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As I understood the grandparent post, the idea is that a highest-level university should 10× its student throughput, and 9 other, lower-level universities would be made redundant by that.

This would make sense if all what an elite university did were providing elite-level education. Of course exclusive schools provide other benefits, often more valuable for the target audience than the education proper: a highly filtered student body, networking and bonding with the right, upwardly mobile people (either mega-talented, or just smart kids of rich and influential parents), a luxury-grade diploma that few can afford. Maybe you could theoretically 10× Stanford or MIT, but likely not Yale.


This has little to do with EVs, and much more to do with the idea that whoever brings a heavier vehicle to collision, wins (and lives). Hence the propensity to drive truck-sized SUVs and actual F-150s with just the driver, and the light load, but the pleasant feeling of safety. Who's gonna survive in an incident of road rage gone bad, a Ford Explorer or a Fiat 500?

Coming back to the EVs, a small EV is a possibility, because it takes less power to move a lighter and smaller car. But would it sell on the US market?


>it takes less power to move a lighter and smaller car

A smaller car has less space for battery than an SUV. Because batteries are extremely heavy, that smaller car needs to be overbuilt compared to its gasoline counterpart, which further reduces room for battery. Then, because safety standards are harder to meet with small cars, the smaller car needs to be overbuilt even more.

This means that you get cars that only have half the range a gasoline-powered car does, and the gas powered car recharges an order of magnitude faster than the EV does. Oh yeah, and the people who buy smaller cars like this tend to live in places where there's no charging other than going to a gas station anyway.

It wouldn't sell on the US market because better alternatives exist. It could sell on the Chinese market because there are no better alternatives.


The game is missing the side effects of a nuclear strike: contamination of the territory, inevitable civilian casualties, international outcry and isolation, internal outcry and protests, etc. Without these, a nuke is a wonder weapon, it's stupid not to use it.

One can try themself, for Claude is fine at waging war [1]. Notice the thoughtful UX, including the typing "I ACCEPT FULL RESPONSIBILITY".

[1]: https://nitter.poast.org/elder_plinius/status/20264475874910...


They had to do with "state-of-the-art radars", "military-grade communication systems", etc.

Yeah but they dealt with sota and military-spec systems their entire career and they know that it just means "lowest bidder".

Confirmed: the van network in Brooklyn exists, a ride still costs $2 (compared to $3 on an MTA bus), the vans / minibuses largely follow popular bus routes, and stop basically anywhere along the route where it is safe, including on a red light.

A pretty dumb eInk display that could do one thing, that is, receive and blit a bitmap at a given location, would suffice for great many uses. It only needs a way to connect to wifi or zigbee securely, e.g. using TLS.

This is sort of related to a revelation I had once I got into Home Assistant.

The usual idea is a that a smart home becomes filled with smart devices and yet what worked really well for me was having dumb devices with a very smart brain in the middle.

Buttons, switches, lamps, and sensors are commodify Zigbee devices and the entirety of the logic and programming is done on the Home Assistant server. The downside is latency.


Usually you can bind ZigBee devices together. I have multiple IKEA "rodret" switches bound to generic ZigBee smart plugs from Aliexpress. Works great, with minimal latency.

With zha, you can bind them together from the Home Assistant device page.

I usually favor an architecture that can work without Home Assistant, such as standalone ZigBee dimmers, or contactors that can work with existing wiring. Home Assistant brings automation on top, but it doesn't matter much if it breaks (I mostly notice the shutters not opening with sunrise). Then Internet connectivity can bring additional features, but most things still work if it's down.

I'd say it has been pretty solid for years, and I don't stress too much when I have server issues.


Such devices exist are are expensive, more so than e-readers.

...but obtaining that phrase may be nontrivial.

Sorry, I mean the current implementation seems trivial to spoof. I agree that doing something like your suggestion would make me feel much more comfortable about those logins.

Everybody and their dog will be doing it. Actually, the dog will be in charge. Dogs are loyal, enthusiastic, and require less office space. With their endless desire to play and to please, they will take over the game development industry.

In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.


They also don't take 20 years to become smart like pesky resource-exhausting humans. I bet you could be up and running from a pup in 10-20 months.

I still can’t believe Altman said that. I mean I can, but still.

I can because I have also used similar arguments. There are people who say that you should use a real artist instead of AI due to AI's water use. Yet in actuality asking a human to draw something will require more water. There are people who think AI uses more resources than humans which is why it must be said.

> a human to draw something will require more water.

That human would require the same amount of water whether you ask them to draw or not, and would exist anyway because they are not born for productivity reasons. "Creation" of humans isn't driven by the amount of work to accomplish.

You are not causing more water to be used by asking a human to work on something.

Same for energy consumption.

This argument doesn't work at all.

What you do for humans to use fewer resources is to work on making us produce less garbage, and produce things using techniques that are less resource-intensive.


> You are not causing more water to be used by asking a human to work on something.

That's certainly not true. Asking me to think hard about something will cause me to burn more calories. Asking me to do physical work even more so.


Would you be completely at rest if you were not asked to produce stuff?

Do you think AI replaces our hard thinking and our physical work?

AI or not, I personally intend to keep thinking and my physical activity.


I don't do any moral judgement at all, and I also don't predict the future.

I respond to "You are not causing more water to be used by asking a human to work on something.", because that statement is false. (Mental) work has an effect on the human metabolism.


This whole discussion is wild to me. Comparing people and machines like this is not productive. It is not actually answering a serious question.

> There are people who say that you should use a real artist instead of AI due to AI's water use.

Nobody I know says this. In fact, I've never heard of this ever before, and I read artist and hobby communities pretty hostile to AI, but I never once read this nice strawman you've built.

People say you should use a real artist instead of AI for a multitude of reasons:

- Because they want to enjoy art created by humans.

- Because it provides a living to artists, even artists for minor work like advertising or lesser commercial illustrations.

- Because AI "art" is built by stealing from human artists, and while human art has a history of copying and cloning, never before has tech allowed this in such a massive, soulless scale.

Sam Altman gave a deranged, completely out of touch reply, and he should be called to task for it, not defended. A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal. That's a very stupid thing to say.


> A human being is not some number on a spreadsheet, built over 20 years in order to achieve some "smartness" goal

But from the perspective of the business and capitalism that's exactly what a human is. A tool that consumes resources and hopefully produces more value for the business than it consumes.

Sure we can dance around this and you can pretend your employer gives a shit about you and your family and your childhood stories but they don't.


> Sure we can dance around this and you can pretend your employer gives a shit about you and your family and your childhood stories but they don't.

I don’t get what you’re doing here. They didn’t say anything like that.


> I don’t get what you’re doing here

You said that a CEO was out of bounds for framing employees as numbers on a spreadsheet. To me this suggests that you believe company owners should care about the humanity of their workers. And I'm saying they don't.


I think by "they", Forgeties79 means me, the_af.

I get the general point you're making. Indeed, Altman's take is capitalism taken to 11. There was a lot of that going on before AI or the past few decades, but I don't think it wasn't as extreme and for every company. There's definitely a conversation to be had about modern capitalism (and plenty of people studying it, too). However, not everything is a FAANG or tech startup. Some owners do care about their employees to a higher degree than just numbers on a spreadsheet (not going into the whole "we're a family" bullshit speech, I mean the genuine stuff).

Imagine thinking of people as "resource-hogs before they reach peak smartness"!

What's new here, in my opinion, is people like Sam Altman behaving as if they didn't understand normal human behavior. You cannot simply compare an LLM to a growing human. You cannot say things like "grow a human over 20 years before they achieve smartness". What? That's not how human beings think about human beings, and Altman is detached from real human behavior here. He's saying out loud the thoughts he should keep to himself, a bit like a person with coprolalia. And it's ok for us to dislike him for this, even if he's just voicing the opinions of extreme techno-capitalism.

Sam Altman once joked (?) he wouldn't know how to raise his child without ChatGPT. Maybe he should ask ChatGPT how to behave more like a human? Or at least fake it?


It's that second point. We live in an age of artificial scarcity created by a system of social organization that we've mostly not argued about since the 50s, that's now showing it's stretch marks.

If it weren't for the need to 'earn' a living, I'd say to the other two points: Por que no los dos? Save for the capital argument (which is valid, I'm not saying it isn't. You will starve if you don't make money), why is it necessarily true that the two (AI and people) are in competition?

In fact, I think "actual" artists would benefit incredibly from the use of AI, which they could do if it weren't a shibboleth (like I said, for good reason). You'd no longer have to have an army of underpaid animators from vietnam to bring your OC to life - you could just use your own art and make it move and sing. We'd not need huge lumbering organizations full of people who, let's be honest, work there making other people's dreams come to life in large part because it's a better bet than taking a joe-job at the local denny's (after all, you're doing the thing you love even if it isn't truly "yours").

I've had this discussion with younger folks, who are legitimately shook by the state of things. They're worried that all the work they've done to this point is going to be moot, because they've correctly assessed that the whole capital system isn't going anywhere any time soon, and they've been prepping to try and get a job at netflix, or disney, or paramount - because that's the world we've handed them. They see those positions drying up and what else are you going to do? They have the power financially and politically and without them you're doing "not art" for work, which sucks because you need to work.

I say; eat the rich. General wildcat strikes until UBI. Tax the everloving shit out of capital gains and peel back personal income taxes. We (the millenials) were handed a steaming pile of shit for a world, so at least we know what would constitute not an absolute disaster for Zeds, Alphas, etc. Have I gone totally off the rails for a conversation about AI? Actually, I don't believe so. The cultural pushback is a function of a busted system. After all, it's the economy, stupid.


>Nobody I know says this.

>I never once read this nice strawman you've built.

The instance of it I found was in a YouTube comment section.


Ok, let me reframe in a less assertive way: it's not common to say that you should hire human artists "because of water", so uncommon it's not a widely held belief I've seen in artist or hobbyist communities, and therefore using this to justify Altman's deranged remark seems weird to me.

Over a year ago yeah I occasionally heard that argument or some light variation of it, though not nearly to this ridiculous extent that you’re portraying now. Now? It’s basically a strawman. Most people’s objections revolve around the theft/reckless scraping that has literally taken down public infrastructure required to train these models as well as the ridiculous expectations being put that all of us implement it in literally every aspect of our lives even if it doesn’t fit, especially professionally.

These guys can't watch a dystopian scifi movie without picturing themselves as the bad guy.

Yup. The Torment Nexus meme proved depressingly accurate.

It helps to picture some sort of extraterrestrial saying this. Maybe someone like Alan Tudyk in "Resident Alien". It makes much more sense than to assume it's a human being saying these things.

>In the meantime, the financial industry will be taken over by cats.

Cats would certainly be less flummoxed by stock values suddenly plummeting; they may even enjoy knocking them over.


Beavers will control construction and infrastructure... building dams, bridges, and entire housing developments with zero corruption.

The 2-factor SMS messages usually say: "Do not give this code to anyone! The bank will NEVER ask you for this code!".

The sideloading warning is much much milder, something like "are you sure you want to install this?".


You'll then get more warnings if you want to give the sideloaded app additional permissions. And if they want to make the sideloading warnings more dire, that wouldn't be nearly as unreasonable.

the main issue is the bank using sms and OTP apps instead of something like passkeys and mandatory in bank setup.

One of my banks uses a card reader and pin to log in, seems more secure.

Pins can still be phished. Just make the phishing a live proxy resembling the real site.

A fundamental difference with e.g. FIDO2 (especially hardware-backed) is that the private credentials are keyed to the relying party ID, so it's not possible for a phising site to intercept the challenge-response.


That’s just as bad. You need to take out the human error out of the equation.

> The bank will NEVER ask you for this code!

> Please enter the code we sent you in the app.

lol, lmao even


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