There is no evidence that anyone actually needs FB/IG/Threads.
If tommorow Meta shuts down and the entirety of its assets, all the money, all the infrastructure and the people get repurposed to do science instead of reels, commercials, cat videos, selfies and trending videos, that would be great.
I disagree with this. Even though I'm unhappy with Facebook/Meta and I believe the world would have been better off without the current iteration of their products, lots of small businesses depend on their platforms for their marketing/advertising needs and success in general. Their instant messaging platforms like Messenger/WhatsApp are essential communication tools used by literally millions of users. There is also an argument to be made that Facebook has allowed relationships/connections to be preserved that would've eventually ceased. Facebook/Instagram are terrible tools for creating new relationships or social networks though
I’m not a Facebook fan by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s true that Facebook is what a lot of small businesses rely on.
It’s a good platform for certain types of businesses to share information with a lot of people in a channel other than email. Think gyms, restaurants, salons, laundromats, etc.
And then there are people whose businesses run on Facebook. Not that it’s a common thing, but I actually pay a fitness instructor $25/mo to join daily group fitness classes that anre available exclusively via Facebook Live.
If Facebook were to go away, the biggest missing piece up for grabs would be a common platform used by a lot of people to broadcast information to people who share things in common.
Small businesses marketed before the existence Facebook, and people messaged before the existence of Facebook. They aren't doing anything special other than being the beneficiaries of the network-effect-du-jour.
>Their instant messaging platforms like Messenger/WhatsApp are essential communication tools used by literally millions of users.
As if in the absence of this parasitic monopoly an alternative couldn’t be spun up in a matter of days, maybe weeks, given modern frameworks and cloud infrastructure. Hell, they bought WhatsApp. Most of what they have done to it just made it worse or knocked off features from other platforms like Telegram.
Is this based on any sort of understanding of the economy behind FB/IG/Threads, or do you just not like them? Because like it or not, people's livelihoods are being run off those things these days, which amounts to people needing FB/IG/Threads.
How much of that economy actually matters? Who benefits from the transfer of products/services here? It's not the end users for the most part. Some people are able to benefit from it, but is that a large segment of any population? And is that something that we really feel is a necessary market?
I think we need to be able to take a look at ourselves and evaluate what's chaff as tech evolves.
Science can be a money pit, waste of time and threat to health if not directed properly. All that money based on what is funded now would go to studying the effects of coffee or if red wine is good or bad for health with some minor studies that time change sleeping habits and screentime vs teens vaping.
What's the point of doing the science if we're not going to use the resulting output for things that aren't needs? Why have the needs at all if we dont get to have wants?
No offence but you live in an out of touch worldview. A majority of the world uses instagram/fb. Every single non techy adult I know uses instagram regularly to stay in touch with their social circle. Older generations use FB. Most people value social connection over “doing science”, believe it or not.
> In the case of a woman who has a fully developed muscular system and has had ample physical exertion all through the preg nancy, as is common with all more primitive peoples, nature provides all the necessary equipment and power to
have a normal and quick delivery. This is not the case, however, with more civilized women who often do not have the opportunity to develop the muscles needed in confinement.
that's an interesting observation. goes to show how office work has altered
natural mechanisms and the functions of the human body the way it was designed
to work.
also, does the patent mean centripetal force instead of centrifugal?
it's centripetal that pulls to the center of the rotating disk.
on the bottom of page 7 it's suggested that the disk be rotated
until the force reaches a full 7g, that's almost the same as
the acceleration a fighter pilot gets subjected to in tests.
it's possible that the mother would be passed out at that point.
the effects on the child are probably not the best.
i wonder if the patent office considers the potential harm done
to human life when a patent is approved.
That an algorithm is heuristic does not preclude it from being provably correct.
It precludes it from being optimal!
The goal of an heuristic algorithm is to produce a near-optimal or approximate solution in a reasonable amount of time. From here, some heuristics have more or less theory behind them and that theory shows what sort of properties the solution has.
What's surprising is that anyone would've expected an AI to come up with a brand-new algorithm with better complexity than pre-exsiting human-made solutions.
How could it possibly come up with something better when it doesn't even understand how the original authors of qsort/mergesort/etc came up with their own..
Sure, it's great PR for the company, but.. the results just aren't there.
Even if AlphaZero does play better chess, there's absolutely zero it can do in terms of explaining why it played that way.
AlphaZero is zero in terms of explainability.
Humans have to explain to themselves and to others what they do, this is key in understanding what's happening, in communicating what's happening, in human decision-making, in deciding between what works and what doesn't and how well or how bad it works.
Returning back to the original DeepMind press release, it's misinforming the public about the alleged progress, in fact no fundamental progress was made, DeepMind did not come up with an entirely new sorting algorithm, the improvement was marginal at best.
I maintain my opinion that Alphadev does not understand any of the existing sorting algorithms at all.
Even if AI comes up with a marginal improvement to something, it's incapable of explaining what it has done. Humans (unless they're a politician or a dictator) always have to explain their decisions, how they got there, they have to argue their decisions and their thought-process.
It cannot explain because (1) it is not necessary to become good and (2) it wasn't explicitly trained to explain.
But it's reasonable to imagine a later model trained to explain things. The issue is that some positions might not be explainable, as they require branching too much and a lot of edge cases, so the explanation is not understandable by the human.
It's unreasonable to give up on explanations and deem something "not understandable" when we've been doing this thing for 3000+ years called mathematics, where it's exactly explainability that we seek and the removal of doubt.
The only other entities that we know of who can't communicate or explain what they're doing are animals.
It's fine if you want to refer to Kahneman's classification [1] of instinctual and thorough thinking. Explainability is a separate topic. Also when the amount of energy and compute used are as high as they are.. the results, the return on investment really isn't that high. Hopefully there are better days ahead.
