Lugh

joined 1 year ago
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[–] Lugh 4 points 3 months ago

n the 1960s, the famous media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted the effects of TV on society. Now it seems we are rapidly transitioning to the post-TV age.

At TV's height of influence in the late 20th century, it shaped country's cultures, history, and those country's citizen's national identity, and politics. It still does for the old. People often worry about the bad side of the post-TV social media world. Those problems are real, but it has its good sides too. It's decentralized, and content creation is now in the hands of the many, not the rich, elite few. That means the ability to shape identities, national narratives, and political realities is becoming more decentralized too.

[–] Lugh 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

LLMs seem to be rapidly evolving robotics AI. Looking at Figure right now, it seems general purpose robots capable of most unskilled work (cleaning, warehouses, etc) can't be far off.

[–] Lugh 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Musk again recently said that he believes Tesla could finally deliver on its promise of an unsupervised self-driving system by the end of the year, or he will “be surprised” if it doesn’t happen next year.

The CEO doesn’t have much credibility with these predictions as he said the same thing every year for the last 5 years.

Precisely.

I wonder if the first Level 5 car is going to happen in China?

[–] Lugh 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's a huge amount of humanoid robots in development around the world. Here's a list I compiled from another post (and I probably missed several).

LimX Dynamics

1X's NEO

Astribot S1

Tesla's Optimus

Agility Robotics

Xiaomi's CyberOne

Apptronik Apollo

Ubtech's Walker S

Figure's Figure 1

Fourier Intelligence's GR-1

Sanctuary's Phoenix

Unitree Robotics' H1

XPENG's PX5

[–] Lugh 8 points 4 months ago

Germany, like several other European countries with proportional representation voting systems, frequently has its Green Party in power. It's interesting that laws around NIMBYism were changed to overrule objections that were blocking people from doing this.

The more decentralized power generation gets, the more it's an issue for the owners of the electricity grid. It will be interesting to see how Germany deals with this.

[–] Lugh 3 points 4 months ago

The crux of this idea is that if the speed of light severely limits two-way communication, why not get around that problem by sending the AI to them so they can talk to it, and not need back and forth communication to learn about us.

Needless to say, readers of 'The Three Body Problem' will have mostly negative thoughts on this idea, but to me it poses a question. What if there are other alien civilizations doing this already - how would we spot them?

[–] Lugh 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

For sure. Though I think by definition the word "lie" implies the intent. Anything accidental is just getting your facts wrong.

[–] Lugh 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Many people will ask who gets to decide what a lie is? This mentions an "independent judicial process". Courts and juries generally have a good record of establishing truth, so it will be interesting to see how this works.

One of the little realized aspects of so much of 21st-century politics being lies - is how inefficient it makes life. Technology and change are accelerating. Yet every instance our political discourse wastes time countering lies, it's taking valuable time away from solving problems.

[–] Lugh 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

They are pretty grainy images, but its amazing to think we are able to look at another solar system 12 light years away. It's worth noting that space agencies around the world are ramping up efforts to get more detailed data about solar systems and their exoplanets within 100 light-years of Earth. Estimates vary, but that is thought to include 12,000 - 15,000 solar systems. Presumably, the exoplanet tally will be 100,000. If microbial life is widespread in the Universe, it seems a near-certainty it will have to be in some of these.

[–] Lugh 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There is certainly progress to be made with multi-modality, but I wonder if they've already exhausted scaling LLMs based on data.

[–] Lugh 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To think six months ago they were valuing OpenAI at $80 billion. I don't think so ...

[–] Lugh 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Good riddance - don't forget your coat on the way out.

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