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.

Oldest hard drives I’ve dealt with were 4RU. Those systems also had me attaching reels of tape with write enable rings.

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.

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.

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.

0.2 people, not percentage. That was what they were trying to straighten out because percent per 100k doesn’t make sense.

Question is whether he dislikes Silwa or just recognizes he can’t just spend Silwa into sufficient popularity.

However if he funds a “plausible Democrat”, he might split the left vote.

You joke but he might like that just fine. Two progressive candidates splitting the progressive vote could hand an easier victory to a right winger.

Having a head of state immune from criminal prosecution seems to be a thing Americans wouldn’t abide… right?

Ah yes survivorship bias.

Becomes easier to internalize when you get old enough to start to see the “crap new stuff” when you were young become the “stuff that lasts forever”.

I didn’t build a home but did buy a house that was recent construction. We had an inspector go over the place and he was shocked…

Evidently they actually did a respectable job building the house, evidently the best foundation and attic he had ever seen. He found a couple of things due to settling and some minor wear, but everything was just done right.

I hope that’s the net result, just afraid that so many others will be dismissive of someone asserting autism, particularly with certain folks seeming to think being autistic is a license to be inconsiderate while claiming it also means you are smart and so is worth declaring a self-diagnosis.

improved how we recognize and diagnose it.

Well, we at least have changed how we recognize and diagnose it, I’m not totally convinced it’s 100% an “improvement”. We’ve kind of jumbled up a whole bunch of people under a common umbrella and diluted the implications of the term, to the point where it tells you negligible practical information when someone is described as “autistic” or “on the spectrum”.

Keep in mind this is a system with millions of miles under it’s belt and it still doesn’t understand what to do with a forced left turn lane in a very short trip in a fairly controlled environment with supremely good visual, road, and traffic conditions. LIDAR wouldn’t have helped the car here, there was no “whoops, confusining visibility”, it just completely screwed up and ignored the road markings.

It’s been in this state for years now, of being surprisingly capable, yet horrible screw ups being noted frequently. They seem to be like 95% of the way there and stuck, with no progress in reality just some willfull denial convincing them to move forward anyway.