Total EU defense spending is around $450M USD. The US defense budget, prior to 2027, is about $950M USD. Are you saying the US could have all those social policies for $500M USD?
Whenever somebody makes a benchmark, people complain that the benchmark results are meaningless because they’re gamed. I don’t know why those same people don’t understand that grading on vibes is strictly worse.
Google stupidly positioned their service as if it was a separate console you had to buy games for, which then couldn’t be played anywhere else. The successful streaming services sell you games for non-streaming platforms and then just allow you to stream them as an option.
The notion of “PhD-level research” is too vague to be useful anyways. Is it equivalent to a preprint, a poster, a workshop paper, a conference paper, a journal submission, or a book? Is it expected to pass peer review in a prestigious venue, a mid-tier venue, or simply any venue at all?
There’s wildly varying levels of quality among these options, even though they could all reasonably be called “PhD-level research.”
> buying an EV does not actually reduce emissions like magic, unless the owner drives that car for a looooong time. Like 10-15+ years.
I find this timeframe surprising. I did some quick searches and there are models like GREET that suggest the break-even point is much sooner than that in the US. It is difficult to know for certain, of course, as there are many variables.
Regardless, it is of course better to incentivize long-term ownership as well. I think of HOV access as similar to a tax deduction on purchase. It’s a cheap way to provide a carrot for initial EV adoption.
It makes sense if you view the HOV lane primarily as a way to reduce emissions, not traffic. This is also why e.g. single-rider motorcycles are often allowed to use HOV lanes as well.
> Google spends something around 30 billion dollars a year to be the default search engine across many platforms. You can spend the same amount and tomorrow your search engine will have 88.9% of searches.
It is a widely held belief that users don’t change the defaults, and I’m not asserting it’s wrong in general, but why doesn’t it apply to web browsers?
As an (unhappy) Windows user, I note that Microsoft pushes Edge aggressively, with each major Windows update “helpfully” offering to “optimize my computer” by making it the default browser again. However, Edge market share is only ~12% on desktop [0], despite the fact it is significantly more work to install Chrome than it is to change a mere default setting. Is that just because desktop users are more willing to jump through hoops?
The rejection message doesn’t seem to be accurate. I tried “happy person” as a prompt in AI Studio and it generated a happy human without any complaints.
It’s possible that they relaxed the safety filtering to allow humans but forgot to update the error message.
If you look at the side-by-side [1], it looks pretty plagiarized to me. They changed the words a bit but the overall plot and themes are essentially identical.
> Trump won the majority vote in an election that brought out a huge amount of voters compared to previous elections, and Republicans won every other government body.
For the curious, based on [1], turnout in 2024 was 63.1% of the voting eligible population, compared to 65.3% in 2020, 59.2% in 2016, and 58.0% in 2012.
To clarify, they look at the probability a model will produce a verbatim 50-token excerpt given the preceding 50 tokens. They evaluate this for all sequences in the book using a sliding window of 10 characters (NB: not tokens). Sequences from Harry Potter have substantially higher probabilities of being reproduced than sequences from less well-known books.
Whether this is "recall" is, of course, one of those tricky semantic arguments we have yet to settle when it comes to LLMs.
> I learned a while back that Google Maps was moved from maps.google.com to google.com/maps so that when people gave location permission to Maps, Google Search could also use that permission.
This does not appear to be the case, at least on iOS Safari. I went to Google Maps, gave it permission, then went to Google Search and searched for “delivery near me.” It again asked me for permission.
> In the spirit of good science and as a happy taxpayer for the cause of these organizations, we should still be open to their scrutiny. A simple question we should ask, after all we're good scientists, is whether these groups are at their appropriate funding-to-success level or not, particularly in an era of a spiraling debt crisis.
I agree, in principle. However, this is a trap.
Here’s a playbook:
1. Declare, loudly, that a problem exists. The problem doesn’t have to be real, but it’s better if it is.
2. Announce, even more loudly, that you are going to address the problem in a way that’s suspiciously self serving.
3. Implement your preferred solution as rapidly as possible. The “solution” can be as flawed as you like. It may or may not actually fix the original problem; that part is unimportant.
4. When people react to your implementation, they sort themselves into three buckets: supporters (partisan or otherwise), detractors (partisan or otherwise), and “reasonable people” who “see both sides.”
5. While the “reasonable people” are still debating whether it was a good idea to cure the patient’s brain tumor by decapitation, move on to the next “problem” that needs to be “fixed.”
Education level is correlated with voting preference [0].
US universities are funded in large part by scientific research grants. Cutting funding directly damages these institutions, and it gives the current administration leverage they can use to influence university political policies through either overt ultimatums (cut DEI or we don’t give you the money) or indirectly by funding professors with pro-administration viewpoints while defunding professors with anti-administration viewpoints.
