Gone awfully quiet!

They might wonder why it took Trump two years to get around to applying his famous (if essentially non-existent) skills in deal making. He was going to end the war in the Ukraine within days of getting re-elected, and that still hasn't happened.

The hostages would be unwise to say so publicly. Trump needs to be flattered more or less non-stop, and gets quite nasty when he doesn't get the admiration he feels he deserves. He'd probably try to get Pam Bondi to prosecute them.

So if you have enough data you can draw pretty much any conclusion you want. This appears to be true for some subjects, such as politics, but not as true for other subjects.

At one extreme a subject such as mathematics has statements which are hard to argue with.

At the other extreme there are subjects where it's hard to tell nonsense from anything serious.

Is AI going to do this any better than humans do and if so why?

And the ones who still do, they don't let them retire :-(

That's not what I was saying. If you are selective about the data you do collect, you can construct plausible but misleading stories, and the answer to that is to collect more data from a genuinely representative sample of test subjects

It's certainly not true of politics

It can take quite a lot of effort to detect the lies, but some people do seem to be willing to put in that effort.

If it does - and it should - it would be because it could integrate more data, and systematically check it for distortions and inconsistencies.

There will be human actors who will use the same technology to construct even more plausible nonsense.

No more American weapons of Israel if it didn't stop the war.

Not that he cares about America's interest. He wants to burnish his image.

Liking the ideas isn't going to make them happen.

The Russians would like that, but Putin and his oligarchs wouldn't. The fall of the Russian communist party was a missed opportunity. A certain amount of American and European bribery could have lead to a much better outcome, but it would have left Russia richer and appreciably more powerful, which is probably why it didn't happen.

Sensible of what? I'm well aware that you think that the sun shines out of Donald Trump's bottom, but that's mainly because he's an worse egomaniac than you are. Your idea of a "sensible discussion" is one that isn't dismissive of your favourite misconceptions, and you do have a lot of them.

Yes. I know a couple of guys who retired voluntarily or were nudged out by bean counters. Now they work as much as they please, for their former employers, and make a lot more money.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Sorry, my mistake, you weren't starting to have a sensble discussion.

TDS is a weird disease. It must be frustrating. Designing electronics is much more amusing.

I'm finishing up an 8-channel relay/circuit breaker module, meeting with the coders today to do the FPGA and the driver. And we'll need a test set. We can mostly "dogfood" it, use two P946 modules and an SMU to test one P946.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

And those people might turn into AI in the future.

Which is probably what will happen. Nothing in our own brains gives any particular status to truth so why should AI be different? If it's trained by humans it will be like humans.

Yes

No

Per unit time.

Ed

I imagine that they are using it already.

There's nothing obvious in our brains that gives any particular status to truth. It's the real world we live in that does that. If you get stuff right your plans work out, and if you get it wrong your schemes fall apart.

The feature of our brains that does give a particular status to truth is memory - we can remember what people claimed was going to happen, and if it doesn't we distrust them from then on.

If AI is going to be useful it has to understand real world facts and make predictions that come true in the real world.

The problem with the Bell Curve book was that Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein wanted to find that your IQ determined how well you did. In fact it has a fairly weak effect, and your social status, your social environment and the quality of education you get also have effects.

Herrnstein and Murray lumped these three effects together as a single social status number, when in fact they are separate factors which - while correllated - varied quite a lot from subject to subject. Lumping them together let a lot of variation from these factors cancel out

The book "Inequality by Design" ran a four way multivariate analysis on all four factors, and captured a lot more of the variation in outcomes, and showed that the IQ had less effect than the various sorts of social advantage.

This isn't all that subtle, but getting your AI to be clever enough to run the analysis correctly would be a big ask.

When our whole engineering department was closed and thus all our jobs vanished at my first employer, my phone rang at 6:10am the day after. Literally six hours and ten minutes after my employment had formally ended. A real crisis call. Except by then I was a consultant. They had wisely signed my agreement beforehand.

And that's the beauty. They don't suck you into endless boring meetings because the "taxi meter" would keep ticking during those. Meaning you can work on other client's stuff that time. Or do a mountain bike trip.

Yes! That's the value (both ways) of being ready when the axe falls.

Another value (in my case) is being able to say No to their emergency request - but nicely, knowing what their reaction will be to your answer. "I'm consulting now, I'll be glad to help you out. I bill $250 per hour". Of course it's all individual, what fits for one may fail for another.

Yup! Sometimes the value of that mountain bike trip far exceeds any reasonable dollar amount - maybe even any dollar amount.

Ed

I volunteer a bit in care homes, visiting people who are lonely. Sometimes folks work and work and work, well past retirement age. Then one day the usually sedentary lifestyle that comes with it takes revenge. They have accrued a ton of money but by then some important parts of their body have given out. No more fun, just waiting for the end.

So you're pro-genocide is what you're saying. Pure evil..

So you're pro-genocide is what you're saying. Pure evil..

Everybody would benefit from gaza being peaceful and prosperous. Except hamas.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

The otherwise unemployable arresting and harassing people with actual jobs describes ICE pretty well.

We do have immigration laws. And laws against selling deadly drugs.

There are literally billions of people who would come to the USA if we let them. Some of those people are Not Very Nice. Most would work insane hours under terrible conditions, off the books, and push many citizens out of their jobs. Some would turn to crime.

Immigration should be humane but controlled. Without borders and ICE we would turn into chaos and crime. I think some european countries are learning that now.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics