About half the inhabitants of Gaza are under 18 years old, so 1/3 of the dead being children corresponds to a ratio of two civilians killed for every combatant. This is not out of the ordinary for urban warfare conducted in a manner intended to reduce civilian casualties.
How long do I have to wait until they can make an ultra-baby for me? There’s no reason to have a kid now if I could have a much better kid instead in a just few years…
He doesn’t look particularly concerned.
There’s already a genetic mutation that does that.
Myostatin-related muscle hypertrophy is not known to cause any medical problems, and affected individuals are intellectually normal.
And it makes you look like this:
That’s a house-cat, and it looks like that without having to lift weights. Some people have this mutation too, and it’s particularly dramatic in children who would otherwise never be that muscular. (I’d post pictures but I’m not sure about the ethics of sharing photos of other people’s swole toddlers even when they’re already available online.)
And Picard is nine feet tall. I guess that’s why he’s in charge.
Removed by mod
I understand that that’s the intent. The problem is the methodology, which is as I said just multiplication by five. Calling it a gold standard implies that there’s actually some sophisticated analysis going on, and there isn’t.
The “gold standard in the field” is apparently to multiply the Hamas numbers by five. I’m not kidding. That’s where the 186,000 number comes from. This is low-effort bullshit.
Edit: Also this article is just wrong about what the 335,500 number is claimed to be. It is what you get if you extrapolate the 186,000 number to the end of the year, not to September.
Does… Does this mean Harris actually isn’t the lesser of two evils? Now I don’t know who to vote for.
My naming convention for C++ is that custom types are capitalized and instances aren’t. So I might write User user;.
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.
I don’t understand why the father would just confess like that, but I suppose I shouldn’t expect good judgement from him.
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…
According to this article:
The NEL was an offshoot of an ongoing digital lending project called the Open Library, in which the Internet Archive scans physical copies of library books and lets people check out the digital copies as though they’re regular reading material instead of ebooks. The Open Library lent the books to one person at a time—but the NEL removed this ratio rule, instead letting large numbers of people borrow each scanned book at once.
It sounds like what you’re describing is what they were doing before they did the thing for which they got sued.
As for AI, I think that in general using a copyrighted work to train an AI is a transformative use and therefore that it is permitted by law. Specific instances in which an AI outputs copyrighted text without any transformative modifications may still be copyright infringement They may also be fair use, in the way that copying a short excerpt from a longer document is fair use. I’m not a lawyer.
Anyway, if the courts rule against the AI companies, the enforcement of such a ruling would be disastrous for the ability for American companies to compete with international rivals who will still freely use the training data that American companies would no longer have access to. A law would be (or at least should be) passed to prevent that, although the tech companies might end up paying some nominal fee.
Many people seem to think so but the evidence doesn’t support their argument. A 2:1 ratio of civilians to combatants killed isn’t particularly low but it is far closer to the best that Western armies have been able to accomplish than it is to the ratio seen from armies that are not trying to reduce civilian casualties. For example, Russia’s ratio in Mariupol is approximately 8:1 and that was against Ukrainian soldiers in uniform who weren’t deliberately hiding among civilians. Urban warfare always involves heavy civilian casualties.