I'm in the UK pretty much only use iMessage/Snapchat.
I had a look at the stats though and you're probably correct about WhatsApp being default, although we do have a surprisingly diverse and competitive messenger market:
Id be very interested to break that data down by age. I'd hypothesise people who grew up during the dawn of social media (late 00s, early 2010s), will be strongly aligned with whatsapp whereas younger generations might be more iMessage/snapchat whatever else is out there these days. The most interesting generation would be gen X'ers. I guess theyll be a jumble of all solutions, including SMS
I also suspect international social structures could play a big role. In the UK many people have friends & family that emigrated to iMessage counties like the US & Australia. But many have links to WhatsApp countries like India or even Telegram countries in Eastern Europe.
It doesn't. Apple could play hardball and threaten to withdraw from the UK market, with a propaganda notification like TikTok did. They could also appeal to Trump/Elon for help.
Also the wider part of this order is that Apple would access to the international users data, including US customers, if I understand the article correctly.
Tim Cook is a master of negotiating with governments. See how he played off China and the US during Trump's first term to avoid both American tariffs and Nike-style Chinese boycotts.
If he's antagonising Trump it's for a reason. Perhaps to avoid showing weakness by being too keen.
In fairness those still follow a relatively straightforward naming convention.
The only thing that's slightly non-intuitive is how standard/digital determines whether a disc can be used to play a game. But every other aspect of the naming could be understood by a person new to the category.
drone and missile guidance system development has been using ML for decades at this point. That's just as much "AI" as anything currently coming out of the LLM craze.
Like a lot of AI boosters, would you like to explain how that works other than magic AI dust? Some forms of optical guidance are already in use, but there's other limitations (lighting! weather!)
1) Have a camera on your drone
2) Run some frames through a locally running version of something like AWS Rekognition's celebrity identification service but for relevant military targets.
3) Navigate towards coordinates of target individuals
I think jamming resistance is a red herring. AI weapons will have their own failure modes due to jamming. Any sensor modality will have its own particular weakness. Also reasoning model malfunctions as well i.e. hallucinations.
Humans are beyond evolution. There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age, so there's no reward for adaptations.
Totally wrong, killing humans is not required for evolution.
Ignoring genetic drift and taking into account only natural selection, all that's needed is differences in fitness, i.e. differences in how much an individual contributes to the gene pool of future generations.
People is taking the parent comment literally but that was very clearly not the intent, obviously human evolution in the stricly technical biological sense its still happening (e.g. genetic diversity) but is by far currently molded by changes done by humanity itself (e.g. industralization, tech) not by factors outside their control as it happens with every other animal on earth, and as it adapts to the environment of its own creation it also loses the traits that favor surviving outside of such an environemnt (e.g. in case of disaster and we lose some of that environment, like a nuclear holocaust)
There are ways we could avoid losing most of that survivability but of course they are wildly unpopular such as actively discourage people with terrible inheritable diseases to procreate (e.g. ALS, Lupus), favor reproduction of people with both higher intelligence and physical skills (e.g. goverment subsidies for their parents, tied to their children grades and general well being)
This. “Natural selection” refers to selection and survivability of traits, not of individuals. Evolution is how that selection process then manifests itself over time in a population.
can't remember where i read this, but significant and big leaps in evolution seem to often happen in times of crisis when the environment forces it. that's not to say that evolution doesn't happen all the time with little pressure it's just very slow when things are more stable. by extension big leaps in evolution can really be down to a low number of individuals. read an article about a genetic study claiming the human population was down to a few thousand individuals around 90k years ago.
Crisis presumably doesn’t affect the rate of mutation, so is the mechanism here just that there is a tight filter that from the perspective of future animals made the species more like themselves, because by definition the future animals have passed the filter?
Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis.
So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
Evolution is not primarily driven by the mutation rate. It's primarily driven by differential success of already-existing genetic variation. Over the very, very long term, you need mutation to be the source of that genetic variation, but over the short term mutation is mostly just harmful, and this:
> Like the traits must have already been present in some lower frequency pre crisis, and the crisis distills the traits which are selected for by the crisis.
is correct.
> So probably less evolution moves faster during crisis and more that there is an interesting survivorship bias related to crisis when analyzing the change of a species over time.
This is conceptually wrong; in this context "survivorship bias" bears a technical name you've probably heard of, "natural selection". A stronger survivorship bias means faster evolution.
I think i misread your comment a bit. i thought you where making the point that evolution was only about mutations on a large scale and that individuals doesn't really matter. But what you are writing is true even though populations can become very small where these small populations that survive have sometimes been selected for because of traits that mutated in a larger population earlier. Sometimes though it's just the lucky ones that weren't in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
No no yeah that might explain why I attracted some other weird comments as well.
I only mean, natural selection is the survivability of e.g. a nose shape trait across generations, which can happen via reproduction, early death, etc and it’s not about survivability of the person WITH the nose except to the extent that facilitates the former
no one is having babies mon ami. birth rates are declining.
it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born. dying before reproducing ensures that number stays 0, but you can still hit sexual maturity and not reproduce.
plus there is a fertility window -- after 50 most humans, male or female, ain't having kids (a handful of rockstar types whelping babies at 80 notwithstanding).
there is a TON of meaningful pressure in our environment, like the inability to have a living wage reducing how many Gen Z's are marrying and having kids.
> it's not about killing people before reproductive age, it's about absolute numbers of offspring born.
Technically, it's about averaging offspring (weighted by your genetic contribution to them) across all of time. If you have 30 children, and all of them starve to death before reproducing, you've reproduced less than your neighbor with the one child and one grandchild.
But that's impossible to calculate, so mostly we just have to work with number of children. This detail, though, is something you might want to keep in mind when looking at reports of "effective population" in the past. Any actual population in the far past who end up being wiped out in the middle past are excluded from the "effective population" that we calculate.
This simply isn't how evolution works. There's no way to be "beyond" it. It's an inevitable facet of populations of living organisms.
If a population used genetic engineering to collectively ensure their genetics didn't change, no mutations, no other populations involved, then... I guess? Otherwise, there is this staggering multitude of influences.
Living longer and reproducing longer is a huge weight on the scales of evolution. Why does anyone need to die early for it to work?
Interesting article on the median artery given that there is no proposed advantage to the phenotype that is increasing in representation.
My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence.
Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change in prevalence is entirely incidental and tied to a second Factor?
Is it accurate to say a trait evolved if the change is a regression to the mean in the absence of pressure?
I went looking for papers on why the median artery might be selected for, and one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished.
Another hypothesis is that the variation in median artery is not reflective of a change in genome, but change in environmentally triggered gene expression associated with maternal health.
> one hypothesized that it may be grouped with, fetal deformities, such as spina bifida, which are increasing not because they are advantageous, but because adverse selection pressures are diminished
Nobody seems to have studied the effects of a persistent median artery on dexterity (important amidst increasing literacy and now phone/computer use) or forearm circumference (looks hot).
Dexterity would be an interesting one. Whatever it is (direct or associated) must be a strong force to triple the prevalence in 150 years or so. Thats like 15% growth each 20-year generation, which would be a huge difference in reproductive success. I think this puts a pretty strong indicator that it's not a genome shift but something else
>My understanding is that evolution is specifically directional change in response to a pressure, not random drift or coincidence.
Evolution just means change, and it includes genetic drift. In common parlance, 'evolution' generally implies improvement, but that's not the technical definition.
Take just the easiest to measure of those factors, wealth. Per your hypothesis, wealthier men should have more babies. Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies?
In fact, it's quite the opposite. There is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and number of babies. Both globally [1] and in the US [2]. There is some data that you can seek out that will suggest the trend is reversed in some first-world countries in the past couple of years, but that's no where near enough time to draw conclusions.
Is there real evidence that men with greater "health" (besides the obvious, of, say, having a crippling disease) or "reputation" have more children?
I'm sorry, but this sounds like "women only chose alpha males" junk to me.
> Do you have any evidence that wealthier men have more babies?
Broadly, yes--wealthy people have more kids than poor people [1]. The confounding variable is market opportunity: when opportunity is high, the opportunity cost of kids goes up, which causes wealthier people to have fewer kids.
That study is hardly strong enough to make that statement that firmly. "Broadly," only if you exclude all of the Western world, and much of the rest of the world as well.
The study cites a dozen or so papers saying:
> Within contemporary Western populations, wealthier, higher status men tend to have lower fertility. In low and middle-income countries where populations are at different stages of this transition, women in wealthier households have fewer children on average. Over the course of the fertility transition, wealthier families also reduce their fertility earlier and more dramatically than the rest of the population.
They then essentially do a big regression analysis to say that if you take your material wealth and your education together, which they call your market opportunity, there is a strong negative relationship between that and fertility. Then if you take that same material wealth and your agricultural wealth together, there is a weaker positive relationship between that and fertility. So basically agricultural wealth (land and livestock) may be weakly correlated with having more kids, but other kinds of wealth aren't.
(And that's ignoring the fact that the chi-squared analysis said that their model was a poor fit anyway, but they hand-wave that away by saying that that's probably just because they had too much data.)
Finally, and importantly, the original statement by GP was that there was a sexual selection that favoring rich men. That is, that rich men would be selected by women and have more children. This study does not address that at all, as it measures household wealth, household education and number of children per woman, not per man.
Per my hypothesis I never said wealthier men should have more babies. Birth control is a factor here.
Women do marry and prefer richer men. Hypergamy is scientifically true, you can look it up if you want. But birth control changes the outcome even though hypergamy is an influencing factor.
In addition I said health and reputation are factors. So a man with good health but low wealth has one positive factor in his favor.
I feel your entire reply is rude and over the top. Calling my statement junk is not conducive to discussion.
Ok, fair enough, I didn't mean to be rude. It's just that it sounds a lot like stuff that people who push fairly sexist stuff say.
The thread is about evolution, and sexual selection in the context of evolution generally implies having an evolutionary fitness. I missed the part about birth control, since then we're not really talking about whether sexual selection is having a role in human evolution.
In the context of sexual selection affecting evolutionary fitness, it seems clear that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and number of offspring.
I am not sure if there are any scientific studies purporting to link "reputation" and either marriage or offspring. Do you know of any?
>In the context of sexual selection affecting evolutionary fitness, it seems clear that there is an inverse relationship between wealth and number of offspring.
This inverse is caused be birth control and economic circumstance. For the poor person, more kids means more kids on the farm to work. So the poor person chooses to have more kids via not using birth control.
For rich people in rich areas, more kids equals more college tuition to pay. So the rich person chooses to have less kids via using birth control.
That's what causes it. I'm too lazy to cite sources but this comes from anthropology 101 it's textbook stuff. And like most anthro stuff the studies are qualitative, so take from it what you will.
>I am not sure if there are any scientific studies purporting to link "reputation" and either marriage or offspring. Do you know of any?
It's even in the wikipedia. It's also quite obvious if you've interacted with a lot of women before.
Look I know there's this woke movement that likes to cover up a lot of the dark stuff surrounding human behavior. Men and women have dark sides and this is just one of the darker things about women: Hypergamy. I think the thing that makes it more intriguing then the dark side of men is that culture and society basically masks this fact about women.
You see the double standard here? You can call men dumb and into boobs and butts and physical pleasures but to even mention something superficial about women you became all reactive about it like it's sexist. Men ARE into boobs and butts, that's just a fundamental truth and it's not sexist. Neither is this. It's also obvious.
> There's no meaningful selection pressure in our environment that kills people before reproductive age
War and disease. Rich countries can afford defence and healthcare. Poor countries cannot. (Within rich countries, the kids of the rich see war and disease less. They're more likely to be in offices, not on the battlefield and they're more likely to be educated and vaccinated.)
And even rich countries have periodic selection pressures. Natural disasters. Pandemics. Addiction epidemics. Propensities towards violent altercations or risk-taking behaviour. (Exhibit A: young men in cars.)
Really? I was under the understanding that we have continued to get taller and bigger driven by out our access to nutrition and medicine over the last couple of centuries.
Is this really a genetic adaptation to the environment or rather fulfilling the inherent growth potential that would otherwise be inhibited by nutrient deficiency?
Meta should actually go up from this. If deep seek is perfect they don't need to pay for an expensive Llama team. And even if deep seek isn't perfect, the low cost training strategies they've invented could be used by Meta to reduce the cost of Llama training.
Although Meta develops models they don't sell them. So a world where foundation models are free is fine for them.
From Meta’s perspective, AI could be incredibly profitable in the context of generating adverts or interactive chat bots for businesses.
They just don’t want to use OpenAI/Google models because they fear being screwed over by them with anti-advert terms of service or price increases. Similar to what they suffered with Apple.
It's like everyone forgets that App Tracking Transparency (ATT) was supposed to put Meta out of business. By many accounts, Meta's ad targeting is even better now than before ATT. It's been reported that AI is what saved their ad targeting.
The OSS goodwill is just a side effect and a way to undermine companies who are not using AI to effectively make profits today.
Cheaper/more efficient is absolutely great for Meta. If they can lower their capex it would be an instant bump to their bottom line.
Thanks, but I don't really see how these articles support the claim that their ad network is more efficient. As you note, the first article has a single anecdata point about it actually being 10-15% worse, while the second one basically says 'trust me bro'. Also of note from the second article is the fact that the ad spend would actually increase.
Of course, if businesses are gullible enough to believe facebook when it fudges up some brand lift metrics without having a real impact on conversions, that's their choice. Trusting facebook to report any analytics is how you take your business behind the barn and help it pivot to video. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
No, it seems to me like a stopgap measure against others, rather than anything for themselves. If they were out after "open source goodwill" they'd actually release the models as open source (like let people use it without signing a license/terms agreement, and use models for whatever). As it stands today, they're tricking people into "open source goodwill" but it will eventually catch up with them.
But now (presumably) they don't need to spend 50 billion? e.g. 5 billion or whatever might be enough which makes it even easier for them to justify this.
In the UK there's no significant regulatory advantage to big banks outside of the mortgage market, yet the same dynamics occur. The biggest issue for new digital banks is customer acquisition cost. Most consumers won't change bank accounts unless you spend hundreds of pounds on adverts and incentives.
I get a couple of cheques a year from family in the UK. It's an infrequent transaction but an important one, and cheque scanning is actually the only reason I maintain my legacy bank account.
> More than 2/3rds of my graduating physics class went straight into banking
This is why I advise people to never study physical sciences or non-software engineering. There just aren’t many jobs for it in the UK. And even fewer that pay well.
The usefulness of that depends on whether you think academic higher education is vocational ("I'm doing a chemistry degree so that I can be a chemist") or inquisitive ("I'm doing a chemistry degree because it's so heckin' interesting").
I'd tend to advise people to study stuff they find interesting. I'd wager the percentage of degree holders doing a job that's directly related to their degree is in the minority, and that's not a bad thing.
Those people don’t have those jobs because of their degree.
As a non-wealthy, not particularly bright creative writing major, the focus of your degree only holds you back if you let it, or if you are utterly unwilling to work outside of your focus area. Tech, especially, has an absurd number of on-ramps for anyone willing to do the tiniest modicum of extra-curricular work.
I don't live in the UK, but here in the USA I studied Physics and Music and then got a job programming. A lot of it was dumb luck, but I want to emphasize that school is about learning, not about vocational training. My experience in programming was due to being a giant nerd, not school.
I think another big difference is that in the UK higher education is not really valued. In Germany people get PhDs because then they can get into much higher paying jobs, even if the PhD is not in a topic related much to the job. For example because I have a physics PhD I was able to get an entry level software dev position with a wage of 73k where someone with a bachelors may get only 40-50k. I don’t think that dynamic exists in the UK
At the moment on LinkedIn there are about 15k results for jobs containing the “software engineer” keyword in the UK, compared to just over 3k for the “biology” keyword.
Despite this, 56k people graduated in biological sciences but 24k people graduated in computer science.
(Graduation data is from 2019/20 so may have changed slightly, but unlikely enough to move the needle)
The vast majority of jobs on LinkedIn are fake. Even so your figures confirm my claim; 24k graduates versus 15k jobs. The supply is greater than the demand.
As a sibling comment has pointed out, there are too many software engineers in the UK.
Only because there are too many software engineers, not the fact that AI will replace those jobs. Experienced software engineers are still required for successful businesses.
I do wonder how long this will hold up. It's true (though cliche) that software is "eating the world", but as the low hanging fruit gets automated away you do need people that understand more complex underlying processes to work on the software. I feel the right combination at this point is to do a little of both.
It’s slightly more nuanced than that. Investment banks and consultancy companies are really interested in graduates who are smart and articulate. The nature of their degree is not that relevant.
I know an extremely clever young woman who graduated in performance arts. She had no difficulty in getting a job at a top tier consultancy company. This company was far more interested in her than some mediocre plodder who hacked his way through a comp. Sci degree.
It’s not that these degrees are totally without value. Most banks and consultancies accept any quantitative degree as long as it’s from a prestigious university.
But if you know you’re going into banking anyway you might as well do something vaguely relevant like accounting, economics or statistics.
I had a look at the stats though and you're probably correct about WhatsApp being default, although we do have a surprisingly diverse and competitive messenger market:
https://www.statista.com/forecasts/997945/most-used-messenge...
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