If so, then fracking will not be the key to American energy independence.

This article has some problems. The biggest one -- beyond some of the more basic conceptual problems with what these machine learning systems actually do -- is the vague demand that AI be "democratized."

They never define what the mean by "democratize" though they caution that "Big corporations are doing everything in their power to stop the democratization of AI."

We have AI because of big corporations. And nobody is going to "democratize" AI by giving every poor kid in the hood a big NVIDIA card and the skills to work with Python, Bash, Linux, Anaconda, CUDA, PyTorch, and the whole slew of technologies needed to make this stuff work. You can't just "give" people knowledge and skills.

This article is kind of nonsense.

A lot of these models are under-trained

https://www.deepmind.com/publications/an-empirical-analysis-of-compute-optimal-large-language-model-training

and seem to be forming a type of "lossy" text compression, where their ability to memorize data is both poorly understood, and accomplished using only a fraction of the information-theoretic capacity of the model design

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1802.08232.pdf

Also, as indicated in the first citation above, it turns out that the quality of large language models is more determined by the size and quality of the training set rather than the size of the model itself.

They're still viable, but they'll never be practical in the sense that you will be using one for gaming or word processing.

It's not "the next step" in computer technology generally, it's a new technique for very niche applications like advanced physical simulations and cryptography.

https://www.science.org/action/doSearch?AllField=quantum+computer

Yes, it is, and if the moon of fear is finding, they did it and it is when they found it. They did search the finding of the moon blocks, and the blocks are they say the searching fear. The blocks is finding.

Don't worry, a predictive policing AI will send an AI murder drone to get them if they're a real threat.

> You wrote all that for nothing

Also I love to write, and all this is practice

ACDCA

>relativity must be taken into account for GPS to work. If relativity wasn't a thing, GPS would still work

That statement is logically inconsistent.

The paper I cited above

https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

describes the role of relativistic "time dilation" in the functioning of the GPS coordinate system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_dilation

relative speed and the relative strength of a gravitational field each affect the local measurement of "time."

In the case of a GPS satellite, which is out in space and farther from us (its users -- and the earth as a gravitational well) and moving faster relative to us (because they need to stay in orbit and constantly fall over the horizon while we are stationary on the ground), these relativistic effects work at cross-purposes.

GPS uses not triangulation to determine a location, but tri-lateration with a fourth satellite to account for timing delays due to relativity.

The paper I cited notes " If these effects were not properly taken into account, a navigational fix based on the GPS constellation would be false after only 2 minutes, and errors in global positions would continue to accumulate at a rate of about 10 kilometers each day"

>long-winded explanation

A joke on the "Aether wind?"

> but the distance between us and them is growing

Missed that, you're quite right there, space itself is expanding.

The speed of light represents a limit for how fast local interactions can be propagated in space-time, or, how quickly an inertial body can traverse a reference frame.

Einstein's relativity is still within the classical Newtonian framework governed by locality, causality, and determinism, but Einstein's major insight was that Newtonian "absolute space" does not exist.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/newton-stm/

In relativity, it does not matter if space is expanding when we are trying to reason about things like how fast a distance can be traversed. In relativity, speeds are not additive and subtractive the way speed works in the grade school math problem about two boats on a river.

https://www.onlinemath4all.com/boats-and-streams.html

Einstein formulated general relativity in the wake of a major failed experiment, probably the most important failed experiment of the last 150 years.

The Michelson-Morley experiment was trying to measure the speed of light relative to the rotation of the earth by measuring its differential at a given point on the earth rotating either into or away from light streaming out from the sun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment

It turns out there is no difference in the measurable speed of light, which paved the way for relativity.

As it turns out, relativity is what makes GPS work

https://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/pogge.1/Ast162/Unit5/gps.html

And 1905 was the magic year Einstein invented relativity and quantum mechanics (by defining "the quanta")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers

edit: typo

You'll never get across the universe.

The light astronomers study is billions of years old: it takes a long time to reach us from such great distances.

Because you can never travel faster than the speed of light, you will never be able to get to the source of a star's light before it reaches us here.

Many of the stars astronomers study have exploded and no longer exist, but their light hasn't reached us yet. We can never physically travel to those locations as we perceive and understand them because it means we would need to go backwards in time.

We can never catch up to the expanding edge of the universe.

> Yes, there are galaxies moving away from us at faster than the speed of light

No, "the speed of light" is a cosmic speed limit. There is no valid mathematical framework for "galaxies moving away from us at faster than the speed of light"

https://medium.com/the-infinite-universe/why-galaxies-receding-faster-than-the-speed-of-light-are-still-visible-664ff21f0829

As an inertial body approaches "the speed of light" (which varies by medium, causing, for example, the optical effect of "index of refraction"), the amount of energy required to continue to accelerate that body approaches infinity.

> You really did the math on that.

I make weird websites for fun. One of the oldest that is still online is for The National Rifle Association Christian Bible Choir, most of which I wrote as a teenager in the late 90's:

http://choir.faithweb.com/turner_robertson.html

Anyway, ahead of Biden's election, I began collecting notes for a satirical "Cheney-Bush 2020" website -- and got derailed by the pandemic. I didn't have internet at home until I needed it for work (somewhat after the Lockdowns), and when I couldn't go out to get online, well, no new website...

The unrealized project was premised on the idea that after 12 years of amateur rule (between Obama and Trump), America needs a seasoned ruler like Dick Cheney.

Because Dick Cheney has more experience running the country than anybody else eligible for the office.

So then I started thinking about what kinds of talking points might go along with a Cheney-Bush platform, and the "drill, baby, drill" crowd suggested a theme: "Global Warming is Cool."

Among the favorable, pro-business aspects of progress in global warming was a year-round Northwest Passage...

Good, we're making progress. The age-old dream of a year-round Northwest Passage is within reach. This will pay dividends for international trade far into the future.

The 3D machine learning application you are are wondering about is the"neural radiance field" or NERF, which has VR applications.

https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf

The technology is related to "computational photography" (or "light field photography" techniques that are a decade or so old.

> I suspect these tools are going to combine with and reinforce the 2D art generators - and possibly break into animation.

It's already happening. Stability Diffusion has been integrated into GIMP and Blender. I.e., auto-texture 3D models.

> genetically modified plants could be used to store data

A lot of this comes down to applications of CRISPR, which is a bacterial immune system component that scientists have been using for the past 10+ years as way to "copy and paste" genes.

The "CRISPR array" is a portion of the genome that can be used to store arbitrary genetic sequences. Bacteria use the "CRISPR array" to store fragments of viral DNA for the immune system.

CRISPR has been modified, however, allowing us to store arbitrary data like videos inside a living cell's DNA

https://www.statnews.com/2017/07/12/crispr-bacteria-video-harvard-wyss/

and CRISPR has been used to implement digital-stye logic gates inside living cells:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms1516

These devices have been used in conjunction to coerce cells into recording -- into CRISPR -- information about their own internal activities, such as how many times a cell has undergone mitosis

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6492567/

> The broad point is that anybody can program

LOL a lot of young people struggle with folders

We should just train a definitive AI on the subject and all of us just defer to that

> any random a*hole with a computer can make one with access to a broad enough knowledge base to be smarter than a human

Been training machine learning models for four years. Without a big lab and an atom bomb worth of energy, it is hard.

> Also, how can you ensure that the AI won't find the vulnerabilities in your system itself

Only by making it economically prohibitive to train large models

https://www.schneier.com/news/archives/2021/05/when-ai-becomes-the-hacker.html

People don't differentiate between "AI" and "pre-trained neural network" when talking about things like GPT and Stable Diffusion

>Who will buy the burgers and how will they pay?

The rich will just eat us and machines will cook us

>How it should happen: we all work less on things that “must” be done, giving us more time for leisure and innovation

Unlikely. If workers had been given their share of increasing productivity since automation became widespread, we'd be working 20 hour weeks with full employment and benefits.

See, for example, point XIV from the charter of the Knights of Labor from the late 1800's

“XIV. The reduction of the hours of labor to eight per day, so that laborers may have more time for social enjoyment and intellectual improvement, and be enabled to reap the advantages conferred by the labor-saving machinery which their brains have created.”

The US sends its manufacturing to China and sets up a carbon offset system (instead of reduction) to make itself look "green"

https://www.savemoneycutcarbon.com/learn-save/carbon-reduction-vs-carbon-offset-whats-the-difference/