I was frankly playing around with Copilot. It was operating in a more privileged environment than it should have been, but not one where it could have caused real harm.
There's no way this will actually be allowed. Musk is petty, has deep pockets, and giving up the trademark also means losing Twitter.com and all the links to it. This filing must be a publicity stunt.
If the baker loans to the butcher so that the butcher can buy from the baker, then the baker comes out ahead only if the butcher is good for the money.
You need something of substance exchanged, not just delivered. Nvidia hasn't gotten anything of substance from OpenAI yet.
I don't know shit about AI, but Nvidia could still give me $100b to buy their GPUs. Now I build a datacenter and Nvidia gets to claim $100b worth of sales AND a $100b stake in my datacenter. As I understand it, that's what's earning Nvidia all this side-eye.
Amazing and humbling to read about technological marvels from 1400 years ago. It really puts our modern achievements in a new light. It's tempting sometimes to think of innovation as a recent phenomen, but people have been innovating and solving the same problems for thousands of years. To be honest, I didn't even know they HAD e-commerce back then!
People seem to take for granted that since agriculture is one of the oldest technologies, it must be a "solved problem" and our modern approach is optimal.
When in reality, modern industrial agriculture is one of the most ham fisted and naive approached to the problem: just bulldoze, fertilize, irrigate, and spray everything into submission. With many negative consequences of course, which we generally refer to as "unsustainable".
Because understanding all the complex relationships within an ecosystem, and then how to engineer it to yield surplus material for human use without intolerable negative consequences, is in fact a cutting edge and poorly grasped science.
The "biocultural legacy" is an empirical approach to this problem refined over milenia, which we would do well to understand and appreciate.
I'd hardly call the solution to Malthusian traps "ham fisted". Modern industrial agriculture, or at least fertilizer use, has let us escape from constant famine.
If you believe in Malthusian traps then at best we've just kicked the can down the road and set ourselves up for an even greater collapse. When it's not just that humans are starving, but the topsoil is gone, the pollinators are dead, the oceans have warmed and the ice caps melted, etc etc.
The "green revolution" (a misnomer with our current use of the word) sure was effective; the point is that it was also unsustainable.
Of course the land has a finite carrying capacity. And I'm not anti-ag-tech either. In fact I believe higher precision and intelligence is the answer. We need to create highly diverse and cohesive ecosystems tailored to the local environment, which requires lots of observation and iteration.
You’re missing a critical step in your analysis, birth rates.
The exit for Malthusian traps is to temporarily have enough abundance to reduce the birth rate dramatically not simply to steadily increase food production. Being unsustainable isn’t actually a problem if the total population starts dropping.
I'm not claiming we need indefinite growth or really even care about the hypothetical traps - that was a response to the parent and the history of the green revolution.
"Unsustainable" isn't about matching rates; I mean we are washing away the topsoil, polluting the ocean, and releasing greenhouse gases (via fertilizer production from fossil fuels) that cause widespread climate change -- things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible.
Yes you can imagine an amount of degrowth that allows us to keep using these technologies without as much broad negative impact, but that doesn't seem as likely. Or even necessary, if we get our act together on clean energy and "regenerative" agriculture.
Wealthy societies can change their practices rather than seeking maximum short term efficiency that’s ultimately the solution not any one set of practices.
Regenerative agriculture doesn’t produces nearly as much food from the same resources so that’s only an option if you’ve escaped the trap.
Similarly there’s plenty of nitrogen in the atmosphere genetic engineering is a viable solution as long as you’re willing to take a slight hit to productivity as plants need energy to use atmospheric nitrogen.
Alternatively we can spend more energy to capture atmospheric nitrogen, but again only if we can avoid maximize output while minimizing inputs. And so fort across every issue you’re talking about.
> things that will make industrial agriculture itself impossible
You can continue to do all of those things across geological timeframes. Industrial agriculture doesn’t need healthy oceans, natural topsoil, or current levels of CO2. Carbon capture to produce chemical feedstocks or even fuels isn’t an efficient process, but it’s a proven technology. If batteries weren’t an option for example, we wouldn’t just give up.
In what way does that counter the claim it's ham fisted? Modern agriculture is a solution to malthusian traps because of its scale, not its precision. Shifting from small scale, artisanal farming to large, standardized operations was one of the key components of massively increasing food production.
Yeah, it's a weird catch-22 for modern ag: don't use aggressive chemical herbicide and pesticides, but mechanical weed control has it's downsides too: with compacting that ground or erosion or use too much fuel.
Right now congresspeople are only paid about $200k. People who want that position are likely to be people who plan to profit off of it in other ways, at the expense of the nation. We should pay congresspeople more, as well as increasing trading and lobbying restrictions, to help attract honest, capable candidates.
Agreed. The whole idea that they are in it for the “service” is a really naive idea. If we want honest hardworking and qualified people to do the job the salaries should be in the 500k to 1.5m (senate) range. Then knock out the corruption.
According to this link [1] 200k would put someone above the 80th percentile and not far below the 95th percentile in terms of household income for the DC metro area, so I don't see how that could be considered "underpaid", especially when you consider the benefits.
The type of person who gets elected to Congress is likely to be far above average in charisma/intelligence/skill, and hence underpaid relative to what they could attain in the private sector
I mean, it sounds dumb, but returns from further wealth are logarithmic; after a certain point, the only thing you can buy more of is power. And you’ve already got that, in this case!
If you’re in a situation where getting more wealth could endanger your power, it makes sense not to wealth-max since, again, what else could you buy with it? But you need to get into the “what else could you buy with it” regime for this reasoning to make sense.
Someone who only has basic needs gets there pretty early. But even the relatively unenlightened don’t need the second jet except, yannow, for power.
i'd support that if and only if it required congresspeople to divest from individual stocks. with perhaps some compromise like...maybe they could hold "total market" index funds, or are only able to trade once a year, or etc
Colleges used to be much more affordable even though they covered liberal arts and engineering together.
Are all colleges unaffordable? Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts? Maybe this isn't universal, maybe it's just that prestigious colleges all have strong liberal arts programs, either out of tradition or because it's required for being seen as prestigious.
Liberal arts courses arguably are still helpful for building general language and reasoning skills.
On the whole though, it does seem strange that I paid the same for a graduate level stats course and a freshman history course, even though the former taught me about five times as much.
> Do all colleges require engineering students to take liberal arts?
15 credit hours of liberal arts education isn't why college in the US is so expensive, and if one pays attention, they might even learn something from it.
If nothing else, you'll learn how to read and write.
Liberal arts is a huge grab bag of courses with varying rigor, quality, appeal and difficulty.
One of the best courses I had in college was a metalworking course during which I learned to weld.
But like many (engineering) students, for most of the liberal arts credit, I went with stuff where I could get the best possible grade with the least possible work.
Consoles are just loss leaders for software now. Hot take: this is true of the Steam Deck and Machine as well. Yes you can play games from other vendors, but PC gamers are very loyal to Steam and many will never bother. I imagine at least half of steam deck users just use it like a console, not like a PC.
It's pretty good as a consumer but they take a massive cut out for developers. I'm not crying about EA not getting its profit margins, but the cut Steam takes can really hurt indie devs.
> I'm not crying about EA not getting its profit margins, but the cut Steam takes can really hurt indie devs.
Indies actually lose more of their margin than EA does, because Steam reduces their 30% cut to 25% after $10m in sales and 20% after $50m in sales. Few indies are doing those numbers, so it's functionally a discount for AAA publishers to discourage them from leaving for their own launchers again (EA did leave back when it was a flat 30% rate for everyone).
Steam is a good experience and a good price relative to consoles, but other PC gaming storefronts do undercut them. See: Epic free games, isthereanydeal.com (competitive marketplace for legitimate game code resellers, which you can register with Steam,) and the class action lawsuits from Wolfire Games for price fixing.
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