Wait a few decades until your infrastructure needs replacing.
Old water pipes have been the financial downfall of many suburbs.
Odds are you don't have a lot of heavy fright coming through, so your roads don't need constant replacing. You likely don't have bridges that carry heavy freight, those are a maintenance nightmare.
But once all the buried pipes need replacing, suddenly all the roads need tearing up, and that is expensive.
All this says is that America has been specifically altered by those prior advancements, and nothing on the rest of the worlds or their handling of LLMs
> Cash is dead in many places. Stores all around me have "cash not accepted" signs.
Side note, but here in Australia smaller stores are starting to preference cash again due to high card fees that legally cannot be (directly) passed into the customer.
U.S. cities were horse-and-buggy centric before they were car centric. The car replaced the horse not walking.
Some places still only accept cash believe it or not.
There are more brick and mortar stores in my home city than ever in my life. I know people buy things on Amazon but Amazon also kind of sucks for product curation and recommendation these days. The search function is basically broken and you just get recommendations for 15 Chinese clones of the same product for anything you try to search for.
None of them are true. They might be almost true in little bubbles of the West. Will those bubbles expand and encompass the world? Personally I doubt it.
When those things did happen, how much of that was because people had multiple options and chose one of them over the other?
I think the solution is in education. Do not teach people about the things that are useful right now. Teach people to value the things that make their lives better.
I'm ok with thinking as a hobby. That's doing it because you value it. If there are not enough people doing it, the problem is that they don't value it or don't know how to value it.
Automobiles partially killed walking; e-scooters are here to all but finish the job. Walking is going to be a purely indoor activity done within buildings for most people and a hobby for outdoorsy types.
Maybe. This reminds me of the Asimov short story "It's Such a Beautiful Day". Teleportation became so normalised in this fictional society that using a regular door and going outside is seen as deviant.
Some of us like to be healthy and fit, and choose walking over e-scooter or car for that reason alone. I wouldn't count it as a "hobby", more of a lifestyle thing.
Only maybe in US, more probably only in some weird micro bubble you live in. Otherwise all you write is false obscure projection. Maybe go outside more? Its pretty healthy also mentally
You clearly dont travel enough then :) nothing like that or even slightly in that direction is happening anywhere in Europe, at all.
In contrary - people are way more outdoorsy than say 10 years ago, most folks are counting steps daily (I dont but I walk a lot regardless). Tourism exploded in european alps in non-winter times - i have a small apartment in a nice place and summer is cca on par with winter now, it was before covid much weaker season. Spring/autumn used to be empty times, not so much anymore.
Most folks we know or colleagues are 'outdoorsy' in some form these days, thats not some fringe group but majority.
Yeah I've been to Europe plenty. I didn't say not walking is universal, but huge swaths of the US continue to be built out, to this day, with 0 walkability.
Even countries like China have built lots of new car first infrastructure.
Everytime my system updated my flat pack and Nvidia drivers get out of sync. Claude easily fixes it.
A recent update crashed in the middle and left me running an incorrect kernel for my GPU drivers, if I had of rebooted I'd have been hosed. Thankfully Claude caught it before that happened (steam games refused to run) and fixed me up.
Maybe Fedora Atomic (or another atomic) would be a good solution for you. I have an old MacBook Air that needs out-of-tree and closed-source WiFi and webcam drivers, and with Fedora Atomic it won’t update the system if it can’t get them compiled in first. Then, if it did and there was still some issue, I could roll the whole system back to the previous working state all at once.
In my update notes I have a warning to always do a btrfs snapshot before a system update. And my system update warns me when kernel changes (since that usually requires new drivers for Nvidia). And to wait after flatpak updates for the driver to finish compiling (since apparently the flatpak installer exits as done before the background akmods compilation finishes)
So, yeah, I feel that pain. So far I've been careful and/or lucky.
Also it kind of infantalizes terrorists as if not having an LLM access or 3d printer is what stopping their attacks. Like okay I ask LLM to help me create a dirty nuclear bomb but the moment i start taking steps to do that, law enforcement will already be tracking me.
Most people saying LLMs can make terrorism easy have never given doing terroism a serious thought imo.
The raw materials to make bioweapons are easily purchased on line with no pre-emptive tracing. It's absurd to discount the expertise factor in being a bottleneck, which LLMs have evaporated.
> It's absurd to discount the expertise factor in being a bottleneck, which LLMs have evaporated.
Mmm. Especially in this arena, LLM assistance is like The Anarchist's Cookbook. A quarter of the time following the instructions will seriously injure you... and if you know enough to identify which instructions are the hazardous ones, you know enough to not need the assistance.
> But it's not a limitation that will remain indefinitely.
The Sun is going to fail in somewhere between many hundreds of millions and a few billion years. This will either turn the surface of the earth into slag, freeze it, or both. Either way, all life on the planet is doomed. This fact is not a reason to fail to switch from hydrocarbon-burning electricity generators to photovoltaic, fission, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal electricity generators. Extinction events that will happen in the extremely distant future shouldn't prevent us from doing the things that are smart to do in the medium- and long-term.
But, -to bring things to the present day- companies that are solidly on track to hit their promised growth targets don't come out and publicly say "We're working on WMDs. [0] We are incapable of safely working on these WMDs. We refuse to stop working on these WMDs. However, if you lawmakers make special laws and regulations just for us and include us in the process, we'll be quite happy to submit the stop work order to our employees!". That's a statement you only make if there's no way in hell you're going to keep your promises and you're willing to risk jail time and annihilation of your companies for a shot at being able to con Congress into giving you an ironclad excuse to fail to keep your promises.
Given enough time and focused effort, we will end up with widely-available automated librarians that are very good. We're not there yet, and -based on current events- are absolutely not going to get there in the near future.
[0] Anything with a 10% chance of destroying all humanity is a WMD.
It's strange how quick people are willing to dismiss concerns with horrible reasoning as long as it suits their biases. Perhaps a little intellectual honesty is called for considering the stakes? There are many plausible reasons why we haven't seen AI fuel bio-terror attacks yet. None of which implies it's unlikely or implausible in principle.
But hasn't bio attacks already been possible before AI, what has changed? Maybe the barrier to entry lowered, but one could argue the availability of info has not been the bottleneck for as long as the internet has existed.
The threat is ofc real, but AI won't magically "do the thing" still, it's not code that's the bottleneck AFAIK? Correct me where I'm wrong.
Synthesizing complex information from a range of technical sources enough to build bioweapons is cognitively impenetrable for the vast majority of people. The ability of AI to synthesize this information into a step-by-step recipe to follow is a step change in accessibility.
There's an opportunity cost to terrorism just like with any time sink. The effort to build up knowledge enough to produce some weaponized pathogen will be compared to just doing traditional terrorism. For some low capability terror cell, its easy to see how the cost/benefit analysis has been in favor of traditional terrorism up to now. The kinds of terror acts that take years of sustained effort to execute are rare. But as the barriers to entry to bioterrorism fall away and become widely accessible we may see the cost/benefit shift.
> Synthesizing complex information from a range of technical sources enough to build bioweapons is cognitively impenetrable for the vast majority of people. The ability of AI to synthesize this information into a step-by-step recipe to follow is a step change in accessibility.
I agree with this part.
> But as the barriers to entry to bioterrorism fall away and become widely accessible we may see the cost/benefit shift.
But I argue that the barrier to entry is not about information, it's about needing to build, execute and maintain a lab and production facility? It's not the theoretical part that's the bottleneck.
Or maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of implementing such a thing, this is not in my area of expertise.
>Or maybe I'm overestimating the difficulty of implementing such a thing, this is not in my area of expertise.
Not mine either. But there is a vocal contingent of experts in biotech that have been sounding the alarm for the last couple of decades at the potential for rogue groups to develop weaponized pathogens for terrorism. And this was years before LLMs. Apparently constructing a sufficiently capable lab isn't really a bottleneck due to how freely available equipment is by mail order and how unsophisticated the processes are in practice.
>Consider our publication earlier this year, in which we reported that 36 of 38 companies shipped pieces of the 1918 influenza genome. That was collectively enough to generate the virus using reverse genetics several times over – and they were ordered by a student using a pseudonym falsely claiming to work at an office address. No one asked whether we had permission to work with 1918 influenza (a select agent), or why we needed genes from it, even though the official U.S. guidance at the time instructed them to do so. In fairness to the companies, that guidance was voluntary, and the fragments we ordered were legal to produce and sell domestically in every nation of the world (export controls are complicated). That is still true today, which is why we have a problem.
It is weird, a year and a half ago I wrote a blog post (https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-...) basically describing a lot of what Muse does, except all hosted locally. I included a section about using hardware around the house to enhance AI agents.
When the initial Muse launch happened, my first reaction was "wow this sounds familiar."
Now the HW side of things is announced.
To be fair, this is all obvious stuff that should be done. The key is who can pull it off. It has been pointed out many types that technically Muse is nothing new, some combination of Gemini products can already do it. The counterpoint being that packaging and branding make a product.
I am kind of sad that desktop computer use ended up being the way to go instead of hooking into mobile phones. Mobile phones allow for a lot more potential integrations with day to day life, plenty of services now days are (sadly) only available through a mobile app.
Googles subscription offerings are so confusing, I didn't even know gemini spark was a thing. The Gemini brand means so much now.
Meta was genius in coming up with a new name and offering Muse for free to start. They can upsell you once you see the value. Meanwhile I have 3 existing Google subscriptions to different services and from what I can tell, paying for one of the all in one subscriptions that includes Gemini would cost me a lot more.
But in any given year I maybe plant a dozen new plants tops. 6 tomato plants and half a dozen other random things.
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