Various web links I found to be of interest recently.
Yann LeCun, NYU professor and Meta Platforms AI guru.
At the same time, he is convinced that today's AIs aren't, in any
meaningful sense, intelligent-and that many others in the field,
especially at AI startups, are ready to extrapolate its recent
development in ways that he finds ridiculous.
...
LeCun thinks that the problem with today's AI systems is how they are
designed, not their scale. No matter how many GPUs tech giants cram
into data centers around the world, he says, today's AIs aren't
going to get us artificial general intelligence.
His bet is that research on AIs that work in a fundamentally different
way will set us on a path to human-level intelligence. These hypothetical
future AIs could take many forms, but work being done at FAIR to digest
video from the real world is among the projects that currently excite
LeCun. The idea is to create models that learn in a way that's
analogous to how a baby animal does, by building a world model from
the visual information it takes in.
For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think.
To think is to resist – something no machine does.
Peter Beinart interviews Ta-Nehisi Coates about his book The Message.
Ta-Nehisi Coates's refusal to lie about what he saw in the West Bank,
first to go there right? Because so many people, so many celebrated people
in American public life, choose not to go there. Because they know,
at some level, that if they went there, then they would be forced to
carry around the secret that they don't want to have to face the
consequences of exposing. He purposely went to see it, and then decided
to write about what he had seen.
...
And so, perhaps the message of Camus is that actually the deepest form
of community that you have is when you're actually willing to say the
things that you believe are true, even if that puts you in community
with people who you don't know, who you can't see, who certainly don't
have the power and the cultural status, to celebrate you in the way
that people in power do.
Costs of tariffs.
Tariffs are a tax on imports, and they will raise prices for households
and, crucially, for businesses that rely on imported inputs to make their
products. Not only will prices rise for the imported products, so will
the prices of goods produced at home that compete with imports.
Simply put, protectionism reduces the gains from trade; we choose
to pay more than necessary for some goods (imports and their domestic
substitutes) instead of focusing on those goods that we produce more
efficiently than foreigners.
...
Economists have long known that tariffs on imports not only reduce the
demand for imports, they also discourage exports. This effect arises
because as more domestic resources are used to produce goods that were
previously imported, those resources are drawn away from export industries.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry-the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
Integrate, visualize, and analyze data. All in one place.
Free for individuals. Optimized for teams.
Read more about it at, Fintech OpenBB aims to be more than an 'open source Bloomberg Terminal'.
Now for the first time scientists researching the brain of a fly have
identified the position, shape and connections of every single one of its
130,000 cells and 50 million connections.
...
We have a million times as many brain cells, or neurons,
than the fruit fly which was studied.
...
Developing a computer the size of a poppy seed capable of all these tasks
is way beyond the ability of modern science.
"A growing body of research suggests that both long COVID and chronic fatigue are post-viral syndromes that result in chronic, low-grade inflammation that can damage healthy tissue and, in some cases, the production of auto-antibodies that can attack it."
More specifically, does the amount of water that hits you depend
on your speed? And is there an ideal speed that minimises the total
water you encounter on your way from point A to point B?
...
To sum it all up: it's a good idea to lean forward and move quickly
when you're caught in the rain. But careful: leaning forward increases
Sh (horizontal surface area of the individual). To really stay drier,
you'll need to increase your speed enough
to compensate for this.
We theorize that terrorism can work, but for its supporters rather than for the terrorists themselves. Because supporters are willing to contribute resources to a terrorist organization, thereby increasing the organization's ability to launch attacks, this can coerce the targeted government to revise its policies in accordance with the supporters' preferences. Targeted governments may respond with concessions in order to erode support and thereby render the terrorists easier to defeat. Support can be rational even when supporters' ideal policies are closer to those of the government than to those of the terrorists.
Nothing About It Has Been Easy
Her joyful pop anthems have connected with a massive audience,
but getting here involved long odds and a lot of heartache.
And fame is freaking her out a bit.