Hmm. i think you need a universe at least 10bn+ years for intelligent life as you need to have had cycle of earlier stars going supernovae to create the heavier elements.
That aside, 13bn years old is young. literally an instantaneous flash in the context of all time until heat death of the universe.
Those are the ones fundamentally shifting theories about how early stars/blackholes/galaxies can form. (there are other factors like dark matters that can play a role but nobody knows for sure yet)
13bn years is not too young with that context in mind.
> That aside, 13bn years old is young. literally an instantaneous flash in the context of all time until heat death of the universe.
That alone is sus, because if we have infinity billion trillion years until the end, and we're so close to the beginning as to be a rounding error, it's weird.
That activity is massively massively frontloaded. About 95% of all stars that will ever form, have already formed. And with typical main sequence stars lasting under 10 billion years, we're already well into the decline of the universe.
No we don't have that much time.
Over time there will no longer be huge areas of new star formation.
Most stars are also rather short lived and can not sup6a plane like planet Earth.
Our sun, sol, has a neat live span so we can thrive for while if we don't **up this plants ecosystem.
But as far as I understood astro physics we are rather quiet early in the game.
I was so lucky! One lived to 35 in the Paris basin a few thousand years ago, the other lived to 25 in China, died in 1945. Both were married and left living children!
Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?
Comments here seem like an ideological kneejerk response.
You assume it will be used in good faith which is charitable. It doesn't even need to take an authoritarian regime to pervert this technology. Abusive police officers in the US for example use Flock to stalk ex girlfriends.
Yes I'm sure their police force is entirely free of any psychological problems and in no way selects for people who might be incline to abuse their position of authority.
> The report looked at police training requirements in more than 100 countries and found that the US had among the lowest, in terms of average hours required.
> Also, many other countries require officers to have a university degree - or equivalent - before joining the police, but in the US most forces just require the equivalent of a high-school diploma.
> Lots of moaning about this in the comments but no real explanation as to what the objection is beyond vague references to "privacy". What is the actual risk to me as an innocent person going about their daily business? If it helps identify perpetrators of crime what's the issue?
This same argument would apply to Flock cameras, correct?
The “main character” syndrome is strong here .. thing is, most people wouldn’t even be the main character in a movie about their own lives .. also if this helps catch criminals/terrorists/thieves .. what’s the actual harm to an innocent passenger ..
honestly, i've found that it's usually better to not engage in these threads. the likelihood of a good faith discussion is very low. as you point out, it's mostly ideological kneejerk reactions rather than actual discussion based on considered viewpoints. but i'll give it a go.
i personally don't like this for a few reasons. possibility of data leaks, ick factor via my built-in paranoia around being watched/recorded, possibility of false positives etc. but i have some faith in TfL / BTP to not piss about in an egregious way. we have pretty decent checks and balances these days for UK police compared to the past and definitely compared to some police forces in the states. i'm also aware that as a man i tend to not experience the same shit that a lot of women have to deal with on a daily basis.
so i might be willing to accept it as part of a necessary trade-off based on my real life experiences on the tube. i'd probably be willing to accept having my face recorded/pattern matched when using the tube if it either stops or helps to prosecute a sexual assault.
there is definitely a difference between liking something and accepting it.
Literally all normal people on the tube already pay with bank card or Apple Pay and are thus trackable anyway. This just levels the playing field for the barrier pushers.
Ideally, you can simulate everything from first principles. That works well enough only for a rather limited set of systems.
More typical is that you need to do real world measurements/model (not LLM, but a model of what you simulate) validation before you can reasonably simulate.
Interesting reversal of the "think of the kids" argument, though: think of the kids who could have used their phones to document their mistreatment at the hands of alcoholic perverts.
Reminds me of the "good guys with guns" narrative tbh. Being able to document such transgressions is not enough of an argument to do a mass rollout of ad display technology IMHO.
The ability to film people on their phone is not the same as the ad display technology.
I think the argument upthread about "conflation" has a point, but .. it's social media itself that forces the conflation. You can't just have a social network that lets you communicate with your community, it has to get tied up with international politics and exploitative advertising.
the even more direct analogy is the Arab Spring, where social media and phones were widely advertised as a means to bring evil dictators down, as a democratic, youth empowering anti evil old pervert technology.
The tech industry obviously jumped onto it because it's a rhetorically powerful argument but it tells you very little what the systemic consequences are ten years down the road.
It's still funny how much it's celebrated because it brings down establishments, not realizing it'll also bring down their own. Reminds me of why no one should start biological warfare.
MAD is another one, the concept of firing your nuke means you lost. So you have to spend a lot of money to have said nuke and keep it available, just so you DON'T use it...
Age 16-17 is very different than Ages 5-10 for kids to carry a device.
The former is no issue. I just don't think the author's take is nuanced as they think.
Kids (Age 5-13) safety is of ultimate importance. Devices, independently are also a major issue in schools. Social media use of bullying also is a major issue. To the point they are banned.
The UK is not proposing disallowing 16-17 year olds (or any children) from carrying smart phones on public transit, though, which makes the entire article fall apart.
The author leaps from a proposed ban on 15 year olds using tiktok to wholesale bans on smartphones.
Removing a means of bullying that leaves a trail is not the same thing as removing bullying. It's just removing undeniable bullying.
If people truly agreed that children needed to be protected from the desires of others, teaching them that a particular religion is the true one would be restricted until they were of an age where they could provide informed consent.
For some, communication devices are the only way to escape that particular abuse.
Forgive me if I am misinterpreting or getting in the way of your primary point -- but I think it is relatively well recognized that, though cyberbullying might not be objectively worse than analog bullying (obviously direct physical abuse/altercations cant happen electronically....yet), the 24/7 pervasiveness, anonymity, lack of emotional feedback for the bully, reach, and permanence of cyberbullying has had a meaningful impact on the state of the bullying game and the impacts it has on children.
That doesn't mean I agree with the general thrust of taking technology away from kids and young adults....I don't. But I do think we should probably understand the bad that we are taking with the good.
I think a lot of people here just don't have kids of a relevant age yet. They assume either the bullying doesn't happen, or it isn't any different than bullying in person, or that it's easy to stop when it happens.
You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating. You have to frequently audit what's on their phones because they often won't volunteer what's happening. You take them out of one group chat only to have the bullies reappear in another one.
Old fashioned bullying kept regular business hours. This gives them a portal into your home life 24/7, and that's the best case, when you put a ton of effort into managing it.
And if you're not having this problem somehow, you might want to double check and make sure your kid isn't the bully.
> You can just not have phones, but it's socially isolating.
I hear this plenty, but kids are literally forced to go be with their peers (hopefully including some friends) for 6+ hours a day (in my country). Don't they have enough time to arrange their social lives in person?
I seem to recall both of us being children once, although admittedly not at the same time. The research my daughter does as part of her charity work probably counts as well.
Learning about something doesn't invalidate it entirely on that basis alone, just like the experience of one parent doesn't speak for all parents, or those concerned about the impacts of phones on kids (who are future adults).
Removing phones doesn't remove a means of bullying, it removes a magnifier and multiplier of bullying.
There's lots of ways to capture bullying. But it might be hot water right? What if it was a watch with a camera? What if it was a camera alone? :)
Bullying is serious enough it can't be conflated with the desires of device manufacturers and social media platforms to manufacture young consumers of their feeds.
An issue here is the unfiltered internet is not capable of raising children, as much as they want to be exposed to everything, it doesn't work out the same for every child based on a whole host of independent factors than those who take the position above.
Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream. A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize. I met people some of whom I’m friends to this day, but more importantly - I could meet people to go out with, to talk to.
Should we ban schools then? Because school grounds are famously place where the most bullying, especially kids 5-13 (which you highlighted yourself), is happening. Or maybe ban real life interactions? Because you can meet someone who will bully you or be of bad influence?
We both know that’s not the right way, just like banning social media is not solving any problems. It’s just a convenient argument to introduce internet-wide surveillance, as well as to take away any autonomy or rights kids may have. Instead of investing in moderation, and actually scrutinizing big tech, which is the real cause of more bullying, shorter attention spans, and whatever else people say is wrong with the kids these days.
Technologies when not learned by the people to use in proper ways, too often can be used against people by people with vested financial interests.
Social Media worked out that way. So did device addiction.
It's great to find ways to socialize, and those ways existed before, and will also exist after.
The exclusion of current forms of social media and connectivity as default doesn't mean better solutions don't step up.
I'm not really sure of the tying of schools to phone bans in schools. Schools aren't perfect, but they have a legal liability to keep kids safe (or safer). Devices and social media don't.
A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth. This would probably be a way.
Societally, rules and laws, including public health are a social contract and agreement on how to live together in a tight place.
Inside the home, though, is the opportunity for parents to learn and expose as they wish.
Solving today's social media can solve a ton of problems, or at least provide an impetus for it to improve. Schools are supposed to be safe places for kids, right? And the entire unfiltered outside world was coming into it via device.
For example, one solution is parents getting literate in tech enough to know how to lead young people before this even becomes a conversation. One way to do this is to offer unlimited screen time for creating, and much less for passive consuming. The generation that wants to experience the real world through a little screen has it backwards, and that's coming form the people who built the little digital world too.
I'm not anti-technology for young people at all. I'm anti-addiction and anti-manipultion by unlimited people and parties interested in reaching eyeballs.
Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
> A large part of this is life coming at parents faster than they can keep up, let alone stay one season ahead of their childs growth.
The amount of administrative tasks, bureaucracy and complexity an adult, let alone a parent, has to navigate on a daily basis has increased 100x since the 70’s. It is very convent for corporations but less convenient for parents. Just look at the amount of legal contract you have to sign relating to data, Eula, etc.
> Parents, legally, are required to provide a safe and growing environment.
True, but be carefull, people might solve the problem in ways you don’t expect.
For example if someone races near a kids playground on electric skateboard at 50 km/h, and authorities keep ignoring the issue, they might just hit an unexpected obstacle
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue. I’ve been bullied before social media was mainstream.
The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach. I don't think we can argue that social media is not an issue on these fronts.
> A little later in life, when internet as a whole was majorly taking off, it helped me actually socialize.
I agree, but I also have to wonder if the nature of the Internet has changed to the point where the benefits are secondary to the costs. In the early days, it was far easier to access the positives and far easier to ignore the negatives since we made explicit decisions about where to go. While you can still do that today, by avoiding social media, it is far more difficult. The mainstream has consolidated to the point where you pretty much have to isolate yourself to avoid it. Much of what mainstream social media sites provide is pushed to the user in some for or another. On top of all of that, the online world had far less reach in the past. At least when I was younger, the bullies simply didn't go online and while exploitive people were online there seemed to be far fewer of them.
As for the Internet wide surveillance: I don't think that is the driving force behind the current regulations. We already have Internet wide surveillance. That is why your proposal is all the more important, the bit about moderation and scrutinizing big tech, because we let them get away with far too much.
> The differences with bullying via social media are: the difficulty to escape it in space or time as well as its reach.
Just log off of Instagram / TikTok / wherever. Or block the people bothering you. If anything I'd say digital bullying is easier to escape because unlike school kids aren't required to be on those sites six to eight hours a day, and blocking someone needs a lot less effort and cooperation from adults than reporting them to school authorities.
A large number of youth will do that, but there is also a reason why children and youth are considered a vulnerable population.
I cannot speak too much on youth since most of my experience is with children. While some of them are more than happy to navigate their social lives by choosing who their friends are and ignoring those who cause them grief, where possible (as you suggested, there is the physical proximity in schools to complicate things), a great many more want to belong. They want to belong even where they are unwelcome and the unwelcomeness is manifested as bullying. What little I've seen of teens suggests that much the same does happen, only the bullying is meaner.
And that only addresses bullying. It does not address content directed towards adults, much of which is perfectly fine for younger people to know but they should also learn about it under the guidance of an adult so they don't come to think it is acceptable or the norm. It also fails to address the manipulative nature of some sites, something that they probably haven't learned to recognize never mind how to handle.
Yes, in a sense, you can turn off the problems and a lot of the problems will just go away. I'm not going to say they will disappear completely. Remember, social media has a larger audience and the others in that audience may bring it back to real life. Also remember that the people we are discussing don't always have the wisdom or experience to turn it off. Heck, a lot of adults don't have that wisdom or experience (but, at least for adults, we can claim they ought to know better).
> Except social media as a concept isn’t the issue
Are you sure about that? So far the negatives vastly outweigh the positives. Imagine a statement:
> as a concept there isn’t an issue with a social credit score / great firewall / reeducation camp as long as they are done by a competent well-meaning person
I'm reminded of the way that universally carried high resolution cameras made UFOs and crop circles disappear, but police suddenly became a lot less trustworthy.
The abuse question .. well, "social justice" is a term that starts fights, but there have been a lot of people who've been able to get some sort of justice only because they raised their cause on social media, having been ignored by the authorities. #MeToo is probably the big example, culminating in the Epstein revelations.
Not who you’re responding to, but I also don’t really think the article makes any kind of sensible argument that I can follow. Yes, it’s bad that a creepy drunk man used his phone to take pictures of teenage girls. Yes, it’s commendable that bystanders called him out. Yes, some countries are thinking of curtailing social media access for teenagers. I’m not sure what any of these things have to do with each other but the author presents them as somehow related, without drawing a coherent thread through them.
I don’t agree. Whether or not these girls had phones, or social media, was irrelevant in this case. And I’ve never heard anyone seriously argue that 16-year-olds shouldn’t have phones, or that 16-year-old girls are at fault when an old man secretly makes videos of them. Both these groups seem like imagined bogeymen that the article is railing against.
Perhaps there's stuff going on in the UK that I'm missing but:
- I have not heard of a general cell phone ban for children and youth. They may "ban" the use of phones in schools (in reality: phones must remain in a bag or locker) and parents may choose to forbid their children from having phones (which is difficult to enforce after a certain age), but nothing general.
One may argue that children and youth may use phones to document improper or abusive situations in schools, which certainly can happen, but that is not the dominant use of phones by children and youth in schools and there are other avenues to document such circumstances.
- Most of the regulations we are discussing today are related to access to adult content or sites that are run in an exploitive manner (e.g. "the algorithm"). I have heard of no prohibitions of children and youth accessing sites outside of that context, even though there is plenty of room to question where the boundaries should be.
So I will agree that the author is either misrepresenting or conflating the regulations, to the point where the article is nonsense.
Assuming the measurements are independent samples from a normal distribution. Which they of course aren't, as measurements of adjacent days are obviously correlated (if they were independent, a 1-in-7000 event could be expected to happen on about 2 days within a 44-year span). Now the question is what the nature of the deviation is.
- How independent are measurements of different years?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution mean?
- Has there been a systematic change in the distribution variance?
- Was there a good reason to assume that the temperature distribution would be normally distributed to begin with? (Maybe there are strong non-additive effects.)
In any case, it's clear that assuming the observed temperatures in the 1991-2020 range follow a normal distribution and temperatures outside that date range will follow the same distribution is a bad model of reality.
Yes there are. Scientists compare the measurements from both methods in the time when there's data from both. For example ice cores formed last decade should match direct temperature measurements from last decade. It's the same way the oldest rings from living trees are matched against the newest rings from tree fossils, and radiocarbon dating is checked against all of that.
That does not look very reliable to me, because that implies certain things are only affected by ambient temperature.
Btw, Can you tell me how ancient temperature is measured from ice cores? My lookup only says we can detect atmospheric composition, and not temperatures from the ice cores.
>Past precipitation can be used to reconstruct past palaeoclimatic temperatures. δD and δ18O is related to surface temperature at middle and high latitudes. The relationship is consistent and linear over Antarctica[9]...
I think this is also flawed, because this computation requires the ratio of the isotopes in the atmosphere at the period of interest, which we don't have. And the people making this measurement just seem to assume it would certain value derived from the present, which is also unreliable...
So yea, all things considered, pretty unreliable..
See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?
Also share if this accuracy requires any implicit assumptions. For example, "If we assume that X today is true then it is true back then as well" where X is not a physical constant...
See, since it seems that you are convinced yourselves, can you tell me how accurately the past temperature can be assessed by using this method? I mean +/- how many degrees?
Can you tell me how many research papers on this specific subject you have read, before coming to that conclusion?
Hint: chances are you're correct (!). Size of the error bars, timeframe(s) talked about, how data was gathered, how results were processed etc, that is what such papers are about. Educate yourself! (Wikipedia is usually a good start)
None. It goes against my common sense. That is why I am asking what accuracy can this method give. I am asking that to people who are already seemingly convinced that the methods listed (fossil records, ice-cores) can be accurate..
> That applies to things you're experiencing on a daily basis.
That we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it, is something that I experience on a daily basis.
Seriously, if you are so convinced, then why don't you just give me an accuracy measure and reasons to support it? I am not interested in anymore articles that does not contain an explicit accuracy claims and reasons to support the same.
So please understand this. It is not that I am questioning the existence of such techniques. I am questioning their accuracy/reliability..
> So please understand this. It is not that I am questioning the existence of such techniques. I am questioning their accuracy/reliability..
That is fine. Scientists do the same, all the time.
> we cannot accurately look into the past unless we explicitly record it
Please allow me an opportunity to enlighten you:
We cannot look into the past unless it is recorded somehow.
Note the absence of "we" in the recording part. Also note "somehow" may happen in many different ways.
Sensor data, satellite measurements, ice cores, fossilized creatures captured in stone, slices of tree trunks, samples of minerals whose radioactivity decayed over millenia, history books or landscape features, are just different types of records. Each with their own set of properties (accuracy being 1 of them).
So I am aware. The "we" is important because I said "accurately". When "we" set up the recording, we can make it to record with the required precision. Inferring measurements from incidental things can give the required precision, but it should be justified.
It seems like you're on the trajectory to refuting all historical measurements altogether. In that case, I can't help you. Good luck. I suggest the philosophy of Last Tuesdayism, it may interest you.
I only reject using them for certain things that require vastly more reliable data. And I am not making the mistake of relying on unreliable data just because it is the best we can manage.
Also why don't you answer my question about ice cores?
I'm not an ice core scientist. I suggest you ask them for detailed specifications. But the way you have posed the question strongly suggests that you will not be satisfied with any possible answer. Anything short of your eyes laying upon a thermometer will always be "not reliable enough", and thermometers only record the current temperature.
> I'm not sure how you can make that claim with only 29 years of data without making some pretty big assumptions about the underlying distribution.
Under what circumstances would 29 years be an insufficient mean to compare to the last few years? Precisely those circumstances in which the climate had changed.
Under any sane statistical model. If we assume that this is a naturally occurring once in century El Nino under an equal probability model we'd expect not to see it before we have 70 years of records.
Within the 1982-2026 span there is an equally negative 3.5 sigmas deviation somewhere (no year labels on the graph). The article doesn't touch on it at all so I have no context as to what it could be. But it definitely suggests 3.5 sigmas is not really 1 in 7000 years.
What do their gold deliveries have anything to do with their financial situation? That'll just be settling GC contracts, and there will be clients on the other side.
First no is that the model as is has too few parameters for that. You could train it on the wikipedia but it wouldn’t do much of any good.
But what if you increase the number of parameters? Then you get to the second layer of “no”. The code as is is too naive to train a realistic size LLM for that task in realistic timeframes. As is it would be too slow.
But what if you increase the number of parameters and improve the performance of the code? I would argue that would by that point not be “this” but something entirely different. But even then the answer is still no. If you run that new code with increased parameters and improved efficiencly and train it on wikipedia you would still not get a model which “generate semi-sensible responses”. For the simple reason that the code as is only does the pre-training. Without the RLHF step the model would not be “responding”. It would just be completing the document. So for example if you ask it “How long is a bus?” it wouldn’t know it is supposed to answer your question. What exactly happens is kinda up to randomness. It might output a wikipedia like text about transportation, or it might output a list of questions similar to yours, or it might output broken markup garbage. Quite simply without this finishing step the base model doesn’t know that it is supposed to answer your question and it is supposed to follow your instructions. That is why this last step is called “instruction tuning” sometimes. Because it teaches the model to follow instructions.
But if you would increase the parameter count, improve the efficiency, train it on wikipedia, then do the instruction tuning (wich involves curating a database of instruction - response pairs) then yes. After that it would generate semi-sensible responses. But as you can see it would take quite a lot more work and would stretch the definition of “this”.
It is a bit like asking if my car could compete in formula-1. The answer is yes, but first we need to replace all parts of it with different parts, and also add a few new parts. To the point where you might question if it is the same car at all.
That aside, 13bn years old is young. literally an instantaneous flash in the context of all time until heat death of the universe.
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