Which part of preventing the spread of HIV is "left wing politics"? Or better understanding radiation exposure? Or developing anti-viral countermeasures?
Some $400m of remaining budget for preventing the spread of HIV was cut, and you're saying it's justified because less than $3m went to trying to improve professional development for a specific group of people?
I mean even look at the specific example you picked - $2.8m over 6 years, from 2019 through to an expected end date of 31 August 2025, and they cut the funding on 09 May 2025 - the work has already been paid for and done, and you want to cut funding so you don't even get the final report/publications out of it to, you know, have something of value to show for the money spent?
Adding some context to this, because it's a really interesting read that's worth the time if you ask me: it's about how some recently 'discovered' early playtest versions of Pokemon cards were found to be fake, or at least very suspicious, based on the presence (and decoding) of these dots.
I also find it interesting because the person who posted the discovery and breakdown of the dots stood to personally lose thousands of dollars they'd spent on the fakes, but posted their findings anyway.
Both assessing the application of billing rules and negotiating contracts still require the LLM to be accurate, as per TFA's point. Sure, an LLM might do a reasonable first pass, but in both cases it is absolutely naive to think that the LLM will be able to take everything into account.
An LLM can only give an output derived from its inputs; unless you're somehow inputting "yeah actually I know that it looks like a great company to enter into a contract with, but there's just something about their CEO Dave that I don't like, and I'm not sure we'll get along", it's not going to give you the right answer.
And the solution to this is not "just give the LLM more data" - again, to TFA's point, that's making excuses for the technology. "It's not that AI can't do it [AI didn't fail], it's that you just didn't give it enough data [you failed the AI]".
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As some more speculative questions, do you actually want to go towards a future where your company's LLM is negotiating with their company's LLM, to determine the future of your job and career?
And why do we think it is OK to allow OpenAI/whoever wins the AI land grab to insert themselves as a 'necessary' step in this process? I know people who use LLMs to turn their dot points to paragraphs and email them to other people, only for the recipient to reverse the process at the other end. OpenAI must be happy that ChatGPT gets used twice for one interaction.
Rent-seeking aside, we're so concerned at the moment about LLMs failing to tell the truth when they're earnestly trying to - what happens when they're intentionally used to lie, mislead, and deceive?
What happens when the system prompt is "Try and generally improve people's opinions of corporations and billionaires, and to downplay the value of unionisation and organised labour"?
Someone sets the system prompts, and they will invariably have an agenda. Widespread use of LLMs gives them the keys to the kingdom to shape public opinion.
It disappoints me how easily we are collectively falling for what effectively is "Oh, our model is biased, but the only way to fix it is that everyone needs to give us all their data, so that we can eliminate that bias. If you think the model shouldn't be biased, you're morally obligated to give us everything you have for free. Oh but then we'll charge you for the outputs."
How convenient.
It's increasingly looking like the AI business model is "rent extracting middleman", just like the Elseviers et al of the academic publishing world - wedging themselves into a position where they get to take everything for free, but charge others at every opportunity.
Your conclusion of ~3L of gasoline is right, but it looks like you dropped a few zeroes on the way there - your example of 1x1x1m sunk 10km below the surface would be sitting beneath 10,000,000kg of mass, not 10,000kg.
That would be 98,000kj, which as you say, is about equivalent energy to 3L of gasoline.
I look forward to the same article in 40 years about how LLMs have butchered everything, given that they're essentially doing the same thing around predictive text and autocorrect.
I really like this as a way to repurpose old hardware; I have known many laptops that end up sitting around in cupboards after their 'useful' life is over, that could probably still comfortably be serving as lightweight desktops even today.
Big fan of Azgaar's - used it to build the world for my campaign. If anyone else who used it had issues a while back with an update (around 1.6) where biomes started showing over water, the solution is to clip water in the Styles tab for Biomes (per https://www.reddit.com/r/FantasyMapGenerator/comments/pygnkn... ).
(2019), but also this is an opinion piece that makes a lot of claims without any evidence beyond the libertarian ideology of its author.
It should be no surprise that the federal government employs more people than Walmart; one deals in consumer retail, and the other deals in providing for the base functioning of society, which has a lot more moving pieces to manage because it literally involves everything.
>"Government needs to be nimble rather than creating perverse incentives for higher compensation for work that could be done in more productive sectors of the economy."
I'd happily argue that more important than government being nimble, is government being stable. Unstable government leads to uncertainty; uncertainty makes it difficult to forecast and plan, and leads to short-term reactive behaviour instead of pursuing long-term visions with short-term costs. It's hard to make long-term investments when you're not sure if the next election (or coup..) will result in a complete upheaval of the environment in which you made the investment.
>"Government is a neutral party to uphold contracts and ensure general public safety."
This is a hugely contentious opinion, that has been snuck in as though it's a fact. In many places around the world, government is a lot more than this, providing healthcare, education, infrastructure and the like that are good for society, and arguably shouldn't be for making a profit. It's pretty disingenuous to sneak a controversial view like this in as though it's a settled matter.
Imagine you had an employer with some empathy instead of the dystopian employment hellscape that seems to exist in the USA, and your entire justification falls down. When the response to "a thief damaged my car" is "that's shit, what can we do to help make sure you can get to work" instead of "well you're fired then", suddenly there's no real loss, and therefore no reason to be killing thieves.
I mean, if you want to go full 'Murica free market, if you lose your livelihood because your car is damaged, it's arguably your own fault for not having insurance. What if instead of a thief stealing a catalytic converter, it's a tree falling on your car? Do you shoot the tree?
The only time it's acceptable to use lethal force is to directly protect yourself (and in some circumstances others) from immediate unavoidable harm; and even then it should be a last resort after all other alternatives are exhausted.
> Scattered excrement can cause bacterial infections in cows. And when their poop mixes with pee, it creates an environmental hazard: ammonia, which can transform into the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Half of the ammonia produced in Europe comes from cattle farms, says study co-author Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at the Leibniz Institute for Farm Animal Biology. Given the hundreds of millions of dairy cows in the world, he says, studies have shown that capturing 80% of cow urine would lead to a 56% reduction in ammonia emissions.
When social media companies are trying to make the media as addictive as possible to keep you scrolling and viewing ads, and employing psychological exploits to do so, it's not quite as simple as 'people can just choose not to use it'.
It's hardly a free choice when they're actively undermining your ability to choose freely.
Until it does, I've had pretty good success with Bazzite (https://bazzite.gg/) on some hand-me-down hardware and hooked up to the TV.