Annual risk management reviews definitely favor large incumbents. Large incumbents have the ability to hire and maintain compliance teams. That burden is definitely a barrier to entry to new competitors (though not an insurmountable one).
But it only applies to AI controlling critical infrastructure, you think this is an issue in practice?
I would think if a power plant deploys some AI model to optimize something or other, it would be on the plant operator to perform the reviews, regardless of who they get the AI from.
COVID damaged the average American. The Biden administration (and the preceding Trump administration) did not perform perfectly by any means, but US inflation was below that of most other OECD countries. Real wages took a serious hit and I understand people being mad about that, but it’s hard to imagine a world where the supply chain disruptions don’t cause real living standards to fall at least a little bit.
Roughly 3 years. That being said, there’s thousands of carriers globally and they have maybe a 25 year lifespan, so a couple of ships becoming inoperable is largely negligible.
>are we losing (or did we never have) a shared definition of the word "think"
People have been saying, “the computer is thinking,” while webpages are loading or software is running for as long as I’ve been consciously aware. I agree there’s something new about describing AI as, “literally a machine that can think,” but language has always had fuzzy borders
It's wild to watch documentaries from the 1980s where a primitive computer is said to be "a thinking machine" that is "taking most of the work out of a job".
yeah, for sure. i really think some people are under the impression that LLMs are a form of general AI that actually processes thought rather than being an admittedly-impressive exponential autocomplete.
though i'm not by any means an AI booster, my question wasn't really meant to be taken as a gotcha - more a general taking stock of where we're at in terms of broader understanding of these technologies outside of the professional AI/hobbyist world.
Demand for cigarettes isn’t static. If you make them expensive enough, demand falls. Lower demand means less smoking which means less cancer.
The only real risk with pigouvian taxes is that if you raise them too high, you can foster the development of a black market, which comes with its own set of negative social consequences.
Sure, lower demand does indeed reduce smoking, and a reduction in smoking might decrease cancer (iirc that's really hard to prove as an isolated variable given that those who give up smoking tend to make other lifestyle improvements that could also account for the difference).
My point is that the solution is such a blunt tool. Given that smoking rates aren't relatively high in Iowa, smoking alone cannot be the major contributor to their relatively increased cancer rates. Were they to smoke more than any other state and also have high rates, I could maybe see it, but that's just not the case.
Even if smoking rates were high and and increasing the tax were a solution, I'd still suggest that it's rather lazy to only do that given that tobacco does not cause a majority of cancer.
You could do the same thing in a different direction and be equally relatively ineffective by, for instance, decreasing tax on sunscreen, or subsidizing healthy foods or gym memberships.
Given that stress contributes to cancer rates, you could decrease the cost of mental health, run a de-stigmatizing campaign, force all corporations to finance therapy with independently verified therapists etc.
There are so many many things that can be done that would likely be better than attempting to decrease an already low smoking rate.
I understand that you were trying to make a different point so forgive me for derailing this conversation but this is important and I want to be emphatic.
Smoking incontrovertibly and substantially increases your risk of developing cancer. 85-90% of lung cancer cases and a substantial number of other forms cancers of can be attributed to smoking. There are a lot of ways to study this (you can look at people that never started smoking, not just people who quit). Yes, these studies are correlational (we don’t do RTCs on things that can kill you) but they are very high powered and are designed to account for confounding variables. The entire reason we’ve seen a decline in cancer mortality in the US since the 90s is largely attributable to falling smoking rates beginning in the 70s. And while much fewer people smoke, roughly 1 in 7 still do. Encouraging them to find another way to feed their nicotine addiction, and discouraging young people from ever picking up the habit, would save a lot of lives still.
The entire reason we’ve seen a decline in cancer mortality in the US since the 90s is largely attributable to falling smoking rates beginning in the 70s.
I don't think this is true, do you have any evidence? I would think mortality rates going down is mostly due to advances in treatment. Especially since the majority of cancer types are not caused by smoking.
To bad lowering smoking doesn't reduce costs. It is just a straight up regressive tax. Smokers mostly die around retirement age which means they skip the most expensive healthcare costs, age related care, and smoking itself disqualifies people from having many procedures that are common otherwise.
It’s more accurate to say that the private credit market was created by the government adding new regulations, not removing them. Business development corporations have existed since the 80s but they didn’t explode in popularity as business loan originators until Dodd Frank and other post-2008 regulations made it more difficult for banks to lend money. This led small and medium size businesses to seek out credit from firms like Ares et al instead.
Additional reporting available at the WSJ[1]. Reading between the lines it sounds like the group responsible got access to a Microsoft 365 or Intune administrator account.
Thanks, I have updated the comment. I had thought that it was 200 but its actually 1700 and also for the official link.
From the link that you shared:
It's currently the seventh-greenest computer in the world, he said.
"This particular system is about half a petaflop, or capable of about 500 trillion calculations per second," he said. "In the current time that we can measure it, it's about the 35th- or 36th-fastest computer in the world, and with some things that are going to be changing in the next eight or nine months with some upgrades, we could boost it to maybe the 20th-fastest computer in the world, and at the same time make it, at that moment in time, the greenest computer."
Do you feel like something like this can again be possible with Linux being ported to PS5 now? I don't quite understand why sony would remove the linux feature from ps4 if this was something that the govt. was benefitting from. I assume that the govt. must have put some pressure to still allow linux on ps4/ps5 given that it was benefitting from it in the past?
They removed it because they lost money on every console sold unless you also bought some games. When governments/universities started buying thousands to use in compute clusters without buying a single game, it stopped being worth it.
They added it to avoid game console specific tariffs, so they must have run the numbers and realized paying those would cost less than subsidizing a bunch of clusters.
My recollection / impression was that Sony was quite happy to lose game sales on thousands of PS3s because "used to make super computers" was a marketting win for them. They were used in this role for several years until Sony started trying to roll it back immediately following the publication of game piracy related developments that in part used OtherOS vulnerabilities.
No they didn't, you couldn't run games since you had no access to the GPU. The whole exploiting and homebrew CFW shenanigangs followed after Sony (illegally) removed the option for OtherOS.
OtherOS originally existed so Sony could claim the PS3 was a computer, which put it into a lower tariff category than a game console in Europe. They never offered it on the PS3 Slim (launched in September 2009) because by that point Sony had gotten the price on the system down enough that the difference in taxes didn't matter to them, but they continued supporting it on the PS3 Fat. This was all legal because Sony never advertised OtherOS support on the Slim.
Sony only removed OtherOS on the Fat after George Hotz discovered and published an exploit that allowed users to break out of the OtherOS sandbox and gain full control over the PS3. This allowed running custom firmware and pirating games with a bit of additional work. Sony judged that they couldn't patch the exploit without disabling access to OtherOS entirely, so that's what they did. Hotz announced his exploit in January 2010 (https://web.archive.org/web/20100129034435/http://geohotps3....), the Yellow Dog Linux team posted a rumor that Sony was getting rid of OtherOS in February 2010 (https://www.xtremeps3.com/2010/02/20/rumor-alert-otheros-to-...), and Sony officially announced the removal of OtherOS due to security concerns in late March 2010 (https://blog.playstation.com/2010/03/28/ps3-firmware-v3-21-u...). As you say, this removal was later found to be illegal in court.
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