There are also players working on accelerating later stages of drug development with AI, e.g. https://atlas.bio/ probably just a matter of time until the big AI labs also start working on this.
Brainwashed fission bros double-count reactor builds every year they are under construction. In terms of completed stations, China is opening 1 new reactor (~2GW) and hundreds of new PV stations (~300GW) per year. Over 99% of it is solar and nuclear is a sideshow.
Wow that's bananas. I suspected the answer would skew towards solar but not by that much. To me that also substantially discredits the "bureaucracy makes nuclear expensive" argument, my impression is the Chinese at doing this kind of engineering efficiently.
Whoops, my bad, I somehow got thinking about room-temperature superconductors. But I accept my failure of course and do owe you 1$. Have any suggestions how to send them with minimal hassle?
Every platform. Just being authenticated by government ID doesn’t change the issue. You still have fraud and inauthentic behavior.
India is a billion plus people. Google says that the dating app user base is 100mn, which is much lower than the total number of people who would use a government match making app.
That’s why the question regarding scale. That assumption makes a 10 person firm for a nation viable or impossible.
> You could make an app for a whole country with a company of less than 10 people.
Perhaps you could do it for Singapore, I’d love to know how those 10 people would be split across functions, and how they would handle the fraud and safety issues that crop up.
In practice it would be 10 managers and in-between contractor types siphoning all allotted money and then an unexperienced dev building a terrible overburdened service that noone wants to use.
depends on the country. this type of corruption is guaranteed in some countries, less so in others. Singapore is usually good at avoiding it. Their online services are very good.
the government can switch up the incentives and for example make payment contingent on people actually using the platform as well as opening the tender to startup teams (usually they are locked out).
Sure it's easier to keep eyes on in a tiny country like Singapore, but basically all major western countries struggle with stuff like this because politics is way too spread out and ingrained with too many local interests. Strong federalism is the cradle of corruption, but if you can walk across your country in a day there's simply not enough room to federalize. OTOH federalism is necessary if your seat of government is 500 miles away, because there is no way for them to effectively govern local issues anymore.
The UK had some success with GDS. Not all IT in bigger countries is failures.
I honestly think that labeling corruption as corruption and a popular sentiment towards slamming a few people in jail for it would go a long way towards fixing these problems.
Instead even among the general public the sentiment is "government is just incompetent" which helps soften the reaction to it and thus indirectly encourages it to get worse.
There's no shortage of countries around the world that have dug themselves a corruption hole they struggle to get out of. It's easier to fix it starting from here than there but we don't want to end up there.
Things similar to GDS exist in many wealthy countries by now. And quite a few of them do work more or less. But it you ever get to work with the government on something like this or even just get a peek behind the scenes at how critical software decisions are made, you would share the same opinion.
my previous comment was about my peek behind the scenes.
the worst software decisions were primarily about corruption, even when they looked like they were about competence.
ime the private sector isnt any more competent on average it's just that most companies' IT budgets can't be milked endlessly with the right connection. even there there are exceptions though.
Those don't have the property of being easily verified, which the problems proposed here do. I think that's a smart idea because it's a way to capture quick PR seeking AI-lab dollars for quite useful outcomes.
Being easily verifiable does not elevate something to the level of being a grand challenge. It really drives home the point that biology is not math or coding.
I guess to me the grandiosity here feels fake and unearned - like they vibe slopped it together without much input in the way of deep thought or expertise.
For example, synthesize arbitrary dna sequences > 3000 nt in length with error rate < 0.001 at > 95% purity. Easily verifiable, beyond the frontier, and generally useful.
I agree with you there are other much grander challenges, but apart from that I don't think the list is horrible, because as I said it's incentive-aligned with the current moment we are in. Your suggestion would definitely be a good addition to the list for sure.
I think some of the items on the list are also way less likely to be worked on (like cryogenics) than others, because they really require some heavy infrastructure to iterate. My money for which of these gets cracked with help of an AI would be rubisco, that can be quite effectively worked on in a closed loop lab fashion with a standard lab or CRO.
Biology is a really really big field. Many problems in biology are that of math and coding. Just as a simple example look at the golden ratio in living organisms. Biology follows a lot of different algorithms because they are energy efficient and come with massive secondary benefits.
The golden ratio is one of those things you can study for years and be a amazed by.
>The golden ratio (≈ 1.618) and its related golden angle (137.5°) show up in nature because they maximize space, exposure, and flow.
The golden ratio is an algorithm, but it is also a natural law that systems of many different scales follow. Wherever we look we find examples of it. Without this algorithm the world is a much harder place to explain.
What many scientists starting to look for is these algorithms we have not identified in natural systems as an explanatory means of their workings. Also because they are algorithms they are things we can put into computer systems to increase efficiency, or may naturally emerge from evolutionary learning systems like AI in what we call emegence.
Did you even read what you linked to, or did you just read the headline?
>There is no convincing evidence that the golden ratio is linked to idealized human proportions or facial beauty. There is currently no evidence to support the use of the golden ratio in orthognathic or facial aesthetic/reconstructive surgical planning or analysis of results.
This is about peoples faces. What I listed was about things like available surface area for things like chemical reactions and mixing, you know things that are mathematically calculatable. Much in the same manner a hexagon is an optimal low energy shape, hence we see lots of them in nature too.
We're going in the other direction. In Seattle it's common for restaurants to tack on an extra "service charge" that's not a tip, just because. It's supposed to be declared somewhere.
That’s also very common in the UK, and shows up elsewhere in Europe sometimes. In the UK, they are legally but not practically or socially discretionary. There are some tax advantages for the restaurant and in the ideal case for staff.
Touristy places in central London maybe. They wouldn't dare try sneaking an undeclared service charge onto a locals bill in Northern England or Scotland :-)
> In the UK, they are legally but not practically or socially discretionary.
Speak for yourself. When entertaining clients at touristy places in London, one routinely asks for this underhand charge to be removed from the bill. (Whether or not we then choose to leave a cash tip is a matter of discretion, but the chances are rather low after such shenanigans).
Then is should be declared in advance on the menu.
Adding an undeclared "service charge" to the bill only when it is presented to you is what we are talking about here. It is an increasingly common underhand tactic in and around London and an charge which one should ALWAYS ask to be removed ("that wasn't on the menu mate").
Then, if you wish, tip the staff whatever amount you prefer. (Though at this point, any restaurant that tries sneakily adding an additional charge to my bill probably isn't getting anything).
Or a date would look at it as me being so cheap (or secretly broke) that I'm willing to make a production over something that isn't really that big of a deal, financially speaking.
But, date or not, it's not something I'm OK with doing. It's just not worth it when I can resolve the issue completely with much less bother.
It's pretty common where I live in Asia, and they almost always write it on their menu, too. I don't really see it as shenanigans as long as it's communicated in advance. We don't have a tipping culture, though.
They disclose it in the US as well. It's shenanigans to me because it's sneaky. Rather than being honest an increasing the price of the food, they're using a "service fee" separately to try to trick you into thinking the restaurant is less expensive than it is. I genuinely find it offensive, for pretty much the same reason that I find tipping culture offensive.
I doubt whoever thinks installing this US software on UK/Irish POS terminals has done their homework. Its simply one way to piss off the customers and embarrass the staff.
Interesting. What POS terminals are common there? I am curious about culture spreading through technology defaults and wonder if it's effectively driven by whatever Square chose and whomever else decided to ape the incumbent or whatever.
You them everywhere. Most insane are the bars where you have to walk up from your seating to the bar to order, the bartender plops the drinks on the bar and immediately moves on to another customer, and the terminal still displays default tip amounts and you have to do custom → €0. What the hell am I tipping you for?
At this point I'm waiting for supermarket self-checkout to add a default tip amount.
Interestingly I haven't seen the charity thing seen here in Germany for a while. I guess its because they all are asking if you have a customer loyalty card now (sometimes for both the chain-specific one and wider programs) and there is only so much they can ask for before the cost from lower throughput becomes significant.
Hahaha, I was surprised by one of those in Newark/EWR. I can't believe it's real haha. Who gets the tip? I just tipped the self-service worker in cash ;)
It's configurable on any terminal that supports it — obviously the terminal is designed so it can be used in a restaurant, or for paying in a shop, or paying a fee to the government. (To give an example of where even Americans don't tip.)
It would be pretty neat to actually have the thing funded through a revenue neutral ticketing scheme. i.e. you just auction off tickets for 4 week blocks. That will allow people who are time-sensitive to appropriately select, and if you make more than you need you can just rebate participants proportional to their spend. Might be a pretty good way to allocate the scarce resource.
I don't think square supports slovenia for now, but POS vedors add the tip option, and our restaurant owners enable it, because it doesn't cost them anything, any many (especially foreign) guests "feel bad" for choosing the zero on the screen.
Because from the restaurant's POV it seems like free money. If no one tips, they perceive no harm. If someone tips, then free money.
It's also more money to the company providing the payment system so they are incentivized to tell every restaurant to turn on tips.
I hate it. I don't know how to fight it except to try to start a movement big enough that everyone who goes to such a restaurant gives it 1 star and not not return, until it becomes unacceptable for business to do it. Like many things that is unlikely to happen without some major awareness campaign.
Unless it's a bottle deposit tax, then it gets added outside the advertised price ;) 2 Euro bottle of Coke, great, I have 2 euro left, pay 2 euro 20 please... Fawwwwwkkkkkkkkk
yeah, this one also gets to my bones. and then you cant return every deposit-taxed bottle everywhere - but only in stores where it's sold. then some friends leave bottles at your place which you cannot return anywhere near... what a mess
This is obviously regional too; here in finland all stores that sell "drinks" have a machine for accepting returns.
It doesn't matter what kind of bottle it is, or which company made it, all returns are accepted at every point.
Children, unemployed, and elderly people are often seen hunting for stray cans/bottles, by bins, in parks, and similar places, to return them for the cash.
I think a lot of LLM progress in the last 2 years or so is really from densifying the training data to niches like this and not so much from general problem solving capability. I guess the hope is that the deluge of super specific training data will pay off through better overall competence. cf https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-sample-efficiency-black-hole
This is a pretty stunning result. The time series looks really convincing. Is the way the detector itself is trained orthogonal to this or could there be some "leakage" in that the pre-chatgpt text is in the (positive) training data?
My honest first impressions, since I think the project is well intended: This writeup is itself AI, and I would venture to call it slop. The Calibration section is borderline uninterpretable, and I challenge any non-author who claims to understand it to answer some basic peer review questions about it.
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