I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s more afraid of an embarassingly small crowd more than protestors.

To be fair they stated they didn’t want to have an audience out in lightning.

Whatever the case, calling off such festivities is what I’d like to happen anyway. His stupid birthday parade not happening would be a good outcome.

Note this experience is specific to the US and Western Europe. A great deal of relief and prosperity. Things get more complicated for the former Soviet centered world as they tried to navigate the new situation

Putin came to power basically because post soviet Russia failed to reach the sort of prosperity they hoped for.

He mentions creating more problems than we’ve solved, which like you I disagree, but on the other hand he asked if the world was, presumably on average, “happier”.

I think that could be a tougher call. On the one hand, the average life experience is by any rational consideration better now, but as communication has advanced now everyone gets to know about the most miserable news that they would have previously been completely oblivious to.

So while atrocities always were happening, 50 miles away people would have no idea. Now any such event on the other side of the world has instant awareness.

So we get exposed to harsh realities constantly and if we have any shred of empathy we get burdened with that. Those realities may be smaller compared to the population than before, but their emotional impact is far broader.

To be fair they made a lot of strides to the point where config file wrangling went from mandatory to almost never done.

But yes, Nvidia would have quirks driving people back to wrangling config file, but they got better too.

Though I’m not particularly interested in X11. The biggest thing they had was trivial application forwarding, but the architecture didn’t scale well to modern resolutions and UI design that was largely bitmaps being pushed, as well as not handling higher latency networks too well.

I’d say that those details that vary tend not to vary within a language and ecosystem, so a fairly dumb correlative relationship is enough to generally be fine. There’s no way to use logic to infer that it’s obvious that in language X you need to do mylist.join(string) but in language Y you need to do string.join(mylist), but it’s super easy to recognize tokens that suggest those things and a correlation to the vocabulary that matches the context.

Rinse and repeat for things like do I need to specify type and what is the vocabulary for the best type for a numeric value, This variable that makes sense is missing a declaration, does this look to actually be a new distinct variable or just a typo of one that was declared.

But again, I’m thinking mostly in what kind of sort of can work, my experience personally is that it’s wrong so often as to be annoying and get in the way of more traditional completion behaviors that play it safe, though with less help particularly for languages like python or javascript.

Fine, a chess engine that is capable of running with affordable even for the time 1970s electronics will best what marketing folks would have you think is an arbitrarily capable “reasoning” model running on top of the line 2025 hardware.

You can split hairs about “well actually, the 2600 is hardware and a chess engine is the software” but everyone gets the point.

As to assertions that no one should expect an LLM to be a chess engine, well tell that to the industry that is asserting the LLMs are now “reasoning” and provides a basis to replace most of the labor pool. We need stories like this to calibrate expectations in a way common people can understand…

Oh man, I feel this. A couple of times I’ve had to field questions about some REST API I support and they ask why they get errors when they supply a specific attribute. Now that attribute never existed, not in our code, not in our documentation, we never thought of it. So I say “Well, that attribute is invalid, I’m not sure where you saw to do that”. They get insistent that the code is generated by a very good LLM, so we must be missing something…

To be fair, a decent chunk of coding is stupid boilerplate/minutia that varies environment to environment, language to language, library to library.

So LLM can do some code completion, filling out a bunch of boilerplate that is blatantly obvious, generating the redundant text mandated by certain patterns, and keeping straight details between languages like “does this language want join as a method on a list with a string argument, or vice versa?”

Problem is this can be sometimes more annoying than it’s worth, as miscompletions are annoying.

GPTs which claim to use a stockfish API

Then the actual chess isn’t LLM. If you are going stockfish, then the LLM doesn’t add anything, stockfish is doing everything.

The whole point is the marketing rage is that LLMs can do all kinds of stuff, doubling down on this with the branding of some approaches as “reasoning” models, which are roughly “similar to ‘pre-reasoning’, but forcing use of more tokens on disposable intermediate generation steps”. With this facet of LLM marketing, the promise would be that the LLM can “reason” itself through a chess game without particular enablement. In practice, people trying to feed in gobs of chess data to an LLM end up with an LLM that doesn’t even comply to the rules of the game, let alone provide reasonable competitive responses to an oppone.

There’s not an express purpose of the emissions, the emissions are a side effect of combusting to propel the aircraft.

The injection, release, or dispersion, by any means, of a chemical, a chemical compound, a substance, or an apparatus into the atmosphere within the borders of this state for the express purpose of affecting the temperature, weather, climate, or intensity of sunlight is prohibited.

Key phrase being “for the express purpose…”

My understanding is that these bills would make that illegal.

Pretty sure that the actual components of airline exhaust would be considered legal. They wouldn’t just ban all fossil fuel powered flight, they just want to ban the non-existant mind-control/climate manipulation they think the airplanes are doing.

I feel like there isn’t an assertion that the police would act out from ignorance of the law, but just how they operate. If anything the enhanced legal awareness may embolden them to know how far they can push the line and get away with it.

More than the legal awareness or lack thereof, there’s the nature of the careers. American police day to day consider everyone around them to have the capacity to become a threat. The national guard certainly will have training, but most of their actual job experience on average has been devoid of actual potential threats.

At least, there’s the hope this is true, to offset the rather dire context of federal authority mobilizing military within a state against the will of that state…

To be fair those incidents aren’t inconsistent with his hopes, that the national guard may be more restrained than the police forces that did those actions.

Police have spent an entire career actively considering the civilian population potential enemies at all times, with less vetting and training than you’d hope they should have.

National Guardsmen have access to equipment and training, but their careers are less likely to have been antagonistic to civilian populations.

This may be an overly optimistic viewpoint, but it’s not one disproved by those incidents just yet.

Without being explicit with well researched material, then the marketing presentation gets to stand largely unopposed.

So this is good even if most experts in the field consider it an obvious result.

Particularly to counter some more baseless marketing assertions about the nature of the technology.

And that’s pretty damn useful, but obnoxious to have expectations wildly set incorrectly.

Yes, as long as you were on the side that benefits from success, it was better to leave things “simple” and not challenge the incorrect stuff out loud you aren’t going to “well actually…” the “expert” if it risks your job and/or the wrong stuff isn’t too important or too hard to overcome when the rubber meets the road.

Still, sitting in a room or otherwise being a party to a conversation where an executive is constantly being confidently incorrect and still praised as a smart expert likely making 7 figures is maddening.

While I have not reviewed a lot of Musk speak, let alone armed with enough to credibly review his commentary, but based on my own field and “respected technical leaders” that interview with customers and the press, with broad acknowledgement that they really know their stuff…

Most of them I’ve known can sound very confident and credible while saying completely incorrect stuff. No one tries to correct them because them being actually correct doesn’t add value and trying to fix that is more trouble than it’s worth much of the time. The people paying attention don’t know well enough to recognize they are wrong… usually…

Upon occasion my company throws one of these “geniuses” at a customer that actually knows what they are doing. Then I got to see our executive basically try to gaslight the audience when they challenged his competency. The sales people has to last minute pull in the actual technical people to try to repair our image after the customer interacted with the executive…

Now one would think, clearly, after such an embarrassment, surely the company learned to field the actual technical experts to deal with technical questions… But no, for every smart customer that is turned off by that executive, there’s 10 more clients that don’t know any better and respond so much better to his baseless confidence than actual competent discussion. Also, those 10 suckers will also get suckered into more high margin stuff versus the smart customer, that will be really good at getting the most cost effective products, with low margin and skipping the pointless addions.