LLMs are causing cancer rates to increase? Say what???

What do you think the causal mechanism is?

I think they're implying that the suffragettes who set buildings on fire were mentally ill.

Hmm, maybe. Even then, there are causes worth burning buildings over, I think, and the right to vote is probably one of them.

Europe is a place with people in it, who have a particular culture. (Or set of cultures, which in global terms are rather similar to each other.)

When you come right down to it, we don't care about Europe because of the scenery. We don't even care about it because it's economically powerful. We care about it because that culture has given more freedom to more people than any other.

Yes, sure. But the culture is intrinsic to the place, not the ethnic makeup of its people. That's why we built institutions like the EU to codify and preserve it.

Some correct programs are supposed to run forever.

When is an OS supposed to halt? When you shut it down, or when you power down the hardware, and no other times. So if you don't do either of those things, then the OS is supposed to run forever. Does that, by itself, mean that the program is incorrect, or that the language is inadequate? No, it means that the definition is worthless (or at least worthless for programs like OSes).

Two different meanings of "forever" there. An OS runs for an arbitrarily large finite time, which is different from an infinite time.

Same way you can count to any finite integer with enough time, but you can never count to infinity.

Those kinds of interactive programs take in a stream of input events, which can be arbitrarily long, but eventually ends when the computer is shut down.

Termination checkers don't stop you from writing these interactive loops, they only stop non-interactive loops

you can still verify arbitrarily long running programs - there are instances of such software, such as sel4 (https://sel4.systems/) and certikos (https://flint.cs.yale.edu/certikos/), you simply model them as finite programs that run on an infinite stream of events.

> finite programs that run on an infinite stream of events

This requires coinduction, right? (That's my understanding of the formal representation of infinite streams.) If so, that does limit your options, since most of the proof assistants don't handle coinductive data, as I understand it.

This is not actually a problem for total languages, which simply model these kinds of processes using corecursion/coinduction/codata.

But if we care about people being educated enough to vote, a high school education is enough. Or at least, what high school was 50 years ago was enough.

If you care about voting, fix primary and secondary education. The universities aren't the main problem.

But collected by Iran, not by Oman. Which is weird, if it's really Oman's territorial waters.

Could you explain how you think that's going to work? Because to me it seems that until machines have bank accounts, there's no money for them to get.

People make mistake of thinking that their only way of making money is directly selling tokens. They miss the fact that if you have AGI it’s better to keep tokens to yourself and sell final results instead. When we all loose jobs it’s not going to be to somebody using their tokens, it’s going to be to them selling final products. Selling tokens will be to them like selling books by Amazon, their revenue will be dominated by self branded services and products that doesn’t require exposing AGI internals directly. Tokens API will always be nerfed.

Not the parent, but I guess that if AGI happened and was competent enough to trade markets, they'd earn the company back their investment in a short period.

China would have an equivalent version out for cheap next month anyway.

They are 6-12 months behind not 1 month and precisely the gap will widen if they can’t do distillation.

I have doubts the gap will widen. If you look at the research papers, the majority of researchers are Chinese. Of course many of them are living in the US or elsewhere. But under the current circumstances, many are returning home or choosing not to leave China.

The future of cutting edge research and tech seems to be progressively moving to China. And a delay in model quality could represent more of an unwillingness to burn stacks of cash to be first, when you can have the same thing slightly later for much cheaper.

That didn't keep them from getting bombed for a month, and their senior leadership all killed. It just let them punch back a little bit. Not an equal amount, just a little bit.

So, no, not a "nuke equivalent".

"Our position is that it should" is very different from "the text of their statement says". This is Senator Wong's (or Australia's) idea of what would happen in an ideal world, not anything anybody involved recognizes as relevant. (I mean, they may not recognize the text as being relevant, either, but this is a step below even that.)

> The short range of IR terminal guidance limits the size of the associated warhead.

Could you explain this a bit? OK, IR guidance is short range. Why does that mean I can't put a bigger bomb in it?

The warhead is typically 10-30% of total missile weight and most of the non-motor weight. A substantially heavier warhead on the same rocket motor greatly reduces missile acceleration, speed, and range.

IR missiles must accelerate to ~Mach 2.5 over a very short distance to maintain lock and close the distance for the purpose of air intercept due to the short-range of the guidance. IR seekers are lightweight and compact, which lends itself to quick acceleration.

This short-range performance profile can be maintained with a heavier warhead using a larger, heavier rocket motor. This has cost, weight, size, etc implications but that isn't a reason to not do it in isolation.

The upgraded IR missile is still short-range but now it has a footprint similar to long-range radar missiles and those have a similarly large warhead. It erases the major technical advantages of IR missiles (cheap, light, small) without addressing their major deficiency (short range).

You could build an IR missile with a heavy warhead but it doesn't make much sense. The quick acceleration requirement creates a lot of engineering pressure to reduce weight, which can only be meaningfully achieved by reducing warhead size.