621–630 of 633 posts
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9 figure is hardly enough when some kid sells their vscode fork to them for more, is it? Why not just boomerang and get $$$.
Did that really happen? What was the fork you are talking about?
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How many lavishly-paid deans and bureaucrats and administrators are employed for each grad student?
It's not easy to disentangle and it varies by country and institution, but those positions are not normally directly funded by public research grants.
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4. Manage the Nitrogen Cycle Easy solution - eat less products that pass an animal first - reduces nitrogen pollution by 10x intantly, low tech. I'd re-formulate: 4. Make people more flexible to changing their mindsets & habits - this is the ultimate problem.
In other words, a boil-the-ocean scheme. Solutions that require a great many humans to change an ingrained behavior are usually non-starters.
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It's not just gatekeeping though. The reason you get a qualified, credentialed structural engineer to sign off on your house instead of just YOLOing the build is so that you (and your insurance company) can sue their pants off if it collapses.
If a future version of Claude ever gets less error prone than a human, I might prefer the smaller chance of a building collapse from Claude than the larger but insured chance from a human engineer.
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Are these theoretical spherical scientists that work in free range habitats just doing science and nibbling on carrots? The telephone came out of a corporation's research lab and there was a lot of money and profit motive involved.
Was the Wright brothers working for any corporation or for money?
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It can indeed feel perverse, but we have to do what is realistic, not what is unrealistic, especially with climate change where we are on a clock. Fixing our politics is probably much, much harder than lowering the price of solar to such low values that the market would simply have no choice but to adopt it, or developing other technological solutions.
Fixing the politics is still necessary, and rather urgent. (Yes, I don't see how.) Otherwise we are in for a great societal upheaval that might make low price of solar irrelevant.
I agree. It's just wishful thinking to say that oh if we just lower the price of solar then it'll be okay. There are innumerable issues which are blocked by politics and we will never solve them all without fixing politics.
> Otherwise we are in for a great societal upheaval that might make low price of solar irrelevant.
These days I think a great societal upheaval may be the only way to fix politics.
From Jeff's twitter post: > Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise…
From Jeff's twitter post: > Our general approach is to automate the experimental loop. We think this approach is broadly applicable across many different fields of science and engineering. We’ll initially focus on ML research and engineering, but believe the approach can help with important subproblems in nearly every one of the fourteen NAE Grand Challenge problems. We think doing this well requires strong expertise…
We’ll face a bigger problem sooner rather than later, which is population collapse. Youth don’t procreate amy more. Birth numbers are at an all time low. We see the issue arise in rats and the experiment is all too relevant for the current age of social media and fearmongering (John B. Calhoun’s rodent “utopia” experiment). All these “Grand Challenge” problems seem trivial to that.
Furthermore: Why is 1 here when 2 is present. Again, solar is usually not relevant when we want power when it’s dark… even theoretical it wouldn’t work. We’d need a high capacity dirt cheap storage, and even then we can’t keep it till winter when there’s no sun to go around and effectively supply 3. Irrelevant when there’s population collapse. And even then, why would we want this instead of reforestation and low depth water protection from fishing and environmental issues.
5. How is this even a problem. Unless we got corrupt(ed/able) governments (read: lobbies) that allow exemptions in every law designed to protect the environment (also, settlements are a twisted way to fill governments pockets instead of rooting out evil) 7/8/9 the inverse effects are even worse health, as everything is fixable. 9 would incur even more social isolation, more so than the internet did 10 seems to be the first that’s actually reasonable Same for 11 For 12 see 9 13 yes but that’s something that a self learner would already be able to do. AI is at a level that we can manage
/rant