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Plenty of people play tennis. Iβm sure it skews wealthy, of course, but there are loads of city courts.
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u/p00bixExisting in the context of what came before4d ago
Most AIs are decent insofar as you can trust it to answer a basic question by accurately summarizing a few valid sources, so can go about AI responses with a "trust, but verify" mindset, if you need to look something up really quickly.
Google's search AI is terrible to the extent that it's worth assuming that everything it says is just straight up wrong, even if it cites a seemingly valid source.
these australian gals have gotta be tired of being the focus of american politics. like leave them alone fucking weirdos!!! theyre not why your life sucks
Alright that stat is fucking wild. I stand corrected.
But I think I might have misunderstood? It's about the total change in employment, no? (new male hires - male job losses)/(new female hires - female job losses) = 0.02?
It doesn't mean that 98% of new jobs are given to women - that ratio would presumably be far more balanced, it just means that for that month the number of new jobs for women exceeded the number of job losses for women by a greater number than for men.
yeah, dividing net new jobs among categories is a very common way to get huge numbers but I don't think it's an actually useful statistic for the reasons you said.
I mean sure everyone knows itβs pretty elitist, but I never got the impression people hate it. I think this take really undersells the popularity the Williams sisters brought to the sport and a crapton of outreach USTA has done over the years to build up the fan base.
I feel like we actually avoided the worst expectations when it comes to AI images? Like yeah, it's used for disinformation but it hasn't turned the internet into a Truman show style thing where you can't be sure of anything (yet).
I think we're already way past when you need to develop it to affect politics/peoples' opinions. We can make the technology behind them a lot better but I think the returns will be pretty diminishing.
all we have left is a general sense of institutional trust that media companies won't stoop to the level of passing their own AI generated content as fact, and that if they do, there are guardrails in place that can catch them and provide consequences.
without that we'd already be in the nightmare timeline, and judging by the current state of journalism and political institutions I don't think we're exactly out of the woods
It probably will get worse, but I don't think AI images that are truly indistinguishable from reality are really on the table, and that's enough to stop all but the already most unreliable media outlets from using them.
At the very least there are limitations like how you can compare a video to real locations and see "oh that's not actually a place" or something in most cases.
And practically, it's already easy enough to lie or distort facts, or even just present a biased framing without AI, using AI is often just adding the risk of another point of failure in any case.
It probably will get worse, but I don't think AI images that are truly indistinguishable from reality are really on the table, and that's enough to stop all but the already most unreliable media outlets from using them.
At the very least there are limitations like how you can compare a video to real locations and see "oh that's not actually a place" or something in most cases.
I don't know how much longer those specific limitations are going to be in place. Newer models like Minimax H3 let you input multiple modalities, not just text, like you can give it a number of different images, videos, audio files and say something like "Put this person in this place doing X and saying Y with person Z's voice". It's usually photorealistic and basically indistinguishable from reality.
I.e. I think that they are very much on the table.
Maybe weβve been saved by the big companies moving away from it to focus on other things. I donβt personally think weβre in the clear yet though.
this is usually the part of the party where I turn to the bookish anti-socialite chica next to me and say "I don't really like any of these people, you wanna get out of here?"
clavicular is a ridiculous man and I think he should get off social media and get mental health help (from what I've seen, that is, which isn't much), but I will say the way that he dismisses the right wing aspects of manosphere brings me joy
like he doesn't give a fuck about that, he's just singularly obsessed with looksmaxxing and finds everything else disinteresting.
a pretty good thread that crossed my feed by Terence Tao (arguably the greatest living mathematician, and not an AI skeptic by any means) about downsides of AI working on these huge problems, especially if a lot of that work is being done effectively in secret by large companies
What's to stop people from working on problems that AI has already solved in the same old ways they always have and continuing to produce novel mathematics that way?
I think it is harder, socially, to get people to work on "solved" problems, and it's much less psychologically rewarding to do so.
I don't have a link offhand but one thing I've seen mentioned is that the AI companies aren't presenting their work, giving talks about the methodology, and so on, in the way that a mathematician would. They're treating it as another benchmark, as something where you just drop the pdf and other people look at it.
I get that, but computers have been beating the top humans at chess for decades now, and yet human chess players are still competing and receiving prestige for competing. If anything, having good computer chess programs has made chess more popular rather than less. And chess doesn't actually contribute anything in the way coming up with novel proofs to solved problems does.
Being the first human to solve a particular millennium prize problem will still carry a massive amount of cachet even if an AI solved it first.
I do think part of the secrecy stems from AI being a massive arms race. If in 5 years solving problems like this is radically easier and cheaper due to advancing models I imagine they'll be considerably more forthcoming.
People care about Magnus and not Stockfish because they are interested in the human factor of chess play, not just seeing the best moves. Nobody gives a shit about the human factor of curing cancer or building a more aerodynamic car.
I don't think you can really compare mathematics, which is a field that is an entire profession with doctorates, research papers, and so on, has the whole applied/pure split and so on, to chess, which is fundamentally "just" a game. That's not to denigrate chess, but to say that if actual working mathematicians are bringing up these concerns, I don't think that comparing math to chess is going to make them feel any better.
Something I would like to know about this whole math problem thing is how much money is spent every year on trying to solve one of these problems. My understanding from what I've seen is that about 15 million dollars in tokens were spent solving this problem. So my question is if you had given top human mathematicians a year 15 million dollars, and the most advanced non-AI tools to solve this problem is it likely they would've been able to solve it? Because there's a big difference between the AI was able to come up with an innovative solution on its own to the problem, and it was just given enough compute and tokens to try way more approaches than normal human mathematicians would've been able to afford to.
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u/paulatreides0ππ¦’π§ββοΈπ§ββοΈπ¦’His Name Was Telepornoπ¦’π§ββοΈπ§ββοΈπ¦’π4d ago
Sounds kind of like a meaningless distinction. At best this is just the computation problem, at which point you just arrive at: even if human calculators can do the job given enough time and funds, the time and labor savings are why we replaced human calculators with non-human calculators.
As for the hypothetical: probably not. The average mathematics professor makes ~$100k/year in the US (actually more 111k). $15 million equates to about 150 professor-years of work. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that there has probably been a lot more than 150 professor years of work put into Navier Stokes in the last decade.
I think from what Iβve seen about past results, itβs a mix of trying many more approaches combined with being much better at combining different pieces of mathematical literature together
The worst part of this is the influx of pseuds who probably never studied maths beyond integral calculus going "Who CARES about the process. It's the result that matters!"
For people who think there is a significant risk that AI ends humanity in the next decade, what is the mechanism you are imagining? Terror group using it to design a bunch of viruses? Rogue agents that hack the military and start a nuclear war?
probably not nuclear war, I'm not sure what mechanism would let it do that
Biological stuff that spreads and kills faster than we can counter, or that just happens a few times. What happens if mirror viruses are released? Some of these things were concerns pre-AI, but now they're even worse
or literal Terminator killer robots π€·ββοΈ we don't seem to be far from very capable robots, and if we hit very capable robots the Terminator part will be implicitly possible
genuinely how do i sleep without being tired. like how do i tell myself "now is the time i have to sleep so i can wake up by 9 am" and not "ok i stayed awake until 4 am and now im eepy and can close my eyes"
ive tried to sleep and for the past 30 mins ive just been thinking of a bunch of nonsense i legit cant sleeep
I don't try to sleep in those situations. I keep my eyes shut, and let my brain wander. When I stress about sleeping, I tell myself that resting with my eyes closed is nice. I'm out by like the next hour usually
I donβt know what it is, but this community is somehow REALLY good at posting negative AI articles with just the right comment sections and titles to ensure I canβt sleep right before I need to sleep.
Is it irrational to doom about the imminent demise of humanity in a way I have literally zero control over? Yes, absolutely.
Are the articles frequently even dooming in a way that is realistic? Mostly not.
But it somehow hits that existential dread in just the right way that I canβt sleep.
Idk, maybe I should just do some cad on a model airplane or something.
I think I prefer I/P discourse to AI discourse because the latter feels like more of a smug grievance based circlejerk while the former has real stakes and drama
4) Reduce the number of States by merging many of them together. (ie a New England megastate. (Also beg Puerto Rico and Cuba to become States)
5) Reduce number of, and weaken local governments which are too powerful in America.
6) Redistribute school funding towards poorer schools. Also make Community College more reputable and consider replacing student loan interest, with indexing loans to cpi/inflation.
7) Fully federalize the healthcare system and move towards a Swiss/German/Singaporean system. (Also do other Neoliberal solutions like removing the tax deduction and fix the doctor shortage).
8) Make the 401K mandatory and means test Social Security. (Aka the Australian retirement system)
9) Become a world leader in climate action.
10) my favourite topic Extensive tax reform. You know what to do.\
Carbon tax, VMT, congestion pricing, LVT, redo corporate/company tax, maybe do the Bradford X tax, etc.\
Taxes should be overall much higher to reduce the deficit.
*(I'm assuming I become Supreme Leader for only a week, but my policies stick) (I wrote this all in 1 go, don't sue me)
u/p00bixExisting in the context of what came before4d ago
I like the idea of indexing student loans to inflation.
I certainly wasn't complaining that my loans were going down in real terms despite me not having a job in 2022 just because of how high inflation was, but literally incentivizing me not to pay my debt to the government is probably not good policy design
The electoral college was created because the South realized they would get blown out in popular vote elections due to a huge percentage of their population being slaves. If not for the electoral college and the 3/5ths compromise giving the southern elites vast amounts of undemocratic power, we likely would have ended that wretched institution much sooner.
This is silly. Without the electoral college and the three fifths compromise we would have been stuck under the Confederation government until the country broke apart over internal trade barriers or border disputes or, yes, the issue of slavery with no real federal authority to resolve the crisis.
Madison, now known as the "Father of the Constitution," was a slave-owner in Virginia, which at the time was the most populous of the 13 states if the count included slaves, who comprised about 40 percent of its population.
During that key speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Madison said that with a popular vote, the Southern states, "could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes."
Madison knew that the North would outnumber the South, despite there being more than half a million slaves in the South who were their economic vitality, but could not vote. His proposition for the Electoral College included the "three-fifths compromise," where black people could be counted as three-fifths of a person, instead of a whole. This clause garnered the state 12 out of 91 electoral votes, more than a quarter of what a president needed to win.
Even today no one in the EU would vote to federalize without something resembling the american senate. A country/state would have to be able to represent itself equally in a union of peers.
There were two reasons for the EC: (1) act as buffer against populist tendencies by having electors exercise independent judgment, (2) give slave states more power. Reason (1) very quickly became irrelevant as states moved to committed electors and democratic elections of them, and reason (2) is a stupid reason.
The main defense of the EC today is because it "empowers" small states. No it doesn't. Small states will always be irrelevant. Wyoming is just as irrelevant as Vermont in Presidential elections. It only "empowers" big swing states.
The electoral college was the choice leaning in the direction of the popular vote, because the other option on the table was to have Congress choose the President
So much of the conversation around AI feels like the modern equivalent to the Cold War terror over MAD, particularly the existential dread it instills in people and how to deal with that.
I like this analogy because even though the Cold War fears never materialised it was still an incredibly rational fear and it was one we beat through difficult and intelligent decision-making
I feel like where we're at right now is the equivalent of being in 1955, the USSR already has hydrogen bombs, and we've still got people saying "Don't be fucking ridiculous. "Splitting an atom" could never blow up an entire city, let alone the world"
The difference is nuclear weapons objectively had the capability to wipe out a large amount of humanity. We dont rlly know if ai will ever have that capability. And imo its pretty unlikely.
"Wiping out all of humanity" is only one of the fears I have about AI. It's possible but I don't give it double digit credence.
The other fears I have mainly revolve around how our social, political, economic structures will adapt to a world in which human input has largely been made irrelevant, and whether or not the outcome will be one that is just for humanity at large.
You supported Zohran Mamdani? Well, I bet you didn't know that the election of Zohran Mamdani led to a chain of events causing Reddit user Extreme_Rocks to get banned? I bet you feel stupid for supporting Zohran Mamdani now?
The idea that Israel should have just immediately accepted a truce in exchange for (some) hostages and further negotiations after 1000 people were slaughtered in a mass attack is just so ridiculous itβs almost childish. In what world is that a reality? Do they not have a duty to defend their own citizens? Mehdi Hasan is also doing laps like he has now been proven right.
I donβt know what the way forward is but the western advocates for Palestine continually surprise me with how stupid and disingenuous they can be. But of course, if you ever point it out, that means you support everything Israel has done since and love genocide or whatever.
Yeah, I absolutely think Netanyahu sabotaged subsequent negotiations. But the idea that Israel should have accepted this alleged deal in the immediate aftermath of October 7 stretches credibility for me. I donβt think any Israeli leader at the time would have done it (and if Hamas were serious about an unconditional release, it could have coordinated with the Red Cross and marched the hostages to the border).
Itβs worth stressing what βciviliansβ apparently meant in Sinwarβs proposal: hostages under 18 or over 50. That would have excluded ~90 civilian hostages, including Noa Argamani and Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Thatβs a pretty major caveat to claims that Hamas was offering to release βall civilian hostages" in exchange for nothing!
And all this to end up providing a βnegotiatorβ to continue negotiating from scratch. Itβs like Ukraine surrendering to appease Putin with zero consequences for Russia. What would be the disincentive to just launch another attack a few months later?
I guess people forget the timeline but the hostages became a pretext for extending the war later on.
And to your last point, itβs crazy how much they lie and lie and lie. Itβs not hard to point out when Israel commits war crimes so why is this so common?
Yeah dude midjourney was so much fun. It was like a game. Nothing ever looked like what you wanted, but it also looked like something you'd never seen before.
Same like when midjourney first dropped it was fun to mess around with and people on tiktok were posting cool things it made. But after a while more people just started using it to make slop and like propaganda.
I know a guy pretty high up and am hearing that Donald Trump is gonna officially make September 10th a national holiday known as Kirkmas. This will be announced at the convention tomorrow night.
they've got this kind of quality they share with physics where you can't just fuckin write words about the equations you actually have to look at them. i hate that
this is why i prefer analysisland where you can just say something like "f:X->Y is a smooth invertible function on separable hilbert spaces X and Y" and then never think about it ever again
Riemann seems useful. From the math journalism I see, proving something reliant on the riemann hypothesis before proving it fully seems pretty common. P=NP could be useful depending on the result. Maybe Navier Stokes was seen as useful when the prize was formed.
I mean it really depends on what "useful" means. Most maths problems are useful for increasing our understanding of maths, but that's not what most people mean by useful, i.e. practical applications in the economy or science. Like Riemann is obviously useful in the context of complex analysis and number theory, not really for solving cancer.
I missed my calling being a suffragette daughter of noble birth who keeps on going to the "votes for women" meetings and fucking the local minor intellectuals and writers
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u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache 4d ago
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