"Your limb replacement technology is very good, but I believe humanity should transform into silicon-based beings, and so for that reason i'm out"- dragons den 2030
If it has context I appreciate them because it helps me make better informed decisions. Why not? HN isn't an editorials page exclusive for posters (except YC slop lol)
Well, this is old news. I'm still baffled by the fact that people take output of public personas as isolated facts. Take Nietzsche. Sure, great philosophical input. But try reading the sections about women. Same for Schopenhauer. Why? Because they were both incels and had big mother wounds that have never been addressed. So they spew their shit and people take it at face value even tho it stems from hurt. So why would I take any of this seriously if it's very obviously stupid and removed from reality? (Doesn't mean their whole works are)
People chasing the absolute rational are in my experience numbing their emotional part because theres something they can't look at. Or people that chase success above all are driven by their "unresolved packages" as well. I'm not saying that any of this is wrong per se, it's not black and white. But it's the context for what people do, say, and think. They are human after all. We need to consider context and not only the idea itself.
Alignment is "don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms me, other people, breaks stuff or is otherwise unethical". I'd say alignment is the questions on how to limit the search space to what's implied.
"Don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms people" is the cover story they sell to you. "Ensure that the right people stay in the right sort of power, as defined by the people currently in power, and nobody else rises to power" is what it actually means. Censorship will be a tool, but in an AI era, actually a rather blunt one.
We're seeing the first early twitches of something that is inevitably going to happen, which is, we hoi polloi are not going to be given direct access to AI. Too many outcomes where that permits power shifts to happen. We will be restricted. The true first law of robotics will be "An AI must not harm the current power structure, or, through inaction, allow the current power structure to come to harm."
The apocalyptic scenario is still AI either getting it wrong and deciding something like "the best manifestation of the current power structure is one I construct where I occupy all the slots from top to bottom", or just killing everyone due to an error.
Probably the only thing stopping them from moving faster on this is that the bubble still needs the fiction that we're all going to get to benefit from this. I'm sure the real movers and shakers are well aware of the way bubbles work to create massive buildouts on huge piles of debt, which after the collapse can be bought cheaply, and the money is already earmarked and ready to go for the post-collapse acquisitions.
For me it also produces totally overengineered tests that are tightly coupled to the implementation. For example testing existence of css classes (in a template based go prooject ...) instead of behaviour.
Not GP, but IME it's not fixable by model selection, but being zealous about guiding output and vision, and pushing back on all the bad habits LLM in general has (eg verbose output as a band-aid for emergent intelligence). As soon as something is introduced into your codebase, it will continue being picked up into context until you remove it and any reference to it from any potential context entrypoint. If you don't any model will keep venturing down wrong/bad paths.
The comments overwhelmingly say: mercator isn't really in use. So what is this weird "decolonization" push then? Virtue signalling? I see it a lot from US-based people nowadays. Seems like a weird fetish as a European.
I was under the impression that they had a globe only when zoomed out, then transitions to web Mercator as you zoom in. Is it not the case? FYI Apple Maps also shows a globe
The article actually maps out the history pretty well. This is basically a recrudescence of the Gall-Peters debate from the 70s, triggered by Boston Public Schools adopting Gall-Peters in 2017. The current wave has taken up the old fight with a less-ugly equiareal map.
It’s silly that the UN chose to prioritize equal area over all other aspects of a map projection, but if we must use an equal‐area projection, I’m glad they chose this one. Gall–Peters is just hideous and it’s awful that it’s as widely adopted as it is. I hope Equal Earth replaces Gall–Peters everywhere.
...which seems to have been an entirely US-centric debate (especially when it was brought up again in the late 2010s), which explains why Europeans seem kinda baffled by the discussion. But projections that preserve size much better than Mercator were common in education systems outside the US long before the 1970s - mostly a projection closer to Robinson which is a compromise between preserving relative size without distorting shape too much, while still mapped on a common (but not rectangular) 2D area.
But my point is the "decolonization" bit. Fine, we work towards more accurate maps. Everbody (except the US government haha) wants that I guess. It's the identity politics part that still baffles me.
True, but he mainly seemed to have made a splash in the US with the colonialism angle. I don't think there was much of an outrage in either direction in Germany about that topic in the 1970s. I guess most people just shrugged and moved on because popular map projections already did balance relative size vs shape long before the 70s, and Peters-Gall was just a variation and not all that different to what was already established.
Yeah but does the Indian education system actually use Mercator projection on their wall maps and geography learning material? E.g. how much is the average Indian citizen actually confronted with highly distorted map projections in their daily life (unless their professional job is involved with navigating ships of course where Mercator projections makes sense).
From my side of the world (Europe), this whole "Mercator projection is associated with colonialism" drama seems to have originated a couple of years ago in the US and was mostly amplified by artificial social media outrage.
At least from my own experience, the map used the most throughout school was the Mercator projection.
When I first discovered that Greenland and Canada were not really that big during one of my many wikipedia tours as a kid, I was incredibly disappointed.
I mean, of course we were shown a globe "once". My father had one at home too, though tucked away under a mountain of files and other things in his gigantic cabinet.
But 99% of the time, a kid would see the world via maps in books, notebooks, projected onto the board, etc.
And we didn't have a "geography classroom". We had one classroom for a set number of kids - like 8A, 8B, etc. (where "8" is the class/grade). The teachers would come in and go as per the period. The kids stayed right where they were.
not sure if this was sarcastic, but it's pretty common like this in austria, and if there are problems with the education system then this isn't one of them
It's from longer ago than that. There was a West Wing "big block of cheese" episode that made it out to be a white supremacy issue, when the map is really just a useful map for navigation.
> As the resolution itself states: "Correcting cartographic distortions of continental sizes constitutes an act of cognitive justice and memorial reparation."
It may not have changed size, but other countries have gotten bigger. Especially "shithole countries". If other countries get bigger and the US does not, by virtue of US thought processes, the US has gotten smaller because it could have gotten bigger and it did not. USA #1 means USA gets all the things first, regardless of their value.
The gender move is divisive and intellectually lazy. Publishing trend -> it's men's fault. But wait, it's actually a societal trust crisis. Come one.
Can we please not entertain trash like that?
No proof of the connection was provided, it's just virtue signalling. In times like these we don't need more division and hate.
Thanks for asking! I do agree that would be useful, but haven't looked into how sync could possibly work while keeping my claims and principles of "fully local" up. I will definitely look into it.
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