I’ve heard a lot of denialists push the Tonga volcano and resultant water vapor in the stratosphere as evidence that climate change is more complex than we understand.
I always whole heartedly agree that it’s very complex, but we do know introducing novel gases to various parts of the atmosphere is generally chaotic and something to be avoided when we can.
I find the term denialist really unhelpful. It’s a polarizing thought-terminating cliche.
Outright denial that climate change is happening is now rare. It’s hard to argue with hard data so only the looniest attempt it. We have a fair few people arguing that climate change is happening but that it’s natural and the human impact is negligible. These people are mostly ignorant and could potentially be described as in denial. But then we have a lot of people who agree that climate change is real, agree that humans are a major causative factor, but disagree on what to do about it. I don’t think these people deserve to be called denialists even if I disagree with them. It shuts down dissenting views, and I’m not ready to declare that I definitely know what the answer to climate change is. I think it should remain possible to express different views. I worry that someone will eventually decide things have got bad enough that we’re going to try some drastic risky geoengineering, and objectors will be denounced as denialists because that’s what we do to heterodox thought.
I've encountered people who deny it's happening, deny it's manmade, deny it will have impact, deny it will have a negative impact, and deny we should prioritize any changes in behavior. All on HN. I don't care which of the above you are, you are a denialist if you fit into any of them.
I find it hard to believe there are "plenty" as well. I was hoping for a link as I'm curious where these people congregate.
Science allows many different views, each with differing levels of proof. "Denialist" would be a term reserved for the intolerant who believe in one truth.
It stratifies people into weird binary groups, while ignoring the reality that people have nuanced opinions, and many of those are quite reasonable.
It's a subtle form of "you're with us or against us", and disparages people who don't see things exactly the same way you do.
It's also used to move goal posts. I.e. if a person believes that yes, it's likely that humans are having some effect on climate, but that we aren't sure exactly what it is and how harmful it will be over a period of time - are they a "denier"?
It has its roots in holocaust denialism, and tries to paint folks skeptical of a single climate viewpoint with that same brush.
It doesn't further the discussion and encourages tribalism.
Inflammatory words like that are a barrier to quality discussion.
> if a person believes that yes, it's likely that humans are having some effect on climate, but that we aren't sure exactly what it is and how harmful it will be over a period of time - are they a "denier"?
Yes 100% they are a denier. This was a position that was valid in the 80s. It's also exactly the bs talking point spread by those who profit from us not moving away from fossil fuels. Confuse and delay as much as possible and discredit those pesky scientists with their models that can't decide if it'll be terrible or catastrophic.
Ah. So if they aren't with you they're against you. Nuance and moderation need not show up, all those "pesky" scientists with different opinions should take their science back to the 80s?
Got it. Why bother considering other opinions? It's obvious what the Truth is.
There's got to be some pitchforks and torches around here somewhere...
Climate is the premier example of a non-linear chaotic system, as evoked with the butterfly effect and unreliability of weather forecasts more than a week out. Making predictions of the far future state of chaotic systems is obviously going to have wide error bars. In just the past couple thousand years there has been significant climate change with little ice ages and warm periods. Notably, the colder climates have generally been far more destructive to civilization than the warm periods.
A sober approach would weigh the pros and cons of climate change and cost benefit analyses of the various mitigation strategies. Climate alarmists advocate degrowth in the extreme, or spending many trillions on intermittent energy sources and impractical energy storage systems. This would obviously reduce human well-being as energy consumption per capita is tightly correlated with standards of living. The costs of climate change are still unknown, and it could very well be the case that higher CO2 levels do not increase global temperatures to catastrophic levels, as evident with life thriving during the Carboniferous Era. Increasing CO2 levels would also be beneficial due to the CO2 fertilization effect, effectively greening the Earth, while also increasing agricultural yields as observed in greenhouses. And if temperatures rise too much then stratospheric aerosol injection is always an option. Calcium carbonate could be a good alternative to sulfur dioxide since it doesn't react with ozone, and cooling the Earth is estimated to cost only a few billion a year.
Obviously energy independence and ecological preservation should still be pursued for their own sake. Yet we should be careful of succumbing to hysteria and malinvestment.
Are global climate trends a non-linear, chaotic system the way short term local weather is? If not this sounds intentionally misleading.
I don't like to feed the trolls usually but I found it entertaining to see you mix and match a "be reasonable" tone with bonkers suggestions and irresponsible "just buy your way out of it later" proposals. In particular I laughed out loud when you handwaved away catastrophic temperature changes because we could try to intentionally change the climate by injecting aerosols. I guess that unpredictable, chaotic system is totally predictable when it supports the (in)action you prefer?
> And if temperatures rise too much then stratospheric aerosol injection is always an option.
I also find it interesting that climate change has taken the role of eschatology for an increasingly secular society, and I say this as an atheist. The industrial revolution acts as original sin, mother nature will give us her final judgment, we must all atone by buying climate pledge products from Amazon, etc. Western secular liberals don't realize how religious they actually are.
We've observed the immediate effects of stratospheric aerosols in living history, as with volcanic eruptions and forest fires reducing temperatures significantly. We don't know their long term effects, though most aerosols only stay suspended in the atmosphere for a limited time. CO2 is a much less powerful greenhouse gas in absolute magnitude than aerosols are anti-greenhouse gases, so we don't need long range modelling to understand they can cool the Earth in the short term.
My point is that mitigation strategies like stratospheric aerosol injection would be far more effective in the worst case climate scenarios than trying to spend many trillions on direct air capture of CO2, intermittent energy sources, grid scale batteries, punitive regulations, etc. I also find it interesting that all the elites seem to relish in the climate change narrative, they bring Greta Thunberg to admonish them, they fly their private jets to the conferences, still own their beach front properties. Revealed preferences would suggest they don't actually believe it to be that big an issue, and that it's more likely yet another scheme for increasing their power and extracting wealth from the public.
Everyone here is complaining about the nature of the proposed natural experiment and I’m just here thinking “where are the pockets on OP’s clothes?”
Phones are stored primarily in front pockets that are nowhere near the colon in terms of biology (almost everyone has relatively dense meaty quads and femurs between the thigh and colon) or the inverse square law.
Just a periodic reminder that 'Beyond the Pale' is a pro-colonialist phrase that many believe was was part of Britain's Centuries-long campaign to eliminate Irish culture.
That claim is not supported in the source you linked. In fact, it's directly contradicted several times. For example, toward the end, it quotes the OED:
"The theory that the origin of the phrase [‘beyond the pale’] relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale … or the Pale of Settlement in Russia … is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization.”
Throughout, your source draws a distinction between the histories of the separate phrases "beyond the pale" and "pale of settlement".
So I guess your statement might be true in the narrow sense that "many believe" the false etymology, just as you can find many who believe that the earth is flat. But that's not a good reason to go around chiding people for using a common expression.
Hmm, so if you're interested in my answer, I guess I would ask you how you want to proceed. Do we want to accept that OED is an trustworthy catalog of etymological facts, or not? If not, why? Do you think the quotes it pulls from the 1700's are fabricated? Do you think it's suppressing an earlier usage of "pale of settlement"? What is your claim, exactly?
You're the one whose source was quoting from OED, so you tell me. It'll be easier if we're starting from a shared ground truth.
Where exactly is the reference to colonization in the Mackenzie quote? This one: "when we would be blessed beyond the pale of reason, we are blessed imperfectly". Sorry, I'm not seeing it.
"Many people believe..."
Name one. Have a free do-over: pick a source you actually agree with this time. Make sure it doesn't quote any reference books that you distrust.
The phrase seems to refer to journeying "beyond the established border" of the settlement. Even if this is from a colonialist perspective, that doesn't obviously make it "pro-colonialist".
> Also keep in mind that the major doubter is the Oxford English Dictionary
So we are to disregard English opinion on the English language?..
As for the relationship between the two expressions, the OED has this to say:
“The theory that the origin of the phrase [‘beyond the pale’] relates to any of several specific regions, such as the area of Ireland formerly called the Pale … or the Pale of Settlement in Russia … is not supported by the early historical evidence and is likely to be a later rationalization.”
Also from the article: a “pale” is a fence. “Beyond the pale” used to require a suffix (e.g., “beyond the pale of reason”) but eventually by itself started to be short for “beyond the pale of acceptable behavior”.
Metaphorical boundaries of things like reason and acceptable behavior. “Beyond the pale” means outside the fence. Being “beyond the Pale of Settlement” (that is, outside the ghetto) would be a good thing.
You have successfully repeated the opinion of the Oxford English Dictionary after reading an entire article about how the British used Pales to colonize areas and define boundaries, but I'm not sure it's as cut and dry as you want it to be.
I'm saying you didn't read the source because you cited a source and it clearly contradicted what you said.
I don't know why you're still typing, you're not convincing anybody, you're not getting any karma, and nobody is gonna respect you more for refusing to acknowledge how blatantly wrong you are. The best you can do here is admit (to yourself) you screwed up and that you have a lot of trouble admitting when you're wrong, and then working on that character flaw -- your life will go a lot smoother.
Isn't this a forum for the intellectually curious?
I made no call to action.
I guess I should have known any time the information is something certain people would consider 'woke' it elicits a strong emotional reaction beyond the information itself.
Indeed, we're even curious enough to read your link! And to discover that it says the opposite of what you claimed! What you're seeing is in fact a strong emotional reaction to misinformation.
And your implicit call to action was crystal clear. Don't be coy.
I’m willing to believe that because so much of our language is tainted in that way, however the blog you are referencing here doesn’t support what you are saying. You mention “many people” believe this so surely there are better sources.
As someone else who doesn't deal in identity politics, please know I don't care what you think of it and was trying to share information on a forum for the intellectually curious.
There isn't much to "colonialism". It's just the establishment of colonies. In the many historical cases where the subject peoples were cannibals, I would have supported colonization.
A huge aspect people ignore is how expensive it is to handle cash. From storage, administration, transportation, loss, etc. it's usually a little more expensive to take cash vs. card.
This is why your grocery store partners with an ATM network to let you take out extra cash at the POS. As long as you're paying the fee, they'll do whatever they can to trade you cash for a digital deposit into their bank account.
I worked at several small businesses and we always preferred cash, we even accepted multiple currencies. The handling was no problem but I admit that it must be more difficult for larger businesses.
Card payments made the price of the service more expensive for all customers because we weren't allowed to have a card payment fee.
Small businesses put in sweat equity to handle cash payments, like the owner going to the bank to make a deposit. If they had to pay an hourly employee to do that, it might even out with credit card processing fees. Also small businesses can fudge numbers with cash payments in a way that’s a lot harder to do when some other company keeps a record of all of your cc transactions.
Yup, cash handling costs are significant when done as a service, they can be cheaper if you don't account for the time and risk (of both theft and forgery). Banks in the UK typically charge about 0.6-0.8% to pay cash in for large companies, and even more for small ones, and very few locations will take cash.
However nothing beats that sweet sweet tax evasion that cash allows.
Back when I was publishing a magazine in the 90s, I preferred credit card payments over checks in the mail because while there was the 3% vig for the merchant account on the credit cards, taking piles of checks to the bank was a pain and there was always the risk of a check bouncing (yes, there was also the chance of a charge being reversed, but in the whole time I did this, that only happened once—selling subscriptions for a print product is a good hedge against fraudulent use of cards and the one time I got stung it was someone who bought a big pile of back issues and had them shipped to Hungary). Add in that credit card orders could be handled by phone or internet while checks had to come in the mail and it was a clear win. And that’s ignoring the multiple studies that show that credit card purchasers at brick and mortar retail tend to spend more money than cash purchasers.
From the other side, my wife owns a small business where 90% of her sales are on credit cards. She has no desire to encourage cash as we honestly report all income regardless of source (and cash is a hassle and increases theft risk). The ~3% credit card fee is also more than made up for by the higher spend of credit card buyers.
From talking to other business owners, though, the lure of "tax free" cash is definitely a factor.
When I sold on eBay and they allowed cash/bank draft payments, I accepted local currency, but also major currencies like US$ (in cash or bank draft because I had a US$ account too) and other major currencies in cash (like EUR and GBP) because they were cheaper to convert with when travelling (or I could use directly). Without a spread.
Plenty of places in the world accept currencies besides the local ones because they are more stable or just worth more in general. Depending on the business, they might handle currency the same way too.
BTW. Good luck catching that. In SF, that is how many businesses work. You want to use a card? Ok, one extra dollar. Nothing enrages visa more, but, the merchant should have this right.
In a properly working market, every consumer would pay their exact interchange fee and it would be printed on the receipt as a pass-through cost.
This would actively drive interchange fees lower when consumers have to choose to pay 3% on an Amex swipe vs 1.6% no frills MasterCard swipe, or .05% for a debit swipe.
The reasons there is no downward pressure today is because there is because there is no transparency, and no incentive for consumers to choose a lower cost card.
Massachusetts and Connecticut are the two states that have laws banning credit card surcharges. Massachusetts also has a law requiring acceptance of cash.
>Connecticut law prohibits a business from charging a customer a surcharge for using one payment type (usually credit card) over another payment type (usually cash). However, the law does allow a business to offer a discount if a customer chooses to use one type of payment (e.g., cash) over another type of payment (e.g., credit card). Receiving the discount is not the same as adding a surcharge. As long as the discount policy is clearly written and presented to the customer and the final receipt shows a discount, it complies with Connecticut law
Between the Massachusetts Right to Repair Act and requirement to accept cash (Part III, Title IV, Chapter 255D, Section 10A), that state is looking more and more like the right kind of place for me to land once I'm done doing the FAANG thing. Convince me otherwise.
I think the law should be that you state the maximum price for a given transaction and then discount down.
So you can have a cash discount but it's okay to say no credit card fees. These are the "junk fees" that came up in political discourse in the last year or two. Credit card vendors shouldn't be allowed to restrict cash discounts. I know this isn't libertarian, but I want it to be a pre-negotiated thing simply for the sake of keeping cash alive, like how minimum wage is a pre-negotiated wage to avoid the overhead of getting the whole nation into a labor union.
That's why I like free shipping on Amazon. I know it's not literally free, I just want to see what you're _actually_ gonna charge me, it cuts off an avenue of bullshit.
This is why your grocery store partners with an ATM network to let you take out extra cash at the POS. As long as you're paying the fee, they'll do whatever they can to trade you cash for a digital deposit into their bank account.
This is not universal.
Where I currently live, and where I lived five years ago, supermarkets charge a fee (50¢ here, 25¢ where I used to live) to take out cash at the POS, because the card transaction cost more than handling cash.
There was a lot of "Are you sure?" prompts on the screen because the supermarkets (both big chains) didn't want the burden of the plastic transaction.
I've seen it stated a lot in technology forums that "cash is more expensive for merchants than cards," but I've never seen that spelled out from any source other than the card companies.
Every low-margin business I patronize, from the garden centers, to the convenience stores, to the antique stores all either offer a discount for cash, or charge a fee to use plastic.
Just last week, a woman who's run an antiques store for 35 years told me that card fees were going to put her out of business, and she practically begged me to go down the street to my bank to get cash for my purchase.
A lot of businesses have a few percent cash discount to offset credit card costs, so they make the same amount either way. An antique store that would go out of business unless you pay in cash is either because they aren't paying consigners honestly, or they aren't paying taxes.
I hope you don't mind if I take the word of a woman who's been running her business for 35 years and is a staple in the community over some rando on the internet who doesn't know her business, hasn't seen her financial records, has zero information about how much the fees actually cost her, and may not even be in the same hemisphere?
Meanwhile eBay forces payments by debit/credit card/Paypal, because they have arrangements with a (formerly owned) processor, even though I, as a seller, would be happy to accept cash/drafts/cheques/COD/whatever to keep that ~3%.
There are “people who improperly use data that’s being given to them, like Plaid,” Dimon told analysts. [0]
Amazing how openly CEO's like Dimon will fear-monger about start-ups, when in reality they're just not satisfied with their own team's progress in doing the same exact thing. But of course it's OK when they eventually launch the product.
Plaid wouldn't exist if there had been practical open banking APIs.
Remember their original use case was to offer third-party services something with a little more guiderails than "enter your ACH info and cross your fingers" and a little less clumsy than "we'll take that info and make some test deposits that you have to read back to confirm it's your account."
I think the real issue here is that a CEO who nobody has heard of and is doing a bad job running the company claims that he needs to fly private as a business expense.
It's one think for Zuck or Tim Cook to claim that flying commercial would be dangerous and a waste of time, but the way that attitude has filtered down to very small companies is astounding (especially given the outsized negative impact private jet travel has on the rest of us).
Any reasonable board for a public company that size and a CEO that unrecognizable should at most reimburse first class fare and if the CEO wants to fly private, the delta can come from personal funds.
I agree. It's one thing for the CEO of a large, profitable company to be flying private, but for a small, loss-making company, it feels off.
The guy is already ultra-rich...he might as well pay for those flights himself to show solidarity with shareholders. But it's up to Canoo shareholders to decide that, not me.
He is effectively paying for these flights by buying Canoo stock. This whole structure is set up to allow him to maximize the tax efficiency of his compensation. The jet travel is realized as a business expense and offsets future potential profits at the company, he also avoids paying the ~60% (federal and state income tax, as well as payroll tax paid by employer) tax that you incur paying high wage w2 employees.
> Aquila Commits Misappropriation Of Solera Assets And Resources
> After execution of the Separation Agreement and Omnibus Agreement, Solera confirmed that prior to his separation from the Company, Aquila had misappropriated Solera’s resources and money by fraudulently claiming that certain flight and hotel expenses were for Solera business, when in fact, Aquila incurred these expenses solely on personal, non-Solera business—including fundraising for his intended new investment venture.
> Specifically, Aquila used a private jet chartered by Solera (Gulfstream IV- SP-N910AF) solely for Aquila’s personal business, but nevertheless charged the flights to Solera, between November 2018 and May 2019—i.e., when Aquila was still Solera’s President and CEO. For example, Aquila had Solera pay over $700,000 for 45.8 hours of flight time for Aquila’s trips to, among other places, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Bulgaria, Qatar, Kuwait, and France, as well as thousands of dollars for certain hotel expenses associated with certain of these trips. These trips were not for Solera business. Aquila traveled for personal purposes, including in connection with his position as the Chairman of the Board of Sportradar and to fundraise for his new “Founders Select” venture.
> Solera is continuing to investigate Aquila’s pre-separation activities with respect to any further instances of fraud, theft, misappropriation, or other actions of Aquila giving rise to claims that are not released under the Separation Agreement.
It’s actually not fraud because it’s happening in the open with board approval. And, no not every share holder is an equal. A share holders relevance is proportional to their voting power. While you can’t outright fleece a shareholder, it’s not the case that a single share held is worth the same as is given the same rights as someone holding 51% of all shares. At that point they effectively own the company. The company still has residual responsibility by law and regulation to all shareholders but it not nearly as broad as you seem to paint. This structure described is absolutely ok. Further the fact it’s publicly disclosed almost entirely insulates them - if you don’t like it, vote your shares or sell it on the public market.
>He is effectively paying for these flights by buying Canoo stock.
If a CEO is intentionally creating a situation to make a company unprofitable and paying it back by buying shares, that is 100% securities fraud and I'm stunned anyone disagreed with that assertion.
I'm not saying the company is committing securities fraud, I am saying that if the company created a scheme as described by the commentor I was replying to, then that would be securities fraud.
The politicians play us with "eat the rich" and "fair share". Meanwhile they increase taxes on 400k in HCOL areas making it painful to succeed.
Why isn't the slogan "stop the loopholes" (The one in this thread)? Because politicians play us against each other instead of fixing laws they benefit from.
The board chooses the CEO and his salary; if the board wants to give some of the salary in the form of jet reimbursements it's not really any concern beyond them and the shareholders.
It is a concern for the tax payers if company is paying it as expense and deducting it from taxes instead of paying it as (taxed) salary and him doing what he wants with his money. Don't you have rules what can be expensed in the US?
And personal use is accounted for (if paid by the company) and remanded as salary/perks.
I even got affected by that at a restaurant I worked at; they fed us and we got a small "virtual" payment that would show up on our taxes for that meal.
My recollection (I’m not checking) is that congress passed a law restricting the deductibility of private air flights, but that there’s widespread fraud in the form of “security consultants” advising boards that such flights are necessary for security purposes and so they are deducted anyway.
It’s pretty unreal when you think about it that our culture has not small cadres of credentialed, professional liars for hire. Not just for CEOs either, think about the fake service pets for another example.
it's also sucky because we're in a rightfully very negative EV environment. Fisker Ocean sucks, Cybertruck is good? but rusting?, nobody buys the Lucid, Rivians are great but lose ~80k USD per unit for Rivian, BYD and Evergrande EV cars are filling up junkyards in china...
Canoo is one of a few EV companies that on paper should make it. They have an order book that takes them to profitability. They have alpha vehicles that work (aka the product is not science fiction). Since they're selling these primarily as fleet vehicles, it's pretty valid to believe that the typical consumer EV concerns (range anxiety, nonfunctional/overbooked chargers, I live in an apartment, etc) should apply, their customers have the capital to spend, and can even easily calculate depreciation and expected benefit over existing fleet inventory.
100% of the risk in the company is manufacturing risk + not fucking up the finances e.g. by going too far into debt where the product payout doesn't make sense. That's a pretty nice place to be for being an EV company in the market now.
I actually took a punt on them this week (280 shares), mostly because they're selling something so different from the rest of the market.
It seems like the mainstream American EV manufacturers are very blinkered-- bigger, heavier, longer range, more luxury. Those products might appeal to buyers in the US, Canada, maybe Australia, but for the rest of the world, you're going to have to compete with manufacturers like BYD.
I could see the Canoo product selling in a lot of markets that you'd never sell a Lucid Air or Rivian R1T in. Once they've got a stable base on fleet orders, I could see them acquiring a quirky street cred among consumers-- sort of like Volkswagens of the '60s and '70s.
Let's dispense with the fiction that there is some "need" or "business reasons" for 99% of CEOs except a very small number of examples like you mentioned to fly private. They do it simply because they can. Private jets are probably the last frontier of conspicuous consumption, and small time CEOs flying private lets them feel big and important.
There is a lot of overhead to commercial air travel, even when it's first/business.
You're probably right that it's more reasonable for flying overseas. But for local travel, limitations on timing, connections, and airports served turn into a big waste of time. It's an analysis that has to be made about the value of the CEO or whoever's time, but it's not black and white, and a couple million bucks vs a few 100k for way better scheduling could easily be worth it.
It sounds like he's actually doing quite a good job as CEO. The vid from minute 3 to 7 gives much of his strategy and how he got into it.
He was a billionaire investor with a background in car parts and servicing that looked at 12 or so EV companies to invest in and figured Canoo was the one and then the board asked him to be CEO.
I guess if you are a struggling EV company looking for some billionaire to save you you may have to put up with him using a jet.
Thank you for this - the name neural networks has made a whole generation of people forget that they have an endocrine system.
We know things like sleep, hunger, fear, and stress all impact how we think, yet people want to still build this mental model that synapses are just dot products that either reach an activation threshold or don't.
Fortunately for academics looking for a new start in industry, this widespread misunderstanding has made it only far too easy to transition from a slow-paced career in computational neuroscience to an overwhelmingly lucrative one in machine learning!
There have been people on HN arguing that the human brain is a biological LLM, because they can't think of any other way it could work, as if we evolved to generate the next token, instead of fitness as organisms in the real world. Where things like eating, sleeping, shelter, avoiding danger, social bonds, reproduction and child rearing are important. Things that require a body.
Isn’t that taken the analogy too literally? You’re saying nature is promoting humans to generate the next token to be outputted? What about all the other organisms that don’t have language? How do you distinguish nature prompts from nature training datasets? What makes you think nature is tokenized? What makes you think language generation is fundamental to biology?
I would imagine the baseline assumption of your thinking is that things like sleep and emotions are a 'bug' in terms of cognition (or at the very least, 'prompts' that are optional).
Said differently, the assumption is that with the right engineer, you could reach human-parity cognition with a model that doesn't sleep or feel emotions (after all what's the point of an LLM if it gets tired and doesn't want to answer your questions sometimes? Or even worse knowingly deceives you because it is mad at you or prejudiced against you).
The problem with that assumption is that as far as we can tell, every being with even the slightest amount of cognition sleeps in some form and has something akin to emotional states. As far as we can prove, sleep and emotions are necessary preconditions to cognition.
A worldview where the 'good' parts of the brain (reasoning and logic) are replicated in LLM but the 'bad' parts (sleep, hunger, emotions, etc.) are not is likely an incomplete model.
Ah a very fun 'snippy' question that just proves my point further. Thank you.
No airplanes do not sleep. That's part of why their flying is fundamentally different than birds'.
You'll likely also notice that birds flap their wings while planes use jet engines and fixed wings.
My entire point is that it is foolish to imagine airplanes as mechanical birds, since they are in fact completely different and require their own mental models to understand.
This is analogous to LLMs. They do something completely different than what our brains do and require their own mental models in order to understand them completely.
Here, it's actually fun to respond to your comment in another way, so let's try this out:
Yes, sleep is in fact a prerequisite to planes flying. We have very strict laws about it actually. Most planes are only able to fly because a human (who does sleep) is piloting it.
The drones and other vehicles that can fly without pilots were still programmed by a person (who also needed sleep) FWIW.
It works because well, its actually pretty primitive at its core. Whole learning process is actually pretty brutal. Doing millions of interations w/ random (and semi-random) adjustments.
Honestly once you understand maximum-likelihood estimation, empirical risk minimization, automatic differentiation, and stochastic gradient descent, it's not that much of a surprise it works.
It's the main counterexample to 'The Olympics are good because they force the development of infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't get built' argument.
Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
All this rushing and purpose-building led to suboptimal decision making that ultimately made it a completely wasted investment.
A similar story can be told about Olympic stadium in Montreal.
I thought the main counterexample to that argument was the fact that it has never worked anywhere.
From what I've heard, the Olympics have failed to benefit every city that's hosted them except LA, and the reason they were good for LA was specifically that no new infrastructure was built to accommodate them.
Many will disagree with me, but the Vancouver Olympics prompted construction of some things that I would consider vital to the Sea to Sky region - the highway upgrade being the biggest.
Many will disagree with me, but the Vancouver Olympics prompted construction of some things that I would consider vital to the Sea to Sky region - the highway upgrade being the biggest.
> It's the main counterexample to 'The Olympics are good because they force the development of infrastructure that otherwise wouldn't get built' argument.
> Many of the weird choices about that airport was made so it would be open and useful for the 1976 Olympics. The location was closer to Montreal (but father from Ottawa) in part to make the international arrival experience better for the fans (not for the long-term users of the airport). The plan was 'International flights in time for the Olympics and Domestic flights a couple of years later' as a way to 'show off to the world.'
That's just poor and short sighted planning, nothing specific for the Olympics. Paris for instance isn't making any such short term infrastructure decisions, only rushing to finish some stuff before the Olympics (e.g. line 14 to Orly, while failing others like line 15 South which was supposed to be ready but won't).
I always whole heartedly agree that it’s very complex, but we do know introducing novel gases to various parts of the atmosphere is generally chaotic and something to be avoided when we can.