sohois
15d ago
Death Valley is sparsely populated: by your logic, we can assume it's a good place to live.
Plus, I daresay that many Indians would in fact like to live in Mumbai, more than are currently there
sohois
15d ago
The examples we have of liberalised planning, both historical and current, are far superior to the examples we have of drug legalisation/decriminalisation, so it seems unlikely
sohois
16d ago
Same, I've got nothing against the occasional pop banger, k or otherwise, but didn't land with me at all
sohois
18d ago
Your first two paragraphs just appear to be quibbling over definitions. I don't really care what measurement scheme you use, abandon percentages if you find them useless. The point of the comparison is to show that the advancement in AI capabilities is on a completely different planet to AVs.
As for the comparison of investment, it seems trivial to point out that the difference in magnitude is due to the potential markets. If a company invented Level 5 self driving cars tomorrow, what would they get? You could take away human taxi drivers and truck drivers and some other logistics, and start taking a big chunk of the consumer car market. For a time at least, since other companies would be able to copy you pretty quickly. I'm assuming a lot of companies in that market plan to licence the technology for their revenues, rather than trying to take direct control. Certainly a big market, which likely explains a lot of the valuation for your Teslas and Ubers, but not unlimited.
The impact of a company announcing AGI tomorrow would be unimaginable, even if we assume a slow takeoff with limited recursive self-improvement.
sohois
18d ago
AVs seem like an incomparable category. I couldn't pinpoint the beginning of AV hype the same way you can point to the Transformer architecture for LLMs, but the early examples of AVs 10-15 years ago I recall were pretty impressive. It was like 80% of the way to human parity right from the get-go; it made sense that people were predicting a rapid replacement of human drivers, because they'd made such an impressive start. (I appreciate that AV efforts probably existed long before this but I think it's a fair starting point)
And then over the next decade AV capabilities crept up to human levels at like 1% per year. There were no significant breakthroughs, no evidence of rapid progress, and as you state it is only now that we're getting commercially available taxis in specific locations. Even when Waymo started rolling out proper AV taxis in some cities, it did not signal a sudden leap forward in capabilities as you might expect.
Contrast to LLMs. GPT-1 came out in 2018, a year after the Transformer paper, with GPT-2 following a year later. GPT-2 was impressive compared to previous language generators, but still only perhaps at 33% of the level of an average human. with 3 it jumped up to 50%, 3.5 went further, while 4 was perhaps at the 80% level that AVs started at. Every few months since then has since more and more large leaps, such that current models are winning mathematical competitions and are measured at PhD level in a huge variety of domains.
Chart the progress of both technologies, and they'll look completely different. It's fair to think at some point natural limits will stop the endless scaling of LLM capabilities, but thus far extrapolating a straight line has worked pretty well. AVs never even had a line to extrapolate from.
sohois
26d ago
Do people pick these up and read forever though? A lot of these webfics are serialized, people reach the end and then just read chapter by chapter.
One of the big draws for me with webfiction is that I am a very fast reader, and if I was buying everything it would bankrupt me. A million word story can give me a nice week of reading, but I wouldn't be spending more than a few hours of leisure a day, and most of the time keeping up with ongoing web releases is ~1hour a week
sohois
28d ago
I can't believe this Reddit tier joke has made it to a motte thread. Aside from being a decade old and barely funny the first time, it's not even accurate.
sohois
28d ago
Saudi Arabia takes its biggest step yet into the biggest of culture war arenas:
EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for $55 Billion
Electronic Arts has been bought up by the Saudi investment arm PIF, alongside Jared Kushner's Affinity Partners and PE giant Silver Lake. The trio paid $55Bn for EA, albeit in a leveraged buyout involving $20Bn of debt financing(!).
On the surface, nothing too interesting, perhaps another example of the incredible growth in private equity. And that might be all there is, just 3 funds thinking there is untapped potential in what was an often poorly run gaming giant. However, PIF is almost certainly the largest owner, and AP News identifies the deal as part of the Saudi strategy. I expect Kushner is either wetting his beak or acting as a lightning rod for the Saudis, while Silver Lake probably needed no encouragement to get in on the deal.
The Saudis appear to have identified major cultural industries in Sports and Gaming as prime opportunities for...something? "Sportswashing" makes sense for the tiny nations and city states like Qatar and Abu Dhabi which have no real power outside of their resources, but it's not clear what Saudi Arabia gains from pumping hundreds of billions into these industries. Much has been said of the desire of MBS to diversify Saudi Arabia, and at least with this deal there is room to move EA functions into the country, but it's a drop in the bucket. The leveraged nature of the deal is also unusual; that's the kind of option you typically pursue when asset stripping - neither the Saudis nor Silver Lake needs that kind of business.
sohois
28d ago
As substantialfrivolity says, the damage cap can be removed later, but honestly I'm wondering why you're concerned. In Act 1 and 2, none of the enemies aren't really tough enough that you need to break the damage cap to win easily. If I had any criticisms of the combat in the game, it's that a lot of mechanics seemed to be balanced around post game and new game+, such that you never need to learn or use them in the course of beating the game's story.
sohois
1mo ago
I'm hesitant to read too far into the readership of places like Ao3 or Royal Road or what have you, but I actually think web serials are something that will only grow more popular in the future
Japan has already figured out a clear [webnovel > light novel > manga > anime & beyond] pipeline and China & Korea look to be following that route. It seems like the self published web novel stuff is increasingly dominating the media landscape over there and I expect it could be similar in the West if entertainment companies can figure out a similar route to mass consumption.
sohois
1mo ago
As the other posters have said, numbers for the march appear heavily inflated and it wasn't that massive. At the same time, it does seem to represent a noticeable shift. Protests arranged by Tommy Robinson or involving him in some way were lucky to attract thousands in the past, it was always a bit of a joke. Suddenly he's pulling in huge crowds and everything has a veneer of acceptability to it that it didn't in the past.
sohois
1mo ago
I think Citymapper was better last time I used it, although I understand it got a bit shitty when it got bought out
sohois
1mo ago
Think there are a few things to think about here:
-
This is probably an area where international perspectives differ a lot. As I recall, Germany and Australia were the biggest proponents of the anti game side with numerous restrictive laws. I don't see any politicians for me in the UK or in the US talking about games that way, but perhaps there are holdouts elsewhere?
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For those nations that don't have any opposition, I think gamergate played a big role. In the past, the anti game side was largely right wing Christians, assorted boomers, and general cranks, while gamers themselves were mostly (perceived to be) young left wingers. As gamergate screwed up this traditional alignment, there's now little political benefit to being anti: you'll be hitting your own base as much as the enemy.
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But surely the biggest thing is that games are too big, too popular. Gamers grew up, and most of the working population have probably played games or continue to play them. Even in the "hot coffee" GTA days the anti side wasnt that popular, but now?
sohois
1mo ago
Only read the first volume and then stop. Once it wrings the humour out of the situation, it descends to absolute trash tier
sohois
1mo ago
I'm a bit confused by this post; you open by stating that
I believe the economies of the US and Japan (along with the bulk of the other “rich” countries) are very dysfunctional compared even to poor countries like Thailand
but your evidence just appears to be that mid range hotels are better than low cost hotels, and national carriers are better than low cost carriers.
You do realise that Thailand also has low-cost airlines that nickel and dime you for everything and provide a very basic service? And high income countries all have airlines providing similar service to Thai airlines at similar prices?
It's the same with hotels. Your $20 a night hotel in Thailand is mid range but you can easily find much more basic hotels with similar service to the low end hotels you use in the US. The US is just a more expensive country, and prices reflect that.
sohois
1mo ago
It is (or was, before the "safety act") trivial to arrange over the internet, so not sure theres any barrier to scale
sohois
2mo ago
A quick Google bought this up immediately:
The franchise has raked in an estimated $46.7 billion, with merchandise sales at an estimated $29.057 billion.
So not quite 90%, but still a majority of earnings.
Whether this means Disney has made profits or a return on their initial investment I don't know, although some of the other Google results suggested merch was still bringing in around 1b per year for them.
sohois
2mo ago
Merchandise is the biggest earner for IPs by a huge margin, indeed the value of Star Wars was probably 90% merch sales when they bought it
sohois
2mo ago
As others have already implied, this study seems to be a vehicle for attracting media attention, rather than a serious attempt at evaluating the impact of LLMs on productivity. "Rapid revenue acceleration"? So we're already excluding anything that is merely cost-saving by replacing employees?
The actual paper is not freely available, so I don't actually know how rigorous their research was. At the very least, it is described as being enterprise only - historically the slowest and least agile when it comes to adopting new technologies. There are basic bitch wrappers that already have billion dollar+ valuations! And if it is focused solely on revenue generation as the benchmark, you will be cutting out a huge swath of projects that involve LLMs.
One might also wonder at timing. While LLMs will seem old news to rats and SSC readers due to familiarity with GPT-2, ChatGPT has only been around since November of 2022: not even 3 years old. And that was GPT3.5, GPT4 only came out in March of '23. Any other technology would be incredible if it drove rapid revenue acceleration in ~15 enterprise deployments after such a tiny amount of time. That's not to mention the yuge problem of AI studies becoming out of date simply because the whole thing moves way too quickly for academia. When was this study completed? Autumn of last year, if we're being generous?
Again, without reading the primary source it would be harsh to jump to conclusions, but based on the article linked this just screams "proactive title finding to get attention" rather than something important to learn about business adoption.
sohois
2mo ago
I recall something similar in another web novel. It was otherwise quite an interesting story, blending cyberpunk with a fantasy litrpg: earth was a cyberpunk dystopia, but got visited by aliens who gifted them access to a shared litrpg world.
Now, you expect some progressive politics to insert themselves in cyberpunk just by it's nature, but it was the fantasy litrpg part which embarrassed the novel. One of the aliens was from a race which was agender until a certain age, when they would become male or female. This was a great excuse for the author to show his MCs progressive bonafides, referring carefully to "them" and acting shocked when other characters - including other alien races - didn't.
But this was alien race. Calling a woman "sir" or vice versa is insulting for humans with a large amount of sexual dimorphism, but it makes zero sense that this race would have the same issues. To them, it would be completely "alien" to worry about someone using different pronoun.
Even worse, they weren't even speaking English. Every race had their own language filtered through a perfect universal translator. Did their language even have pronouns? Would the translator not just switch anything to the correct pronoun? It was a complete failure of world building
sohois
2mo ago
The UK has failed to build any new reservoirs for, IIRC, several decades. This despite the fact that the population has expanded considerably in that time.
sohois
2mo ago
I wonder how much of the lack of chemistry is driven by the simple fact that Johnson and Evans are not good actors. Perhaps Song thought she could get something interesting out of them once they were taken away from comicbook crap?
sohois
2mo ago
The two episodes were fine, nothing special, but their ability to rile up conservatives and the administration itself is by far the funniest thing they've done in a long time.
If I were to just look at episodes in isolation, my main concern would be the fallback on old jokes. They did member berries just under 10 years ago now (coincidentally when they first started doing Garrison as Trump) but have now resorted to "remember Saddam Hussein" and "remember that bank guy"
sohois
2mo ago
enshittify
This verb implies a movement from a good state to a bad one; the language was previously not shit. Except, the people using LLMs in this way already can't communicate. The original english translation you posted below is incomprehensible. You suggest
the English they do write will be worse
but I can't see how anyone would suggest the AI translation is worse than the original. It might screw up some of the meaning, but that comes with the tradeoff of being more readable.
Or are you just using this example to push your point that native speakers are going to degrade the quality of their communication? This seems far more to reinforce the argument that smart users of LLMs will use them to leap forward, while poor users will get left behind. As I write this post I am using the Grammarly add-on; it's a useful spelling and grammar checker. It will also pop up "writing improvements". Almost without exception, these improvements are shit, and they've been shit long before ChatGPT came along. However, it hasn't changed the way I write, because I am capable of judging the quality of its suggestions. Do you think that Grammarly has been degrading the quality of English for years because some users implement everything it says?
It's the same story with translation. 15 years ago, a non-native speaker might go to babelfish.com and pump out something completely useless. 10 years ago, they would have switched to Google translate, and got something better, but still missing a ton of meaning. 5 years ago, DeepL was the standard, but still a long way off human translation. Now it's LLMs. When learning any language, one of the first lessons a student learns is not to blindly trust any machine translation.
It took Uber 15 years to record a profit and zero years to completely change the taxi market
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