Pretty much this. For further consideration it may be worth looking into Daniel Dennett's writing on qualia (notably that they're ineffable and private).
I feel like it's apparent why comparing healthcare in the US with healthcare in, well, any of the aforementioned countries, is problematic. If you look at Western Europe (a bit less populous than the US) or the EU as a whole (a bit more population than the US) they have functional healthcare at much more reasonable rates than the US. Scale matters, but scale is also a matter of division. If a single system can't serve 300+ million people then it can be broken down into regional systems or state systems. That being said medicare already serves something like 60 million people. I'd argue that scaling a system to support 5x the number it currently serves is significantly more doable than scaling anything from zero.
The US is not comparable to W Europe or the EU on this topic, since neither of those are political units responsible for a healthcare system. However, that brings us to your next point
>scale is also a matter of division...
This is a great point. However, for whatever reason, we have never seen a successful single-payer system in a US state. Even very blue, wealthy states have not achieved this.
>scaling a system to support 5x...
Again, the data does not support this. I don't have a reason why, just observing that it's not supported by real life.
Hm, with regards to the difficulty of scaling these systems specifically and really the whole topic at hand more generally I don't know that there is sufficient domain specific data to justify a viewpoint either way. I mean how many examples of scaling a national healthcare system (public, private, or otherwise) to support 300+ million people do we have? Literally three, right? The US, China, and India. Each of which has such significantly different circumstances that comparing them is less apples to oranges than it is apples to giraffes to glaciers. That being the case I feel like it's only reasonable to draw upon non-domain specific data wherein so far as I'm aware and in my experience we see a pattern of scaling existing systems being simpler than originating new ones.
You're right that we only have a handful of countries operating at this scale (~150M+ populations) so it's not exactly "data" in the common tech-sense of that word.
I want to get back to my original point: it's not "astoundingly clear" that the US should have a single-payer system (not your words, I know). My own thoughts are that this is mostly a scale problem as well as an inability to properly assess the performance of other systems (e.g. I would call both Canada and UK healthcare broken, but others see those as successful).
I agree that the US system seems broken from both an "Outcomes vs Cost" and a "Cost over Time" perspective. I just disagree that nationalizing healthcare, either through a single-payer system or the current Obamacare system is the answer.
The file uploading functionality of ChatGPT is just awful, it has nothing to do with the file name. You can test it yourself with any arbitrary file, the number of failures to upload you experience will be significantly higher than you would experience with, I'd hazard to guess, any other upload function around the internet. Now whether that's something with their processing pipeline or just their servers being perpetually overwhelmed I have no idea, but it's almost certainly a case of ineptitude, not malice.
The coders at OpenAI are all ML people who only know Python. They have no idea how "proper" software is written, or how infrastructure works.
They had such glaring errors in their APIs for such a long time that it's almost comical. Such as when they increased the context window from 8K to 32K tokens, they forgot to increase the HTTP CDN WAF limit for a while. If you actually tried to submit that much data, you'd get a HTTP error code back. They never noticed because internally they don't go through a CDN.
Similarly, the "web browsing" feature was comically bad, with a failure rate exceeding 80% for months after it was released. Even when it worked it was glacially slow and would time out easily and fail. Meanwhile Phind was doing the same thing with 100% success rates and lightning fast response times... with a fraction of the budget and manpower.
Using fossil fuels for plastics has to be better environmentally speaking than using them for energy. Simply by virtue of the fact that the carbon is trapped as a constituent of the plastic, not binding off as CO2 and floating away.
That aside though, even if it was ‘just’ a 10x reduction in usage for energy that would still be a huge win because that becomes massively easier to mitigate and offset in effective ways.
Every time you increase or decrease the scale of a problem by an order of magnitude it changes the dynamics of approaching it significantly.
I think you might be trying to form a model based on false premises here. The universe doesn't know anything. Or to put it another way, the universe doesn't know anything because it is everything. You seem to be assuming a sort of director and actor based model wherein the universe (the director) needs to be telling the planets and stars (the actors) what to do, but that's not the case. The planets and stars interact with each other via the various forces that they're subject to and their state may or may not change as a result.
I guess, to generalize, my point is that things are as they are as a consequence of the physics that they're subject to. A rock has its particular color, weight, and texture due to its elemental composition. A molecule doesn't need to know what it is in order to reflect or absorb certain wavelengths of light, that's what naturally occurs when those wavelengths interact with particles that have a certain composition and state. There's no conscious direction happening at any point, nor is there any data being computed.
The universe is essentially a medium that exists with certain properties and everything in it is stuff that also exists with certain properties. We call the manner in which these properties interact physics. So in summation I'd say that there are intrinsic properties and emergent phenomena based on those properties, that's where a rock gets its color, weight, and texture.
I mean, the combination of not being laminated and disintegrating with ease is the point so far as I understand it. The idea being that if you ever drop your wallet with it in it somewhere then hopefully environmental conditions will degrade it beyond recognition before someone can find it and make use of it. Not saying that's a good or bad idea, just that it is in fact intentional.
That strikes me as being a much higher unit cost than I would have anticipated. Are you way overprovisioned on the arduino and the steppers or is there something else fancy going on that's driving costs up?
It could certainly be much cheaper than $75, that's just the ceiling. Arduino Nano BLE is $30 and one stepper on Amazon is $15. Plus other small hardware, plastic and assembly.
The final few pages on about what internet communities will look like is very interesting. They discuss the idea of an OLIVER, that is an "“on-line interactive vicarious expediter and responder”, which seems not terribly far from ChatGPT + your google data.
So far as I'm aware IP addresses exist out of a functional need, not a moral imperative, but if you have a source with regards to that I'd love to read it. You can hardly call the number of IPv4 addresses that AWS has a monopoly either, iirc they have something like 2% of the IPv4 space? Not charging for them was comparatively strange given that other cloud providers have been charging for them for a good long while. Managing their address space isn't a zero cost endeavor for AWS, so why wouldn't they charge for it? At the least to cover their costs, but given the way the world works these days making a profit isn't weird or unexpected either.
If you're really upset about it you can go through the trouble of registering your own ASN and get on the list to get your own allocation from ARIN. No one is stopping you from doing so.
I think there's an enormous number of things that it's very worth criticizing AWS (and other cloud providers) for, but this really isn't one of them in my book.
> So far as I'm aware IP addresses exist out of a functional need, not a moral imperative, but if you have a source with regards to that I'd love to read it.
Are we talking about IPv4 addresses or are we talking about the internet as a whole? Because that quote seems to be about the latter and I was referring to the former above. I read the Licklider paper that they link and it's much more on the abstract side rather than discussing actual implementation details.
Licklider and Taylor did have some very interesting predictions about how the internet would shape up though. Probably my favorite quote from the article:
"Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for
consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network’s software to all
the new generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels
of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in
an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging."
I think I have ideas. I could imagine either somebody who's young and edgy and hasn't really made the connection to take reality seriously. I could imagine somebody who has built up enough animosity (due to involvement in the movement or personal bad experiences) to blow past and actively defy calls for civility; you see this play out in radical political discourse. Or, I suppose, a psychopath (which could also be formed by bad experiences).
Psychopathy is mostly genetic and has little to do with “bad experiences”. It can be diagnosed in kids as early as a few weeks of age. These kids will always lack empathy but most are able to avoid being detected as psychopaths by becoming good at pretending to be normal people.
