LCEnzo
1yr ago
Singapore and Korea? They're not welfare states, are amongst the richest places on Earth, and have the lowest fertility in the world.
The problem is the middle road between patriarchy and equiality. Either don't give women access education and work, or equalize social expectations and have husbands to take an equal share of chores, housework, childcare, etc.
The middle ground puts too much stress on women, and pushes the most agentic out of the country.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
Peter Watts - Blindsight
Great Sci-Fi book touching on consciousness, truly alien aliens, firs contact, mental disorders, etc. Pretty good, tho the writing could be better.
The Martian
Got a movie, haven't watched it. It's near future, about a guy trying to survive alone on Mars after his colleagues though him dead. Has a solid grounding in real science.
Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947
I'm curious about governments which were/are outliers, and thus wanted to learn more about Prussia which united Germany, and was famed for the quality of it's armies. It was readable for a layman, though some jumps across dates were a little jarring for me. I enjoyed, though couldn't read more than 2 chapters a day.
Na Drini ćuprija/The Bridge on the Drina
The one book I really enjoyed reading in Highschool. It was written by Ivo Andrić, a Nobel prize winner, diplomat, and a lover of history. This book depicts a small town on a river that divides modern day Bosnia and Serbia. Though most of the events in the book are fictional, it presents the reader with a rich and colorful picture of life in the town around the bridge (and through it the events in the surrounding lands) from the bridges construction in 16th century, to it's partial destruction in World War 1.
LCEnzo
1yr ago
People will get back alley abortions, their family, friends, and neighbours will cover them. You'd see a rise in Infant Sudden Death Syndrome, and babies being given up for adoption.
You can't force people into being parents, or at least not so overtly. You need to convince them by making it more high status, virtuous, convenient, and cheap.
LCEnzo
1yr ago
I've had those moments occasionally, when I was younger. Now my daydreams are filled with AGI.
LCEnzo
1yr ago
It's not about literally one women, or how many women commit violence im absolute terms. Per capita, men commit more violent crimes.
If you want to argue that there are a lot of female masterminds that have male minions commititng crimes on their behalf, that still implicates at least an equal number of men and women, besides being pure conjecture.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
AI has been noted as a priority in the most recent 5 year plan, but that is talk.
Chinese tech companies have been corralled and restrained, starting with Jack Ma and the Ant group. You might say that they aren't AI companies. This would be mostly right. AI hasn't had great success in being monetized in it of itself. Companies like Google and Meta can pay for research and large amounts of compute which need not be profitable by the way of their other businesses. Even OpenAI, is getting investment from Microsoft (as a former employee, I've talked to an intern working on fine tuning GPT3). The real estate bubble popping and the zero covid policy put more strain on tech companies in the midst of their humbling.
Let's look on the three things needed for AI R&D (besides money): data, compute, and human talent/capital.
China as a society gathers a ton of data. The state and companies collect a lot. The question is how much of that is available to researchers. Despite the Chinese advantage in data collection, most of human genetics research uses the UK biobank dateset. Researchers in firms like Alibaba and Tencent are bound to have some good stuff.
China has received a ban on buying advanced compute. It's domestic industry has been hard hit, and received no state support to keep them propped up. YMCA didn't get it's billion dollar deal with Apple to supply memory. On the design front, China has some companies. Their electronics industry in general is good and that includes design. I'm aware of Moore Threads designing GPUs, but haven't looked into other compute hardware (there was a x86 CPU a couple of years back, but that was in partnership with AMD, so it might be dead now).
China has a lot of good engineers, being an AI researcher and engineer is one of the most sought after careers due to the high compensation. That said, a lot of them, especially the very talented, head over to the USA.
As for money, tech companies are hurting right now, and I don't know the state of funding in academia.
you need computers for AI hence they're going to be supporting indigenous chip production.
Yes, AI needs compute. Where you're wrong is that the support for domestic chips ain't here. The companies are bleeding money and can't wait forever for state help. They're conducting layoffs as we write.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
not all birds fly, and anyway birds have slop similar to those of reptiles.
Nor do species lose adaptations the moment the original reason they got them disappears, but I concede the point.
larger bodies have about same number of components as smaller ones [...] And the only parts which larger bodies have more complex are gastrointestinal tract and lungs
'Components' is an artificial category. The number of cells which sense are what matters (since the collected data needs to be processed, otherwise the cell is worse than useless). If you need to sense with the same precision on 1 mm^2 of skin and on 5 mm^2, you'd need more neurons for transport and processing for the larger patch of skin. Not necessarily 5 times more, you can compress the data or whatever, but you definitely need more than for the 1 mm^2 patch.
LCEnzo
9mo ago
Software is stuff, very much so. Or at least something worth caring about.
The boardgames I used to play as a kid? Replaced by videogames. Mail chess? Chess.com. TV? Streaming. Notebooks for planning, notes, recipes? An app. Physical maps? An app. The Encyclopedia? Replaced by Wikipedia, plus I can for the most part freely access scientific papers as they're published on pubmed, arxiv, etc.
How do I learn things like cooking, sewing, gardening, woodworking, chemistry, or look up information? Used to be a trip to a library, asking around, searching for experts in the phonebook, etc. Now I can google stuff, youtube is full of how tos and instructional videos, and LLMs can spit out semi accurate answers to common problems that are hard to find on google.
People complain how newer appliances are crappier, but the price to income ratio nosedived.
All that said, I agree that we lost things, and that some things got worse. Replacing physical buttons with touch controls in cars springs to mind. Architecture is another common example.
AFAIK, two things come together to give birds small but powerful brains, and better mass/compute scaling:
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Cell size can vary between species, and birds have pressure to miniaturize to reduce weight.
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Smaller bodies have less stuff (skin, muscles, etc) that need a nervous connection and a part of the brain to process data from and/or issue commands to. See Encephalization quotient. Eg. Women have the same IQ as men, despite having, on average, 90% of the brain size.
EDIT: This post by Scott might be of interest.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
Yeah, but using existing tools does not research make. Some money has gotta be flowing from the gov to the vendors supplying the software. This ain't the same as funding fundamental research or subsidizing industry.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
Appeal to authority is a hack, a heuristic, a quick and dirty way to gather information in a world where our time and will is finite. It's like building a house on sand.
When you argue using authority, you're taking someone else's words on faith (or to be more generous/realistic, you're making a good bet). If you knew (ie have read and reasoned about) their argument, you might as well have used that. Since you did not, when the person you're arguing against starts questioning the authority, all that's left is to insist they have faith (or use and continue the authorities reasoning, as could've been done in the first place, without the appeal). No further argument can be made against you, except insofar as can be argued that you made a bad bet.
LCEnzo
1yr ago
Human populations don't (only) cluster genetically based on skin color. Race is a bad, lossy, over used heuristic. Grab a group of 130+ IQ Serbs, or Arabs, or Nigerians, and you'd have a much performance along most metrics we value. Indians in the US e.g.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
It has a SFW section, and some authors put their SFW stories in the NSFW since it's more popular (which leads to frustration among readers). E.g. Beware of Chicken and Virtuous Sons are also posted on QQ, as does Ack.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
What's the cost in trying it out? Jumping ship after 6 to 12 months is not uncommon for a SWE, especially one early in his career. My advice would be to take the offer, and see if you find it fun or tolerable. If so, great. If not, the extra cash will allow you to take 6 - 12 months of vacation, soul searching, and job hunting, and still end up net zero in terms of income. The firm will, presumably, also be good for your CV, meaning you'll find the next job hunt even easier. Just be wary of life style inflation if you plan on switching jobs to something less lucrative.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
It's exciting news, and we should give time to effort posters to collect and organize their thoughts on the matter.
LCEnzo
1yr ago
Your posts are the main thing bringing me back to the site. Too bad you didn't drop your new twitter/substack.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
Walk with a friend. I have a guy from college who I can meet up in 15 minutes. Super easy to spend 2 hours walking in discussion. Our part of the city is pretty decent for walking.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
Is the job worth the risks, and can you afford the fallout if this goes sideways? If yes, go for it, and be honest (or not, can't force you). If not, send them a email that you aren't interested in the position anymore.
LCEnzo
2yr ago
Firstly, afaik China does not have EUV machines, but I'm not sure. What they surely lack is support from ASML. The machines are somewhat custom built for each customer, and companies don't just buy the things. They also buy maintenance, support services, etc.
Secondly for the same reason that if Putin had the design docs for 5th gen fighters and an intact model, Russia would be building 5th gen fighters any time soon. It's bloody hard, and requires a lot of rare expertise and tacit knowledge in multiple domains. It's not impossible, China has after all built things like planes. But it's really hard. And, as is, companies do not have state support for such a venture. The West won't stand still.
For a historical example, let's take Japan. Their government in the mid 70s organized it's 5 big players in the so called VLSI project, and granted them state support. They also had both a large domestic and export market for it's chips. They became a leader, at least for DRAM, for a time. Unlike China, where Xi is no mood to support anything related to computers, and I'm unaware of any big companies which might be able to pull it off on their own. Maybe the industry self organizes, and deals with this on their own. I would bet that they don't, at least for 4 years.
This is coarse, and based on racism. The nuanced argument is that IQ is > 50% determined by genetics, and that distributions between groups differ. Notably, these groups need not correspond exactly, or at all to races. Not all Jewish groups have a 15 IQ advantage, it's the Ashkenazi. Big rich cities in big countries select for IQ, Indians in the US are a self selected subgroup, etc.
The ethnic group with the highest average IQ is, as far as I know, the Ashkenazi Jews. If the theory that intelligence was mainly driven by social competition holds, I'd guess smarts and neotony would be selected for by similar pressures.
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