Gary Marcus again. The chief doomer of AI where goal posts keep on moving.
Almost everyone around me, even the primary school kids use ChatGPT/Perplexity/Gemini/Claude in some form on almost a daily basis. The daily engagement is v strong.
The models keep improving every year. Nano banana gets text spot on, human anatomy of digits and toes is spot on. Deep Research mode is mind boggling. All the major vendors have some form of voice interaction, and it feels pretty good. I use perplexity talk feature while driving to learn deep about a topic of interest.
The trend is strong, betting against the trend isn't wise.
I can paste entire books and ask questions about certain pieces. The context windows nowadays are wild.
Price per token keeps on dropping, more capability keeps on coming online.
Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Libya, Yemen. It's kind of wild how the middle east has been at some kind of war with each other for more than half a century, possibly longer.
Meanwhile Europe aggressively killed each other during WWI and WWII and then went into a peaceful union with a free trading bloc.
Will there ever be a Middle-east union unification like EU in our lifetime?
> It's kind of wild how the middle east has been at some kind of war with each other for more than half a century, possibly longer.
> Will there ever be a Middle-east union unification like EU in our lifetime?
A reminder that Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire and created mini states along ethnic and tribal lines, and then also planted Israel in the middle of it all, specifically in order to PREVENT a reunification of the Middle East (and eastern North Africa). Before that, there was the Ottoman Empire.
Why would external dominant forces WANT a united middle east, with a state that would control such vast resources and so many geographic choke points? Might does not want competition. Might wants vassals. Similarly, Western Might wants a collapse and fragmentation of Iran since it does not align with them geopolitically.
A combination of cameras, lidar, ridar, ultrasonic fused together have a strong sense of perception since they fill in each other's gaps. (short, long, different spectrums of electro-magnetic spectrum / sound).
The good news is they're all commodity hardware prices now.
Tesla removing radar and parking ultrasonic sensors was a self own. Computer vision inference is pretty bad when all the camera sees is a while wall when backing up.
Fog - Radar will perceive the car. Multi car crash, long range radar picks it up.
Bright glare from sun, lidar picks it up. Lidar misses something, camera picks it up.
Waymo has the correct approach on perception. Jam with sensor so they have superhuman vision of environment around.
I guess it would be a major step towards civil war, but I wonder if states have the right to protect their residents from unlawful conduct by federal law enforcement. ICE has established a clear pattern of behavior in the last year that should remove any assumption they are acting lawfully (and federal judges have told them as much).
I was of that mindset until I learned how currencies and central banks work. The government doesn't need our tax money. US dollars aren't a fixed resource. With fractional reserve banking and interest rates, central bank controls how much new money is entering the economy. Taxes are a way to take some money out of the economy. However the economy runs warm at 2-3% inflation on average. Economy can technically run without any taxation if inflation is kept under control, and productivity of goods and services is going up.
State and city institutions get loans just like we do, sometimes at lower interest rates than individuals can. During covid, loan rate was lower than inflation. That is essentially free money.
It's a complex subject. We've been all told that US debt is a massive timebomb that will explode, however many other countries have higher debt:gdp ratio.
I'm not saying one shouldn't pay their taxes. I'm saying don't pay more tax than you need to. US govt can create money out of thin air either via congress approval or fed interest rate.
It's an interesting point, but "US govt can create money out of thin air either via congress approval or fed interest rate" has spectacular knock-on effects that you'd need to wilfully ignore. I recommend David Graeber's `Debt: The First 5,000 Years` for some good reading on the subject.
Congress and Supreme court ought to be reigning the executive branch and enforcing citizen rights according to constitution and bill of rights.
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