AIUI, a Javelin missile ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FGM-148_Javelin ) works by pointing its camera at your target and holding it in-frame there for a few seconds while the missile learns what your target looks like well enough to home in on it once launched.
I imagine the Pentagon would pay billions for an LLM that could shave a couple of seconds off that target-acquisition time.
One high priority for the military has been using AIs to analyze massive volumes of data. A common example is analyzing satellite photos for interesting objects.
They say the want to output a shortlist to aid human decision-making, but of course they might decide to skip that step.
Propaganda - now any language on earth. Coming soon - personalized with the voice of your loved ones, voice application are currently happily harvesting.
I strongly feel that this is where the really destructive potential of military LLM applications lies. We've already seen examples of faked images, voice clips and videos being disseminated of prominent political figures. It's not difficult to imagine a well planned disinfo attack could paralyse or misdirect the political apparatus and public sentiment of a state during some critical moment in time (IE, during a coup attempt or invasion).
Everyone might be able to work out which snippets of media were true and which were not in a few days, but if it happens during a crisis point the loss of time and momentum could be catastrophic.
Performing better than the other two major European economies, France and Germany?
Britain doesn’t seem to be an outlier considering a backdrop of an ailing European economy suffering the after effects of the energy crisis - though clearly it could be doing far better in the global context.
The economy wide productivity gains from having tax funded roads mean it doesn’t make sense to have roads be profitable or break even as an individual entity.
Gotta be careful what you measure though. If I spend a bunch of money owning and maintaining my car, it's possible that that could've been spent on other things that would be overall better for the economy.
Neat story. Agreed that animals are already communicating without some kind of newfangled AI. But also most meat consumption isn’t roadkill and doesn’t involve reasonable conditions for the animals while they’re alive. I see it as a big spectrum with factory farming on one side and {insert better conditions farm} on the other, and it seems worthwhile to move things to the right side of the spectrum.
Basically the idea is whether one’s accumulation of wealth is actually tied to their positive impact on society: does wealth accrue in a morally correct manner?
In Capital, Piketty argues no. For cases like bezos (or Gates, Musk, etc) it’s at least the case that they did give something to our society. However those people benefitted from countless other inventions before them whose inventors did not benefit from to the same tune as the super wealthy. For every computer billionaire there are hundreds of researchers who worked on transistors, internet protocols, and so on, in order to make something like Amazon possible. SpaceX benefits incredibly from NASA research. Etc.
And those are the ones where we can at least contend they did something. On the other hand you have people like Lillaine Bettancourt, the daughter and heiress of the L’Oreal fortune. Piketty writes:
> Between 1990 and 2010, the fortune of Bill Gates—the founder of Microsoft, the world leader in operating systems, and the very incarnation of entrepreneurial wealth and number one in the Forbes rankings for more than ten years—increased from $4 billion to $50 billion. At the same time, the fortune of Liliane Bettencourt—the heiress of L’Oréal, the world leader in cosmetics, founded by her father Eugène Schueller, who in 1907 invented a range of hair dyes that were destined to do well in a way reminiscent of César Birotteau’s success with perfume a century earlier—increased from $2 billion to $25 billion, again according to Forbes.
> In other words, Liliane Bettencourt, who never worked a day in her life, saw her fortune grow exactly as fast as that of Bill Gates, the high-tech pioneer, whose wealth has incidentally continued to grow just as rapidly since he stopped working.
In other words wealth does not accumulate in line with what you’ve done for humanity. It’s not a “tremendous deal” without bounds.
We’re told that rich people got rich because they deserve it, and that’s just a pernicious self-aggrandizing lie we’ve inherited from Calvin and others. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology)
I definitely think accumulation is an incentive and some people do greater things than others, but I think our system is distorted in that it considers some to have done so so so much more when that’s not really the case.
Whose morals? Who judges the correctness of the manner?
> Piketty writes
Piketty has done nothing for his society. Today's France's top 3 companies are in Fashion. Another country left behind. Its philosophers should shut up and take notes, not dictate how they thing others should run their own country.
In the west, or in relatively free societies, it is true that one's wealth is basically proportional to their contribution to society. Inheritance too, if someone contributes a great deal it's their choice what they want to do with it. If they want to leave it to their offspring then who are we to disagree?
Only in socialist societies are people who contribute nothing the richest - e.g. North Korea.
Regarding wealth growth while not working, what are you trying to get at? This is such a simple concept that it barely requires an explanation. Rich people don't earn money per hour worked, by definition. You'll never be rich if your income is proportional to the hours you work. You have to do something that's scalable, and thankfully with Industrialisation a lot of things are.
Elasticity has no bearing on whether something is a plastic or not, and any attempt to use it as a distinction would be pointlessly arbitrary. Silicone is certainly a polymer...
Metabolism converts sugars and oxygen to carbon dioxide and water. Fire has the same inputs and outputs too! You can think of metabolism as releasing the same energy as fire but with more steps so our bodies can harness and use the energy via various other chemical reactions.
Most of the water from metabolism is released in your breath. Water you pee is mostly water you ingested via drinking and eating.
The water you exhale is just the amount of water that happens to evaporate in your respiratory tract/lungs. The water you urinate is whatever "extra" water is left over (based on a bunch of factors like blood pressure, how much stuff is dissolved in you blood, etc).
The water that leaves via your lungs and the water that leaves via your kidneys all had to get there via your blood. There's no distinction made based on the "source" of that water.
> Most of the water from metabolism is released in your breath
And the reason for that is that air is bad for heat exchange and transport, water is much better, and evaporates! While the body passively cools in air (either directly when air is colder or via sweat evaporation when air is too hot) most of the heat exchange happens actively via breathing, which is nice because it's easy and quick to adjust, just by breathing faster or slower, so as to maintain 37ish C-100ish F while the body is continuously burning molecules. Without breathing we'd not only lack comburant (oxygen), we'd overheat pretty quickly!
The primary driver for your respiratory rate is the pH of your blood. For instance, metabolic disorders that result in a drop in blood pH will result in an increase in respiratory rate/depth (e.g. Kussmaul breathing). As far as I know (with a fairly deep anatomy and physiology background) there is no mechanism by which body temperature can directly influence respiratory rate. If your respiratory rate increased just to get rid of heat, you’d also be blowing off more carbon dioxide and would end up in a state of respiratory alkalosis.
As you mentioned, sweat is also evaporating water, and that is a much more effective way of dumping heat.
It’s a tagged Union with associated data (the molecule), released in edition Homo Erectus. Pretty nifty feature a lot of other species lack. Abstract Human Types are much more powerful than what Homo Go can offer, for example.
You’re right, the scientist example is benign as you say
The difference is when there’s a profit motive for the person to inflate the actual numbers or distort their recommendation.
If the example was “professional climate scientist selling cloud seeding chemicals suggests we should do more cloud seeding to fight climate change” then there would be cause for skepticism.
> The difference is when there’s a profit motive for the person to inflate the actual numbers or distort their recommendation.
Grant money is distributed based on the perception of a problem. Nobody would be funding climate change research if the scientific consensus is that it wasn't a problem.
I am 100% a believer in anthropogenic climate change, but it's ridiculous to claim that there's no financial incentive for researchers to find positive results.
You're talking about the difference between a scientist making like $50-150k/year salary and entities making millions or billions of dollars a year in profit. These are in no way comparable.
There's a lot of money being thrown into climate research. All those researchers like their jobs. We have a massive oversupply of academics and scientists with PhDs. Corporations aren't the only entities with perverse incentives.
I mean I don't blame them, I like my job too, but we should recognize the incentive exists.
Since 1993, OMB has reported over $154 billion in funding for federal climate change activities, spread across the government—raising questions about fragmentation, overlap, or duplication.
>"In 1996, Ensure had sales of about $300 million and accounted for 80% of protein supplement sales"
In 1996 Protein shakes were still new. Back then people using whey were 'cutting' edge.
Today:
>"The global protein supplements market size was USD 25.34 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow from USD 27.41 billion in 2023 to USD 51.81 billion by 2030 at a CAGR of 9.5% during 2023-2030."
25 Billion a Year.
Meanwhile. Your Climate numbers on that linked site.
Yes, something like 8 Billion a Year on Research.
A pittance, that is to carry out the studies, not get paid.
And, A big chunk of that is on Technology, not 'proving if it's real or not', but on actually creating new tech, which goes into expanding the economy.
So the private companies making that tech are definitely incentivized.
>Joe Blow Researchers are not rich people.
Neither are cops, but there is plenty of incentive to fear monger crime to keep their headcount up and their budgets increasing. Do you not think there is an incentive to keep research grants for climate change flowing?
Here's something that came out recently. I don't know if you've read it, but it's interesting. I know a few people in the academic world and they are always desperate to get research grants to keep the lights on.
Sure. All researchers are scrounging to find grants.
I did read that article. Isn't one of the findings was that the data that was left out didn't change the results? Leaving it out just helped clarify the results? I guess if people did the opposite, they could include hundreds of 'possible' things that would really muddy the results.
Everyone in every form of writing is taught to stick to the basics and leave out extraneous 'possibilities' to clarify the message. That is just being succinct. If it doesn't change the results, then it is a matter of style.
I'm just saying the scale is orders of magnitude different.
You were equating the incentives of pretty lowly researchers scrounging for grants to do very basic research, to big money food production companies with huge incentives to sway opinions.
The climate scientist is not promoting a product, sure they want to get the next grant, and that is just how research is. But that is a really low bar. I don't think any grants specify that the results of the previous grant better result in "X".
That would be like saying, "I better produce something that proves that String Theory is real or I wont get another grant". -- OOOPS. Might have contradicted myself since string theory is garbage.
So.
All studies, as all humans, have bias.
All academic fields have bias.
So with all studies in all fields, the bias has to be factored in.
It was only a few years ago really that hundreds of studies said smoking was not only safe, but could be healthy. But those were corporate studies.
And like the protein study, there is just far greater scales of bias in corporate funded studies. They have bigger money, bigger stakes, more to protect.
The lowly climate scientist isn't getting much beyond a citation and enough money for dinner.
This narrative that there is some big money in climate science is a full on press of BS to discredit it, by the same people producing biased studies to disprove it. Just like with Tabaco companies.
>You were equating the incentives of pretty lowly researchers scrounging for grants to do very basic research, to big money food production companies with huge incentives to sway opinions.
I wasn't defending the corporation.
>The climate scientist is not promoting a product, sure they want to get the next grant, and that is just how research is. But that is a really low bar. I don't think any grants specify that the results of the previous grant better result in "X".
So you agree, there are perverse incentives to keep climate research funding flowing. That was my assertion.
No. I do NOT agree that climate science has any incentives beyond any research topic any any field. There are no 'perverse incentives' special to climate science. I never said that.
You are really taking some generic statements about how all research must guard against bias, about how bias is a characteristic in all humans. And then micro-focusing on climate science seeming to assert that this one particular field is much more biased than all other fields.
To do this you need to come up with some proof.
Saying all research contains some bias, climate science is research, thus climate science is biased, -> Is really just trolling.
You know gravity is just a theory, it is researched, that doesn't mean research on gravity is biased thus gravity is not real.
>And then micro-focusing on climate science seeming to assert that this one particular field is much more biased than all other fields.
I don't believe I asserted climate science was much more biased. I was just acknowledging the perverse incentive. I did assert it was very well funded though.
k.
I thought you were applying the "perverse incentive" to Climate Science specifically.
If you are saying all research, across all fields, has a "perverse incentive", that the entire research system across all disciplines is 'perverse', then I might agree.
There was whole thread on HN about this subject recently, sorry, don't have link.
BUT. In all the complaining about how research is currently done, I've not seen anybody come up with a credible alternative. You still need funding, still need a way to filter out crap, so still need some reviews by 'experts', that would still have biases.
I'm just demonstrating how much the government spends on climate change activities and compared it to sales of a single year of Ensure. What don't you understand?
Also that GAO report was published Apr 30, 2018. Publicly Released: May 30, 2018, so 25 years.
Any study sponsored by any given industry, that may have any effect on their bottom line, are generally treated with suspicion because the whole point of private ventures is to increase profits. The narrative is driven by that, not the other way around.
In contrast, climate research would happen with or without climate change happening.
So my original assertion was. I was demonstrating how much money is spent on climate research, then compared it with what Equate sells (which was mentioned earlier). The comparison was to demonstrate how much $154 billion was compared to a market leader at a given time. You know, like "how high is space in Eiffel towers."
>There's a lot of money being thrown into climate research. All those researchers like their jobs. We have a massive oversupply of academics and scientists with PhDs. Corporations aren't the only entities with perverse incentives.
>In contrast, climate research would happen with or without climate change happening.
Sure, but when something generates as much media attention and has as much fervor and staying power as climate change does, it gets a whole lot more funding. That's why most of what we hear as the consequence of climate change is absolute worst case scenarios. If people were to lose interest (fear), researchers would lose funding. Getting hit by an asteroid would be more devastating, but I'll bet it doesn't get nearly as much funding, because there isn't as much fervor.
Dude wtf to take your numbers … you said this nutrition enterprise was making like 300 million a year and then you are whining about that the budget for planetary defense is to low … it’s 150 million a year .. soo please Google bevor you speak.
> Getting hit by an asteroid would be more devastating, but I'll bet it doesn't get nearly as much funding, because there isn't as much fervor.
Perhaps because the chance of an asteroid triggering an extinction level event is infinitesimal, whereas climate change is a very palpable, ongoing issue?
Why did we spent so much money developing vaccines to address the COVID-19 pandemic, when there are supervolcanoes that could end all life on Earth as we know it?
> We have a massive oversupply of academics and scientists with PhDs. Corporations aren't the only entities with perverse incentives.
Corporations, especially publicly traded ones, will almost always pursue maximizing profits. That's quite literally the fiduciary duty of the C-Suite towards shareholders.
Academia really is not the most profitable endeavor. Spending 10+ years as a researcher to make less money than a software engineer sounds too dumb for someone smart enough to get a PhD, because it is [0]:
> For example, at Pennsylvania State University, professors in the earth and mineral sciences department made an average salary of $157,773, which was below the universitywide average of $166,731. Professors in earth and environmental sciences earned $98,567 on average at Iowa State University, compared with the average salary of $134,039.
It's worth noting that, to become an associate university professor, one needs to earn a MSc and a PhD, and spend handful of years as a postdoctorate.
Grants aren't "pocket money" for researchers either. In fact they aren't even awarded to individuals, but projects and organizations:
> [...] Dr. Hayhoe explained how a $1.1 million grant she received was spent: It was divided over four years, was split with her university for facilities costs, helped pay for a graduate assistant and covered the costs of conferences, laptops and publishing in scientific journals.
In short, I don't think these two are remotely comparable.
The marketing team for a protein shake is not making billions. If you mean the CEO and shareholders then you can’t compare them to scientists chasing grants, that’s not an apples to apples comparison.
All the researchers I know are driving old used cars and scraping by. Nobody is rich.
All the big firm researchers/marketers I know are living very comfortable upper class lives, and don't want to jeopardize that with any 'counter findings'.
How hard is this to understand:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor
I love airship ideas! In your message you don’t comment on safety and fire risk, which is what I’d bet most people want to hear about given the public perception of H2 airships.
Safety is the most important thing when it comes to aerial industry. We are working with people who are manufacturing their own H2 gas balloons that litterally fly with people in it.
Check it out: https://balloonfiesta.com/Gordon-Bennett-2023
There are special materials and glue that ensure safety from electricity and fire hazards. The people building their balloons use that kind of materials and it works!
The NY Times did an expose on infrastructure expenses and found that France simply uses fewer people to build and doesn’t waste time asking for peoples opinions.
France also has half the population density meaning that there are in fact fewer people to ask and fewer people negatively affected (per unit distance of rail for instance).
These metrics are almost meaningless when you use them this generically -- for the same reason Spain is on the lower end of EU countries ranked by population density yet contains some of the most densely populated regions in all of Europe (as mentioned in the article). Moreso than Paris.
Paris and the surrounding area is densely populated. The rest of France is very rural overall it comes in at 105 per km^2. England, in contrast is almost as densely populated as India (434 per km^2). There are a lot more places to put things in France. As a consequence land in France goes for about €6k per h, while in England it's closer to €30k.
If you want to begin to understand this I recommend you read two books, in the following order:
The Abolition of Britain - Peter Hitchens
The Abolition of Liberty - Peter Hitchens
Synopsis:
Two worldwide wars led the flower of Britain to be torn to shreds by shrapnel into rat food. The millions of broken homes, (furthered by the subsequent exodus of native Brits which continues somewhat to this day), and society which has never really recovered led to the spivs taking charge. Hence the phrase 'mediocre mafia'.
Things are changing for the better, and will continue to do so. But right now we are seeing the light of the past fade and the lunacy (PR1D3overPrinciples) of a nation only just coming to terms with this loss from 1914 onwards - hence 'special relationship' sucking up to 'USA'/'YU-ES-AY'.
> Things are changing for the better, and will continue to do so.
I'm curious as to what gives you cause for optimism. As an interested observer from Australia, it seems to me that the UK has a very bleak immediate to medium term future. But I'd be happy to hear why I'm wrong or what I'm missing.
Though even within England, the population is highly concentrated in the South East, so the South West and North East have a lot of relatively sparsely populated areas.
Brits don't want quietness. Instead they go to Germany and drink until they can't stand upright - and then continue to drink until they pass out.
Source: was a barkeeper many years ago in Munich. A group of half a dozen Manchester fans drank more in one night than what would last two days otherwise, it's absolutely insane. Australians also tend to drink a lot, but IME they tend to get rowdy when too drunk.
Maybe the brits who want quiet aren’t going to bars in Munich to seek it out? What a fucking ridiculous means to back up an equally ridiculous statement.
Yeah, UK by area is mostly Scotland, which is stunningly beautiful and quite empty. Also infrastructure there tends to be more basic; even main roads in the north of Scotland are often single lane with passing places.
Wales and Northern Ireland are smallish by land and not very densely populated (?) but not massive outliers I'd think.
Even the SE has areas with surprisingly low population density. Outside of the urban areas much of the land is protected against development as national park/AONB/green belt.
