This article is scratching the surface of the concept of desynchronization from the theory of social acceleration and the sociology of speed. Any technology that is supposed to create idle time, once it reaches mass adoptions has the opposite effect of speeding up everything else.
We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected.
"AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.
> Sometimes models that seem nonlinear turns linear if those nonlinearities are pushed into the basis functions, so one can still hope.
That idea was pushed to its limit by the Koopman operator theory. The argument sounds quite good at first, but unfortunately it can’t really work for all cases in its current formulation [1].
From the abstract and skimming a few sections of the first paper, imho it is not really the same. The paper is moving the loss gradient to the tangent dual space where weights reside for better performance in gradient descent, but as far as I understand neither the loss function nor the neural net are analyzed in a new way.
The Fourier and Wavelet transforms are different as they are self-adjoint operators (=> form an orthogonal basis) on the space of functions (and not on a finite dimensional vector space of weights that parametrize a net) that simplify some usually hard operators such as derivatives and integrals, by reducing them to multiplications and divisions or to a sparse algebra.
So in a certain sense these methods are looking at projections, which are unhelpful when thinking about NN weights since they are all mixed with each other in a very non-linear way.
Since as you say this utilitarian view is rather common, perhaps it would good to show _why_ this is problematic by presenting a counterargument.
The basic premise under GP's statements is that although not perfect, we should use the technology in such a way that it maximizes the well being of the largest number of people, even if comes at the expense of a few.
But therein lies a problem: we cannot really measure well being (or utility). This becomes obvious if you look at individuals instead of the aggregate: imagine LLM therapy becomes widespread and a famous high profile person and your (not famous) daughter end up in "the few" for which LLM therapy goes terribly wrong and commit suicide. The loss of the famous person will cause thousands (perhaps millions) people to be a bit sad, and the loss of your daughter will cause you unimaginable pain. Which one is greater? Can they even be be compared? And how many people with a successful LLM therapy are enough to compensate for either one?
Unmeasurable well-being then makes these moral calculations at best inexact and at worst completely meaningless. And if they are truly meaningless, how can they inform your LLM therapy policy decisions?
Suppose for the sake of the argument we accept the above, and there is a way to measure well being. Then would it be just? Justice is a fuzzy concept, but imagine we reverse the example above: many people lose their lives because of bad LLM therapy, but one very famous person in the entertainment industry is saved by LLM therapy. Let's suppose then that this famous persons' well being plus the millions of spectators' improved well-being (through their entertainment) is worth enough to compensate the people who died.
This means saving a famous funny person justifies the death of many. This does not feel just, does it?
There is a vast amount of literature on this topic (criticisms of utilitarianism).
I don't think this is the reason. Since Apple stopped making new interesting product lines they are very attentive about not having one line cannibalize the sales of the other(s) as it happened with the iPod and iPhone. This is also the reason why iPads will never run macOS and vice-versa.
It has definitely been overused by too many authors.
This reminds me a passage of Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language":
> A newly−invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g., iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn−out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves
My favourite (fiction) book this year was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. An amazingly intricate storyline with a perfect ending.
While I certainly appreciate the practicality of these technologies I do feel uneasy when thinking about a future where more or less everyone owns AR devices, as they denormalize interacting with others to do these activities. I was taught how to cook first from my mother and I later learned more with a flatmate. Similarly, when I had a flat tire my friends who were more into cars helped me out. Both have helped me develop and strengthen good personal relationships which I still have to this day.
I know smartphones are extremely valuable as I have learned a lot from the internet, and they are great tools when you have no other options, but they are already starting to become the default way of doing anything, and that way is solitary. AR devices would only exacerbate this trend by just being even more convenient to use. I love the technology but I wouldn’t want to live in a future where asking to your AR glasses before of your friends is the norm.
I’m not sure what is the best way to move forward without sounding like a luddite.
> It's breaking news about a topic that came out of the blue for everyone.
After having read the two rather strongly opinionated pieces "Amusing ourselves to death" [1] and "Avoid news" [2] they have mostly convinced me that "breaking news" is rarely of value in our everyday life, and I would rather have less of it.
> I have tried to find good scientific evidence that shows that social media is a net negative for kids and or adults. I have been unable to do so.
The author mentioned by GP is currently working on a similar questions collecting, reviewing and categorizing known literature in these open access documents [1][2]. I suggest you take a look if you are interested in the topic.
> For example, Hacker News is the only social media that I use, and I feel that I use it very differently than folks that use Instagram, for example. Can they be effectively conflated?
Well, I would say no. But to have a meaningful discussion we need to first agree on what is meant here with "social media". Clearly, this law has been passed with the intent to affect Meta / ByteDance / Reddit and similar companies with a business model that hinges on capturing as much attention of their users as possible, which is very different from HackerNews. Most accusations to social media begin bad are towards of the former type.
> but I would be very curious to see a scientific justification for banning it for kids under 16.
From [1], it seems to me that there is a non-negligible amount of literature that has been accumulating, that could be used to justify the ban. Though, Australia is not a technocracy (I hope), so I would say that there is also a certain degree of "purely social" reasons why they might want to curb the access of social media companies to their youth.
Indeed, around 2019 I was reading many computer vision papers for volume estimation and came across a few that tried to estimate the weight of the meals from pictures using the size of known objects (cutlery beside the plate). The idea was good but they were very far from accurate and not robust at all, and that was just for the weight, not even carb counting. I know CV is a fast moving field but I wouldn't bet that the tech has improved enough to be anywhere near medically safe.
Kalman filters are usually the way to go because for some cases it is mathematically proven that they are optimal, in the sense that they minimize the noise. About alternatives, not sure if people actually do this but I think Savitzky-Golay filters could be used for the same purpose.
If I understand correctly the fees are only for an overleaf-type web collaborative editing experience. The typst program itself, the one you install on your computer, is free to use and open-source.
If you don’t need it to be perfect it is actually not too difficult. A notch filter could be enough remove most of the pattern provided that you have a good way of guesstimating its frequency
Not sure if there are standing waves involved, or resonance. I presume it is very similar to a phased array [1] for beamforming in antennas, except that then anisotropic properties of medium may not be negligible to construct the wavefront (temperature gradients & wind), which is probably also why these devices do not sound great. To produce a high quality waveform at the receiving end the physics probably becomes quite involved rather quickly.
We have been on this track for a long time: cars were supposed to save time in transit, but people started living farther from city centres (c.f. Marchetti's constant). E-Mail and instant messaging were supposed to eliminate wait time from postal services, but we now send orders of magnitude more messages and social norms have shifted such that faster replies are expected.
"AI" backed productivity increases are only impressive relative to non-AI users. The idilliac dream of working one or two days a week with agents in the background "doing the rest" is delusional. Like all previous technologies once it reaches mass adoption everyone will be working at a faster pace, because our society is obsessed with speed.