"The festivities were streamed live from the Peacock Theater in L.A. across more than 30 platforms including YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, TikTok Live, X (Twitter), Steam, WeChat, Bilibili, Huya, DouYu, Xiaohongshu and Instagram Live"
The main goal isn't to reduce the amount of overall plastic created its to reduce the amount of plastic trash that ends up on the streets, beaches, rivers, etc.
The article seems to argue that the goal is very narrowly to reduce the amount of plastic bags created/consumed and then claims a study shows that the bans do indeed achieve that goal. It's hard to imagine this goal not being achieved, but it's too narrow.
I haven't seen any study showing that total plastic trash, incorrectly disposed, is reduced. It could be hard to study, I admit. I'd love to know the amount of the reduction as well. My guess would be there is a reduction, but it is fairly small.
I'd imagine 7% reduction is the upper bound on the impact, but it could be smaller than that if other litter increased. Maybe that's high enough to make the ban worth the inconvenience, I don't know what the right threshold should be.
Broader goals could include reducing total plastic production, reducing fossil fuel mining, etc. I'm more suspicious that these goals are not being meaningfully affected by bag bans.
If that's the case, is targeting rich developed countries with efficient waste management and pickup the best approach? I live in a very clean, North American city. I rarely see plastic bags blowing around. We have residential garbage pick up, and public spaces all have public bins. Our landfills are, what I would assume, are well run. Does the plastic bag ban in my city make sense? We never had an issue with plastic ending up in lakes/rivers etc. Now look to developing nations where rivers and streams are overrun with plastic. Do they have plastic bag bans? Doesn't seem like it and seems like that is where there should be one.
If I was going to steel-man the argument, I’d suggest that you’re adding some kind of extra economies of scale to production of less polluting alternatives?
Also I note that mid-income countries like Thailand are also getting in on plastic bag reduction. The kind interpretation of that is that muang thai has finally discovered its eco-consciousness, but an alternative one is that they’re copying rich countries ‘cuz it’s fashionable, and that that effect might trickle down to the countries who are serious polluters
If the purpose it to keep plastic waste and microplastics out of your local environment and local drinking water sources, then local policies make sense.
Should other places that also have that potential problem also do that? Sure, probably, if it's practical. But people in country X usually don't get to make local policy for people in country Y.
The elephant in the room here is that these LLM's still have problems with hallucinations. Even its only 1% or even 0.1% of the time thats still a huge problem. You could have someone go their whole lives believing something they were confidently taught by an AI which is completely wrong.
Teachers should be very careful using a vanilla LLM for education without some kinds of extra guardrails or extra verification.
This is also the case if taught by any educator who happens to trust the source they looked up as well. The internet, text books, and even scientific articles can all be factually incorrect.
GNNs (for which LLMs are a subclass of) have a potential to be optimized in such a way that all the knowledge contained within them remains as parsimonious as possible. This is not the case for a human reading some internet article for which they have not gained extensive context within the field.
There are plenty of people that strongly believe in strange ideas that were taught to them by some 4th grade teacher that was never corrected over their life.
While you're statements are correct in this miniscule snapshot of time, it's exceedingly short-sighted to assert that language modeling is to be avoided due to some issues that exists this month, and disregard the clear future of improvements that will come very soon.
Damned, I'd have loved if my teachers only hallucinated 1% of the time. Instead we had the southern Baptist football coaches attempting to teach us science... poorly.
> The elephant in the room here is that these LLM's still have problems with hallucinations. Even its only 1% or even 0.1% of the time thats still a huge problem.
If you heard the bullshit that actual teachers say (both inside and outside of class), you would think that “1% hallucinations” would be a godsend.
Don’t get me wrong, some teachers are amazing and have a “hallucination rate” that is 0% or close to it (mainly by being willing to say they don’t know or they need to look something up), but these folks are the exceptions.
Education as a whole attracts a decidedly mediocre group of minds who sometimes (often?) develop god complexes.
My middle school history teacher hallucinated much more than 1%. Much more than 10%, really. He was so bad that I needed to "relearn" history in high school.
in my experience, its sometimes 100% of the time, even after repeated attempts to correct it with more specific prompts. Even on simple problems involving divisions or multiples of numbers from 1 to 10 with one additional operation.
The parent post probably means that it's not a random chance independent of the question, that while for some (many!) types of questions the hallucination rate is low, there exist some questions or groups of questions for which it will systematically provide misleading information.
The reason they're having success in Montana is because Montana's constitution says "The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations"
It would be nice if we could amend the US constitution with something similar.
