There’s a big difference between deterministic and smooth though. Typical LLMs certainly aren’t reliably smooth, so the small prompt change might product a large and unpredictable output change. I’m not sure if that’s any better with the typesafe approach.

… What?? Much of this seems duplicitous, but this isn’t even coherent. Is their implication that it’s not “autonomous” if it involves an api call to an external system? That mere definition would be extremely alarming.

The questions you pose are interesting ones, for the sake of the experiment I think at least:

- Programming

- Loading new software

- Adding new functionality

- Persisting user data

Could all at least in principle be achieved without changing the network architecture, but rather just providing the relevant data at the inputs (eg the full bit stream of the install file of the new software being installed) and having that lead to adjustments in activations (not weights or architecture) across the network which lead to any future inputs to the network resulting in the outputs that would be expected in the presence of the new software. Same deal for the other examples.

As to whether this is practical or achievable at present - not even remotely close in my view. But it’s still an interesting idea, even if just to think about why it wouldnt work and what that implies for future development direction of multimodal networks etc.

If ops point was rather that “accident”/“luck” are uniquely human… I don’t agree. Luck is when probability works out in your favour - and that can happen all the time with any sort of probabilistic search, which is rife in ML.

In NZ we also have an effective system for recognising and incentivising certain classes of forest carbon removals (which I think are a legitimate and important class of credits - unlike avoided emission credits which I agree are junk).

It might provide a way to harvest the remaining gravitational potential energy of the rain (possible funnel being your roof and guttering) but the only upside is that you could concentrate the energy with something that’s already there (and hence harvest over a smaller area). The amount of energy (and hence value) available would be even lower - unless you had a really high roof.

This is also the reason I abandoned my high school scheme of hydro turbines at the bottom of downpipes.

As the comments below say - you need to be working at the scale of a few major geographic features as a funnel before it starts to get really interesting.

I wasn’t sure about the droplet analysis so took your same numbers (25mm/h, 10m/s) and just worked out aggregate mass: 25mm over 1m^2 = 0.025m^3 = 25kg

0.5mv^2 => 1250J/h… so looks like we agree.

And to add a simple economic analysis of why this is such a dead-end idea:

Mawsynram, in India, is apparently the rainiest city in the world with roughly 10,000mm of annual rainfall - 10x the global average.

A given rain energy harvesting panel, deployed there, would generate 500,000J/yr… or 0.138kWh. That’s significantly less than what a typical rooftop 1m2 solar panel would generate in an hour on a sunny day. 0.138kwh is worth around 1.3cents at 10c/kWh.

A big roof might get you $1-$2/year. You couldn’t pay to clean your roof for that. You couldn’t even pay someone to answer an email enquiry about the install costs for your system for that. This solution would have to be VASTLY cheaper than paint to stand a chance of being viable.

There is a reason our existing systems to collect power from rainfall rely on vast existing landscapes and aggregation mechanisms (rivers) to concentrate the rainfall for us.

It is - in my view - a dead idea.

I agree we should keep an open mind regarding creative ways of collecting energy from the environment. But we should also abandon those which are quickly demonstrated to have no meaningful potential even if we were to perfect them.

Ironically I think the whole article is motivated by the thing he claims to condemn - namely: he’s a bootlegger, who has an interest in freedom of ai development.

Part 2 is much more interesting. Part 1 was very very weak.

The reasoning here seems flawed to me. I assume Tesla use periods when the human is driving for training data, so this is no constraint at all.

But it would deliver 24 trillion wh/kg… so by that metric at least we’ve room to progress :-)

I like the framing ;-) Maybe it could work for climate change deniers: “Tired of THE MAN intruding on your personal freedom to pollute? Regain your independence with solar, electric transport, good insulation, and a low impact diet. Freedommmmm!”

The tax isn’t remotely large enough to result in freight migrating to air. And trucking within the eu is already subject to a carbon tax.

This proposed system would be fairer in that it would at least deliver whatever the maximum amount a rich person is prepared to pay to the artist, rather that some scalper intermediary. Those at the lower end of the willingness-to-pay spectrum are no worse off, except to the extent that you think they’re disproportionately lucky, disproportionality motivated (which I accept is possible), or are themselves looking-to/willing-to scalp tickets.

It also seems however that it’d be pretty trivial to just prohibit resale of tickets and require ID at the venue. Artists/promoters might make less money but it’d preserve equality of access and largely eliminate scalping.

You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a while. But I’m pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an excellent job of that stuff rather than just assume that pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it’s enormously naive to assume we’d lose nothing if we took away art as a profession - especially since it’s so obvious it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other professions.

Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!