I am from Germany and what brand of car your are driving is often seen as a statement, often associated with a certain social group.
Although I have observed that this has been constantly diminishing over the years.
Multiplexer
joined 2 weeks ago
Just vague enough to not directly violate Rule 6 of this sub ;-)
Following what I have learned during my Catholic upbringing:
Spearfighting.
One of the neighbouring churches we went to was named after St. Michael and has this totally kick-ass statue on the side altar showing St. Michael stabbing the evil devil/dragon thing with his spear.
Apart from that, almost all Christians where I live don't believe in Satan as an actual entity, but more as a helpful symbol to illustrate the abstract concept of evil.
Church in my region generally revolves more around the positive compassionate concept of "Be nice to each other" than relying on a supernatural bogeyman that tries to lay you traps.
They were still in there?
Well, speaks for itself that they now officially left and before that already didn't cooperate.
I am actually somewhat jealous that you just tried that and succeeded.
VW charged me ~100€ for selling me a new one and teaching it in.
So you can actually just crack it open and just exchange a standard battery...? Ok, where is my butter knife?
The fondest memory I naturally have for the first RPG that I ever played.
And, well, it probably is the very definition of "niche".
I present you HASCS, the Hack And Slay Construction Set, a German project on Atari ST back in the 80s to provide an easy to use environment for the development of an early kind of RPGs.
Games looked like that:
My very first RPG was "HASCS - Allein in Eritra", distributed via Shareware-3.5''-disk.
I still fondly remember being killed by my first encounter with a random snake during the first 20s dozens of times in a row until I finally figured out what to do :-)
Guys, that is a reeaaaallly slippery slope. Don't. Just don't.
-A concerned German-
Curious as our pedestrian crossings don't have arrows at all:
Where is it supposed to point and how does it work?
Well, my KDE-based distro on my 10-year-old cheapo (350€) laptop feels snappier than Win11 on my brand new 1500€ work-laptop.
Admittedly, there are some company specific things like security scanner apps (and the mandatory MS-Office behemoth...) that are not present on the Linux-machine, but it is still a 20-core/64GByte high end machine behaving more sluggish than a 2-core/8GByte totally outdated potato...
So, I am not really surprised about OP's snappiness observation.
You are probably quite right, which is a good thing, but the authors take that into account themselves:
"Our team’s median timelines range from 2028 to 2032. AI progress may slow down in the 2030s if we don’t have AGI by then."
They are citing an essay on this topic, which elaborates on the things you just mentioned:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XiMRyQcEyKCryST8T/slowdown-after-2028-compute-rlvr-uncertainty-moe-data-wall
I will open a champagne bottle if there is no breakthrough in the next few years, because than the pace will significantly slow down.
But still not stop and that is the thing.
I myself might not be around any more if AGI arrives in 2077 instead of 2027, but my children will, so I am taking the possibility seriously.
And pre-2030 is also not completely out of the question. Everyone has been quite surprised on how well LLMs were working.
There might be similar surprises for the other missing components like world model and continuous learning in store, which is a somewhat scary prospect.
And alignment is even now already a major concern, let's just say "Mecha-Hitler", crazy fake videos and bot-armies with someone questionable's agenda...
So seems like a good idea to try and press for control and regulation, even if the more extreme scenarios are likely to happen decades into the future, if at all...
I think the point is not that it is really going to happen at that pace, but to show that it very well might happen within our lifetime. And also the authors have adjusted the earliest possible point of a possible hard to stop runaway scenario to 2028 afaik.
Kind of like the atomic doomsday clock, which has been oscillating between a quarter to twelve and a minute before twelve during the last decades, depending on active nukes and current politics. Helps to illustrate an abstract but nonetheless real risk with maximum possible impact (annihilation of mankind - not fond of the idea...)
Even if it looks like AI has been hitting some walls for now (which I am glad about) and is overhyped, this might not stay this way. So although AGI seems unlikely at the moment, taking the possibility into account and perhaps slowing down and making sure we are not recklessly risking triggering our own destruction is still a good idea, which is exactly the authors' point.
Kind of like scanning the sky with telescopes and doing DART-style asteroid research missions is still a good idea, even though the probability for an extinction level meteorite event is low.
Also I have the impression that lifetime of products has increased again over the past decade or so.
Still rocking my Sony ebook reader from 2011 and a Samsung Galaxy S5 as backup and Whatsapp handy. Both are using Micro USB, so I have a small cable with me anyways.