Readit NewsI mean, I'm just starting a job-search and the top HackerNews story's about how prospective employers ought to be looking for applications like mine! I'd love to talk to such prospective employers; I wonder how to make that connection?
P.S. The /s is sarcasm.
I feel like they're doing LLM-like opinion-pieces and acting as though the results are deeply meaningful. But the mechanics and results seem shallow and uninteresting.
In fields like Physics and Engineering, there're plenty of cranks who say crazy things. But in such fields, reality tears those people down -- their works fail; their perpetual-motion machines don't tend to generate infinite-energy; their snake-oil doesn't seem to open people's latent-psychic abilities; their mathematical theorems fall apart. Reality is a harsh blade that cuts them down without mercy. And people in those fields learn to be harsh/critical themselves, as to survive the constant assaults from reality's judgement.
But the softer fields lack such harshness -- they're comically tolerant. It's like they're all whimsy; there'd seem to be little incentive for an academic to even bother with the extreme costs associated with rationality, as they'd just get out-competed on the metrics that they're actually judged by.
I mean, I don't care to see what (the early versions of) ChatGPT have to say of math; while chatbots might spit out a lot of junk, their rantings would be shallow and disinteresting. Why ought we have any more regard for the same mindlessness in other fields?
Point being that it seems off-topic to discuss such matters in terms of intellectualism -- unless we're using "intellectual" so loosely as to include stuff like ChatGPT-generated content.
I mean, even if we pass laws to offer more protections, as computation gets cheaper, it ought to become easier-and-easier for anyone to start a mass-spying operation -- even by just buying a bunch of cheap sensors and doing all of the work on their personal-computer.
A decent near-term goal might be figuring out what sorts of information we can't reasonably expect privacy on (because someone's going to get it) and then ensuring that access to such data is generally available. Because if the privacy's going to be lost anyway, then may as well try to address the next concern, i.e. disparities in data-access dividing society.
Title: "Meta will enforce ban on AI-powered political ads in every nation, no exceptions".
Sub-title: "With several nations expected to hold elections next year, Meta confirms its generative AI advertising tools cannot be used for campaigns targeting specific services and issues.".
The idea of preventing advertisers from using AI at all ("no exceptions") seems fairly absurd -- for example, if an advertiser asks ChatGPT to spell-check something a human wrote, how would Meta know that ChatGPT did the spell-checking? But if Meta's just trying to manage how people access its own tools, then that'd seem like a different scenario.
Presumably they mean that their tools couldn't be used directly, rather than not at all, though. For example, if Alice uses one of Meta's tools for some other declared purpose to spell-check a word that Alice'll then include in an ad that she'll ask Bob to deploy on Meta, then how would they detect such indirect usage? Though they might still try to detect their own tools' signatures on, say, images or longer bodies of text.
Personally, I'm using a mix of Edge, Firefox, and Chrome. While in theory I could just use one of them (which would probably be Firefox), it's kinda like having 3 different super-profiles for a web-browser (where each browser is its own super-profile), so I'm mostly just using all 3 out of laziness.
I don't particularly trust Chrome nor Edge, so I just don't use them for anything important. Not that I'm 100% confident in Firefox, but if I've got to do something important, Firefox is the easy pick. Then I guess I end up favoring Chrome or Edge for everything else, since I don't want to junk up Firefox with nonsense (so Firefox'll remain solid for when it's appropriate). Between Chrome and Edge, I guess I favor Chrome for junk-level tasks since Chrome feels the most separated (being neither used for important stuff like Firefox nor being tied to the OS like Edge).
I get that some folks might have a business-critical app with compatibility-issues limiting their freedom-of-choice when it comes to certain tasks, but outside of such niche cases, what's the big deal?
["Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change"](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-working-g... ) appears to be the most recent specifically on mitigating climate-change.
From [this PDF's page-117](https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6... ):
> Net zero CO2 industrial-sector emissions are possible but challenging (high confidence). Energy efficiency will continue to be important. Reduced materials demand, material efficiency, and circular economy solutions can reduce the need for primary production. Primary production options include switching to new processes that use low-to-zero GHG energy carriers and feedstocks (e.g., electricity, hydrogen, biofuels, and carbon dioxide capture and utilisation (CCU) to provide carbon feedstocks). Carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be required to mitigate remaining CO2 emissions {11.3}. These options require substantial scaling up of electricity, hydrogen, recycling, CO2, and other infrastructure, as well as phase-out or conversion of existing industrial plants. While improvements in the GHG intensities of major basic materials have nearly stagnated over the last 30 years, analysis of historical technology shifts and newly available technologies indicate these intensities can be significantly reduced by mid-century. {11.2, 11.3, 11.4}
> A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners.
A 1300 miles pipeline is not exactly a cheap/easy project. From what I know, carbon capture over a field is not exactly a solved problem.
So what does BlackRock know that allows them to think it's a worthwhile investment ?
Doesn't appear to be capture-capture over a field. Instead:
> Navigator’s project would have laid pipelines across five US states—South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois—to collect CO₂ from ethanol and fertilizer plants and pipe the gas to an underground storage site in Illinois.
Sounds like they were planning on point-source capture, which is generally a good bit more efficient than open-air capture.
If it were carbon-capture over a field, then it'd probably be under the category of "open-air capture" -- which is technically easy to do (as capture in general is; we've had CO2-capture technology since the 1930's), just more costly (since it's less thermodynamically efficient to capture from a low-concentration source like the atmosphere, relative to capture from a high-concentration source like the flue-gas from a plant).
Capturing CO2 from point-sources (like the flue-gas from plants) tends to be relatively efficient, which seems to work out better both economically and environmentally.
And I think if you used a perfectly balanced dataset for training, you’d get these guardrails for free because the right probabilities would be baked into the model’s weights.
For example, say someone wants to generate a "US President" -- what would the ideal range of outputs be?
The article checked for just two things: sex (male or female) and skin-tone (I, II, III, IV, V, or VI). To date, all US Presidents have been male, and they were probably mostly skin-tones I or II (not bothering to check), except for Obama who was probably.. like IV or something (still not bothering to check).
So if we run StableDiffusion for a "US President", what would a "perfectly balanced" output look like? Should there be any women? What about the skin-tone distribution?
Also, Obama was a 2-term President, so.. if his skin-tone should somehow affect the distribution, should it have a stronger effect because he was in office for longer than average? Or should all US Presidents have the same effect regardless of their time in office? And either way, why?
I wonder what sort of prospective employers might be looking for the sorts of things that this article describes?