pfried

"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.

I see this a lot on Lemmy. Yeah, Chick-fil-A donated to prevent gay people from getting married, but other restaurants do bad things too. Yeah, Trump is bad, but his opponent is bad too. Yeah, slavery is bad, but other things are bad too.

Punish the worst option while working to get better options. If you reward the worst option, everything else will get worse too.

Part of the blame is on American history education. People don't understand how change happens in America (and in democracies in general). For that, it needs to spend more time on black history, women's history, and worker history. That's why Trump wants to remove that history from museums and curricula.

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.

Of course not. It needs to be legislated, just like the 40 hour workweek and worker safety laws. Is there anybody who really thinks companies will voluntarily disadvantage themselves against their competitors?