I agree that this is more of a justification than a reason. I also agree that social media can be dangerous.
But I’m not sure I agree that Twitter is any worse than the rest of them. (Unless you think that only one side is dangerous.)
I wouldn’t be opposed to an under 18 ban on social media. But I’m not sure there is much else than can or should be done. Society needs to evolve enough to be able to live with social media now that the world is connected as it is.
> Arguably, China is subsidizing everything with a low currency
Not really. "Subsidizing everything" is an oxymoron, if you subsidize some production it must be at the expense of other production that is providing the subsidies.
> It may cancel out (or maybe more than cancel out) those tariffs.
The opposite is true, tariffs reduce demand for Chinese products and thus for Chinese currency, which leads to lower yuan.
They subsidize manufacturing of certain specific industries, EV cars being one, at the cost of domestic consumption. Basically they steal Chinese people's savings and use it to give the rest of the world cheap cars.
> Basically they steal Chinese people's savings and use it to give the rest of the world cheap cars.
One of the fundamental equations of macroeconomics: savings == investment
The high speed of Chinese industrialization is made possible by the high level of savings which are fueled into investments, and that doesn't leave much room for subsidies.
Moreover, even if subsidies do exist, they can be structured in a way that maximizes the bang for the buck of investments and in that light, they assure max productivity - that's not "stealing people's savings" - that's utilizing them in the best way possible for their real purpose: investment.
I don't know why so many people without basic understanding of economics imagine themselves to be experts in it. Yes, mainstream economics is a mess but thinking that you'd fix it with a few shortcuts is hubris.
> One of the fundamental equations of macroeconomics: savings == investment
That's not a "fundamental equation", that's merely the hope savers have. Sometimes the hope turns out to be futile and you get bank runs or financial crises.
Chinese investments aren't investments as would be understood in a free system. They have private investors, but when the government subsidizes industries they're force feeding money to things private investors passed up (or they rig the market so private investors pile in even though it doesn't make sense to do so absent the manipulations).
Think about it like this: imagine the government stole your savings and then gave it all to Sam Altman to spend on OpenAI. You might object on several grounds:
1. It's morally wrong to steal people's money.
2. OpenAI probably isn't a viable business.
3. OpenAI will use those savings to give random strangers free chats.
4. If OpenAI implodes or becomes a zombie firm that makes losses forever, the government won't hold itself accountable.
5. In the likely event of negative RoI you won't have any ability to retire anymore.
It's obvious why this scheme is bad and why people who actually do understand economics want governments to stay well away from "investments" of any kind.
> Yes, millions of people in the poorest nations have been raised out of absent poverty since...
That... seems like something that shouldn't just be waved by.
And if you include China and India it's more like hundreds of millions. Like, if you think about the people of the world and not just "the West" the standard of living since the time Causescu was overthrown has increased dramatically.
What is at work is that you cannot treat it like electrical charges and say that the sum is neutral (and even there distance matters, such a statement would only be within a very small distance).
What happens elsewhere is elsewhere. If you get sick, do you want to be sent home because the public health statistically educated doctor tells you that overall health has increased worldwide (just using it as an example, I make no statement about actual worldwide health)?
There is this public discussion phenomenon that in every discussion somebody will inevitably use such a "neutralization" method to "balance" somebody's statement. I find this less than helpful for any discussion.
If we talk about too few good bakeries in the state of Idaho, there is no point in saying that New York has more than enough of them.
Similarly bad discussion phenomena: We cannot even talk about problem X, never mind do anything about it, as long as completely unrelated problem Z exists elsewhere. Or, we should not spend money on X as long as there is Z.
It's like some people assume a Single Global Lock mechanism exists, and the lock is set whenever somebody somewhere attempts to deal with some problem, preventing others from doing anything about theirs.
Dumb question, but: is there a way to find/filter ones that are? (I can't seem to find anything in the (web) UI that makes it clear which books are downloadable.)
There wasn't when I went through my collection. Reading the announcement from Amazon it looks like the existing DRM free books will not be automatically flagged to be downloadable.
The publisher/author will have to go through a process to have their books be downloadable again.
> It’s not that surprising that many successful people seem to be strong fans of heritability, or more broadly, of the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value.
I agree that that could be a motivation. But I would also say that having a motivation for a given result doesn't preclude that result. That is generally true in science.
I'm not an expert. But there seems to be fairly overwhelming evidence that some significant amount of intelligence is heritable. That IQ is a reasonably good measure (or proxy) for intelligence. And that IQ correlates well with a lot of other things like educational attainment and income.
That doesn't mean that your genes determine your future. But it does suggest that some people are "born" in a better position than others -- aside from their socio-economic status.
This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable. Being tall gives you a better shot at making the NBA. The same is true for many other things.
> This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable.
I don't understand why so many commenters here are arguing against a straw man. The article author does not and never did believe in the "blank slate" theory. The author has a "centrist" view that genes matter but are not the only determining factor.
I was responding to the previous comment, not so much the article.
> The author has a "centrist" view that genes matter but are not the only determining factor.
Nobody thinks genes are the only determining factor (that's a straw man on the other side :)
Most people agree it is somewhere on a continuum. Some people think it leans more one way; others the other way. Some people want it to lean more one way; others want it to lean more the other.
> I was responding to the previous comment, not so much the article.
How so? You said, "This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable. Being tall gives you a better shot at making the NBA. The same is true for many other things." But there's no indication that the previous comment was arguing the opposite of that. Rather, the previous comment was arguing against this idea: "Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame."
I said quite a bit more than what you quoted. And I find your interest in my comment and why I made it... odd.
I'm sorry if I didn't get my point across in a way that satisfies you. But I suggest you take a step back and re-read what both of us wrote. Or maybe just move on.
The author questions whether genes are a meaningful factor, in the large, and comes down against it. I don't think that makes them a centrist; I think they're just rejecting a caricature (the "blank slate") laid out by people strongly invested in the idea that intelligence is determined genetically.
> At 30%, one does observe a faint correlation between genetic potential and IQ. The correlation becomes clearer at 50%, while remaining quite noisy. This is an essential aspect to keep in mind: 50% may sound like a solid heritability figure, but the associated correlation is rather modest. It’s only at 80% that the picture starts to “feel like” a line.
My understanding is that the author thinks the heritability of IQ is somewhere between 30% and 50%, but not 80% or 100%, and not 20% or 0%.
The big difference is that Google is both the chip designer *and* the AI company. So they get both sets of profits.
Both Google and Nvidia contract TSMC for chips. Then Nvidia sells them at a huge profit. Then OpenAI (for example) buys them at that inflated rate and them puts them into production.
So while Nvidia is "selling shovels", Google is making their own shovels and has their own mines.
on top of that Google is also cloud infrastructure provider - contrary to OpenAI that need to have someone like Azure plug those GPUs and host servers.
The own shovels for own mines strategy has a hidden downside: isolation. NVIDIA sells shovels to everyone - OpenAI, Meta, xAI, Microsoft - and gets feedback from the entire market. They see where the industry is heading faster than Google, which is stewing in its own juices. While Google optimizes TPUs for current Google tasks (Gemini, Search), NVIDIA optimizes GPUs for all possible future tasks. In an era of rapid change, the market's hive mind usually beats closed vertical integration.
Selling shovels may still turn out to be the right move: Nvidia got rich off the cryptocurrency bubble, now they're getting even richer off the AI bubble.
Having your own mines only pays off if you actually do strike gold. So far AI undercuts Google's profitable search ads, and loses money for OpenAI.
So when the bubble pops the companies making the shovels (TSMC, NVIDIA) might still have the money they got for their products and some of the ex-AI companies might least be able to sell standard compliant GPUs on the wider market.
And Google will end up with lots of useless super specialized custom hardware.
It seems unlikely that large matrix multipliers will become useless. If nothing else, Google uses AI extensively internally. It already did in ways that weren’t user-visible long before the current AI boom. Also, they can still put AI overviews on search pages regardless of what the stock market does. They’re not as bad as they used to be, and I expect they’ll improve.
Even if TPU’s weren’t all that useful, they still own the data centers and can upgrade equipment, or not. They paid for the hardware out of their large pile of cash, so it’s not debt overhang.
Another issue is loss of revenue. Google cloud revenue is currently 15% of their total, so still not that much. The stock market is counting on it continuing to increase, though.
If the stock market crashes, Google’s stock price will go down too, and that could be a very good time to buy, much like it was in 2008. There’s been a spectacular increase since then, the best investment I ever made. (Repeating that is unlikely, though.)
How could Google's custom hardware become useless? They've used it for their business for years now and will do so for years into the future. It's not like their hardware is LLM specific. Google cannot lose with their vast infrastructure.
Meanwhile OpenAI et al dumping GPUs while everyone else is doing the same will get pennies on the dollar. It's exactly the opposite to what you describe.
I hope that comes to pass, because I'll be ready to scoop up cheap GPUs and servers.
Same way cloud hardware always risks becoming useless. The newer hardware is so much better you can't afford to not upgrade, e.g. an algorithmic improvement that can be run on CUDA devices but not on existing TPUs, which changes the economics of AI.
> And Google will end up with lots of useless super specialized custom hardware.
If it gets to the point where this hardware is useless (I doubt it), yes Google will have it sitting there. But it will have cost Google less to build that hardware than any of the companies who built on Nvidia.
Right, and the inevitable bubble pop will just slow things down for a few years - it's not like those TPUs will suddenly be useless, Google will still have them deployed, it's just that instead of upgrading to a newer TPU they'll stay with the older ones longer. It seems like Google will experience much less repercussions when the bubble pops compared to Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle etc. as they're largely staying out of the money circles between those companies.
I think people are confusing the bubble popping with AI being over. When the dot-com bubble popped, it's not like internet infrastructure immediately became useless and worthless.
that's actually not all that true... a lot of fiber that had been laid went dark, or was never lit, and was hoarded by telecoms in an intentional supply constrained market in order to drive up the usage cost of what was lit.
If it was hoarded by anyone, then by definition not useless OR worthless. Also, you are currently on the internet if you're reading this, so the point kinda stands.
Google uses TPUs for its internal AI work (training Gemini for example), which surely isn't decreasing in demand or usage as their portfolio and product footprint increases. So I have a feeling they'd be able to put those TPUs to good use?
Not sure if this matters for you or not, but my understanding (with some experiments) is that the "slicers" implicitly do a union. As in: you could have an STL with a bunch of overlapping blobs and the 3d printer slicing code just checks isInside -- which is effectively a union.
At least that's what I found when I was generating STLs in code.
Minor suggestion/request: would be great if you added a final STL file to the github repo of a working example. Might be easier for people to try if they can't get the python code running on Linux.
(I haven't tried yet. But I'd love to just send an STL to my printer to see how well it prints.)
But I’m not sure I agree that Twitter is any worse than the rest of them. (Unless you think that only one side is dangerous.)
I wouldn’t be opposed to an under 18 ban on social media. But I’m not sure there is much else than can or should be done. Society needs to evolve enough to be able to live with social media now that the world is connected as it is.
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