What is a power user in this context? Someone deeply familiar with Windows and has tons of Windows related setup/applications?
That doesn't sound like a government worker... They rely on Microsoft Office, but the actual operating system could be anything. The only non-portable application is video games really. While LibreOffice may not have complete excel functionality, the vast majority of functionality can be replicated in web apps/libreoffice. And frankly most of this work can be migrated to AI.
You can even skin Linux to look exactly like Windows if you want, or use Mint or something. But really all people need is to be able to open up Chrome and Excel.
In fairness, the transition away from MSFT 365 Copilot (as we all of course call Office now) might include more friction. Mountainous VBasic monstrosities are sometimes the way things get done in orgs I am personally familiar with and that can be hard to switch away from. In general though, I consider this focusing on edge cases as just not helpful, especially as one must start a transition to fully uncover them and get to addressing them too. I also don't think that ancient Excel scripts are an unsolvable problem, but one that needs to be very carefully handled.
Outlook has never been a requirement for work, you can very easily use any email client or outlook.com web app. Outlook is arguably the easiest to replace.
Excel is the only thing holding Office 365 together.
Word, Outlook, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint are all very easy to replace
A human can think logically with reason, not to say they are smart or smarter. But LLMs cannot. You can convince a LLM anything is correct and it will believe you. You can't convince a human anything is correct.
I can't argue that LLMs do not know an absolute insane amount of information about everything. But you can't just say LLMs are smarter then most humans. We've already decided that smartness is not about how much data you know, but thinking about that data with logical reasoning. Including the fact it may or may not be true.
I can run a LLM through absolutely incorrect data, and tell it that data is 100% true. Then ask it questions about that data and get those incorrect results as answers. That's not easy to do with humans.
That just implies LLMs are suggestible. The same is true of children. As we get older and build a more complete world model in our heads, it's harder to get us to believe things which go against that model.
Tell a 5-yr old about Santa, and they will believe it sincerely. Do the same with a 30-year old immigrant who has never heard of Santa, and I suspect you'll have a harder time.
That's not because the 5-year old is dumber, but just because their life-experience ("training data") is much more limited.
Even so, trying to convince a modern LLM of something ridiculous is getting harder. I invite you to try telling ChatGPT or Gemini that the president died a week ago and was replaced by a body-double facsimile until January 2027, so that Vance can have a full term. I suspect you'll have significant difficulty.
> There's a plethora of people who convert to religion at an older age, and that seems far more far fetched than Santa.
Being in a religion doesn’t imply belief in deities; it only implies people want social connection. This is clearly visible in global religion statistics; there are countries where the majority of people identify as belonging to a religion, and at the same time only a small minority state they believe in a “God”. Norway is a decent example that I bumped into just yesterday. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Norway
But I bet you'd have a significantly easier time converting a child rather than a 30/40/50-yr old to a religion.
My point is that LLMs are suggestible, perhaps more so than the average adult, but less so than I child I suspect. I don't think suggestibility really solves the problem of whether something has AGI or not. To me, on the contrary, it seems like to be intelligent and adaptable you need to be able to modify your world model. How easily you are fooled is a function of how mature / data-rich your existing world model is.
Sadly that is not really true in Canada. Most companies in Canada only really work with a small group of close provinces.
BC/Alberta
Sackatchewan/Manitoba
Ontario/Quebec
Quebec/New Brunswick
Nova Scotia/PEI/NFLD/New Brunswick
etc
The big companies have offices in each, but they'll usually break them down even further into eastern, central, western regions. And they'll largely never talk to eachother.
About 90% of BC is nothing but wildlife and trees. You can't really compare it to Germany in any capacity, it doesn't work. Canada has land with literally 0 people on it bigger then the entirely of Germany. The vastness of Canada cannot be understated. Canada is almost 10mil km2, Germany is 350k km2.
As a Chinese living in China, you must know the layout of the city does provide logical sense. I've only been once, and I buy stuff from factories fairly often. When I went there I basically went to a mall district where all the furniture was sold, then I went to the tile district to review tiles, I went to several other "districts" that where nothing but that single item.
I went to the window factory, which was directly beside more window factories, and directly beside that was the place that extruded aluminum for use. The aluminum they used was produced a up the road in what they called the metal district.
You are even saying that "industrial clusters in China" so there is clearly some amount of planning involved. There is obviously benefits to having all of the aluminum factories beside a aluminum producer, and having the shipping/packaging warehouses by the docks, etc.
There is some amount of government work at play here, either on a small scale or a larger scale to provide a reason for places to all setup.
I've also seen things that just are not possible in North America. Asked for samples of aluminum extrusions and had the die made and extrusion done in a day. Locally it would take months before a sample is at my door.
I've sent designs for quotes and get quotes in hours, half the time factory in NA doesn't even reply. And even when it does it's more of a "go away" then anything else.
I've seen live video of robotic factories building entire cabinets for housing.
There is some amount of rose coloured glasses in this thread. But we cannot deny that China wants business and can get stuff done fast and efficiently. That cannot be said for modern day factories in US or Canada. The work ethic and desire for business are just completely different.
You seem to assume that just because similar industries exist near each other in China, that it must have been government intervention. Which maybe it was, I don't know. But this same trend exists in the USA too.
You have areas with lots of Oil Refineries, Houston and Baton Rouge for example. You have areas with lots of steel mills, like in North West Indiana. These are examples I personally know of. Obviously a lot of big tech factories exist close to each other in Silicon Valley and in Austin Texas too.
There are "industrial clusters" in America too, simply put. It is natural for large chemical plants or industrial sites to build up near where their source is. Hence all the oil refineries around the gulf. This is not a uniquely China thing at all. Lots of major US cities are known for specific types of industries.
You'd have better luck mailing a letter, but to be honest the kind of "sending a letter and getting a reply from the CEO or some sort of higher up" is long gone unfortunately. There is a few exceptions, but all of them are for very old private companies. You will never get a reply from Pepsi as a kid with a new flavour idea. Or Disney about a new ride for that matter.
Salt water absolutely murders things, combined with constant movement almost anything will be torn apart in very little time. It's an extremely harsh environment compared to space, which is not anything. If you can get past the solar extremes without earths shield, it's almost perfect for computers. A vacuum, energy source available 24/7 at unlimited capacity, no dust, etc.
The vacuum is the problem. It might be cold but has terrible heat transfer properties. The area of radiators it would take to dissipate a data center dwarfs absolutely anything we’ve ever sent to orbit
Also solar wind, cosmic rays etc. We don't have perfect shielding for that yet. Cooling would be tricky and has to be completely radiative which is very slow in space. Vacuum is a perfect insulator after all, look how thermos work.
You cannot deny that Tesla has not been selling as well as other EV manufacturers. You also cannot deny that Tesla has took a heavy beating internationally.
Tesla valuation is not baked in anything, it's entirely hype about potential, and has absolutely nothing to do with automation, robotics, AI, energy. It is largely betting that Elon Musk will do well, not that Tesla will do well. It might as well just be called EM.
> You cannot deny that Tesla has not been selling as well as other EV manufacturers. You also cannot deny that Tesla has took a heavy beating internationally.
What other EV manufacturers are you even referring here? Do you even know the top 5 EV manufacturers in terms of global sales?
> If your solution is actually good, it will get adopted eventually...
This has never been more incorrect. The entire world of software is people using garbage solutions because the CTO is convinced Oracle/Microsoft/what ever new random software is the best thing since sliced bread. In no fashion has the best software solution ever been a factor.
That doesn't sound like a government worker... They rely on Microsoft Office, but the actual operating system could be anything. The only non-portable application is video games really. While LibreOffice may not have complete excel functionality, the vast majority of functionality can be replicated in web apps/libreoffice. And frankly most of this work can be migrated to AI.
You can even skin Linux to look exactly like Windows if you want, or use Mint or something. But really all people need is to be able to open up Chrome and Excel.
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