gonzobonzo

11 ms·

91.
by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> This isn’t true at all. The Inca were not as technically sophisticated as the Europeans (or the Chinese for that matter) I'm not sure how it isn't true at all when we agree that other governments at the time had much more sop
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Your list proves the point. All of those things were common for governments in Europe and Asia at the time. When people bring up the Safavids or the Timurids, for example, you don't hear people saying "they were able to extract ta
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> One interesting thing is how the Incan organizational capability mostly vanished. The original empire was really extremely well organized, but today's Bolivia and Peru don't show any particular aptitude in this direction. The
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Wikipedia is overall pretty good, but it sometimes contains erroneous information. LLMs are overall pretty good, but they sometimes contain erroneous information. The weird part is when people get really concerned that someone might treat t
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Yes, though by different degrees. I wouldn't take any claim I read on Wikipedia, got from an LLM, saw in a AskHistorians or Hacker News reply, etc., as fact, and I would never use any of those as a source to back up or prove something
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Look at the comments here. No one is claiming that LLMs are reliable, while numerous people are claiming that Wikipedia is reliable.
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> Consequently it's always been fairly reliable. Comments like these honestly make me much more concerned than LLM hallucinations. There have been numerous times when I've tracked down the source for a claim, only to find that
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
I just checked the first two, Apple and Amazon, and they're trading 28% and 23% higher than they were 3 years ago. Annualized returns from the SP 500 have been a little over 10%. Some of that comes from dividends, but Apple and Amazon
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> My problem with it is that inbuilt into the models of all LLMs is that they'll fabricate a lot. What's worse, people are treating them as authoritative. The same is true about the internet, and people even used to use these
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Which companies? Google and Microsoft are only up a little over the past several years, and I doubt much of their valuation is coming from LLM hype. Most of the discussions about x.com say it's worth substantially less than some years
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> The history of Medical research is generally studied on the demographics where such testing is cultural acceptable, and where the gains of such research has been mostly sought, which is young men drafted into wars. Though in this study
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Your quote actually proves the previous posters claims that Botswana can’t keep power up on a consistent basis. If you go to the Botswana Power Corporations Twitter page, you get the daily schedule for what areas are going to have their pow
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> (though it does match many people's inaccurate stereotypes, which I have heard repeatedly in conversations with people who don't live in cities) I run into the opposite problem - people who grew up in the suburbs, move into
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Generally, surburbs are better at encouraging walking/cycling around (since there's very little traffic), but worse at encouraging people to walk to commercial areas (since they're usually far away and the path there is unple
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Looking around the neighborhood, I'm seeing sidewalks on many of those streets, paved paths along public green spaces that run between the houses, multiple apartment buildings and a retirement center. Looking at the map, there also app
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
A more interesting question is what could have happened if NASA had used much more of its funding on practical research (including rocketry research), instead of wasting a huge amount of it on sending people up into space for no good reason
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> It's generally accepted as true that passing any one of them does not constitute fully general intelligence but the difficult part has been finding things that they cannot do. It's pretty easy to find things they can't
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
The robots are operated by the building, for what it's worth. The delivery drivers drop the deliveries off to the robots in the lobby, and the robots take it from there to the individual rooms.
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Chinese delivery robots have been using elevators for years. I believe they wirelessly communicate with the elevator control system.
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
You might refuse to do it, but I doubt you'd ever actually completely fail it. If someone offered to pay $10 million if someone could go into a house, make a cup of coffee, and come back out with it, I imagine just about any functional
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> Coal is expensive and irradiates the atmosphere. Oil drilling causes spills, fracking causes earthquakes, and oil dependency has been a major driver of war for the past century. Fracking lowers emissions. As far as I've been able
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Honestly, I think in your scenario Bing would end up as the top search engine. I've noticed lately that when I'm using a browser with Bing in the search bar, I just use Bing and don't bother using Google. Honestly, the two fe
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
And the article itself appears to be making some logical leaps. It says it's getting its information from a Forbes article, but the information in the Forbes article is simply this[1]: > But the Russian air force could sidestep the
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
I tried watching that video, but found it to be pretty bad. The beginning was good - demonstrating how much information we have at our fingertips, yet don't use. But then it veers off into what feels like a lot of personal frustrations
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
Those people would have been more tuned in, since it was the early days of the Web. But in terms of technical skills? Throwing up a very simple Geocities page was about as much effort as starting a blog on Blogger. Easier than fiddling arou
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
This came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this f
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
I really think you're forgetting what most web pages looked like back then. A simple background, often just one or two columns of text, a few images put in there, some HTML links. Maybe frames for the more complex sites. Here's so
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> Admittedly it still wasn’t easy for everyone to have their own website At least by the Geocities stage it was incredibly easy. Probably about as difficult as making a PowerPoint slideshow. Lots of non-techy kids were doing this in the
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
I guess it depends on the network? From what I've seen, most people are there for the 0.3% getting 99% of the engagement. Whether that 0.3% is the big accounts on Twitter, or whatever is on the main page on Hacker News. Try making a co
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by gonzobonzo 2y ago
> Is that because they're older? Honest question, but do you know much about investing? The investment curve isn't linear. Someone making steady contributions should have around 10 times the amount of wealth at age 67 than they

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