Yeah I always wondered if I ever switched to solar panels, would there be a way to accumulate heat to be used in the Canadian cold months that have little sunlight? The closest I found was electric thermal storage based on heating bricks. They can accumulate more energy than water since they can go to higher temperatures. For example these say they go to 1300°F or 700°C https://steffes.com/ets/roomheater/ . They don't seem to have large models that could heat a house for months however.
This matches my intuition. Systematic misalignment seems like it could be prevented by somewhat simple rules like the hippocratic oath or Asimov's Laws of robotics or rather probabilistic bayesian versions of these rules that take into account error bounds and risk.
The probabilistic version of "Do No Harm" is "Do not take excessive risk of harm".
This should work as AIs become smarter because intelligence implies becoming better bayesians which implies being great at calibrating confidence intervals of their interpretations and their reasoning and basically gaining a superhuman ability for evaluating the bounds of ambiguity and risk.
Now this doesn't mean that AIs won't be misaligned, only that it should be possible to align them. Not every AI maker will necessarily bother to align them properly, especially in adversarial, military applications.
The US has had an unfair advantage in tech, defense, science and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With the newfound isolationism, tariffs, threats etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere, especially if governments can help bootstrap these sectors with efforts like these.
AI middle managers are coming. The highest-level corporate authority can and will continue to exist as a person that makes sure the AI systems are running correctly and skim profits off the top of the AI substructure, with the lowest stratum being an underclass precariat doing the hands-on tickets from an AI agent at a continuously adjusted market price for the task.
That doesn't make Hacker News European. It is American. Y Combinator is American even if pg is originally British. Stripe is American but its founders are Irish.
Yeah i know, my response was a clarification that BenoitEssiambre was referring to the founder, not the site itself. My interpretation of the "so there's that" part of the message, was an acknowledgement that Hacker News is hosted in US, but if nothing else the founder is living in UK.
It is a sad reality. The US has recently threatened to annex Denmark and Canada. Some of us are suddenly keenly aware that the US is in a position to take control of most of our computers and phones via software updates.
Open source is the global alternative you're looking for. There's even interesting hardware options like https://starlabs.systems/
The US also has had an unfair advantage in tech/defense and finance because it hosted the global hubs of the free world. This attracted eye-watering amounts of money to places like SF and NY. With this newfound isolationism, tariffs etc. reducing the viability of hosting the global hubs, there's massive opportunities opening in europe and elsewhere.
I know doctors who've worked with Marrero and they seem to be split in their opinion. They seem to agree he tends to be "excessively thorough", frequently sending tests to labs across the world. This makes him liked by desperate patients with potentially incurable diseases who want someone to "do something".
They are split on whether his thoroughness is just fueling false hopes and sending patients down unnecessary rabbit holes or if he could have potentially identified a real issue.
Note that the "Labor vs Capital" distinction mostly means "workers vs retirees". The reason more money goes to capital these days is not necessarily that each retiree is getting more but that in an aging population, there's more retirees so it takes more resources diverted from workers to support this larger non working population. This problem can be solved with more babies 20 years ago or more immigration of workers now to share the burden (unless AI makes everything weird).
I undestand what you are saying but retirees are not what people mean when they talk about Capital. They are talking about executives, fund managers, billionaires, and so on. People who actually control much of our society. Yes many of the funds are managing the retirements of working people but that does not necessarily need to be the case, nor do those retirees have any active ownership of the companies those funds invest in.
Right but the majority of people holding significant amounts of capital is retirees or people saving for retirement. There is a small minority of people wealthy for other reasons. It doesn't really make sense to strongly associate these people to "capital" since they are a small minority of capital holders.
Do you have a link? What I've seen in most discussions is obscuring of the fact that the majority of "capital" is directly or indirectly retirees or people saving for retirement. Those in the top 5% wealthiest often need to survive on that wealth for decades so it's not as if they have per year spending power that is that high. You too will be at your top percentile wealthiest of your life when you are nearing retirement.
Honestly? Your favorite LLM will be able to build you a syllabus better tailored to fit your current level of understanding. But in short, Capital is the people making decisions about how money is expressed through the economy.
But to make concrete what I am saying. Take a VC fund like Lightspeed that manages tens of billions of dollars. They do this on behalf of LPs, of which the largest are typically large pools of long-term capital like university endowments and pension funds.
Lightspeed, for example, has received ~$400m in investments from CalPERS (retirement program for some California public employees) alone. That represents tens of thousands of employees and former employees. Even if the notional value of one of their retirements is (say) $2m, that person is still Labor. Capital is represented by the people at CalPERS who decide where to allocate money, and by the Lightspeed GPs who decide which startups to fund. A former county attorney who has money in CalPERS has essentially no say over how her retirement funds are invested (if she's on a pension); that decision is down to a relative handful of people she will likely never meet.
A quick way to know the difference: top 5% wealthy people can buy the house next door and make it ugly, being a small nuisance. Capital can crash the entire economy with bad bets or get laws changed/ignored at their behest (we are watching this right now with X's CSAM generation on demand).
reply