"The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in U.S. history, dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge U.S. infrastructure projects such as the railroads, the highway system and the plumbing for the internet."
Ha! I just had a very interesting conversation with ChatGPT about a mushroom that I found in my front lawn. I am 99% sure it was an edible oyster mushroom which included analysis the of the size, growing substrate (dead ash tree root which turns out to be a useful identifying characteristic -- I learned a lot about mycology in a short time). Plus I don't use fertilizers, herbicide, pesticides, fungicides (obviously) on my lawn so I think it would have been quite tasty. Did I eat it? Hell, no. But then I got to thinking, would I trust a human to correctly identify it? I am actually not sure I would either. Penalty is just too great for misidentification LLM or not.
This time of year it is common for folks to mistake Dear mushrooms (Pluteus cervinus) with the poisonous juvenile invasive Amanita family.
Amanita travels everywhere with wood mulch around local gardens, and is practically impossible to get rid of once established.
Stay safe, and never believe your own lying eyes when it comes to mycology. Could join a local university hosted public outreach foraging club, as the experts enjoy nothing more that spotting weird looking finds. =3
org-mode is a way more powerful literate programming environment which can be exported to many different formats including markdown. In the past, I have collaborated with others with markdown as the sort of interface format. But on the collaboration front and not everyone liking emacs, I found that there's no way around that. I am a huge fan of emacs and use it every day but it is not that great of a collaboration tool due to it not being everyone's cup of tea.
Does anybody else feel like this is the answer to the Fermi paradox? Advanced civilizations simply exploit, consume, and pollute their way of existence.
As they say, “power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Perhaps humanity shouldn’t have absolute power over the planet. Perhaps we should check our own power to save ourselves. We’ve done it with government, to insure stability and longevity, why not the planet?
Honestly, I think an easier answer is that intelligent life is simply very rare and interstellar travel is very hard. We may be the only intelligent life within our galaxy. Or perhaps just 1 in 100. In either case, it'd take a LONG time before we ever found or met another civilization.
Then there is a good chance we would never have moved up to a technological state that allowed us to leave the planet. We probably wouldn't also be facing blow back from digging up and burning the planets solar battery.
The universe is vast, both in space and time. You would not detect anything from a past civilization that died a few millions of years ago in the closest solar system, which is really not that far in either time nor space
It's as easy of an answer to accept as any other hypothesis. I think we're all living within a simulation to create, solve, and document as many problems as we can with the technologies our specific environment allows us to develop; that our simulation is air-gapped away from the others performing the same work so as to not contaminate the data.
Most probably it's because the universe is vast and as humans we cannot comprehend how far the stars are. No matter how advanced an alien civilization is, physics prohibits objects with mass travelling faster than light and that's tru for any civilization.
It has been brought up before and it seems plausible. There is no guarantee that we have to leave the planet in any meaningful way or even survive for that matter.
Promoting sociopathy via a capitalist hierarchy that ruin the planet for their own selfish gain feels like a very primate thing to do. I bet there would be many other forms of communal, generous intelligent civilizations with longer-term thinking capability, especially if they lived longer than ~75 years on average. So consider my take on this statement inconclusive.
This article is about the Economist's summary of a journal article so we have a (AI?) summary of a summary. Not very helpful. Here are a couple of better references:
Ok, we'll merge the current thread into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357530, which is one hop closer to the source. I'll put the link to the paper in the toptext there as well.
I am not part of the group being polled (firmly ensconced in middle age), but I feel the opposite. Yes, the AI roll out has been shambolic to say the least, and it can also be annoyingly intrusive. On the plus side, AI is allowing me to take on projects that I would never have bothered in the past because the learning curve would have been too arduous. I am currently reverse engineering an embedded system going in there with a multimeter and logic analyzer. It is a lot of fun and I am learning a ton. If you told me five years ago that I would eventually be taking on such a project, I would not have believed you. On the job side, a lot of what I do involves troubleshooting (e.g., looking at reams of logs), and there too AI has been a boon. So, yes, actually excited about where things are going (with some misgivings).
I actually thought they were talking about the island in the Caribbean since Florida is not mentioned in the article. Anyway, in case you did not know, the reactor in question is in Florida: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Lucie_Nuclear_Power_Plant
> The name "St. Lucie" is originally derived from the name of a settlement near Jupiter Inlet, which was founded on St. Lucia's Day in 1566. Due to numerous errors, the name later came to be associated with the present-day town of St. Lucie Village, Florida, north of present-day Port St. Lucie. After La Florida and St. Augustine, it is the oldest still-in-use European place name in the United States.
I came here looking for that information, as I was incredibly surprised to learn of nuclear energy existing in the Caribbean.
It would be a dream to no longer have to rely on fossil fuels, but my native island is at the peak possible cross-section of hurricane, earthquakes, and volcano eruption risks, so I guess we're only missing tsunamis and dry forest fires to complete our bingo for "best place to build nuclear"
I knew about it, but your post is the first I've heard that SA no longer had those (I only clicked the link because you used the past tense!). I actually thought that no country had ever withdrawn their nuclear program.
This might be the most amazing and hope-inspiring I've read online this week, so I'm grateful for you sharing that link!
My understanding is that they gave up the USSR's weapons (and handed them to Russia), rather than them having built, owned and dismantled the weapons outright through their own nuclear program.
They could have spent substantial effort to make those weapons "theirs" (I've heard people simplify this as "they didn't have the codes but could figure them out") but it would have cost them dearly in international sanctions, versus the assurances and aid they could negotiate by relinquishing them.
That’s true. But Ukraine wasn’t just babysitting weapons made totally elsewhere, either. There was substantial expertise, research and manufacturing built up in Ukraine during the Soviet era.
I think it’s true enough to say they gave up nuclear weapons, even if they didn’t wholly own the nuclear weapons.
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The complete opening sequence of Blade Runner is "fucking amazing". The entire movie is "fucking amazing". It is a beautiful, visually stunning masterpiece that I will never tire to look at complimented with a Vangelis soundtrack that ranks as one of the best in all of cinema. And a performance by Rutger Hauer that is pure artistic mastery. And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp? Speaking of the opening sequence, even that computer animated Ladd Company tree is cool and which I have only seen one other time in "Outland", I think. The music that plays as that tree is being rendered seems to announce you are about to witness something extraordinary.
>And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp?
It really is for me a pinnacle. I sometimes wonder what it’s like to be part of something like this. Do you even know? I’m just some random fifty something among billions and your comment resonated because it was a shared experience. I have no idea if my grandchildren could watch the movie and come away with that but my cumulative nature and nurture sure as hell did.
I've wondered about this too. Did Ridley Scott and crew set out to make the greatest movie ever (IMO)? Or did something magical happen? My guess is "auteurs" often set out to create a masterwork but usually something beyond their control derails that. But, if they are lucky, they stumble upon something extraordinary that touches the heart of the human experience and that only happens once in a lifetime, if even that.
Everything must be aligned, and during the thing you are not sure everything else is going to be aligned.
As an example on the other side of the spectrum, there may be plenty of bad and forgettable movies with incredible and unforgettable performances from a very small part of it (the sound recording or design, one of the actors, a single superb scene, one of the scenerys) while the rest is mediocre to bad.
There is a very good blu-ray set, now out of print but not crazy expensive, that has five different cuts: US theatrical, international theatrical, workprint, directors and final cut (which is the actual director's cut). That's the best version of the theatrical release that you'll probably ever be able to get.
Only the final cut is available on UHD or an in-print blu-ray (and I would guess streaming as well).
I remember the voice over the first time I saw the movie, possibly in a cinema. I liked it, and was surprised with the general level of dislike it has received. The film was meant to be a mid-20th-century film-noir detective drama.
I agree. I think some creations are absolutely rare, unique and unlikely artefacts of culture and circumstances. Technology, people, means, vision and all sorts of other aspects had to collide and conspire to bear fruit to these marvels. Especially for big team projects such as movies. Another examples that come to my mind are computer games StarCraft: Brood War and Bioshock: Infinite. Complex visionary collaborative projects resulting in absolute perfection. Wow, just wow. Humanity truly can be amazing if it gets its shit together
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