I have fun ideas that are kind of complex and I can just experiment and see now with a couple spare hours on the weekend.
Trying to explain to my non software engineering friends that they could build any small app they have an idea for and they’re like I wouldn’t know how, and I’m like, you just ask and you can literally figure it out now so quick.
Maybe software engineers are the most excited and the most cynical.
I think fundamentally it is that. The ability to retain information.
Like given a specific task it can do a thing amazingly well, but can it recall a thing. Its memory seems like a giant filing cabinet and it has to go scan like 20 million tokens worth of memory to recover things previously talked about.
Human memory is more graph like, we don’t recall things exactly, but one thing links to another, we create a pattern of a thing, we mark what is important, and overtime what was important degrades or becomes less so.
I feel like what makes it lack intelligence is it never seems to learn. Like it kind of does, but then doesn’t persist once too many other things are learned.
I’m sure they’re probably working on this, but I feel like that is what I want far more than even better models, is a better memory system to recall and forget things that the models work on.
So I sympathize with the idea that a government school paid for by tax dollars, is violating 1st amendment rights.
But it would also violate 1st amendment rights if they took tax dollars and gave it to families who used it on a private religious education.
Or they could arbitrarily let parents pick whatever school they wanted, regardless of what it taught, but that is way too ripe for fraud.
Can anyone think of how a government could respect various religious beliefs while not advocating for one specific one (and let’s presume secular humanism is a type of religious belief), while maintaining tax funded education?
My point is more that as a parent I shouldn’t be forced to pay for an education i wouldn’t give my children.
Secular humanism not being a religion, does have a set of beliefs. It would seem unconstitutional if someone had to pay a teacher to teach my kids the Bible, or the Quran, and many things taught in government schools are counter to beliefs of religion.
I don’t see a solution to the problem that doesn’t cause crazy amounts of abuse other than the government completely gets out of education, or local communities/governments alone support it and the school matches the beliefs of the local community.
None of that seems plausible. So how do you respect the 1st amendment rights of people like the article talks about?
I've found that none of the words of the Amendments mean anything like what the dictionary says.
If the words "In God We Trust" on the money, and "Under God" in the we're-pretending-it's-not-mandatory prayer, aren't "establishment of religion", then I have no idea what the Constitution says.
How do we respect the "rights" of those people? We let them homeschool their kids. And if they want a tax break for it, we increase their taxes to pay for the sheer number of things that other people pay for but don't use.
> (and let’s presume secular humanism is a type of religious belief)
Let's not presume that, because it's in no way a religious belief. Pretending that it is means that there's little the government could actually do. Which may, in fact, be the point of this particular lie.
Is there a world where we look back at how AI usage is charged today and we equate it with how we had minutes on AOL and how absurd it seems looking back?
I think without a doubt that will be the case, unless the trend of compute getting better over the last 60 years suddenly stops. It should become less tough to run a local model and our devices should become more powerful.
However I think there is still a significant runway for these models to scale, so there will always be some sort of offering from providers. I can't imagine that our current use of the context window will be how that looks in a handful of years.
Absolutely. LLM providers are likely to be the next telecom providers. Low and steady income, translating to safe dividend income for investors. Most of these companies have no moat, since most LLM implementation strategies more or less converge to the same result.
Absolutely. Tokens will flow like electricity, in the instances when you aren't just paying for electricity to run models locally. The token providers (well, at least the frontier labs) will fight it tooth-and-nail with the example of telecoms being "how to become a commodity" but as long as open models continue they will have no choice.
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
> Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
Why is everyone so sure of this? My own instinct is just that we'll adapt to it and it will be fine.
It's just seems like the equivalent of making one of those charts that shows we're going to run out of [some critical resource] by [some date]. They are always wrong, without exception. Because as the resource becomes more scarce, we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it. You can't just extrapolate that trend lines or relationships between statistics like GDP and population continue into the distant future; it almost never works.
I don't have my own competing, grand prediction of how the distant future will pan out. But my thinking is that societies are extremely complex systems and when one variable is tweaked, generally all the other variables also adjust to compensate.
I'm not against growing populations, just not overly concerned about depopulation either.
>> we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it
How? Old people need care. Younger people will need to take care of them. When they die, a lot of knowledge will be lost, because there will not be enough young people to learn all those skills. Less people will also mean overall less economic activity, less creativity, less inventions and so on. I'm not saying the world will stop, but the transition will certainly be painful.
You're assuming at least two things that I disagree with.
First about behavior in old age. I'm pretty sure the majority of adults today don't want to live and think like their grandparents, so we can't say "less" anything. The circumstances are definitely changing enough that we already know it will be different.
The population decline is not happening in huge step changes. "About to bite us" is definitely hyperbole.
No, it will simply be a slow and steady increase of pressure on the working age population: taxes, retirement age delayed further and further, "everyone must work", etc...
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
It's a problem to the economic model, too, but of course no one cares about more than a couple fiscal quarters in the future. The looming ecological disasters will irreversibly destroy the global economy in some of our lifetimes if nothing happens to stop it pretty soon.
Are you...ignorant of how many of the refugee crises are because of climate change? Like literally right now? In 2024 alone, about 40M people were displaced due to climate change, and that's a doubling from ten years ago.
> As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
Each marginal person does not produce more environmental benefits than they consume. It's dramatically the opposite. My butt is not a carbon capture device.
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
No, corporations want people without children, since they have more disposable income to spend on the pointless tat they want to sell you, and are willing to work longer hours to make rich people even richer.
I don't think so - children are drivers of consumption and they also reduce the agency of workers by eliminating their financial slack (less ability to jump jobs / take it easy due to higher spending floor e.g. daycare expenses, larger apartment, etc).
If you’re talking about Pete Hegseth, he I think is CREC, and they are post-millenialists, which means they think more so that the earth will get better and better and should build things that last to welcome in Christ when he returns.
In Spain both are still taught in the standard high-school curriculum.
Not everyone takes those classes of course, but Latin is one of the core optatives in the humanities path, it can be chosen in the university entrance exam as one of the core tests, and many students do pick it.
It's not really taught as a foreign language though, it is used to teach fundamental concepts in linguistic analysis and translation, and it can be a legitimately valuable foundation to have a strong general literacy across romance languages.
I'm not sure how common it is elsewhere, but Roman law also makes up a non-trivial fraction of the compulsory curriculum in the first years of studying law at university. Most of the concepts are still relevant, it's what all modern legal systems are founded on.
I remember that a good friend of mine somehow avoided studying maths for the last four years of high-school by choosing all the alternatives, which included both Latin and ancient Greek. He was and still is a fantastic programmer despite hating maths though, obsessed with Linux distros from early teens.
It's in Spanish, proof based, but not as hard as Spivak. If he is good at programming he must be good at logic and thus if he understands Math as something to apply rules, he we will ace the book.
He can use Maxima to locally solve the equations. Forget LLM's, these will just make him dumber. Maxima to test the solutions, pen and paper:
The Windows version comes with everything in the installer.
Linux distros have it in its repos, install "wxmaxima" and "maxima-doc"
for documentation. It's weights very little, less than 100MB. Install Gnuplot too for plots/charts/graphs (altough it might come preinstalled for Windows).
And a Math background, even a basic one will be extremeley helpful while coding.
Most schools in Spain thaught us Math as methods to blindly apply formulae based on rote memorization and everyone was just clueless.
What's called "Roman law" in Europe derives from the Justinian Code, which was nominally a codification of but in many respects a radical reinterpretation of late roman law. Prior to the Justinian Code, and especially Scholastic era glosses, Roman law was arguably more like a very rigid style of common law; that is, requiring judges to hew closely to precedent rather than applying abstract legal principles.
It was the rediscovery of the Justinian Code during the Scholastic age which kickstarted a blossoming of legal theory in Europe. But they didn't understand that the Justinian Code wasn't a reflection of Roman law so much as a reflection of Emperor Justinian's reforms, which were in part an attempt to reassert control over and simplify the legal system.
Probably not. They were not learning it for funsies, but because it was the business language. English took its place now. If English goes away, it will be replaced by a language by another dominant business power.
Still would be very valuable to be able to read works that shaped western civilization in their original language, since a lot of nuance is lost translating to English. Just see how many crazy readings of the Bible people have (american evangelicals particularly ) because English can’t express the original idea in Greek well enough.
Even this subjective interpretation shows why the question is so good. Someone on the other side would say the fundamentals are completely different.
It is meant to point out how many people say they would be willing to sacrifice even their very lives for a stranger, but in reality they only sacrifice if they already know others had to sacrifice and now they're forced to.
Like if you took the combined wealth of every person who thinks we should tax people more to help the less fortunate - do they give anything freely? They want others to sacrifice first. I'll believe people would actually press blue in a majority, when I see people who claim we should pay more taxes, voluntarily paying more themselves.
I'd love to live in a world where I was confident a vast majority of people would press blue. But I've literally seen people say they would press blue - then go on to say that in a communist revolution certainly we will have to end the lives of all the bourgeois.
I would most definitely press red, because I don't believe anywhere near half the population are actually that good, and don't think I'm a good enough person to actually think I'd risk pressing blue. (Trump won the popular vote in America, and so based on the rhetoric I hear from my left leaning acquaintances, neither would they)
Sad world really. Also why this question is so good.
I have fun ideas that are kind of complex and I can just experiment and see now with a couple spare hours on the weekend.
Trying to explain to my non software engineering friends that they could build any small app they have an idea for and they’re like I wouldn’t know how, and I’m like, you just ask and you can literally figure it out now so quick.
Maybe software engineers are the most excited and the most cynical.
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