It would be very strange if they didn't try things like these. It's actually a pretty competent government that knows how to look for itself, the very fact that Salafism hasn't yet destroyed them (the Saudi Family) is a massive achievement of its own, not to mention the quite effective OPEC+ cartel.
That being said this will be decided by whichever technology is cheaper (including things like the risk premia of being potentially cut off from supplies), regardless of agitation either way. Unless somehow, magically, we can force everyone to pay up for their share of damage caused by temperature change - which is extremely far away from being realizable. UN Security Council cannot agree on much more obvious things, like deciding in specific cases that bombing civilians is actually illegal.
I think that the point is that it reveals that Saudi's renewable energy initiatives [1] are just green-washing. The undercover reporting reveals clearly that their singular objective is increasing and prolonging demand for oil and natural gas.
Because "greenwashing" refers to the Saudi's attempts to say that what they're doing is for ecological, climate reasons.
You're right, they are earnestly pursuing both, for exactly the reasons you describe: pure profit.
But Saudi Arabia has implied that they are pursuing green tech for environmental reasons, which is absolutely antithetical to the stance of "let's burn every single drop of oil we can before it stops being profitable."
"... lobby against government subsidies for electric vehicles in countries around the world."
invalidates the claims they have made to be earnestly pursuing renewables. Personal transportation is a huge consumer of nonrenewable energy today, and EVs are the shortest path to transitioning personal transportation to renewable energy.
> the very fact that Salafism hasn't yet destroyed them
Why would it? My understanding is that royal family promotes this particular brand of religion because it helps them maintain social control. It also makes it harder to infiltrate their country with external influences.
The royal family is actually liberal compared to the people they rule. Read about the Grand Mosque Seizure [1], wherein Salafist extremists seized Saudi's main religious site and demanded the House of Saud to step down because they were influenced by "Westernization".
After that event, the royal family struck a deal that gave the extremists more influence in exchange for holding onto power...we're talking women banned from television, cinemas shut down, extreme gender segregation, etc. It was that way until MBS, a relatively liberal person, ascended and whisked some power away from the religious police and extremists, with an iron fist, of course.
Despite their vast oil wealth, Saudi really lacks the human capital to keep the gears going without the help of foreign expats. If the oil wells hypothetically dry up tomorrow...the country is in deep trouble.
And to some quite extreme people any kind of government that is not solely based on religious wisdom expressed via the clergy is an affront to God (to Allah) - an extremely serious crime worthy of uprisings and martyrdom. Doesn't matter if it's a monarchy, a democracy, or a Soviet/Chinese style one-party system. Unless that party was exclusively filled with religious scholars.
(there's an alternative line of thought that says "you gotta follow the leader because a leaderless state is even worse", and that line of thought is generally prevailing in muslim countries; that's how one would justify having some out of the blue family running Saudi Arabia, with its two out of three most important Muslim holy places)
Not sure if everyone knows just how easy making something like this is. This kind of an app takes less than one week to develop, using the OpenAI function calling API.
Yes, it is easy and it will get easier, the overall quality of software products is rising fast.
Apps and product development is like a marketplace now, the demand for software is huge but most people just don't know about what they can do with software. So there are hundreds of GPT Excel's out there, but there is demand for thousands so if you can do this in one week, do it! There is a lot of people trying those projects just for fun and spending money on it.
I'll give you 10k usd if you copy this work in 1 hour (which is much easier than creating it, mind you). Otherwise stop downplaying other's people work.
OK, do I understand correctly you are offering 10000 USD for someone who recreates this service (=a website that generates an Excel formula based on its description in English) in a week?
Frankly, and I don't want to downplay anybody's work, but this seems doable. The core engine based on API calls to OpenAI is probably a few hours. The remaining time is for user authentication, subscriptions, payments, graphics and so on.
I know this because I'm using OpenAI API for personal automation projects and in spite of its quirks it's relatively simple especially if you don't need continuity and each task is independent.
No, that was a joke. But only a few very capable people can do something at the same level as GPT Excel in one week. Including videos, templates, etc. A prototype? Yes. it will be bad. If you wanna bet, I'm all in.
Just to bring back the comment that sparked this off:
> Not sure if everyone knows just how easy making something like this is. This kind of an app takes less than one week to develop, using the OpenAI function calling API.
So - the original statement was "something like this". Not the design, the videos, the templates but the core, essential functionality. And that is probably a couple of hours work.
I suspect the real value is mainly in the prompt templates. I haven't tried but there's probably some wording that helps guide the results. It might be that these took a lot of trial and error to tune - or it might be that the first thing I try gives me results as good as GPTExcel.
Dunno if it's what happened in this case, but solar flares make the atmosphere bigger* which increases drag on satellites in low Earth orbit.
That said, the satellites have an expected life of 5 years so it's not necessarily a big deal. Their planned constellation is so large that it's dependent on having a nearly continuous churn of replacement satellites.
As one example, IIRC earlier this year they lost some freshly launched satellites in a batch because of a flare, which made the atmosphere expand in density by up to 50% at their altitudes and didn't allow those satellites to point their solar panels at the sun in time.
Starlink sats are launched into a very low orbit and use their ion thrusters to raise into an operational orbit so any which happen to be nonfunctional deorbit very quickly (in the 2 months between this happening and it being reported, many of the involved satellites had already deorbited) and because it maximizes how many they can put up per launch.
So the satellites were lost, as they needed the panel pointed at the sun to sufficiently power the thrusters to overcome drag, but if they moved out of the safe mode orientation of having the solar panel edge point in the direction of motion, the drag would be too high.
Indeed, if you don't have enough delta V to maintain your altitude due to atmospheric drag, increased by solar flares. They've lost them before due to this, an entire batch.
Yes. Or if it's using dynamic libraries and not compiled static, you can use LD_PRELOAD and overwrite ptrace() to do nothing. You don't have to patch anything then, which might be easier.
int ptrace(int request, int pid, void *addr, void *data) {
return 0;
}
Thanks, both! This was used in a static build that decrypted and checksummed its binary before execution, which ruled out naive implementations of the attacks above. I agree there are ways round these too, but I believe it was just intended to discourage amateurs rather than protect against serious hacking.
Your comment is very valid. I'd just add that AI tools are clearly taking the "YouTube approach": they provide a large value added, ignore copyright for the moment, and hope to resolve it peacefully at some later point in time. This worked very well for YouTube.
YouTube wasn't killed and thrived as a platform throughout the process. Meanwhile YT ads funded the lawsuits and negotiations, with a surplus. It is pretty much a solved problem now. This is as peaceful as it gets when you genuinely infringe on someone's very valuable rights.
Yeah they survived but I think we're worse off in a world of Content ID, copystrikes, erosion of fair use, theft of ad revenue by game companies. The list goes on. YouTube should probably be a lesson, not a model to copy.
Limiting the scope to software, I'd say it's fair to distinguish MIT licenses from GPL. The latter provides way more freedom for the user (as opposed to corporations willing to profit without giving back). I am fair more comfortable contributing to an AGPLv3 software as opposed to a MIT licensed one.
I can't talk about licensing for content creators (like youtube), because I do not have much experience about it.
You're right, but I don't see how we could not have those things with the copyright laws as they stand and people being what they are. Maybe it could be a little bit better, but not substantially better.
Much less impressive, though still useful: ChatGPT is an awesome movie subtitle translator. Only very unusual phrases need to be corrected, often there are no such cases. There are projects on GitHub that automate the translation. Short SRT files can be just pasted into the chat with appropriate instructions.
> Ivy league students don't get there by themselves. A life-time of adults help you.
See, this is what I do not get. I got without excessive effort into a top university in Europe. I never had to be taken care nearly this much. Learned calculus at 14-15 by buying an old book in a used book store. Learned programming at around the same age by reading C++ tutorials and doing programming competitions (ACM style, but easier). Ran in various science competitions, here indeed teachers helped me by giving me books, exercises and guidance, with greater or smaller success. Most of my university peers had similar histories. I believe I would be admitted to an Ivy school if I were American, based on my professional experience with people that studied there.
What gives? Is it the last >=2 decades that changed the picture too much? Is it somehow an exclusively American problem? Where are the self-motivated kids, why aren't they taking most spots in those schools? Did something systematically kill the motivation?
The slight (or perhaps not so slight) neurosis and coping mechanisms like "I wasn't even trying, so I didn't fail" imply that those kids are way, way past their comfort zone. Being this far out is very unhealthy, can even be lethal.
> I believe I would be admitted to an Ivy school if I were American, based on my professional experience with people that studied there.
The admission rates are very, very low. I have no problem believing you could follow the studies there, but so could most people who applied. In the US the advertised admission rates are in the single digit percents, and that is after people who have a leg up from having parents who attended the school and various others.
So you end up with a bunch of kids who need to have absolutely top grades, with ridiculous extracurricular activities like publishing research or starting a business. You end up having to give up your entire childhood to do things to have a chance at one of these schools.
Where does self-motivation go? Well if you already know you're going to be a programmer, your motivation is to code, that's how you get good at it. But you also need to be doing your other classes like literature and French plus running your charity. You'll be reminded of this by helpful teachers and parents.
Admission rates are heavily dependent on how easy it is to apply, how many times you're allowed to apply, how likely a student thinks their chances are, basically heavily dependent on the college application process, which is very different in different countries. E.g, I think Indian IITs have <1% acceptance rates but you probably don't have to shell over a $100 to apply.
That may be it, under-supply of schools. What's required there besides perfect, or near perfect SAT scores?
Also, I've always wondered why so few Americans decide to study in Europe. I understand some might not be able to afford the remote study, but this doesn't explain everything. Language is not a problem, every top university offers all, or almost all master's level courses also in English.
I imagine this is a generalisation, some of the elite universities in Europe require 2 year prep programs before you can even apply (e.g. France) which doesn't sound easier than top American ivies?
That's quite some difference, especially if we consider that Harvard has special tracks for legacies and various others. What's the real admission rate? 2%?
For other European unis I don't know what exactly the criteria are for being elite.
I've always had a problem with admission rates, since they obviously depend on self-selection (and supply of schools).
Germany is a good example here, they have a wide spectrum of schools starting already past primary education (around 10 years old). Many of those schools, those of the "mid" and especially "lower" rank do not bash into children's heads that they absolutely must go to a good university or they will be a failure. As a result those kids do not apply there, instead they go into internships and get a job. Overall there is a continuum that a) reduces pressure on people that probably shouldn't study medicine or law, b) gives better education to talented children by putting them together in more aligned groups.
Crucially, the admission to those schools past age of 10 is not zip-code based. Admitting children by zip-code past the very first school where you learn how to sit, read, write and multiply numbers is nonsense.
A process like this will result in a higher university admission rate, all else being equal, including the "true difficulty" of getting into a specific university.
Just go with national / global pool for the denominator. There are about 4 million high school graduation age children in the usa. Probably about 80-100 million world wide. About 20000 ivy league spots per year. So you need to be about one of 5 in a 1000 in the usa. Maybe 1 in a 1000 globally after adding global equivalents of us Ivy League schools. basically top 0.1 to 0.5 %.
The admission rate alone doesn't tell you if, as a candidate, I have more chances of getting into this or that university, because it doesn't say anything about who applies. There might big differences between the pools of applicants.
Oxbridge's admissions rates are not the lowest in the UK; schools no one outside the UK has heard of, like Warwick, have the lowest, and their admissions rates are still two to three times higher than the Ivies'. In many countries, universities admit all applicants that meet the qualifications. An example is Switzerland, where ETH Zurich—by every measure, among the world's finest universities—admits every Swiss with a Matura (university-track high school diploma) who applies.
People do get kicked out of ETH, the selection is after admission, not before (as opposed to e.g. most US universities), at least when you enter right after high school. So it's not comparable. Granted it's still easier to "get into", but that won't get you much if you can't graduate.
Another thing to consider is that the pool of applicants might be different between universities. 1% admission rate tells you a very different story whether 100% or 10% were decent applicants in the first place.
> I believe I would be admitted to an Ivy school if I were American, based on my professional experience with people that studied there.
They do take exceptional students from poorer backgrounds in many cases. But the biggest qualification for Ivy League places is your prestige and how rich you are. They want Names and old money to be admitted and try to keep the riff-raff out as much as possible. They accept poor but extraordinary students because they can becomes Names in the future to enhance the reputation of the establishment. Don't ever believe it's anything to do with you personally.
It's hardly in ruin, has more cash on the balance sheet than, for example, all the help sent to Ukraine, military and humanitarian. It's just that making a shit ton of money ain't actually that fun because your job is basically to constantly patch holes in this gargantuan ship that never stops.
"In ruin" is probably too strong. But, there are lots of expectations that double-digit YoY revenue growth will continue forever. Growth that far exceeds audience growth. That's mostly from ads, and now the most lucrative queries have nothing but ads above the fold...videos are fully saturated with ads, better targeting is constrained by various privacy laws, Apple, etc. So that expectation cannot be met for much longer. They have squeezed all the easy juice. Growth will continue, but at a much lower rate that more closely matches audience growth.
So, "in ruin" may not be right, but there is some kind of big shift coming. The conditions they've enjoyed for a long time aren't going to hold.
The first point is more important. The second point mostly helps with getting the first point done. When other things get stable you can adjust things at your job, or just quit and do something else entirely.
Someone in their 20s often believes bullshit stories about productivity, and understands very little about the social practice of allocation of resources and rewards (aka politics). This can be easily observed by hearing statements like "you know, there is politics at place X!". Gosh, well I hope so, otherwise it would mean there is nothing valuable at place X (i.e. nothing to allocate), or there is exactly one person there.
That very well may be true, but what's wrong with trying to cheat the system and do only the fun part? Clearly some people manage to do just that. I generally don't care about making the business fly, I care about what I care about.
A better discussion would be about what can you reasonably expect, for example you'll probably never lead a project which puts a limit on your salary. It may still be a good decision.
That being said this will be decided by whichever technology is cheaper (including things like the risk premia of being potentially cut off from supplies), regardless of agitation either way. Unless somehow, magically, we can force everyone to pay up for their share of damage caused by temperature change - which is extremely far away from being realizable. UN Security Council cannot agree on much more obvious things, like deciding in specific cases that bombing civilians is actually illegal.