The research I saw mentioning LLMs as being fairly good at chess had the caveat that they allowed up to 20 attempts to cover for it just making up invalid moves that merely sounded like legit moves.

I remember seeing that, and early on it seemed fairly reasonable then it started materializing pieces out of nowhere and convincing each other that they had already lost.

Because the business leaders are famously diligent about putting aside the marketing push and reading into the nuance of the research instead.

To reinforce this, just had a meeting with a software executive who has no coding experience but is nearly certain he’s going to lay off nearly all his employees because the value is all in the requirements he manages and he can feed those to a prompt just as well as any human can.

He does tutorial fodder introductory applications and assumes all the work is that way. So he is confident that he will save the company a lot of money by laying off these obsolete computer guys and focus on his “irreplaceable” insight. He’s convinced that all the negative feedback is just people trying to protect their jobs or people stubbornly not with new technology.

Why should that be bundled with peripherals… doesn’t seem to be a good “synergy”.

That is your use case, that relative to your individual usage only one application uses the framework. In that very specific scenario, sure. However with electron it’s forced to be that way for every single application no matter what your scenario is.

If electron packaged as a dependency, then it would be similar. But it’s always forcibly bundled.

On the scientific discoveries, we have gotten the low hanging fruit. The twentieth century was remarkable, but the limitations of physics are harsh. A lot of excitement as we went from barely pulling off heavier than air flight to a moon landing in under 50 years. Media naturally imagined space exploration to be just a matter of time. Alas everything is exponentially harder and any further loopholes are supremely elusive.

Probably the one area with a great deal of unrealized potential would be biology, because the ethical easy forward is slow.

The thing is that while people struggle harder and harder for a smaller chunk of scraps, they still have a lot of quality of life improvements over the standard of living back in the 70s.

You almost certainly have decent access to passable air conditioning, which was far from a given back then. Even if you can’t afford decent health care, the sporadic health care you can get is still better than the standard of care then. You can have a 60 inch television and more content provided to it than you could imagine… You can instantly engage with people all over the world.

Sea steading, BioShock here we come…

But seriously the fact that anyone ever mentions Mars colonization as a realistic strategy to do better than earth shows how stupid they are. Imagine the least habitable biome on earth where no one wants to live, imagine it even worse by unchecked climate change and realize it’s still just ashtoningly easier to live there than the most optimistic expectations of Mars.

Yes, as common as that is, in the scheme of driving it is relatively anomolous.

By hours in car, most of the time is spent on a freeway driving between two lines either at cruising speed or in a traffic jam. The most mind numbing things for a human, pretty comfortably in the wheel house of driving.

Once you are dealing with pedestrians, signs, intersections, etc, all those despite ‘common’ are anomolous enough to be dramatically more tricky for these systems.

In practice, the office is afforded quite a bit of unilateral power. Yes, other parts of the government can counteract, but at least in practice by default the executive branch can do quite a bit.

At least in my car, the lane following (not keeping system) is handy because the steering wheel naturally tends to go where it should and less often am I “fighting” the tendency to center. The keeping system is at least for me largely nothing. If I turn signal, it ignores me crossing a lane. If circumstances demand an evasive maneuver that crosses a line, it’s resistance isn’t enough to cause an issue. At least mine has fared surprisingly well in areas where the lane markings are all kind of jacked up due to temporary changes for construction. If it is off, then my arms are just having to generally assert more effort to be in the same place I was going to be with the system. Generally no passenger notices when the system engages/disengages in the car except for the chiming it does when it switches over to unaided operation.

So at least my experience has been a positive one, but it hits things just right with intervention versus human attention, including monitoring gaze to make sure I am looking where I should. However there are people who test “how long can I keep my hands off the steering wheel”, which is a more dangerous mode of thinking.

And yes, having cameras everywhere makes fine maneuvering so much nicer, even with the limited visualization possible in the synthesized ‘overhead’ view of your car.

To the extent it is people trying to fool people, it’s rich people looking to fool poorer people for the most part.

To the extent it’s actually useful, it’s to replace certain systems.

Think of the humble phone tree, designed to make it so humans aren’t having to respond, triage, and route calls. So you can have an AI system that can significantly shorten that role, instead of navigating a tedious long maze of options, a couple of sentences back and forth and you either get the portion of automated information that would suffice or routed to a human to take care of it. Same analogy for a lot of online interactions where you have to input way too much and if automated data, you get a wall of text of which you’d like something to distill the relevant 3 or 4 sentences according to your query.

So there are useful interactions.

However it’s also true that it’s dangerous because the “make user approve of the interaction” can bring out the worst in people when they feel like something is just always agreeing with them. Social media has been bad enough, but chatbots that by design want to please the enduser and look almost legitimate really can inflame the worst in our minds.

The thing about self driving is that it has been like 90-95% of the way there for a long time now. It made dramatic progress then plateaued, as approaches have failed to close the gap, with exponentially more and more input thrown at it for less and less incremental subjective improvement.

But your point is accurate, that humans have lapses and AI have lapses. The nature of those lapses is largely disjoint, so that makes an opportunity for AI systems to augment a human driver to get the best of both worlds. A constantly consistently vigilant computer driving monitoring and tending the steering, acceleration, and braking to be the ‘right’ thing in a neutral behavior, with the human looking for more anomolous situations that the AI tends to get confounded about, and making the calls on navigating certain intersections that the AI FSD still can’t figure out. At least for me the worst part of driving is the long haul monotony on freeway where nothing happens, and AI excels at not caring about how monotonous it is and just handling it, so I can pay a bit more attention to what other things on the freeway are doing that might cause me problems.

I don’t have a Tesla, but have a competitor system and have found it useful, though not trustworthy. It’s enough to greatly reduce the drain of driving, but I have to be always looking around, and have to assert control if there’s a traffic jam coming up (it might stop in time, but it certainly doesn’t slow down soon enough) or if I have to do a lane change in some traffic (if traffic conditions are light, it can change langes nicely, but without a whole lot of breathing room, it won’t do it, which is nice when I can afford to be stupidly cautious).

I think the self driving is likely to be safer in the most boring scenarios, the sort of situations where a human driver can get complacent because things have been going so well for the past hour of freeway driving. The self driving is kind of dumb, but it’s at least consistently paying attention, and literally has eyes in the back of it’s head.

However, there’s so much data about how it fails in stupidly obvious ways that it shouldn’t, so you still need the human attention to cover the more anomalous scenarios that foul self driving.

Now there’s models that reason,

Well, no, that’s mostly a marketing term applied to expending more tokens on generating intermediate text. It’s basically writing a fanfic of what thinking on a problem would look like. If you look at the “reasoning” steps, you’ll see artifacts where it just goes disjoint in the generated output that is structurally sound, but is not logically connected to the bits around it.

The probabilities of our sentence structure are a consequence of our speech, we aren’t just trying to statistically match appropriate sounding words.

With enough use of LLM, you will see how it is obviously not doing anything like conceptualizing the tokens it’s working with or “reasoning” even when it is marketed as “reasoning”.

Sticking to textual content generation by LLM, you’ll see that what is emitted is first and foremost structurally appropriate, but beyond that it’s mostly “bonus” for it to be narratively consistent and an extra bonus if it also manages to be factually consistent. An example I saw from Gemini recently had it emit what sounded like an explanation of which action to pick, and then the sentence describing actually picking the action was exactly opposite of the explanation. Both of those were structurally sound and reasonable language, but there’s no logical connection between the two portions of the emitted output in that case.

He’s got the ‘real’ election ahead of him, and given that it’s likely there are two independents in the race, hard to say what that will be.

That said, being too cynical and just ignoring what he says as lying right off the bat isn’t going to do anyone any favors. Reward the mindset, punish betrayal if it happens. A healthy skepticism is good, but not a completely defeatist outlook.

The fact they took a copout path to not speak to the important part is a worrisome sign. If the matter were actually before them, they may rule it as unconstitutional, but they seem to be inclined to have the matter never be technically before them.

A district ruling against the order? Let it stand without taking up the case and potentially setting it nationwide. The people have no standing to appeal because they won their case.

Oh look, a jusge in Texas ruled in favor of the order, all of a sudden the government is shuffling immigrants around and deporting all birthright citizens from that jurisdiction.

So when someone has tried to rationalize ending birthright citizenship, they fixate in the “and subject to the jusrisdiction”.

So they argue that a child born to parents who are citizens elsewhere are subject to the jurisdiction of the parents country of origin. To make this leap they say that language matching the intent should have been “and exclusively subject to the jurisdiction”. Or else they might claim it can only apply to parents legally in the country, but that didn’t let them block visa holders like they would want.

So technically it shouldn’t still be able to make stateless individuals even with their rationalization, but that is of no comfort in any practical terms.