TBF I’m branching out and I just installed Debian on my second laptop and I like that too. But Ubuntu’s been mighty good to me for a lot of years as a reliable workstation and server VM in Proxmox.

I like Ubuntu 😐

I have used Ubuntu as the daily driver for the last 10 years, because support and tools are widespread and easy, and I don’t need any extra pain in my life. Drivers are mostly present and working upon a clean install, and in the one case where the touchpad wasn’t recognized, it was super easy to find an ubuntu forum post containing a 1-line command to fix it. But everybody says i should hate it and use Mint instead.

I’m open to give it a go, but in general, will most of the tutorials and fixes you find for Ubuntu also work with Mint?

Since the forces that determine policy are largely tied up with corporate profit, promoting the interests of domestic companies against those of other states, and access to resources and markets, our system will misuse AI technology whenever and wherever those imperatives conflict with the wider social good. As is the case with any technology, really.

Even if “banning” AI were possible as a protectionist measure for those in white-collar and artistic professions, I think it would ultimately be unfavorable with the ruling classes, since it would concede ground to rival geopolitical blocs who are in a kind of arms race to develop the technology. My personal prediction is that people in those industries will just have to roll with the punches and accept AI encroaching into their space. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, if society made the appropriate accommodations to retrain them and/or otherwise redistribute the dividends of this technological progress. But that’s probably wishful thinking.

To me, one of the most worrying trends, as it’s gained popularity in the public consciousness over the last year or two, has been the tendency to silo technologies within large companies, and build “moats” to protect it. What was once an open and vibrant community, with strong principles of sharing models, data, code, and peer-reviewed papers full of implementation details, is increasingly tending towards closed-source productized software, with the occasional vague “technical report” that reads like an advertising spiel. IMO one of the biggest things we can lobby for is openness and transparency in the field, to guard against the natural monopolies and perverse incentives of hoarding data, technical know-how, and compute power. Not to mention the positive externality spillovers of the open-source scientific community refining and developing new ideas.

It’s similar to how knowledge of the atomic structure gave us both the ability to destroy the world, or fuel it (relatively) cleanly. Knowledge itself is never a bad thing, only what we choose to do with it.

I take your point, but in this specific application (synthetically generated influencer images) it’s largely something that falls out for free from a wider stream of research (namely Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models). It’s not like it’s really coming at the expense of something else.

As for what it’s eventually progressing towards - who knows… It has proven to be quite an unpredictable and fruitful field. For example Toyota’s research lab recently created a very inspired method of applying Diffusion models to robotic control which I don’t think many people were expecting.

That said, there are definitely societal problems surrounding AI, its proposed uses, legislation regarding the acquisition of data, etc. Often times markets incentivize its use for trivial, pointless, or even damaging applications. But IMO it’s important to note that it’s the fault of the structure of our political economy, not the technology itself.

The ability to extract knowledge and capabilities from large datasets with neural models is truly one of humanity’s great achievements (along with metallurgy, the printing press, electricity, digital computing, networking communications, etc.), so the cat’s out of the bag. We just have to try and steer it as best we can.

The Japanese SCMaglev only has the cooling stuff on the train, not along the entire length of the track.

And I think there is a “high-temperature SC Maglev” in development in China too.

Why no superconducting maglev tho?

ML has already had a huge impact on the world (for better or worse), to the extent that Yann LeCun proposes that the tech giants would crumble if it disappeared overnight. For several years it’s been the core of speech-to-text, language translation, optical character recognition, web search, content recommendation, social media hate speech detection, to name a few.

Tangential question - what is stopping youtube from restricting access to their API for 3rd party apps like Reddit did?