“machine learning is the second best solution to any problem”

In much the same way as human thinking is the second best (and soon third best) solution to any problem. The point is that an LLM can come up with the best solution and use it.

These things weren’t predicted by the Attention Is All You Need paper.

Obviously not — they’re not going to make claims beyond the results they achieved in the paper. It was, however, obvious to everyone who read the paper that all of what we consider thinking could be derived by clever application of a sequence model, and all those papers that came after were results achieved by teams doing the obvious thing.

I’m saying there is no “big leap” necessary. As the paper that introduced the transformer said, attention is all you need.

Transformer is useful for damn near anything. At the end of the day, what we consider intelligence is the ability to predict what comes next, whether that is what our senses will tell us next or what the next hypothesis to test should be based on the data we have seen so far.

Solving famous unsolved problem: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/

Drug discovery (AI can’t do anything about the time needed for clinical trials): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03434-4

Assisting the blind: https://www.acb.org/i-am-blind-self-driving-cars-waymo-give-people-me-independence

They want California to use dirtier fuel like the rest of the country, so they can die earlier too.

Housing is mostly a local issue, so you should blame your city council, but the federal government can set incentives for local governments that take time to have an effect, which is what Biden’s HUD did https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Supply_Action_Plan?wprov=sfla1.

Biden’s HHS also worked to improve access to childcare, which is dollar for dollar the best way to reduce crime and help the poor at the margin. Trump is now dismantling that. https://nwlc.org/resource/the-trump-administrations-ongoing-attacks-on-child-care-working-women/

Because I am privileged to not be impoverished, I have the time to see what policies governments have put in place.

Well, you’ve got me interested. What did Biden do that made your parents drive for Doordash?

I’d actually be interested to see how this turns out. Do you have a transcript with Claude Opus 4.7 that you can share?

Yet Myanmar ,

Myanmar wasn’t a democracy.

Thailand ,

This prime minister was removed by the court, not by violence.

Nepal , and

This is the only example you gave of a democratically elected official who was violently overthrown. I said that if you violently overthrow a democratically elected tyrant, the majority will simply democratically install a new tyrant. That’s exactly what happened in Bangladesh, with the same party being elected after it was violently removed. Nepal seems to be a vanishingly a rare counterexample. We’ll see how long that lasts.

Spain uprooted their oppressors violently without democracy.

Spain also wasn’t a democracy.

South Korea kept it’s democracy by taking the tyrant violently .

Also removed by the court, not by rebel violence.

It just seems the disconnect is plain old complacency.

No, if you violently remove a democratically elected official, that official will be democratically replaced with more of the same. Violence doesn’t magically change voters’ minds to agree with you.

If he does dismantle democracy, then you will see people fight. You wouldn’t want to end up in jail or dead if the majority support him and will just install a new fascist in his place. You would have wasted your life for nothing. Your group would have more impact if it educated voters instead.

It did not work fictionally. Nobody supports rebels in a democracy. They are rooted out of their communities and punished as terrorists. Only when it was no longer a democracy did the rebellion work. The same is true historically. If the people being oppressed can vote for their rulers, violently attacking them instead always fails.

It ceased to be a democracy when he declared himself emperor for life. https://youtu.be/f2H4AI21tEs

None of those people live in a democracy. We do. If you overthrow a democratically elected tyrant, the demos who outnumber you will democratically install a new tyrant. The only way to solve the problem and make it last is by convincing the people, not by fisticuffs.

If you wanted to vote for Sanders in the general election, you should have convinced other people to vote for Sanders in the primary. That’s how primaries work.

Look, I’m more progressive than you are. I just happen to also know how things work.

The ones who cared, voted. The ones who didn’t care, didn’t vote. That’s how voting works.

Uh, no it’s not.

It is. As a result of the Epic Games v. Google, Android builds with the Play Store are required to allow users to install apps without any warning at all. They obviously can’t allow any app to be installed without a warning because this would be a boon to malware authors, so this is now enabled with verification. You can now even share apps you build with your friends without requiring them to go through an unverified apps flow with a scary warning. Additionally, Google is not allowed to take a revenue cut from those installs.

You’re confused because the install process for apps that are not verified (a path that didn’t exist before at all) or installed from a system app store has changed. This now has to be done with adb, which takes effect immediately, or via an on-phone process that takes a day to complete. Once it is done, this setting is copied to new phones, so the process actually becomes easier for most people who do this because they don’t have to go through the process repeatedly.

It is possible on every Google phone.

This change is the opposite. It makes it possible for a user to install the Epic Games Store from their website without seeing a scary warning, and Google won’t get a cut of any of the revenues from that store. The same with any other company. Netflix can now offer their app from their website, and people can install it without any warning, and Netflix won’t have to send any revenue to Google for people who subscribe in the app.

This change makes it so you can’t install software (such as F-Droid, NewPipe, Google Camera, Samsung Notes, etc.) from APK, unless you install them directly from Google’s Play Store [without going through unnecessary hoops and 24-hour delays].

This change was precipitated by a change that allows you to install an app outside the Play Store without the user seeing a scary warning or going through the existing hoops, as required by the Epic Games v. ruling.

Which “the people” are you talking about? Sanders had much more support with “the people” (i.e. voters in general), but was unable to get that support from “the people” in the core of the Democratic Party (i.e. the folks who actually decide who the nominee is going to be).

The primary voters. They’re not “the core of the Democratic Party.” They’re just regular voters. The people, if you will. The DNC decides who the nominee will be based on the votes of the people in the primaries. The people overwhelmingly voted for Clinton.