It can be (locally) defeated. You can defeat it in wars of choosing, not in a war of annihilation (as Napoleon and others have learnt).
But in Crimea? Or the Russo-Japanese War? Or WW1? Whenever the stakes are less than existential, superpowers lose.
Saying Russia can't lose is just defeatism. With a few dozen F35s and better capabilities and ammunition, Ukraine would likely have won this war already.
They had luck, depending how hot this summer gets some nuclear facilities have to shut down again because the water gets to warm or they don't have enough water in the cooling water source.
The low river issue 2 or 3 summers ago was overblown. When there is not enough water, the production can be slowed down to use less water.
Regarding what happened during that heatwave, there are, rightfully so, regulations on how hot the water can be to be dumped into regular rivers. These regulations ensure the protection of the marine life and ecosystem of these rivers. During the that summer, the rivers' natural temperature was almost as hot as the threshold set by these regulations, so they could not dump any hot water into the rivers. But there are add-ons solutions to this in the future, such as cooling ponds where they would let water temperature dissipate before dumping it into the rivers.
As a writer, people thinking about LLms writing a book-length story don’t realise it’s in the wrong problem space.
LLMs can solve equations and write code, like make a React web page.
So they assume “a story is just an equation, we just need to get the LLM to write an equation”. Wrong imo.
Storytelling is above language in the problem space. Storytelling can be done in multiple methods - visual (images), auditory (music), characters (letters and language) and gestural (using your body, such as a clown or a mime, Im thinking of Chaplin or Jacques Tati). That means storytelling exists above language, not as a function of it. If you agree with the Noah Harari vision of things, which I do, then storytelling is actually deeply connected somehow to our level of awareness and it seems to emerge with consciousness.
Which means that thinking that an LLM that can understand story because it understands language is… foolish.
Storytelling lives in a problem space above language. Thinking you can get an LLM to tell a story because you can get it to write a sentence is a misunderstanding of what problem space stories are in.
It’s the same as thinking that if an LLM can write a React web app it can invent brand new and groundbreaking computer science.
I agree. Language manipulation is a projection of something higher order. LLMs can shuffle the projection but they clearly cannot go over the gap to the higher order thinking.
Trans people have existed for as long as there are records afaik. So it’s the same as homosexuality - just something our particular society has decided is in the out group.
Yes and no. Lots of people feel trapped. He/she (I’m not sure who this Ziz is) just sounds like someone who knew they could work their work into trans people.
Retaining those 2-10x engineers because they can’t even imagine leaving your company gives you far higher productivity gains than 1 extra work day a week.
Here on HN someone mentioned after a recent (last year) near miss that the US system was overloading the system and that some tragedy might be incoming. Maybe of the most insightful and heart breaking “competency crisis” related posts I’ve encountered.
Meta seems like a zombie company, no. They have one product, WhatsApp, thats isnt monetized or at least isn't monetized where I am. Their other product Facebook I dont use nor do I know anyone my age who does, and Instagram, which they are ad-polluting to the point of un-usability.
I think not "zombie", but rather, "mature". Which is almost as bad from the point of view of people who bought their stock thinking it was still a growth stock.
Their user base can't get much bigger, they haven't ever really had a hit product after the first one, and they have a record of pouring billions into things (like AR) that never pay off.
Now, they have done ok with buying other companies and keeping them running (Instagram), which to be fair lots of tech companies have failed at. So I don't think they're a zombie. But they may be something more like IBM, Cisco, or Oracle; a mature tech company that will go up and down, but whose big growth days are behind it.
> they haven't ever really had a hit product after the first one
Threads is the fastest growing app in history.
And its insane growth showed quite starkly the raw power of Instagram and Facebook in being able to drive large volumes of traffic and bootstrap new products overnight.
I would be surprised if they didn’t try this again to launch a new dedicated TikTok competitor.
Fair. I am on threads and it’s fairly interesting.
However it suffers from what I’d call most of the content being unantheutic. No one is making content just for Threads. They’re sharing videos or tweets from other platforms and it’s their secondary platform.
I’m not sure there’s some niche this isn’t true. But to me threads feels like the personal version of LinkedIn. Lots of self advertising, very little authenticity.
A few hours in the "metaverse" destroyed any faith or confidence I might have had in their ability to develop usable products that might interest people. It was like using a product that had been designed and developed by the wrong species with absolutely no interest in the actual user experience. Billions were flushed down a product toilet chasing something that just... stinks.
The experience is so overwhelmingly bizarre, frustrating, eery and depressing from a user pov that the only conclusion I could draw was that no one cared, that it was never actually tested, that no one actually was developing it for a user.
So I don't know. I don't think the company is functionally capable of developing usable, engaging products for people. If it were, it wouldn't have made that shambling abomination public, or it would have taken a very different form. I think it's just stuck enshitifying itself.
Frankly I don't really want to know more than I do about Meta, but it really does make me wonder whether there were actual voices ringing alarms from day one that the product was a dumpster-fire with horrific fundamentals, or if somehow the reporting on it came up all lilies from up-talking yes-yappers.
a) We have an ageing population which is why you still see solid usage in Facebook. And their Groups/Marketplace features are strong drivers of growth.
b) Meta launched Threads a year ago which is at about 300m MAUs and every month taking more and more users away from X.
Zombie companies don't keep growing at astronomical rates. I've been hearing about the imminent decline of Facebook for the best part of a decade.... still waiting.
I'm now one of those people, the ones talking about how they dropped FB.
Eventually I logged on and noticed that as I was scrolling, like 2/3rds of the content wasn't from my friends at all, not even re-shared stuff, it was all ads or shorts from randos or random group pages that somehow appeared on my feed. And of course a lot of the things from my friends were, in fact, re-shares.
I felt like, if only like 20% or less of the content is original stuff from my friends, what's the point of even being here? This is terrible. So I gave up.
When I look at Facebook now, I immediately click Feeds > Friends. It's not 100% perfect, but so so much better. And I see what I "need" with so much less wasted time.
But in Crimea? Or the Russo-Japanese War? Or WW1? Whenever the stakes are less than existential, superpowers lose.
Saying Russia can't lose is just defeatism. With a few dozen F35s and better capabilities and ammunition, Ukraine would likely have won this war already.