In recent years in Spain they aggressively decreased that threshold to the point where most employees need to have permanent contracts. Interestingly it has led to significant growth because, among others factors, it has increased consumer confidence, and it has been a much smaller burden on companies than expected.

Perhaps the term “permanent” contract is confusing to some. It’s not in the sense of a functionary or tenure, where you virtually have a job for life unless there are extreme circumstances. A permanent contract is an indefinite contract, one without a specific end, where firing you needs to be properly justified, but you can be fired, certainly.

The model generally learns to generate each pixel from its surroundings, even if the surroundings are partially missing.

Not that the university is paying much anyway, often the opposite: the researcher gets their own grant and they are forced to pay a cut to the host university, or to their group leader. It can get rather feudal.

Of course, this is as close to cells, as neurons from neural networks are to real neurons. And I have no idea what it could be applied to (inpainting/outpainting?), but it’s interesting as exploratory research.

This is the most recent shock, and probably the biggest one, but academia has been becoming toxically metrics-driven, authoritative and political for a long while, weirdly more than in industry.

It has nothing to do with scientists of course, they are the last ones that would want this. It's a never-ending squeeze from the top.

And also the fact that so many students were pushed to study pure sciences, which is great in principle, but some of these degrees only prepare you to stay in university as an academic, and there's only so much budget for that.

I was referring to the commenters talking about working 2/3 days a week. In the Netherlands 4 days a week is also becoming the norm, which I'm not a big fan of but it's not all that bad either, actual productivity doesn't change that much in practice.

I just mean that at some point, if you are not actually focused on your job, you end up creating more work than you deliver, or at least not enough of a surplus to justify a salary. So it's not surprising that managers are averse to reducing hours and salary linearly, the impact is not linear.

It bewilders management, because there's a very significant overhead involved in making sure an employee is properly synced on what needs to be done, making sure they are content and productive, and managing the administrative logistics around them. Even disregarding the work of management, in a flat team the communication overhead that each member adds can also be significant and non-linear.

Generally, adding people adds a lot of complexity and inefficiency to an organization, and if you can do something without more people that's usually a lot better. It depends on the role of course, but in many jobs now an employee that is not fully dedicated can be a net-negative. The same can be said of employees that are not very experienced or competent.

This is why there's a significant crisis in early-career employment. More generally, it's also why we have a large fraction of population feeling like they cannot get a decent job, while many companies are simultaneously struggling to find the employees they actually need for a reasonable salary.

Perhaps not that close to US salaries, but those are inflated to hell. Worldwide senior engineers and scientists have salaries just about an order of magnitude away from AI subscriptions that you can use most of the day every day.

The step-up in intelligence looks massive (we'll see in practice), but the price is getting to a point where it's making me question if it's even worth giving it a try.

Good competitors will probably be out soon, which should level the playing field. I am more excited about that, just the fact that they showed that such an improvement is possible. I'm okay waiting a bit longer for this to become attainable for plebs like me.

I suppose that they were counting on the capability to resupply, otherwise they might have carried more contingencies from launch, but still.

It’s possible that it doesn’t play well with JS garbage collection, since it recreates the whole UI structure for every frame (which tends to not to be an issue in the languages immediate-mode is usually employed).

But yes it’s a bit more akin to game renderings than web rendering. Which can be totally fine if done well.

(probably the other way around, but what's the fun in that)

The Krogans got punitively infected with the genophage to drastically reduce successful births after their rebellion.

Broadly it has always been used to indicate that something non-human has a human physical shape, such as robots, aliens, animals...

Anthropic's intention was to make AI designed for the human common good and designed with the human user experience as the top priority. Just as you would design a city with human inhabitants in mind rather than primarily cars.

It turns out that this is best achieved by building AI that imitates human behaviour closely, but that's not what "anthropic" refers to. And acting as if LLMs are sentient people is definitely not a core tenet of the company as you imply.

No it's not... "anthropos" just means "human" in ancient Greek. "Anthropic" means "relating to humans", as in human oriented AI or AI designed with humans in mind.

"Anthropomorphic" means "human shaped".

I get it though, they don't mind if it benefits the local community, that's the issue. I suppose it does make a lot of sense for at least the local municipality to charge steep ongoing land rents or fees for the zoning license. And I suppose that requires national coordination, otherwise they'll just go the next town over, which is exactly what is happening right now.

In China, local municipalities were very profitable for decades just from selling or renting land to industrial deployments. It had a big impact on the local tax burden and they were significant net contributors to the national budget, instead of the other way around.

EDIT: I do get it, it is mainly about local benefit not really about pollution or disruption, even if they are loud about that because it sounds better. Local municipalities should definitely charge significant land rents or zoning fees so that the community benefits. China has been very successful at this for decades.

EDIT: Very rough overview after some research, using Colossus 1 as reference, which is among the biggest GPU deployments. Not thoroughly verified, but it'll be around the right ballpark.

- Electricity: 150 MW live, with another 150 MW planned/studied. That is like adding a medium electric-arc steel mill or large chemical plant to the grid. A small standard power-plant can generate about that much.

- Land / space: About 217 acres and 785,000 sq ft. Footprint-wise, that is like a large factory campus or logistics park; much smaller than a mine, port, refinery, or industrial farm, but far beyond a normal commercial warehouse.

- Water: Roughly 1.3–3M gallons/day in public estimates. That is comparable to the consumptive water use of a small-to-mid steel plant or a large industrial cooling site; not refinery-scale, but locally significant.

- Air pollution: The servers are not the dirty part; the issue is on-site gas turbines/generators. That makes it more like a small gas peaker plant than a steel mill or chemical plant. Colossus 1 reportedly used up to 35 gas turbines before grid connection.

- Noise: Mainly cooling equipment, substations, batteries, turbines/generators. More like living near a substation or small power plant than near a mine, port, or metalworks.

- Traffic / logistics: Heavy during construction, then relatively light. Much less disruptive than a port, mine, farm, steel plant, or refinery, because there is no constant flow of ore, scrap, fuel, chemicals, crops, containers, or waste.

- Heat: Nearly all consumed electricity becomes heat. At 150–300 MW, the heat rejection is industrial-scale, closer to a small power station / large process plant than normal manufacturing.