So how evolution works is that a feature needs to have an evolutionary advantage, but the specimen must also not die. So there are two adversarial pressures here, carefully balancing each other in a mammal species that already has one of the highest birth mortality rates of both mother and child. If heads were any larger, it would create a proportional amount of negative evolutionary pressure by both direct and indirect death (of the mother) at birth.
That's a fascinating thought. As people with larger brains are more successful in life and more likely to have children*, mortality rates for natural births would increase, and over time we would evolve to become dependent upon modern technology.
The continued existence of our species would become dependent upon continued civilisation. A dark age could kill us, or at least cripple the population.
*how true is this? Uni-educated people tend to have lower fertility rates.
If maternal mortality were the only issue, evolutionary pressure would also favor women with wider hips/birthing canals. After all, we see hyper intelligent individuals at the current brain size, it's clearly possible to get more processing power in there but there doesn't seem to be much reproductive benefit.
He most likely wouldn't have this problem if he used a VPN product for clueless users. It has nothing to do with trust towards a class of technology and all to do with the fact that computers are hard.
By the decade is gone that any new nuclear project has been commissioned and built, the rest of the world is running on solar + battery storage at a tenth of the price.
Your first graph shows diminishing returns for both battery storage and solar. It's also not clear whether that's the marginal cost or includes the capital cost to build the structures and all the infrastructure.
To compare nuclear against solar you have to compare it against the sum of the cost of solar plus battery storage.
Investing in solar/wind/nuclear energy sources, storage, and research for improving all of the above seems like the best strategic option for at least the next decade.
It's a bit of an outdated quote now with the Schengen area, high speed trains, cheap flights and comfortable modern cars. We frequently do weekend trips 1000 kilometers away from home. And in the summer most Dutch families I know drive all the way to Spain or the south of France to go on Holiday, which is over 1200 kilometers. In the winter those same people drive to Austria or Switzerland for a ski-trip.
I have done a couple of road trips within Europe that were over 6000 kilometers.
Honestly, if I were OpenAI, I'd just go different directions at once, and it looks like exactly what they're doing. Dall-E was a standalone experiment before, and now it's reintegrated into the core product.
It's completely plausible they have two different teams working on Omni and GPT-5, as both are completely different research directions from each other, and with the Q*-gate, it's pretty clear, the other effort is still going strong.
OP's take seems to be overly doomerist and I don't really get why.
I find it a bit weird that Apple with its massive market share and RnD budget apparently wasn‘t able to get a team and traction (or at least any significant acquisitions or acquihires) on AI with the writing being on the wall since quite some time now. Makes me a bit worried about their privacy angle and that it might disappear.
Their privacy angle is 100% the reason they haven't managed to make a decent LLM.
To make a decent LLM you need to ignore data protection and throw all available text into a huge model. If your morals don't let you do that, then you can't make your own LLM.
But you can partner with a 3rd party to submit all that text to, and pretend your still privacy conscience? Pretty sure people would rather Apple build a first party server based option than partner with anyone else. When it's Apple violating privacy people are more chill about it.
> If your morals don't let you do that, then you can't make your own LLM.
You're reaching, a lot. Apple is more privacy-friendly than most companies at the moment - no argument there, but they still sell your privacy on the web to Google in exchange for a 36% cut of advertising revenue [1] which amounts to ~$20 billion [2], or a rather petty amount of ~$10/device [3].
These same "morals" also allow them to hand over data on all Chinese citizens to the CCP, among countless other privacy-destroying compromises they have to make in order to profit from the Chinese market [4]
> its massive market share and RnD budget apparently wasn‘t able to get a team and traction
Frankly I don't want Apple to try to be the best at everything, because they generally aren't. I've been bitten by iMovie getting worse, Time Machine doing a terrible job, Apple Maps being less than useful for a long time, iCloud being generally lackluster, and more. I'd much rather they outsource the service to a company that is solely focused on the task. There's no reason they couldn't ensure those services remain private or secure.
If you have to fight for a 50$ book, you‘re probably just at the wrong place.
That being said, some developers wanted to test Notion internally, so they got an informal account with a credit card. Turns out they built an important overview in it and send the link around, so everyone who wanted to take a look at it (half the company) implicitly created an account and our CFO got hit by a 10k bill next month.
And that‘s how devs having no purchase authority stories usually start...
How does anything think setting up a system where you can get billed for clicking a link is a good idea? Along with no sensible monthly limit on the credit card. The whole setup is beyond ridiculous, and it's hard to believe this is how "devs having no purchase authority stories usually start".
I work in a small company and we use a few services that bill for active users, and sync with g suite. It reduces the overhead of admin for me significantly as it means I know we're only paying for people who use the service that month.
> Along with no sensible monthly limit on the credit card.
A £1000 limit doesn't stop you from generating a £10000 invoice. It just means you need to go higher with your tail between your legs to pay the bill.
A $10,000 invoice also means that procurement gets involved on the buyer side and sales on the seller side.
Notion doesn't want 1 month of credit card spend tricked out of someone without purchasing authority, they want a site-wide deployment on an annual contract. The invoice is just a tool to ferret out who has authority to have the discussion; nobody expects it'll get paid as presented -- it's just the opening bid. Procurement's opening bid might be a chargeback and a org-wide ban on Notion -- and then you do sales dance.
After the fact. That doesn't change thr
E fact that a card with a $500 limit can generate a $10k invoice, which you need to go to your manager to tell them about.
Aren't this sort of dark patterns exactly what are expected from growth hacking and getting numbers look good? Whole sub-set of companies are incentivised to use these tactics...
Developers (or anyone) buying tools can often also be a sort of local optimization, at the expense of the larger organization. For instance fragmentation, so that you can't find things through a single search anymore, or need to log into different teams' tools separately. Not to mention the compliance nightmare if you want to be SOC compliant while teams are all managing their own tools full of company IP.
Buying books and other learning resources is great, though.
Interestingly, there seem to be some indications showing that human interventions by modern technology already show clear evolutionary trends: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5338417/
Humans might eventually evolve to not even being able to be born naturally anymore at some point.