I was a mentor for an all girls high school FIRST team and I have to say, the way they were treated at competition by other teams and the way the organization handled that sexual objectification of them at competition leads me to a “that checks out” conclusion of Kamen and Epstein.
How did you rule out the much simpler explanation that the culture propagates from the hormones of high school boys, and going against that is a hard problem? You're going to have to be explicit about the details of "the way the organization handled that", as the obvious assumption is that they'd be stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to post-facto punish at the organizational level (as opposed to proactive policies for team mentors to follow going forward).
I am currently a mentor and previously a judge and volunteer for many years at regional events. In all my years I have never seen anything remotely like sexual objectification. I obviously can't know your experience but I would be very very surprised to find this occurring... especially at competitions.
I believe this implication goes against core values of the org and certainly it's local volunteers. I have no skin here except to defend a program that is doing amazing work. My kids are participants and I have contributed to the org for more than 10y.
Some CIO thought it would be great to get rid of our local in office IT team and replaced them with a multi million contract with HP to use their “tier 1” support. Their service was absolute garbage. But the CIO got a fat bonus check for the “cost savings”
The use case varies but for what it’s worth, most major cellular provider in the US offer fallback Internet plans. Ranges from 10-20 a month depending if you already have a line with them. AT&T has an interesting one where your phone lines hotspot is free and unthrottled whenever your fiber is impacted.
Or they’re just offline, because their backup batteries only last a few hours, and the gensets for the backhaul have run out of diesel. Iberian blackout last year, I didn’t even know it had happened until I went to pick the kid up from school - just another day at the home office.
This too depends on which POP/ground station you're landing at.
Maybe less so once the majority of starling satellites are capable of laser communications to route your traffic down to a less saturated ground station.
I noticed this the other day with the Anthropic upholding its redline. I think this is the first time in history where consumer tech exceeds military tech. Historically, it was always military tech trickles down to consumer.
weren't the first instances of that.
you could argue that places like /r/combatfootage are the consumer 'tech' that leads some of this, but it wasn't 2022.
I argue that it’s different. Ukrainian military needed this to adapt to the warfare. The US has plenty of means to bomb people (look at Iran) with or without consumer drones. Our military does not have any native LLM capabilities.
This is a completely unfounded conspiracy theory, but I think it’s a fun one. I think Elon Musk is running these companies the same way that he is a top ranked Diablo player. He just plays one on TV. The decision makers in the military industrial complex pushed black programs into a group of private company so they could scale and cut red tape while shedding contractors with really serious performance problems. So now a faction of “the insiders“ control space launches, social media, and have a backup AI company. There are less successful programs like Tesla for getting cattle like me to drive an electric car that can be remotely driven into a median or disabled if someone in Bethesda decides that they don’t like you. Also there is a not so successful attempt to revolutionize tunnel logistics for defense. So what I’m saying is that this is military tech, they just pretend these are private companies run by a Tony Stark showman. I can’t support this with evidence, but it makes for a good story.
Conspiracy theories aren't very productive. But the one thing that continues to bother me is how there is no great explanation for why TSLA is still worth much. It's a shrinking car company that is failing to execute at FSD and says it's going to make humanoid robots instead of cars.
There is no good reason TSLA should be valued any more than 10% of its current valuation, and even that would be rich. There is a fine argument it should be worth 3-4% of what it currently is.
It is almost like there's a connection between PayPal, Elon Musks fortunes, and crypto.
I still wonder who Satoshi really was. I wonder how Microstrategy remains solvent.
The vision for the future elon gives us (exploring the stars, human augmentation, advanced AI likely leading to elimination of suffering) is a heaven-like vision in a western world where most people don’t believe in anything much, and many of our leaders and intellectuals are misanthropes who think having kids is selfish.
I don’t care what tesla’s quarterly sales are, I’m supporting elon’s vision.
That vision is a lie, and it's a distraction. It is taking advantage of the emptiness that they themselves created, and now they are making you angry to distract you while they rob you. I sincerely wish you well in life, don't pick the wrong heroes.
There are many such mysteries, right? How does Oracle make money when every product of theirs sucks and is worse than free alternatives? How is it that Google and Meta seem to have more revenue from “advertising“ than everyone spends on advertising? Where are the product sales that can be traced to this massive amount of spending? I don’t think you could even articulate a plausible business plan around what Google claims to do, especially when they were hot in the early 2000s. How do large financial institutions, like JP Morgan, get fined for financial crimes yet still operate with total public trust? Just as strange as Bigfoot and aliens but in plain sight.
Again, I’m going to qualify this with the disclaimer that this is my own baseless conspiracy theory presented purely for its entertainment value. I suspect that the United States has many effectively state owned enterprises just like the PRC, but there are elaborate obfuscation techniques used to make that seem as if that were not the case. In part that is because a large criminal network is wearing the dead US government like a skin suit.
Whomever it is, was, there are a handful of individuals still holding block controls on the ORIGINAL chain... that could topple ANY valuation. Those who sold around $0.32/USD would be happy to know that chasing the dragon would have made them as mad as the leads on TV shows.
I think the notion of a cryptocurrency treasury company is idiotic but Strategy (MicroStrategy) is an audited public company. If you want to know how they're solvent then you can literally just read their financial statements.
It’s interesting because my career went from doing higher level language (Python) to lower language (C++ and C). Opus and the like is amazing at Python, honestly sometimes better than me but it does do some really stupid architectural decisions occasionally. But when it comes to embedded stuff, it’s still like a junior engineer. Unsure if that will ever change but I wonder if it’s just the quality and availability of training data. This is why I find it hard to believe LLMs will replace hardware engineers anytime soon (I was a MechE for a decade).
As someone who did Python professionally from a software engineering perspective, I've actually found Python to be pretty crappy really: unaware of _good_ idioms living outside tutorials and likely 90% of Python code out there that was simply hacked together quickly.
I have not tested, but I would expect more niche ecosystems like Rust or Haskell or Erlang to have better overall training set (developer who care about good engineering focus on them), and potentially produce the best output.
For C and C++, I'd expect similar situation with Python: while not as approachable, it is also being pushed on beginning software engineers, and the training data would naturally have plenty of bad code.
I've found it's ok at Rust. I think a lot of existing Rust code is high quality and also the stricter Rust compiler enforces that the output of the LLM is somewhat reasonable.
A big downside with rust is the compile times. Being in a tight AI loop just wasn't part of the design of any existing programming languages.
As languages designed for (and probably written by) AI come out over the next decade, it will be really interesting to see what dragon tradeoffs they make.
"cargo check" is fast and it's enough for the AI to know the code is correct.
I would argue that because Rust is so strict having the agent compile and run tests on every iterations is actually less needed then in other languages.
I program mostly in python but I keep my projects strictly typed with basedpyright and it greatly reduced the amount of errors the agent makes because it can get immediate feedback it has done something stupid.
Of course you still need to review the code because it doesn't solve logic bugs.
>Being in a tight AI loop just wasn't part of the design of any existing programming languages.
I would dare to say that any Lisp (Common Lisp, Clojure, Racket, whatever) is perfect for a tight AI loop thanks to REPL-driven development. It's an interesting space to explore and I know that the Clojure community at least are trying to figure out something there.
Agreed. When I've written very low level code where there are "odd" constraints ("this function must never take a lock, no system calls can be made" etc) the LLM would accidentally violate them. It seems sort of obvious why - the vast majority of code it is trained on does not have those constraints.
I think the combinatorial space is just too much. When I did web dev it was mostly transforming HTML/JSON from well-defined type A to well-defined type B. Everything is in text. There's nothing to reason about besides what is in the prompt itself. But constructing and maintaining a mental model of a chip and all of its instructions and all of the empirical data from profiling is just too much for SOTA to handle reliably.
Unfortunately, I’ve found it’s really good at Wayland and OpenGL. It even knows how to use Clutter and Meta frameworks from the Gnome Mutter stack.
Makes me wonder why I learned this all in the first place.
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