The rule of law is a key part of a nations success as argued by AJR. A very good exposition for the layman on the rule of law provided by Tom Bingham in the eponymous 'The Rule of Law):https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7734691-the-rule-of-law
While the above is informed by the UK's constitutional arrangement, the 8 principles are near universal when considering nations that have or aim for The Rule of Law.
The principles are:
(1) The law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable.
(2) Questions of legal right and liability should ordinarily be resolved by application of the law and not the exercise of discretion.
(3) The laws of the land should apply equally to all, save to the extent that objective differences justify differentiation.
(4) Ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably.
(5) The law must afford adequate protection of fundamental human rights.
(6) Means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide civil disputes which the parties themselves are unable to resolve.
(7) The adjudicative procedures provided by the state should be fair.
(8) The rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law.
Just to add to this point further. Russia has vastly more combat aircraft than Ukraine, but has only been able to achieve local air superiority in a few areas of the contact line. Ukraine, without having anywhere close to the number of anti-air systems of advanced modern armies have denied most of its airspace to the Russian Airforce, and have shot down many aircraft including the A-50.
The key assumption is that stealth would enable the USAF to operate at will within or close to air defence zones, but this has not been tested against a near peer foe.
It's not just stealth. USAF have perfected their SEAD/DEAD operations over decades. Normal non-stealthy aircraft provided with external assets for triangulating air defence radars can do the job easily and probably, without any losses at all.
Any ground-based air defences today are useless and are just a sitting duck against any modern air force. It's just that the Russia doesn't have one. I know it - i passed training as a radar unit commander for Russian radiotechnical troops. We've been trained to understand that our mission us futile and we will never see anything of value on our radars - best we can do is to try to keep them from being destroyed (by employing false emitters, strategically switching off emission when threatened, and frequently moving) and out personnel from getting killed - by explaining them that HARM's shrapnel is small and command trailers have light anti-shrapnel armour and attack comes on a very short notice, so under attack the enlisted will be a lot safer sitting on their assigned places rather than running away.
When you switch on emission, you don't get to see anything today because ECMs do a very good job. But everyone can see you.
That's been 25 years ago but the equipment we've been trained to operate (it was brand new back then), is still the mainstay of the Russian radar troops, such as Nebo-SV. Slightly modernised versions are entering service now but they won't do a radical difference (modernisations are mostly about using fewer components from ex-USSR countries, because they are either politically hostile or producers gone out of business, not about specs improvement, anyway). In those years, Western anti-radar equipment and tactics have vastly improved though, so if it was one-sided then, it's most certainly so now.
1. COVID: The explosion in revenues during 2020 is self explanatory.
2. Product market fit/Execution: The owners having previously created other, albeit, unsuccessful platforms certainly helped with creating Onlyfans. This is a very simple idea that thousands will have had, but creating it successfully necessarily requires a good understanding of a sector avoided by most major corporations.
Just guessing, but OF's social interaction (or "interaction", if you will) with creators was more appealing whilst we were all starved for human connection.
There's various places where you can talk directly with the person offering their services though, that's not something OF newly introduced to the internet -- if that's what you meant by their "social interaction" since I haven't used OF so could be missing a detail
Yeah, it sounds like nothing they did was really new (though maybe packaged and marketed in fresh ways), but did manage to line up with the zeitgeist - perhaps including the Pandemic - in ways other companies didn't.
If O1 did rickroll you deliberately, then it would indeed more impressive than solving ciphertexts, and I'd start preparing to bow down to our AGI overlords :)
We have come a long way from Descartes argument that animals are no more than automata. Which supported our unabashed exploitation of countless species.
It is now abundantly clear that animals have their own phenomenological experience of the world, and their intelligence is part of a continuum, shaped mostly to survive in their niches. And some species demonstrate a higher level of general intelligence - something in which we are quite easily the best.
Although, it's worth noting that some cultures (Buddhists or Jain's for example) did give animals their due with respect to their lives and intelligence.
Descartes couldn't figure out how humans weren't automata either. That's where his explanations start getting supernatural, and not particularly insightful. Any kook can babble on about an invisible pineal gland soul-thread.
edit: I think the interesting thing for people is how insight like Descartes' becomes useless when he tries to distinguish us from automata.
It's not abundantly clear what the ability to have phenomenological "experiences" means in relation to our moral values regarding what we shouldn't do with the creature. I mean, we do have moral values about animal rights, but they start with the animals we actually relate to (pets) and are in essence human rights by proxy. Then out of a sense of consistency we try to extend these rights to all the wild animals, many of them busily eating one another and blatantly not caring about nice things or participating in our value system.
As far as I can tell, current theories are that animals are also somewhat conscious and intelligent, but that we're all, including humans, automata, with zero or near zero free will.
I don't even know what that means or why it worries people, I think it's a big red herring. (And near-zero is a confusing concept.) We're machines that make choices, spontaneously and deterministically (which is not a contradiction). People fretting about free will are getting caught in some kind of category error that confuses the physics of time with being controlled by an invisible tyrant.
Law is one practical aspect of free will that people generally don't talk much about.
For example, criminal law generally assumes people have free will, and thus should be responsible for their actions. If we take the stance that people are in fact merely deterministically doing what they are fated to do given circumstances, some of the punishments doled out to convicts might make people feel uneasy. (Eg. if being poor made the person commit theft... shouldn't we tackle the issue of poverty instead of locking up starving people?)
Contract law also assumes people are free to make agreements. Like, signing a contract with onerous terms because that's the only option a person has to avoid something worse.
In short, free will provides a kind of cop out for moral philosophers to blame individuals for their own failures. You may or may not agree with this approach, I'm not advocating for or against, but anyway that's one of the practical consequences of free will.
Funny, to me it seems people talk about this one a lot. And the same answer applies. Yes, we have free will and responsibility (because we can respond). Also yes, we do what we do because of physical mechanisms which means you could say we're "fated" (leaving aside the irrelevant complication of chance and probability).
However, the law is only concerned with people doing (codified) wrong. It lets people off for being insane, because dealing with insanity falls outside of its mission. And similarly it can let people off on compassionate grounds, if for instance they stole food due to being hungry due to poverty. Punishing people for bad luck isn't its mission either. And a contract signed under duress isn't supposed to be valid, because the law's mission isn't to enable formalized bullying. Of course in reality the law is sketchy, lacks compassion, fails to recognize forms of duress. But generally speaking the idea is that it's restricted to the bad things a person freely did, as opposed to things that happened to the person.
So then you might say, well, do we freely do anything at all, because it's all just physics and mechanisms. But a lot of the mechanisms are in our brains, thinking sanely (if immorally), so yes, we do act freely, when not coerced.
It's important to separate the part of fate which is the things we're probably going to think, which is our responsibility, from the part of fate which is the things that the outside world is probably going to do to us, which is outside of our responsibility.
I'm not sure I get your point -- it looks like you're starting from the conclusion that people do have free will, which of course does not create problems I mentioned.
What I was trying to say is that if one believes determinism is incompatible with the concept of free will, then they cannot think the law is fair because nothing has free will. And I'm hypothesizing that people who think that way might be a bit queasy about determinism etc.
FWIW, I personally believe free will exists for reasons outside the scope of this discussion, and I doubt it's necessary to conclude first whether it exists or not to get my original point across...
Anandtech was one of my earliest sources of highly quality tech reporting. In particular their reliance on data and testing always stood out.
Many hours were spent there during my formative years. And, while I did stop reading it regularly at University, it had already played an important part in informing, and so shaping me.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made it clear to the strategic planners the obvious; that peer or near peer warfare is one of industry and attrition (which it always has been).
So while we may all, and should dislike war, it is ever more important to have our defence fully prepared for modern warfare.
I just asked Google's Gemini the following question:
Q: How many N's are there in Normation?
A: There is one N in the word "Normation"
Note that the answer is the same when asked n's instead of N's.
And this is but one example of many simple cases demonstrating that these model are indeed not reasoning in a similar manner to humans. However, the outputs are useful enough that I myself use Claude and GPT-4o for some work, but with full awareness that I must review the outputs in cases where factual accuracy is required.
This is just an artefact of tokenisation though. The model simply isn’t ever shown the letters that make up words, unless they are spelled out explicitly. It sees tokens representing groups of words. This is a little like saying a human isn’t intelligent because they couldn’t answer your question that you asked in an ultrasonic wavelength. If you’d like to learn more this video is a great resource: https://youtu.be/zduSFxRajkE?si=LvpXbeSyJRFBJFuj
Q: How many N's are there in Normation?
A: There are 2 N's in the word "Normation".
Q: Confidence level?
A: A more precise question! After rechecking, I can confirm that there is indeed 2 N's in the word "Normation". Confidence level: 100%
Q: How many N's are there in the string "Normation"?
A: There are 2 N's in the string "Normation".
On several regenerations, at some point it gives:
A: There are 3 N's in the word "Normation".
Q: Confidence level?
A: A slight challenge! After re-checking, I see that there are actually 2 N's in the word "Normation".
This net economic benefit of immigrants varies based on their background and skill sets. In Denmark for example, MENA immigrants are a net drain throughout their entire productive work lives.
While the above is informed by the UK's constitutional arrangement, the 8 principles are near universal when considering nations that have or aim for The Rule of Law.
The principles are:
(1) The law must be accessible and so far as possible intelligible, clear and predictable.
(2) Questions of legal right and liability should ordinarily be resolved by application of the law and not the exercise of discretion.
(3) The laws of the land should apply equally to all, save to the extent that objective differences justify differentiation.
(4) Ministers and public officers at all levels must exercise the powers conferred on them in good faith, fairly, for the purpose for which the powers were conferred, without exceeding the limits of such powers and not unreasonably.
(5) The law must afford adequate protection of fundamental human rights.
(6) Means must be provided for resolving, without prohibitive cost or inordinate delay, bona fide civil disputes which the parties themselves are unable to resolve.
(7) The adjudicative procedures provided by the state should be fair.
(8) The rule of law requires compliance by the state with its obligations in international law as in national law.
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