vetting.
Having a major production issue? Well, you too can get a response in 3 hours by forking over 4% of your spend or $250 minimum, whichever is greater (how does that even make sense? Why should I pay more than a minimum?). And the response right at the end of the 3 hour window will consist of "We have received your issue and are passing it to the relevant team" which resets the 3 hour window. Whoops it looks like you're outside of business hours now, we'll get to it tomorrow. Unless you want to upgrade to the 8% monthly spend or $5000 minimum plan?
All that said, Twilio can burn. Burn or get their act together. I hope they get eaten by a better service though, truly.
> In my humble opinion, having used Twilio extensively for over a year, it is an awful service.
> They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not.
This is an industry issue. You can request SMS delivery indications, and the carrier can send you delivery indications while dropping the messages. Or an intermediary might do the same thing. There's no way to ensure you only get delivery confirmations from the phone, so the delivery confirmation doesn't mean much. (Often, requesting confirmation results in better deliverability though)
If you can track delivery yourself, because a user is expected to use the message right away (verification), you should really be running multiple providers and picking the provider to use based on success and costs.
All the sms providers will tell you that they have global coverage, only use direct routes, and that they're the best. But they're all lieing. I ran a global SMS (and voice) verification service with 5 SMS providers, and when a major provider had a big outage, their success graph went to zero, but every other provider's graph dropped significantly too --- they all had some routes through that provider.
Yeah the underlying issue is that telecoms networks naturally trend towards monopoly. So often times there will be only one route that is cost effective / reliable to deliver traffic.
I'm with you on the support being sub-par, but the whole vetting brands (A2P) thing has nothing to do with Twilio at all. It's entirely forced by an industry group called The Campaign Registry. I don't know the last time you tried to create a brand in Twilio but they support the entire process in their UI these days, but the nightmarish API you're talking about is entirely an invention of TCR, not Twilio.
> They will happily take your money and report that SMS are being delivered when they're not. They implement the most bureaucratic nightmarish processes for vetting brands which are impossible to do via the UI, and must only be done through broken/bizarre API calls that were clearly cobbled together without any design considerations. Maybe you get it all to work, but then after deliverability customer complaints a month later, you hear from Twilio that something broke on their end and you need to re-submit the vetting.
We have had the same experience. Takes 15-20 api calls at least. And you have to wait unknown amounts of times before you can continue at several points in the process. Their paid support has been worse than useless, they just cost us more time.
Competitors to Twilio only require 3 calls per customer. In comparison, Twilio's process is utter insanity.
An aggressive and vindictive language model, trained on the darkest corners of the internet, and MKUltra'd to have a presentable personality, with access to everything I've ever typed into a search engine? It almost sounds too good to be true!
Yeah, it's a big distraction from other, non-balloon important world events that we should be focusing on, of which there are many. These balloons taking over the news cycle for days on end eats into peoples precious attention spans. Suddenly balloons are the hottest thing to focus on right now though.
>“Smoke and chemicals from the train, that’s the only thing that can cause it, because it doesn’t just happen out of nowhere,” Holzer says. “The chemicals that we’re being told are safe in the air, that’s definitely not safe for the animals … or people.”
>“All the readings we’ve been recording in the community have been at normal concentrations, normal background, what you would find in almost any community operating outside,” said James Justice with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The widespread reports of smells in the air, headaches, dead fish and other animals makes it hard to believe that "all the readings are at normal concentrations".
Although what they actually said is that all the readings they've recorded are normal.
The most disconcerting thing is that vinyl chloride is a carcinogen, so there may be many people who have been exposed to enough to give them cancer but who won't know about it for some years yet
It's not just vinyl chloride in the air. It's hydrogen chloride and phosgene, because they decided to set the vinyl chloride on fire to get rid of it.
Phosgene was a chemical weapon in WW1 and was especially problematic because, drumroll please, it's heavier than air and doesn't dissipate readily. That's one reason they roundabout mention checking air in people's homes.
Air readings could be manipulated simply by taking them from the tops of hills, or upwind, or even a relatively low altitude via plane. People who don't know phosgene is heavier than air would not realize what was going on.
Or the readings could be the usual EPA PM2.5, CO, NOx, and ozone concentrations, and phosgene, vinyl chloride, and HCl are none of the above. (Although a cheap VOC sensor could plausibly detect phosgene and vinyl chloride.)
They say they did test for phosgene at least. https://mobile.twitter.com/MahoningCoEMA/status/162338173074... It’s plausible because phosgene should have been a small fraction of what was produced in the burn, and honestly it’s nasty enough that people would probably notice if they were breathing it.
That quote specifically refers to air pollution. Many other leaking cars were carrying liquid hazardous chemicals. They expect a 100% aquatic life die off in waterways the pollutants reach.
The EPA claims they have a multi-stage containment system in place, and that the ground water and Ohio River are not at risk.
I don’t see how that is possible, but since this is HN, I’m hoping someone will point to an article explaining how modern spill containment works.
Or the people working for the EPA didn't want to get downwind of the plume themselves, so they took their air / water samples upwind of the mess, to avoid exposure (and maybe to make things look less bad as well) and called it a day. Really wouldn't be surprising.
I'd expect anybody measuring things near there to be in full HAZMAT-suits? Especially if this is declared as local state of emergency, and the National Guard involved?
Do we have any reason to believe that happened? There’s been training and response plans for this kind of thing going back to the 70s so it seems like that would be a huge scandal.
I’m not saying the EPA is perfect but simply asking whether we have reason to believe that this case was due to measurement choices, or if that was simply made up for the sake of argument.
Some lube oils are extremely toxic when burned. And there may be reactions between the various chemicals and their degradatoon products. Portable detectors will not be able to detect or quantify many of those. Only more advanced methods like Raman, gas and liquid chromatography with various detectors and mass spectrometry can tell more. And I have yet to see a report using any of those.
In scientific terminology, that's some nasty smelling shit. Toxic too.
If there's enough of it spilled you could smell minuscule amounts a mile away easier than an instrument could get a valid reading though.
It's one of those.
The odor threshold of volatile acrylates is orders of magnitude lower than other flammable toxic chemicals like methanol, but the instrumental detectability of acrylates is not really any more sensitive than regular low-odor chemicals by comparison.
IOW the instrument is better at detecting low-odor chemicals than your nose is, but your nose is more sensitive to things that have a very strong characteristic odor like acrylates.
Given that you can go on YouTube and see videos of the head of the EPA telling the 9/11 first responders that the air was perfectly safe to breathe, I’m probably going to go with the cat owners on this one.
She used every excuse she had: "We weren't going to let the terrorists win" "My son was in building 7 and almost died" "We needed to get the city back on its feet"
I worked a block away and we were back in very quickly. Then the HEPA filters came, then there was a lot of chaos. I learned a lot of how government can go wrong those few months.
More or less the same?? We had 4 years of the largest reversal on environmental protections we've ever seen
The Trump administration had replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined critical terms under the Endangered Species Act, lifted oil and natural gas extraction bans, weakened the Coal Ash Rule, which regulates the disposal of toxic coal waste, and revised Mercury and Air Toxic Standards–just to name a few
There are two big things to consider even if Congress didn’t change the laws significantly. The first is that Congress delegates the power to decide exactly what’s covered by a law to the agencies, on the theory that they employ experts and can adjust over time faster than a legal change. Under Trump, a significant number of regulations were changed at the behest of the affected industries:
The second is more subtle: enforcement is only as good as the people doing it. Under Trump there was an unprecedented effort to politicize normal job functions and, especially, to purge workers who were suspected of political disloyalty.
The obvious thing people would worry about is political ideologies being installed in what are normally supposed to be neutral, science-based jobs but if your goal is simply to prevent normal government operations it’s almost as good to let things stagnate by driving away people who are tired of having their day to day job involve ethical conflicts or simply not rehiring after normal attrition.
It’s the same reason Republicans were trying to fight staffing at the IRS: if you say rich people shouldn’t pay much in taxes, you have to take the heat for that with the voters. If instead you ensure that the auditing division is understaffed and their pay scale doesn’t stretch to the kind of high-end accountants who can go toe-to-toe with a billionaire’s, you get close to the same result without having to stand for it, and you can probably even get a political win by claiming that they have enough money but are wasting it.
The content of the cars was not owned by the epa. Look at how close those corps are to the epa.
Like the history of cigarette health. Or how axon claims tazers are safe by hiring docs to publish they are safe and inventing things like “excited delirium”…
Anyone looking at NATO and NORAD right now, and thinking - hmmm. Them Americans are weak... are not paying very much attention to the current state of the world.
>By more than a two-to-one margin, Americans say their country’s influence in the world has been getting weaker rather than stronger in recent years (47% vs. 19%), according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted this past spring.
Meanwhile in Russia, America is winning a war it's not even fighting in - at least according to the russian press. In all seriousness, using a fraction of the USA's military backlog and supplies, Ukraine is holding Russia at bay. A comparative alliance is taking place in the Pacific. Everyone wants to be in the NATO club (more or less, American protectorates, but with a lot more democracy) while The US economy is steamrolling through what everyone assumed would be a bad recesion, and people are starting to talk about Peak China.
So yeah, MSNBC and Fox are good at pointing out everything wrong, but the facts on the ground are very very different at this moment.
For anyone else seeing this, the above is carefully edited to give the wrong impression. Here’s the full quote:
> I ordered the take down of an unidentified object that violated Canadian airspace. @NORADCommand shot down the object over the Yukon. Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled, and a U.S. F-22 successfully fired at the object.
https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1624527579116871681
Your decision to edit the quote to remove mention of NORAD and the joint response gives a very different impression. Rewrite it without the names which trigger you and it sounds pretty anodyne:
“The joint-defense organization detected an unauthorized object. Following seven decades of policy, joint forces responded. As the leader of the country whose airspace was violated, I approved shooting it down.“
Your average person doesn't know about the organizational structure of NORAD. Your average person sees "Trudeau ordered... US responded." The fact that you can't see that shows your mind blindness to the average person's perception. That and using the word "anodyne" as if it is a common word.
The average person sees “Canadian and U.S. aircraft were scrambled” because the news media is quoting his statement in full. If you were really worried about confusion, you wouldn’t be quoting like a creationist to create that confusion.
If we can't detect previous advanced civilizations, I think it adds more evidence to the simulation hypothesis. Why would simulation designers include ancient nearly-undetectable advanced civilizations? Why don't video game designers fully model and texture areas of the world that aren't accessible?
If we were living in a simulation, I think it would be programmed in such a way that it would be emergent. A bit like a mandelbrot set, where the rules are simple but the complexity is infinite. No need to texture anything if the rules define what the texture would look like by a minimal fixed set of rules (laws of nature).
There’s a part of me that kind of views this as a theological prospect—that God (or however you care to name the supreme being, as such) is constantly upping the challenge for us as humanity.
> it would be more interesting to design specific scenarios to study
The weakness, to me, in the simulation hypothesis is the ancestor simulation assumption. Most of our computing power concerns itself with the future. Not the unchangeable past. Hell,
simulated universes with different physical constants would be far more interesting.
If you have the capability to run such a simulation, why not start from time=0 and just let it run... if you already have near infinite compute ability what does it matter? If you are an observer outside the universe so to speak does time even happen?
Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care. ChatGPT isn't so hot right now because boring PR articles were written about its abilities. It's hot because you can try it and see for yourself. Basic showmanship.
Not just showmanship, utility. ChatGPT has utility since “the common person” actually has access.
Deepmind loves doing research and getting accolades from a fawning press while never allowing commoners to access their dear technology for fear that the rabble could somehow misuse it.
Makes us wonder where Google would be if Larry and Sergie didn’t open it up to the public and we just kept hearing through the press that “there is this amazing search engine that works better than every other search engine”.
After the past decade of every damn startup “guru” advising to “just ship it”, Google just couldn’t follow that advice.
Ultimately it doesn’t matter how good chatgpt or Google’s AI is, all that matters is who shipped it first and how they incorporating feedback in to the model.
I just looked it up and it sounds like there is no point in a person wanting to play chess against AlphaZero right now because other engines have surpassed it. I don't know that much about chess though.
Here is for AlphaFold. I mean what you are going to do with this? It looks cool but I don't have the background to even contemplate doing anything with this information:
https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/entry/L8XZM1
What is most interesting to me is the sociology of people completely writing off the monstrosity of resources and brain power that is Google. Speaking as if they are stubbornly committed to some outdated technology as opposed to the organization that published Transformer: A Novel Neural Network Architecture for Language Understanding.
They don't provide the trained model do they? That would take millions of dollars of GPU time to train. This safely keeps it out of the hands of the rabble.
Yes, but that wouldn't stop Blizzard if they wanted to use it.
But what would anyone do with a bot that beats almost all human players in Starcraft? Its was mainly a demo to show how far they can take their reinforcement learning algorithms after AlphaGo.
AlphaFold has much greater utility and its trained model parameters can be downloaded.
Google gives me Xerox PARC vibes wrt AI. Got to the insights first, way ahead of everyone else, but OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research).
With AI, most failed products aren't just "late" at the game, they often never release anything at all. Most of the wild claims made by AI companies could be strait up lies and we would never know because no one other than the devs has laid eyes on it directly.
The LLM / foundation model industry will happily stay in the United States and ignore the stifling regulation of the EU if necessary. There is so much market share to capture domestically at the moment.
New laws would have to outlaw fair use, that will likely not happen as the only country that ignores such laws will win, especially now that the cat is out of the bag.
They can redefine fair use without removing it entirely. Thing like that happen all the time.
Will it be effective? Dunno, but LLMs aren't as easy to duplicate or execute as films are to pirate or watch, and yet copyright law still gets enforced somewhat.
I have no idea how OpenAI would look at this, and of course there are similar obstacles here re:copilot vs. gpl, but couldn't they just shut off European access.
I think AI would be so important that Europe couldnt afford to not have AI. Wonder how this would resolve.
My guess is that the petty little bureaucratic tyrants in the EU would much rather deprive their subjects of new products than give up any sliver of their power.
One could hope that this would cause a rebellion, but recent history suggests that the populace will go along with anything their lords decree.
Longer reply: I love the EU so much. One of the few institutions taking big tech to task. I can roam cell operators at no extra cost, ensure that companies cant data mine me without my express permission and other wonderful tech oriented regulation.
It is extremely narrow minded to believe that throwing all principle out the window is the only way to «not stifle innovation».
«The lords decree», where does one even begin. The biggest fight against bigtech involving amongst others the cloud act that lets the us govt spy on anyone in complete secrecy is literally spearheaded by a common man [0].
This entire post is either satire, and if so I ate it hook line and sinker… or it is some kind of privacy exploitation stockholm syndrome.
They do occasionally pass decent legislature, but i fear GreedClarifies is likely correct that it's probably more about them wanting the power big tech is currently centralizing for themselves.
For examples check the recent news from Belgium as they've uncovered recent corruption issues in the European Parliament. There is even an organization funded by the EU which is unapologetically treating political refugees as prisoners (putting them behind bars with literal cameras in their "living" space.
There was a pretty good report on German state media about that topic, should have English subtitles though if you can't understand it
https://youtu.be/tJMLNMlJkPw
I am glad they're currently pushing back against big tech though, as FAANG is already speedrunning our society into a total dumbsterfire, but love to that organization is just misplaced. (Or should we call it MAMAA now? Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet Amazon)
You mix up privacy wrt to the state (which has the monopoly on violence) vs private organisations. Two very different cans of worms. The EU is determined to fight the latter while embracing the former (as its incentives would suggest)
You clearly have no idea about how the european union works. It is a much lighter touch on society in general than the us is. We might not have as much gun freedom, but on pretty much every other scale I’d rate the EU higher than the US on «liberty».
No one is banning books about gay people in my kids school for example.
Either way curtailing big tech with regulation has nothing to do with big brother. They are regularing companies, not individuals.
This conversation is clearly talking about the good or bad that the EU does. Are those books banned because of the EU? Would they stop being banned if Poland or Hungary was not part of the EU?
If you, personally, end up restricted from doing things you used to (pay for my software, for example) — you gave up liberty for security, and now have neither.
I’m Canadian, by the way. We now can go to prison for wanting to call our children the name we gave them at birth.
The NSA is the biggest of Brothers in the world and supposedly the country keeps on innovating and big tech power is strongest here. How do you square that circle?
Well power is toxic that way unfortunately, I’m happy we’re having a bribery scandal right now (even if it’s being ignored by much of the media) and that things like Chat Control is being brought up (https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/).
EU will do a lot in the name of its subjects, but in the end it comes down to power and money. Anyone thinking it won’t end up as a totalitarian forced unification of the member states are sorely mistaken, or viewing it within the context of a minuscule time frame.
The great thing about the current-gen LLMs — anybody will be able to run one on the next gen of hardware. We’re within one order of magnitude of the capacity right now on retail hardware.
The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived.
GDPR, LLM “guard rails”, … — only the plebs will be affected by those.
> The moment of transition from “data-centric” (big centralized system/database) to “agent-centric” (locally stored/run systems and identity, sharing arbitrary data/storage) has arrived.
I agree. Use cases such as LLMs-as-backend-of-my-web-stack will move a lot of compute back to the edge of the network, eventually.
At some point, US companies will get fed up with constantly being harassed by the EU and just give up on the relatively small (as in money, not population) European market entirely. The hostility is simply not worth it.
For a sense of scale - the EU has 0 (zero) of the 14 largest companies by market cap. Out of the next 25, only a handful are in the EU.
The world's third largest tech sector is in a European country (the UK), and the two country's bigger than it are literally continent-scale superstates with around 10x the GDP.
The EU is set up to regulate already giant companies, which means it's not possible to create new ones because they can't afford the regulatory risk. (Mostly because the regulations are intended to troll American companies, not to do anything useful.)
And there isn't sufficient venture capital to build up new ones either. Maybe they can all adopt Yandex and VK.
And not a single one of them would be missed or affect European quality of life if they would be gone. How would Europe survive without Facebook...Microsoft spyware and Google advertisements?
> OpenAI is productizing faster (like Apple did with Xerox PARC's research)
what happens in cases like this is a slightly different dynamic what it seems on the surface. Apple, coming of huge success with the Apple ][ using the anemic but cheap 6502 8 bit to build a low-end (compared to Xerox) mass market (compared to Xerox) product, was well positioned to capitalize/productize the next generation of more capable 16/32 bit chips without changing their business model or distribution channel. It's right place right time, plus "easier to improve from the bottom, than downgrade from the top".
This idea was identified in a famous McKinsey study of the British motorcycle industry's loss of market share to low cost Japanese competition in the 1960's and 70's. The post WWII Japanese market developed to serve people who needed transportation but could not afford the leading British brands, not to mention autos. Once Japan had a successful motorcycle industry it was natural for them to export inexpensive bikes to Southeast Asia and South Asia. The British companies (Triumph, BSA, Norton) did not make much profit on the cheap bikes, they made their profit on the powerful luxury models, so they abandoned competing in the cheap sectors.
But then another force comes into play: if you manufacture a large number of something (there is always more of the cheap things) you get all sorts of manufacturing advantages. If you figure out a way to use achieve sturdy construction with fewer nuts and bolts, you get to save those nickels over many many bikes which makes it worth your effort to be good at that. If 1 out of 100 of your bikes leaks oil, and you sell a million, you get a lot of complaints, and you fix it. (these are called "learning curve advantages", and they tend to be logarithmic, so by being 10x bigger, you get +something better)
But who especially wants to buy sturdy, reliable transport (everybody) and is willing to pay a premium for it (rich people in the form of high margins)? So being the largest (and by definition the best) manufacturer of a product leaves you perfectly positioned to be the best high margin luxury supplier.
Xerox was not asleep at the switch, they were just not a high volume low cost manufacturer with a presence in the consumer market, at the time when these learning curve manufacturing/marketing ideas had just been developed so they weren't used to thinking that way. Nor was it a case of the suits not listening to the engineers; the engineering ethos at Xerox was not "can we squeeze this on the smallest chip possible", it was "omg let's leverage Moore's law onto even bigger high end chips, compile into microcode!"
I know it's popular to hate on MBAs here, but this is an example of what they learn, and why VC's might like to see an MBA on the team, this is the kind of talk they want to see in the business plan rather than an impossible dream.
Thanks for the analogy. It seems OpenAI is getting ahead in building mass-market products (ChatGPT, Microsoft Partnership) by using 'lesser' LLMs (vs Google's published results).
From what I've been reading/tinkering, this expertise is essential bc these models are very useful only if the UX paradigms accommodate for them. Getting their hands dirty with consumer-facing applications may keep them a step ahead of Google despite the research 'disadvantage'.
Yeah... So many people miss the:
"Show don't tell"
That's for visual medium, for software it would be more like:
"Touch, don't show"
Especially with software, pretty much every programmer knows that sky is the limit, and that's why promises mean so little.
In a way it's a similar problem to pre-orders.
People need to try it to truly understand it and its value.
Eg.: That new MMORPG looks amazing, but what's the gameplay like, because at the end of the day gameplay > graphics, if there's nothing to do except just the visuals people will get bored.
> Maybe they should make a persuasive demo if they want people to care.
This is the right response for Google's AI news, but not Deepmind.
Building products isn't Deepmind's purpose. They have essentially "demo'd" it by releasing the paper and simulation videos. They don't build any products. This research is absolutely irrelevant for most people right now, but hopefully will be used by other researchers to make progress.
It's like saying "Stanford should build products and do demos instead of just releasing papers".
Hardly any scientific research has a demo for you to try. The job of researchers is to publish research and their primary audience is other researchers. We can read about it but they aren't marketers and they don't have a product to sell to you.
I think the Deepmind guys are ahead technologically because of Google's vast talent pool and computing resources, but they are scared of what they are making. The CEO of Deepmind was considering that they should stop publishing research because bad people might use it. If it wasn't for the Open AI guys putting pressure on them, they'd just toy with this stuff forever and never release anything.
I wonder what Larry and Sergei think of all this. Has Sergei said anything lately? Larry has been on a remote island in Fiji for years now. It seems with all this exciting geeky AI stuff they should be passionate about the business, but as far as I can tell they aren't very engaged.
This is exactly right. ChatGPT (and Copilot) didn't blow my mind because people told me about it. It blew my mind when I started messing around with it. Doesn't matter how good things sound in theory. All the things that made me a believer are things I haven't even told anyone. It's too "you need to try it for yourself" for me to even try explaining.
I’d absurd to see basic research criticized by its lack of showmanship, especially when looking at paywalled secondary reporting on it. Hype isn’t the goal. In fact, hype and showmanship are generally counterproductive with research. That’s why a paper with a title “Compound B associated with low concentration of stuff in mice” turns into “Science says coffee will kill you.” Lack of showmanship and circus is a good thing here.
A poisoned-well "argument" has the following form:
1. Unfavorable information (be it true or false) about person A is presented by another. (e.g. "Before you listen to my opponent, may I remind you that he has been in jail")
2. Therefore, the claims made by person A will be false.
I didn't make any assumptions on the veracity of their data or claims. Think tanks are politically motivated groups whose work entirely revolves around shifting the public's and decision makers opinions. I don't think it hurts to add a disclaimer.
Do you post on liberal sources "Disclaimer: this comes from a liberal source" too? If you're not doing it uniformly, regardless of bias, then yes, you are poisoning the well.
There is far, far more reason to be worried about sources on the right than there is sources on the left. Right-aligned sources are much more likely to deny science, to skew information in a way that benefits corporate benefactors, and to contain bias against marginalized groups such as LGBTQ and even women.
Not sure I agree about the right being more likely to deny science, considering the way discussion around gender seems to work. I'm still trying to find out just how many there are, but nobody knows. Of course, we're not allowed to really discuss that though. Not sure that's very scientific..
Gender is a social construct[0], it is not defined by biological sex, although due to societal norms it often correlates, and can be influenced, by biological sex.
What isn't scientific (as is, no longer valid in scientific consensus[0]) is the premise that gender and biological sex are synonymous, and that, as your comment implies, transgender or nonbinary identity is a denial of science.
Just in case you're going to jump on to the title of the third article i posted below, note that it says gender is not just a social construct, rather than that it isn't such at all. I'll quote an excerpt from that article:
Evidence that gender has some basis in biology, though, in no way implies a strict gender binary, nor negates the existence of transgender and non-binary identities. Many biology-based gender differences originate from the hormonal environment within the womb, which is very different on average for boys compared to girls. But there’s a huge variation in these environments, says Alice Eagly, psychology professor at Northwestern University. “Within boys there will be a range and within girls there will be a range. To say it’s biological doesn’t mean it’s perfectly binary,” she says.
Some people are trying to restrict the word "gender" for political purposes, but it also continues to be used as a synonym of biological sex, a meaning that it has had for centuries.
> In the 15th century gender expanded from its use as a term for a grammatical subclass to join sex in referring to either of the two primary biological forms of a species, a meaning sex has had since the 14th century
It's not political. Which programs to allocate the government budget to is political. This is a human rights issue. Extensive research has been done into the relationship between the physical, psychological, and social aspects of sex and gender, and the definitions we use today reflect our current understanding of how these interact, acknowledging that some people's psychological and social selves may not correspond with their physical biology. Refusal to acknowledge these people's lived experience is pigheaded ignorance and rank bigotry.
I agree it's a human rights issue, but it's a very complicated one, and trans rights conflict with other human rights. Sometimes biology matters.
Allowing biological females to participate in separate sports without biological males, for example. Where do you stand on that? Don't you agree that biology (like testosterone level) matters sometimes?
Or in dating, do you think people have the right to want to know the biological sex of someone they date?
I acknowledge the lived experience of trans people but I don't think their desires outweigh the interests of all other people.
And of course, balancing those competing interests is absolutely political. It's just dishonest to claim this isn't political.
Both science and language evolve over time, that isn't a political conspiracy.
The point is, only one of the two sides in this debate are denying current (not 14th century) science, and it isn't the side you or yucky seem to believe.
No one denies, as your source says, that "neither the health of women nor men is simply a product of biology but is also influenced by sociocultural and psychological experience". That's science.
But trying to dictate that people only use a word in a new way and never use its traditional definition is not science, it's (Orwellian) politics.
And pretending that biology doesn't matter is denying the very science you quoted.
Finally, the major questions about trans rights aren't about science at all, they are about values and why institutions exist.
Do we separate boys and girls in sports because of gender roles (sociocultural), or to give girls an opportunity to play sports without competing against people made stronger by high testosterone (biology)?
Do we separate men's and women's prisons because of gender roles (sociocultural), or to prevent sex and pregnancy (biology)?
I agree, it's not a new phenomenon, language changes all the time.
But while some language changes rise from the people, others (like this one) are dictated by powerful institutions.
Orwell described it well about 100 years ago. Change the meaning of words to make disagreement impossible. Newspeak "designed to diminish the range of thought".
It means "I can't fruitfully discuss this topic with someone who is stuck in an ideological local maximum".
Transgender identity and acknowledgement of the fluid, multidimensional nature of gender IS NOT a conspiracy to take your precious bodily fluids. Don't believe me? Go to San Francisco and try meeting some of the "co-conspirators" -- transgender men and women on the skids, having to turn to professions like sex work, because they ran from their conservative families fearing for their FUCKING LIVES. Living on the edges of society and the law, having to develop their own biopunk parallel medical support because legitimate medicine won't treat them in the way that they need, all to survive in a society that simply wishes they didn't exist because them existing violates a false foundational premise of society: that gender is binary and corresponds to physical sex.
But I've said too much. eyeroll is all the response you deserve.
Those aren't the co-conspirators. The co-conspirators are the people pushing this false idea for profit and political gain.
The people you're describing are the victims of an ideology that falsely told them they could ignore biology and thereby ruined a lot of lives.[1]
Obviously their families were also wrong to abandon them, and like everyone else on the streets, they deserve help to put their lives back together, but if they are still living on the streets they obviously aren't getting that help from the people who claim to represent them but are actually using them as political props instead of helping them find homes and professions they like.
1: I encourage you to read this other discussion that was on HN today:
yes, there's a lot of horrid crap on this topic on HN lately. It's been politicised already, no need to push this agenda further. Your encouragement is not needed, that nonsense is quite visible. eyeroll.
The author describers herself as a queer woman, married to a transman, to the left of Bernie Sanders, and a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.
If you won't even listen to her, dismissing her experience as "horrid crap", then perhaps you're "stuck in an ideological local maximum". Is there anyone you would listen to?
> You probably think you're supporting a good cause, but you're not
project much?
"horrid crap" was my term, you don't get to tell me what I mean.
It's transparently a drummed-up wedge issue, designed to demonise a vulnerable minority for political gain and distraction, and as such is utterly without merit and not worthy of more of my attention. And if allowed to continue, it won't end with that group.
You don't strike me as an instigator of this nonsense though. No, you seem more like you're carrying water for them, what Lenin called a "Useful idiot".
This doesn't even read like an answer to my comment. I am genuinely curious, how many genders are there? And what are they, and who determines what constitutes a gender?
Gender and physical sex are spectra. Asking someone to enumerate them is like asking them to enumerate the complex numbers.
https://cadehildreth.com/gender-spectrum/
Note that this link presents incomplete information as it seems to imply there is only one axis to the gender spectrum.
I'm comfortable being on the other side of the argument from anybody who says biological sex exists on a spectrum and compares the number of sexes to the set of complex numbers.
As to gender, well then it sounds like you're just describing another word for personality. So what exactly is the difference?
No, I think if there is a clear bias from the source, you can also acknowledge that _and_ evaluate the piece itself. The source in this case has a clear conservative bias.
selection bias is omnipresent which is why everyone is welcome to add facts to the discussion, as in the case in courts and the scientific method, so that scientists and juries can come to their own independent judgments rather than relying on an Ordained Authority. In science, if there is not consensus, we loop and add more facts until there is.
You're being intellectually dishonest if you think "Disclaimer: this comes from a conservative organization" to the HN audience doesn't have a clear well-poisoning effect. Maybe you should stop and consider who you're really trying to convince by arguing otherwise.
