You are paying the smartest people in the world to think really really hard, and turns out they might also think really really hard about not making the world a worse place

it's not working

US isn't randomly launching nukes yet

yet.

Because so far if we left it to AI they would be much quicker to do it [1]

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2516885-ais-cant-stop-r...

Is this really the case though? How many smartest people do you really think are there that fit this narrative?! I want to believe there are at least some but I think they are minority in this group… otherwise I think all these pretty much evil corporations would have a awfully difficult time attracting talent? maybe some do but…

Most evil corporations have fairly normal jobs available.

if you want to make the world a better place as OP stated perhaps you can get a normal job in maybe less evil corp?

Most companies are evil in some way, the question is how evil and how close you are to the evil. Most people will pick "not that evil but pays a lot". A few will take "pretty evil and pays more than a lot". Some will choose "less evil and pays poorly". (It's worth noting that there are a lot of jobs that are not at the Pareto frontier and are "more evil and pay worse" but social mobility etc. cause them to be selected anyway).

When presented with a choice between:

1. Take a job making $$$$$$$ at a company making the world worse.

2. Take a job making $$$ at a company not making the world worse.

Very few people have a personality such that they'll pick 2.

exactly what I was asking OP, her/his comment sounded like people will pick the later (I agree with you)

Except they do? They are certainly not making it better place. Like, ok, it is money for few companies and salary, it is business and probably fun work.

But it is absurd to claim it is "making the world better place".

I'm not sure you can provide an objective (i.e way to show that it is absurd) means of explaining how an AI researcher is making the world a worse place. It's going to come down to disagreeing about some axiom like "is ASI rapidly approaching" or "Is AGI good to have" and there's no right answer to those.

not really. 15-20 years ago that same upper echelon of college/professional school graduates you're describing were going into finance.

I'm curious - what were you doing that polars was leaving a 40-80x speedup on the table? I've been happy with it's speed when held correctly, but it's certainly easy to hold it incorrectly and kill your perf if you're not careful

20 year old BI app. Columnar DBs weren't really a thing. (MonetDB was brand new but not super stable. I committed the SQLAlchemy interface to it.)

KDB v1 is from sometime in the late 1990’s (I met v2 in 2002; but v1 was internal use only at some investment bank).

But that follows A and A+ which were extremely column oriented and date to early 1990s or even late 1980s ; and to various APL implementations going back to the 1960’s

Columnar DBs were very much a thing among APL users (finance and operations research) but weren’t really known outside those fields - and even in those fields, there was a period of amnesia in the late ‘90s/early 2000’s

Might be tangential but in my recent experience polars kept crashing the python server with OOM errors whenever I tried to stream data from and into large parquet files with some basic grouping and aggregation.

Claude suggested to just use DuckDB instead and indeed, it made short work of it.

You can't seriously claim points 2) and 3) if you've ever actually paid for and watched cable

I'm in central europe, atm 70 TV channels is $15/month.

I'm in North Texas and get more channels than that OTA.

I still almost always prefer the streaming services I pay for than the linear, ad-supported old TV format.

> Unless of course you need aerospace or space-qualified screws in which case they are definitely coming from the US.

Are you claiming somehow that China would be incapable of making these? Or just admitting that the USG generally restricts such contracts to be sourced from the US only? And what does this have to do with Apple?

iPhones have had lidar for years, have cameras been affected?

Other cameras. When the lidar laser points at the camera sensor.

I'd assume Starlink satellites do the minimal possible amount of compute required (thus power used, thus heat generated) to provide service. The builders of data centers are hungry for as many watts on Earth as they can source.

The study misleading claimed to produce images from brainwaves. In reality, they effectively built a combination of classifier from brainwaves to one of a few predetermined classifications of images shown (still cool, but less impressive) and a neural net to reproduce images it was trained on given a classification (boring).

Apple is the leader of nearly all new developments to the ARM ISA, which has evolved considerably since Acorn died.

Do you know a single person who'd buy an iPhone without a camera? I don't

That's what they used to say about mobile phones with no keyboards :))

Keyboards were replaced with a touch screen alternative that effectively does the same job though. What is the alternative to a camera? Cameras are way too useful on a mobile device for anyone to even consider dropping them IMO.

He's obviously jesting

Oh. Woooosh. Thanks for still being nice about it (-:

AI image generators

Maybe not as an iphone, but they could drop the camera and cellular and make an ipod touch.

They're not claiming to get that many values per pixel, they're getting that many values overall for the medium through which light passes between the card and the phone. The idea light comes from a source (e.g. sun), bounces off the various colors of the card and thus produces hundreds of different spectra, those all pass through a medium, and land on the phone camera. So you're getting one measurement consisting of hundreds of RGB values that each represent intensity of different spectra, and you combine it all together to get a single spectrogram.