There’s a danger this headline is misleading. James Parkinson identified the disease over 200 years ago, so whatever it is can clearly happen without pesticides. Perhaps they make it more prevalent? But that’s very different from saying that a recent invention makes a very old disease “man’made”

These language models don’t get the meaning of anything. They predict the next cluster of letters based on the clusters of letters that have come before. Sorry, but if it feels to you like they’re captured the meaning of something, you’re being bamboozled

There’s at least two steps before those three:

-1. Society has been built around the needs of the auto industry, locking people into car dependency

0. A legal system exists in which the people who build, sell and drive cars are not meaningfully liable when the car hurts somebody

Or an Office 365 Group

These authors (and my work is in there) did not write so that Mark Zuckerberg could steal our work and profit from it

But this is literally how supermarkets provided cheaper prices than the local shops we all used to have. Customers swallow the external costs of last-mile transportation by driving to the business’s warehouse. They swallow the costs of service staff by serving themselves. You’re just describing their whole business model which, let’s not forget, we as a nation gleefully latched onto when it became available, forcing local grocers to close.

Psions were amazing. I had a Psion 3 in the 90s. That thing fell out of my pocket when I was cycling and a van drove over it - still worked fine. I’d like to see an iPhone manage that

Those G Wagons emit something like three times the emissions of a normal car, all for the sake of vanity and profit. They shouldn’t exist, and Mercedes’ CEO can get fucked

I can’t remember who said this, but somebody said the version of the Turing Test as we all remember it is ridiculous: It’s basically saying that the test of intelligence is “Can a chatbot fool one idiot?”

We did curation of existing knowledge for years, in the form of textbooks and reference works. This is just people thinking they can get the same benefits without the expense, and it’ll come crashing down soon enough when people see that you need to handle concepts, not just surface words with a superficial autocomplete

I think Greenland is part of Denmark, which is a member state

Any vaguely recent car is constantly reporting its location back to its manufacturer.

I’d be very intrigued in a system that lets me leave my phone in my (waterproof) pocket and access audio and navigation on Bluetooth. Let’s get this on bikes asap

One of my big worries with the way people are using LLMs is that they’re being trained to trust whatever they spit out. Hey Google, what’s the nutritional content of peanuts? And people are learning not to ask where the information came from or to check sources.

One of the many reasons this worries me is that very soon these businesses are going to need to recoup the billions they’re spending, and I wonder how long until these systems start feeding paid promotions to a population that’s been trained to accept whatever they’re told. imagine what some businesses, or governments, would pay to have exactly their choice of words produced on demand in response to knowledge queries.

Interestingly, my family subscription more or less halved a few months ago, which I was NOT expecting, but which was very welcome

Hard to get too excited when Norway funds all this by selling fossil fuels

It would have a massive effect. Transport (car) emissions are one of the larger - and growing - sources of emissions.

And we can’t hide behind “But the corporations…” because ultimately what they produce gets used by us.

So to answer your question: riding a bike when Global Capital wants you to keep buying cars and pumping oil into them is one of the best acts of defiance you can make

There’s a substantial body of research on how mythbusting lies can be counterproductive because as part of doing so, you repeat the lie and this helps people remember it.

Also, and this is more speculative, but surely there’s probably some survivor bias here? There are probably many thousands of populists neither of us has ever heard of because they haven’t had their voices amplified.

Don’t give these people publicity

That shouldn’t affect GDP - after all, America is much further away and has a bigger GDP than any of these. Indeed, GDP being what it is (a rough measure of total economic activity) I suspect being far away from the hub, like Greece, would likely boost it: think of all the economic activity for your shipping and logistics businesses