ben_w

24 ms·

421.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Argos, Poundland, Tesco, Lidl… Big surprise when I moved to Germany was that there's a Woolworth's brand here that survived independently to the one in the UK which closed decades ago.
422.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Google's search results defaulting to starting with an LLM; and by the power of SEO, so are many of the search results themselves. Having to add "reddit" to get genuine results was already a meme 3 years back: https:/&#
423.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Indeed, though as they had the power to stop him, I believe that still counts for > He could not be doing what he has been doing without them. They share responsibility
424.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Right now for too many critical components there often isn't an alternative to China, and even when it exists it can be at too small a scale. This is basically why China won the trade was vs. Trump's tariffs. People are also incre
425.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> If China stops selling you solar panels tomorrow, you still have all the solar panels they sold you until now. Which is great, unless demand for electricity goes up loads. (Edit: Which I expect to occur if for example AI is transformat
426.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> I'd be a little more worried about this if every single traditional media wasn't already outputting propaganda for party lines and a very particular version of the "national interest". It's the same idea, to be
427.
by ben_w 2mo ago
For now. Globalisation's great right up until your manufacturing base decides they don't like you, or you them. Reshoring is expensive for all the reasons offshoring was ever tempting in the first place, so we'll have to wait
428.
by ben_w 2mo ago
"All" sounds like marketing to me; if the bleeding edge AI firms knew how to do such a thing with such reliably, they'd do it themselves to prevent models from committing felonies while under test. Improving false positives
429.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> But your point stands. Where are the amazing digital products/stuff? I get that it might take time to arrive as we scale up compute and learn new paradigms. But so much infra already exists (deployment pipeliens, everyone reachabl
430.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> You can give custom instructions to a model like K3 when you host it locally. It is unclear if that would be sufficient to circumvent trained-in propaganda.
431.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> It's reasonably safe bet that there will always be someone on the planet with the means and interest to commodify the models. They don't seem very hard to make; we're swimming in options. I don't think that is a saf
432.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> What does it matter if they weren't developed in France or the UK if the average French or English person can download and run them locally? And if countries need a big AI of their own, for whatever odd reason, they can work out a
433.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Isn't it more likely that countries without native frontier models will use open-weights models that will let them be 70% as productive of counties that do? Possibly, but sometimes being marginally better lets you win all the game
434.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Anyone saying 10x as a serious claim is clearly using a round number and vibes; however, even if it were so, AI getting popular 3 years ago does not mean what you say. The earliest used models in this category would easily 10x (what did I j
435.
by ben_w 2mo ago
I'm surprised it got that epithet, I'm used to "upset by weird sex stuff" as being a US-right position, and "woke" being a term that's used by US-right to denigrate US-left. Then again, I'm also old e
436.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Most people will not want to create their own unique movies, even if it is technically possible. Even if it's 1% of the population, this would be enough to end Hollywood and similar agglomerations when an entire film costs $10 to
437.
by ben_w 2mo ago
While this is absolutely the case today, and obviously so, history has shown governments are quite capable of starving their people, they have managed this even by mismanagement while those regions still exported food.
438.
by ben_w 2mo ago
The profit to be made on futures trading is there to supply the capital needed to fund the benefit to the people selling those futures, i.e the farmers. Accurately and fairly pricing risk is a whole field in its own right, one whose surfac
439.
by ben_w 2mo ago
And still we are subject to bad harvests, floods, droughts, pests, and diseases. Any given farmer still has to deal with the consequences of this, even if a nation, or humanity collectively, is better insulated. Futures contracts are themse
440.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Claude and ChatGPT have between them identified one mystery plant in my garden confidently as about a dozen different things. Even though they will get chemistry right more often than me, I still wouldn't want to ingest the result of i
441.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> In my opinion, if you can't do these things, you're just cosplaying software engineering. This standard would significantly reduce the number of software engineers I've worked with. Not that I'm saying you're w
442.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ Oh, that's where it comes from! My dad told me something close when I was a kid, but according to him it was the early EU doing di
443.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Sure, but I'm not suggesting it's good-good, I'm drawing a comparison with "a mediocre hand-made spreadsheet". We live in a world where some genes had to be renamed because Excel evaluated their original names as da
444.
by ben_w 2mo ago
"Full self driving", the capability, is not the same thing as the product for which Telsa has been sued because they described it as "Full Self Driving" before it was good enough to get called that[0]; this is in much th
445.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> I understand skepticism--maybe they will never be able to compete economically with terrestrial datacenters. But the profound certainty that detractors have is amazing to me. I need to finish the blog post about this. I'm around 1
446.
by ben_w 2mo ago
> Neither of those violate the laws of physics. As I said, they may not work economically, but that depends on a large number of unknowns, including the cost per ton to orbit and the cost per GW of new power capacity on Earth in 2030. If
447.
by ben_w 2mo ago
They could, but this would be unnecessary. I suspect that simply blocking payments from locals to Musk may be enough, considering how Musk reacted when advertisers voted with their wallets to leave X. But nations have other tools, as Brazil
448.
by ben_w 2mo ago
Currently, yes. However, based on the rapid development of high-powered lasers, I think we're not too far from it being very cheap. Mostly an optics (adaptive and aperture) problem. This also means it's likely to get deniable very
449.
by ben_w 2mo ago
I suspect consumerism and tourism would mostly evaporate bloodlessly if advertising were successfully banned. I'm not sure a successful ban is even possible, given e.g. influencers. However, ending social media may inherently solve thi
450.
by ben_w 2mo ago
There are many ways this can play out, assuming it happens at all. He may do a Mugabe and reward the faithful at the expense of the nation. He may do a Pol Pot, and punish the opposition until there are none left and then turn on the faithf

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