If "no magic is needed", then why don't you - or someone else - name, say, 5 more such groups/chunks with their exact characteristics? It seems that it is not that easy to find them... and yet someone found such a group in Loma Linda...
It's much easier to find a group of Adventists that have an above average lifespan because Adventists form a community. People with blue eyes or people who are left handed who live in the same county don't all know each other and discuss their statistically insignificant longevity
Doesn’t county or town/cities (doesn’t know the diff in US) counts for "communities", and aren’t those separated in groups while doing national stats? The dice rolling groups are obviously here and have probably been surveyed many time, didn’t they?
I just gave you the math showing such groups are common, with no need for anything special. It's simply math. It as simple as: if I flip a coin long enough, I can find a run of 10 heads, or 100 hears, or a trillion heads.
The number of Americans and the number of ways to organize them is large enough that, just by chance, there will be many that have a 10+ years lifespan for no other reason than we simply have zillions of ways to split people into groups.
The math I presented give you the direction to compute such things. Learn enough math to solve the expected number of such groups, and you will be surprised.
To show one such group is anything other than statistical chance takes far more science and study and analysis than just saying "Look group has desired thing Y all we have is to repeat what the group did!"
> It seems that it is not that easy to find them
It's trivial to find such groups - medicine finds them all the time. Pick any medical result X that is expected to add Y years to life, pick some population center, pick those in the center with the habits/genetics in the study, and voila, you get yet another mystical group with magical life properties.
Except it's not magic. And it will happen with certainly without there being any underlying cause simply due to statistics. Medicine tries to remove the pure randomness of the result and demonstrate a causual relationship, but that is hard and not always done. They do this extra work because they know that stuff like the above happens so often purely randomly.
Simple example: [1] claims (I have not dug into the study, but it is likely well done) that 8 habits (eat healthy, exercise, good body weight, not too much alcohol, not smoking) would add 20ish years to life expectancy. So, go to a big city, find those in this group, and you'll get likely several thousand of them.
And now woo hoo! 24 years!
And for special effect, pick the subset that intersects yet another silly variable, say has red hair, or was bullied as a child, and now you too can get headlines that will spread like this one: "The 8 traits that make readheads live 20 more years!" "Bullied kids can do this one simple trick and outlive their tormentors!"
But this is simply nonsense. There is science, there is causality, and there is statistics, and not being able to disentangle them leads lots of people to post voodoo as if it's not simply random chance.
Cofounder of a well-known startup accelerator and venture capital firm tells us the truth: we (still) don't know why companies are successful and how they are managed best ...
The main advantage of Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller on Radxa X4 board is that they can now use the Raspberry Pi logo next to the Radxa X4 marketing to increase the awareness that they are "similar to Raspberry Pi". Without RP2040 they wouldn't be allowed to do that...
He's famous, so his view is the one that's most commonly regurgitated, but that doesn't make it the most correct one.
Steve's point of view is one point of view, in a story that involved ~10 people. When you hear the story from each person's point of view and union them, the subtly-incorrect aspects of his perspective become pretty glaring.
This "demand multiples for the stock price" will kill the United States economy - one company at a time: HP, Boeing, and others are going in this direction...
With more and more cores and RAM soon we will not need warehouse-scale anymore... everything will be on a single server again - for almost all needs... one can get servers with more than 10TB of RAM and soon we will have more than 1000 cores...
There's probably an S curve on this, right? At some point the super high level languages and frameworks that we use to conveniently create software quickly at the cost of poor efficiency, would have to peak, right?
Only if there's a moderate amount of effort put into optimization. Without it, it's easy to use bad algorithms or bad implementations and there is no limit on slowness.
You can get a 480-core x86 server with 32TB of RAM right now if you want, but I have a hard time seeing the utility of such a thing. Having one giant thing that costs $500k and fails as one unit never seemed terribly convenient to me.
I'd guess that's for shops that are severally space and power constrained relative to their needs and/or need to move around immense amounts of compute.
eg: sports media that need to ship container-offices around the world three times a year. Two of those, one as a cold spare, running immutable OS images, a honking big disk array, and thin clients or laptops. simplifies HVAC, power, noise control, and networking requirements, plus it's only one system to test, validate, and secure, vs a bunch of workstations.
Utility is intense offline data crunching, which will be much more cost efficient and less complex than equal cloud based or self hosted distributed setup.
You're assuming they won't find stuff to do with more computing power. Based on how software has bloated over time, even machines like you're talking about will be used for simple stuff.
Customers demand perfect uptime and companies are compelled to deliver it.
Which means you need to have a highly-available architecture which requires multiple servers across multiple disparate data centres. Especially when it's hosted in the cloud.
"AGI is just around the corner" but we haven't be able to build "fully automatic car driving" for a decade... So first I would like to see car drivers replaced by non-general AI, then I will start believing in AGI...
Automated driving is more a political problem than a technical one. We could make it happen today (and I'm not saying that would be a good thing or a bad one), but it would require leadership we simply don't have.
See also standardization of EV battery form factors -- a problem that, had it been tackled by government several years ago, would have avoided the chicken-and-egg problem that is impeding adoption now.
"We could make it happen today" -> As of today, human drivers make less mistakes than automated driving... and Tesla is promising it for a decade now, but has come to level 2 only (where drivers must hold the steering wheel) and Mercedes has achieved level 3 for highways only... So we are nowhere close to "level 5 on all roads with substantially less mistakes than human drivers"... and that would be just a single part of AGI...
The mistakes made by automated driving usually involve interaction with either human drivers or impaired pedestrians, if you neglect stupid shit like Teslas losing fights with fire trucks because "Cameras Are All You Need." Nonstandard or missing signs and lane markings are close to the top of the list as well.
Doing automated driving right means restructuring our entire surface transportation system to support it. I doubt it can happen without a serious commitment from government... which is in no condition to commit to anything.
But human drivers don't need such restructuring. They can also handle impaired pedestrians, nonstandard and missing signs/lane markings. And if AGI will be "better than most humans at most things" no restructuring should be needed...
Waymo's cars are fully automatic self-driving cars, just limited in where they can go.
It's entirely possible we could see an AGI develop within a specific medium, e.g. text-only to start.
But also, don't you think those two problems are convergent? If we make an algorithm smart enough to drive a car anywhere more safely than a human would, it seems likely to me that that will either be AGI or right on the cusp of it.
The fact that we can't even define what AGI is, or what intelligence is, and yet we are throwing massive amounts of compute and data blindly at this problem... And why? Because chat bots impressed everyone in 2023? The whole thing smells.
The problem isn't that we can't define intelligence, the problem (IMHO) is that people aren't comfortable of the implications of any given definition.
I like to play a game whenever I meet a new group of programmers/lawyers/board gamers/pedants. I ask them to define a sandwich, then I point out all of the edge cases until we get to the point where I can either say their definition is bad because it e.g. doesn't include subs (short for submarine sandwiches), or I can say that poptarts are sandwiches.
The problem is that reality is blurry and clear definitions are fundamentally incapable of capturing the nuance there.
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