Nothing can fix things because teenagers will not cooperate. If Instagram could identify all its teenage users, those users would move to a platform that couldn’t. The only thing the restrictions achieve is a reduction in the market share of the platform with the restrictions.

Does… Does this mean Harris actually isn’t the lesser of two evils? Now I don’t know who to vote for.

Those numbers aren’t right.

First, the total-gun-death numbers are not population-adjusted and therefore useless without additional context. The same article does have the population-adjusted numbers and the USA is, predictably, not in the top ten.

Second, once the numbers are adjusted for population, there are some very strange results. For example, apparently Iraq actually has slightly fewer gun deaths per capita than the USA. Nigeria, the country where Boko Haram is based, has four times fewer gun deaths per capita than the USA?! Clearly the gun-death numbers correspond more to how well records are kept in a country than they do to the actual numbers of gun deaths.

Oh, and those gun death numbers include suicides, not just murders. Most gun deaths in the USA are suicides. A suicide is technically a gun death, but not usually the sort that people have in mind when discussing a school shooting.

So far “more data” has been the solution to most problems, but I don’t think we’re close to the limit of how much useful information can be learned from the data even if we’re close to the limit of how much data is available. Look at the AIs that can’t draw hands. There are already many pictures of hands from every angle in their training data. Maybe just having ten times as many pictures of hands would solve the problem, but I’m confident that if that was not possible then doing more with the existing pictures would also work.* Algorithm design just needs some time to catch up.

*I know that the data that is running out is text data. This is just an analogy.

What occasions are you referring to? I know people claim that Israeli use of white phosphorous munitions is illegal, but the law is actually quite specific about what an incendiary weapon is. Incendiary effects caused by weapons that were not designed with the specific purpose of causing incendiary effects are not prohibited. (As far as I can tell, even the deliberate use of such weapons in order to cause incendiary effects is allowed.) This is extremely permissive, because no reasonable country would actually agree not to use a weapon that it considered effective. Something like the firebombing of Dresden is banned, but little else.

Incendiary weapons do not include:

(i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

(ii) Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.

The issue I have with referring to the current situation as a bubble is that this isn’t just hype. The technology really is amazing, and far better than what people had been expecting. I do think that most current attempts to commercialize it are premature, but there’s such a big first-mover advantage that it makes sense to keep losing money on attempts that are too early in order to succeed as soon as it is possible to do so.

Multiple studies are showing that training on data contaminated with LLM output makes LLMs worse, but there’s no inherent reason why LLMs must be trained on this data. As you say, people are aware of it and they’re going to be avoiding it. At the very least, they will compare the newly trained LLM to their best existing one and if the new one is worse, they won’t switch over. The era of being able to download the entire internet (so to speak) is over but this means that AI will be getting better more slowly, not that it will be getting worse.

I don’t disagree, but before the recent breakthroughs I would have said that AI is like fusion power in the sense that it has been 50 years away for 50 years. If the current approach doesn’t get us there, who knows how long it will take to discover one that does?

It would be odd if AI somehow got worse. I mean, wouldn’t they just revert to a backup?

Anyway, I think (1) is extremely unlikely but I would add (3) the existing algorithms are fundamentally insufficient for AGI no matter how much they’re scaled up. A breakthrough is necessary which may not happen for a long time.

I think (3) is true but I also thought that the existing algorithms were fundamentally insufficient for getting to where we are now, and I was wrong. It turns out that they did just need to be scaled up…

The important thing here isn’t that the AI is worse than humans. It’s than the AI is worth comparing to humans. Humans stay the same while software can quickly improve by orders of magnitude.

This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:

1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.

2. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.

3. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.

4. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.

That’s actually a very low price for an anti-air missile. For comparison, the Stinger shoulder-fired missile costs more than twice as much. A Patriot missile costs four million dollars (but is much more capable). Presumably minimizing cost was a high priority when this missile was designed. Nonetheless, the cost asymmetry is one reason why degrading the ability of Hamas and Hezbollah to fire missiles at Israel is important.

It’s funny because I have the opposite impression. Some Americans feel guilty after studying American history. (Why feel guilty? You’re not the ones responsible.) These Americans seek to absolve themselves of that perceived guilt by identifying something far away that matches the “white vs non white” pattern that they’re looking for, so that they can feel righteous by condemning it without actually having to change how they live their own lives.

Looking back this is obviously wrong

I suppose it was obviously wrong in practice because the Union’s greater population and industrial capacity made a Union victory almost inevitable, but I wouldn’t say it was obviously wrong as a legal theory. The US was created by people who thought they had a moral right to leave the British empire and in that context it would be odd for them to intend that there should be no legal way for any state to leave the USA.

I meant manual transmissions, not supercars.

I want my next car to be a Miata.

I thought I would never possibly want an EV, but the acceleration of the Teslas is impressive enough to tempt me. The guy I know who has one accelerates hard enough to push me back into my seat during city driving. As in, he’s stopped at a red light and then he’s going 30 the moment it turns green. His Tesla goes from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds, as opposed to over 6 in my '08 328i. The M series BMWs can match a Tesla’s acceleration, but the BMWs cost a lot more.

I mean, I’m still not getting an EV. But now I am tempted… Maybe if they had real, physical dials instead of a computer screen?

I would guess that there’s more demand for manuals from older people than from younger people. Younger people can’t be nostalgic about stick shifting.

Subaru WRX with the Performance Transmission

I haven’t tried them myself (I’m not a big WRX fan in general) but I hear a lot of complaining about them and not a lot of praise.

I have only tried paddle shifters on other people’s cars so I couldn’t do anything too exciting. They will really refuse to shift sometimes even if the result would be within the operating parameters of the engine/transmission? Is that just a problem with some models or is it universal?

I do admit that I enjoy the feeling of being able to blow up my engine if I feel like it… (Actually I’m not sure the synchros would let me do that.)