Simon, love your work. Hope this is sarcasm. If not, imagine the opposite: Sam Altman and co suddenly started producing tons of content about how smart they are in Mandarin. Why do they even need a story to begin with, let alone one they push halfway around the world?
The $2.5B number is just these guys. It could be 10x in total.
Yes obviously. We would erase President Xi and his family as well. What are they going to do, cross the Pacific? Our total willingness to do is unconditional.
It’s less of a pipeline and more like a rocket engine. The exhaust gas (clinical data) spins the pump. We’ve put restrictors on that flow, and it’s taking a lot of fuel to get off the ground.
I think this is completely wrong. For a democracy to form, substantially everyone must have bought in. That’s the upstream, not the threat of removal. Authoritarian “regimes” are constantly under threat of removal.
This is one thing many forget, mostly due to drinking our own koolaid about the inherent superiority of liberal democracy. Authoritarian regimes almost by definition have high public support, because they couldn't function at all if even a relatively small proportion of society went against them. The people who want to overthrow them are either out of the country or insignificant. Dictatorship is impossible without populism.
This doesn't make any sense to me. There are and have been numerous authoritarian regimes that lack "high public support", now and in the past. The entire idea for most authoritarian regimes is to slowly minimize the power of those who oppose them. And then, they spend a huge amount of resources looking for dissent (SD/Gestapo, Stasi, etc.) and trying to control the societal narrative.
Any government that lacks public support collapses.
Democratic governments can operate without a plurality of support for the current government, because the population generally supports and is invested in the system of government. When democratic governments fail, there is usually very little danger of violence or economic and societal instability, because there is trust in those systems. Corruption and malfeasance harms trust in the systems of governance which democracies depend upon.
Authoritarian governments depend on confidence in the government to continue functioning. The system of government isn't necessarily trusted, the workers of government aren't necessarily trusted, but the leaders are in charge and doing things. Media manipulation and effective propaganda is certainly an important tool for these governments, but pointing out that it exists doesn't mean that it doesn't work! Propaganda totally does work, by almost all measures. Russia, China, Cuba, Iran all have high domestic support for the government.
Authoritarian governments also tend to be very stable - people know what to expect. Democracies change periodically. The stability and familiarity are key to the trust that authoritarian governments maintain. The protests in Iran prior to the current conflict are a good example of what happens when a government fails to maintain the trust of the people - the arrival of war saved the current regime from falling apart at the seams when Khomeini died of cancer in a few months and a squabble for the leadership broke out amid a collapsing economy.
I think that you're underestimating the power of authoritarianism. For Iran, I don't think the government was in any danger prior to the war. It was capable of exerting control through the state apparatus quite easily. And look at North Korea, you think that the people under that government are supportive? That's nonsense on stilts.
Also, that collapse you refer to can take an awful long time under authoritarian control.
I feel like this discussion is more about westerners who don't understand the actual effects of political repression. A reminder, Nicolae Ceaușescu had a 90+% approval rating just a week before he was put on trial and deleted in less than a day. Measuring approval ratings in authoritarian regimes is an almost impossible task if you care at all about accuracy.
> I’m not sure where that will leave students who start with no research experience.
What is wrong with this guy? Of course he knows where that will leave those students. Why did he even choose to be in the business of developing people? Nobody forced him. Anyway, the ladders were pulled up in 2020–2021.
Reading the piece I _hope_ they are trying to make a point and not really thinking they are not going to help novices become juniors. But who knows, nowadays...
Any webconferencing app on iOS probably fires up the TrueDepth camera to power background replacement and could conceivably do that, albeit not so responsively. Recommend heading to your provider and opting out of share-or-sell if you can.
Also keep in mind keystroke dynamics can probably do that too and has been a topic of study in one form or another since the nineteenth century vis-a-vis telegraph operators.
As a California resident I request to download my personal data from every service I can, and I’m constantly surprised. We each have scores for all kinds of things. The local power company keeps a “Green Ideology” score on me.
It’s likely some customer segmentation label generated through PCA or some other clustering approach.
The qualifying criteria is probably just having picked an offer for renewable-sourced energy in the past, indicating that it has some importance to you. So you will be given more green energy offers in future.
Every company segments its customer base this way for marketing. Sometimes it’s even useful.
They probably don't care. It's probably a mostly BS number. But they probably have to have it and have it at least look like they're trying to be serious about generating it in order to qualify for preferential treatment on some sort of permitting or write off some class of investment in a slightly better way at tax time or something.
I'm not sure if this is better or worse than them doing it because they believe in it.
I mean -also- weird to claim that the CCP invented scoring folks, but even if they did, it'd be hella weird to think that somehow they helped a US local power company implement it...
Look, I get that "CCP Bad". It's just always wild to see folks try and make that case when something has literally nothing to do with it, especially while there are plenty of pretty horrific and material mechanisms in play without pretending that the big-O Other is to blame.
Because it's not illegal. Most data privacy laws just require that user can see data collected about them and prevent sale of said data in optout fashion.
There are rarely laws around preventing collection of said data or using said data for some new service.
The $2.5B number is just these guys. It could be 10x in total.
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