I understand the logic, but realistically, depriving a country of your productivity and taxes has a much larger impact than staying to do an occasional protest. In the same way that companies don’t care about social media posts saying the company is stupid, but they do care if the revenue drops because people actually stop using the company. So while it may feel like fleeing, it’s also the biggest impact they can have, though it’s a massive sacrifice to leave one’s life behind, so it shouldn’t be expected or demanded of everyone.

Right, just like Mark Rutte left politics to become a full-time secondary school teacher after his last cabinet

I am a scientist with a PhD in AI and I’m tired of hearing about it. It’s like how I imagine microbiologists would feel if their field was suddenly in the spotlight 24/7 purely because people with something to gain bombard the public with the benefits of biological weapons, which is claimed to be what microbiology is all about. All they wanted to do was learn about how the world works and maybe use that to prevent diseases or something.

The scientific field I love has been hijacked by people who don’t understand it and try to use one specific direction in the field to the detriment of the world. I can’t blame others for hating my field when all they see of it is this nonsense, I myself hate what is presented as AI just as much.

It feels unfair that we should be the ones to change, but sometimes I really wish we could rebrand the scientific field from the commercial products sharing its name. The problem is that they keep stealing our terms (like “agent”) for at best tangentially related concepts too (or present it as their specific product being what a general term means), so there’d be no end to it.

Edit: niche -> direction

I’m never sure how to answer this because the concept of universal healthcare being a debate is strange to me, often it seems to coincide with “free” healthcare debates but the two seem quite different to me. Isn’t healthcare universal in countries like the US too? The problem being rather that it will bankrupt your family for 3 generations if you have to actually use it unless your employer values you staying alive instead of using the threat of death and disease as leverage to make you work harder for less pay. But that’s more a problem of universal insurance rather than universal healthcare itself, right? Anyone could still get treated if they accept the financial consequences. The system sucks, but still seems universal to me (again, universal insurance is the problem).

It’s not free over here, but everyone needs to have health insurance, and you get some subsidies to pay for it if you have a very low income. After a few decades of neoliberalism the subsidies are not sufficient, there’s an amount each year that you have to pay yourself, and hospitals are permanently nearly overwhelmed. But the financial amounts are much smaller compared to what someone in the US would be faced with (150-200 euros/month insurance, max 450 euros/year you have to pay yourself). There are waiting lists but despite memes I’ve seen of “yeah it’s more affordable in Europe but they never get treatment due to waiting lists”, I’ve never had to wait for actually urgent care, stuff I could do any time had some wait time but nothing crazy (few weeks, rarely 1-2 months for very in-demand optional stuff), and I believe overworked hospitals with crazy waiting lists are still much worse in (some) American hospitals compared to here. But I’m basing that off tv shows and movies where people have to wait for hours in the emergency department, not sure how realistic that is. By the way visits to the GP are free and I’ve never had to wait more than a day for an appointment. When I had something more serious I could stop by the GP instantly regardless of the appointment schedule.

Basically if you compare it to the situation a few decades before it’s worse, and some other European countries have better systems IMO. Compared to the US, which is the only country I know of where universal VS non-universal health care is a topic of debate, i can’t think of a single dimension in which it is not an upgrade, perhaps with the exception of shareholder profits (but even then a full economic argument wouldn’t work based on that, because sick or dead citizens don’t work very well).

Netherlands

I miss being able to make embarrassing mistakes without the risk of it being recorded and shared with the world. It’s not even that I make a lot of them, or that anyone would care, I just hate the principle that anything could potentially be used against you. It’s more that the threat itself takes the enjoyment out of being outside, like everyone has to be so guarded and fake all the time.

The first time I saw this was in the early days of YouTube and smart phones, some kids had found a video of a teacher who was peer pressured by some people into very shyly singing a popular song, which they put on YouTube. After that nobody took him seriously anymore.

Note: this is for actual small silly things only, the kind that can happen to anyone. I absolutely do not support people who try to excuse their crimes, harassment or bigotry as “it was just an embarrassing mistake when I was young haha”, that sort of thing absolutely should be used against them later.

Usually people already live there and have normal jobs. Some big attraction is commercialised, a company (often but not always from outside the community) profits off of it. People like it so more and more keep coming, causing prices to jump. Slowly but surely people can’t afford housing. Normal businesses that do normal work can’t remain competitive when their offices get much more expensive, so they depart too, leaving only more tourism-focused companies to be profitable. The locals have to choose between leaving their home or joining the companies that ruined it.

Mass tourism industries do provide a lot of income for businesses that profit off it. But to do so those businesses have cannibalised the actual life and economic activity of the location. Nice for the businesses, less so for the people who just wanted to live and have a normal job in their home town…

That was my first reaction too. I usually try to stop myself from falling into conspiracy thinking, but in this case it’s hard to do when a few days prior the Internet has been full with an alleged memo with plans to stage something dramatic for the press at this specific event.

Can’t rule out a real attack but at this point I wouldn’t exactly say it’s the option with the highest probability for this government filled with tv personalities at record low popularity…

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Looks like Europe will finally have something to thank JD Vance for. I have a few suggestions for European politicians he should publicly support next.

(serious note: good job Hungary, obviously the real work was done by the Hungarian people who needed no external encouragement, it was just such low hanging fruit)

The American government and their supporters hate modern day Europe, and yet they’re so obsessed with gaudy replication of old European stuff. You see it also with all the kitchy Roman-like pillars and replicas of the statue of David randomly plonked in some room. It’s just so… weird. I guess they like the idea of “old” Europe, the good old days when they still spent half their time killing each other, and the other half killing people in far-away places. They probably see it as their own origin story, so they resent that the modern versions of these countries, after all the devastating wars, have evolved into modern, peaceful countries. Maybe they see themselves as defenders against modern debauchery like freedom, peace and happiness?

From my perspective it just seems kind of hollow and desperate, can’t think of your own stuff to do so you decide to copy the megalomania of dysfunctional old empires that got crushed by their own ego and inability to peacefully coexist in prosperity. There’s a reason they’re not around anymore, and copying them, aside from being vaguely pitiful, just means you’re headed to the same end. Let’s hope it won’t take two world wars for America to catch on.

Kind of niche but Guitar Pro. Not sure what the newer versions are like but the one I have is great for composing and arrangement.

I know you meant it as a critique, but the changing part is actually completely right! I guess my distaste for it stems from my distaste for tribalism. I follow topics I care about, and despite largely comprising opinions I agree with through selection bias, I dislike how there’s a set of agreed upon opinions that people are expected to follow, with intense backlash to attempts at nuance or compromise. Naturally everyone from other tribes is considered a horrible evil being who just wants to see your own tribe suffer, and so anything but the most vicious “anti-them” perspective is considered traitorous.

As far as I can tell, it doesn’t matter much which part of the community it is, most seem to have a relatively large proportion of users who seem to delight in the opportunity to tear others to shreds if they perceive some justification. I sometimes wish we could enjoy things together without turning everything into a hateful fight (that somehow always seems to be considered justified because other tribes are supposedly even worse). Maybe I’m just in the wrong place…

I don’t use Lemmy much anymore nowadays because of this. While it’s important an alternative to Reddit exists, so I try to support it, it ironically feels more like a hivemind than Reddit does (ironic because you’d expect the opposite for federated services). I think it’s because switching to Lemmy from Reddit requires either idealism or a Reddit ban, both of which disproportionately attract people who feel good when they verbally attack internet strangers for disagreeing with them on 1% of the implicitly agreed upon joint viewpoints. It also strangely reminds me of the feeling I got being part of an old gaming community that was slowly dying out, where eventually only the unpleasant ones who defined their identity based on it were left.

I’m always happy to see there are also people here who dislike this attitude, though, or even to see neutral posts. There is still hope!

My experience in the NL: bicycles and functioning public transportation is what gives teenagers mobility, without requiring a lot of money (especially bicycles). Forcing them to share infrastructure with much faster, much more expensive electric mopeds claiming to be e-bikes to avoid safety and licensing requirements makes this much worse. The hard-earned mobility from the infrastructure already in place gets worse, not better, from fatbikes being treated as bicycles.

Is this feedback for devs?

My 144hz monitor randomly runs at 60hz with no way of changing it apart from restarting several times.

I have a TV connected in addition to my monitor (for lazy gaming or watching series), but this causes various small but annoying problems. I can’t unlock my PC without moving the mouse over to my monitor, which invariably spawns on the TV, and I have to guess how to move it over (left/right alignment is also inconsistent). It also turns the mouse pointer massive on the monitor, presumably because the TV has a higher resolution. Despite marking the monitor as the main display, more than half of my applications launch on the TV. Except the ones I actually want there, of course. If my tv is off before booting is complete, and I turn it on later, my background disappears, and sound is routed to the terrible built-in monitor speakers instead of either the tv audio I use while it’s on, or the actually good headphones I use when it’s not.

At some point my kernel randomly broke because the driver of my WiFi adapter was somehow incompatible. It was a massive pain to figure out the problem and fix it.

As a causal user these are definitely points that came out worse than the competition functionality-wise, and since most of the general public will not opt for a lesser experience for the sake of idealism, this type of issue probably prevents other people who just want to use their PCs from switching.

Edit: it was also a massive pain to set up a Korean keyboard layout, in Windows you just select it and you’re done. In Ubuntu, you do the same and nothing changes. I don’t even remember what it was that actually fixed it, but I tried a lot of guides that didn’t work.

It differs per community. Some of the more hype-y conferences I’ve submitted to require at least one co-author to review other papers as a condition to submission. I’ve not seen this at less hyped conferences or journals yet, though. But different communities tend to do things very differently, so many people will have different experiences.

I don’t think this is appeasing a bully, this is actually giving him very little. Appeasement would have involved actually giving him something. The increase to 3.5% is back to around cold war levels, which seems very appropriate for the current geopolitical situation. The final 1.5% is essentially an accounting trick to make whatever expenses you like count towards the 5%, like road maintenance or technological R&D, it would be hard not to reach this target. Plus this money can now be increasingly spent on Europe’s own companies instead of sending 1-2% of yearly GDP straight to the US economy, especially once economies of scale start picking up.

This is just what Europe was planning to do on its own, but framing it in a way that strokes Trump’s ego and lets him claim it as his victory. Especially after a few years this will not be a positive change for the US. I’ll happily sacrifice Rutte’s pride if it means Europe gets exactly what it wanted.

Agreed with the points about intelligence definition, but on a pragmatic note, I’ll list some concrete examples of fields in AI that are not LLMs (I’ll leave it up to your judgement if they’re “more intelligent” or not):

• Machine learning, most of the concrete examples other people gave here were deep learning models. They’re used a lot, but certainly don’t represent all of AI. ML is essentially fitting a function by tuning the function’s parameters using data. Many sub-fields like uncertainty quantification, time-series forecasting, meta-learning, representation learning, surrogate modelling and emulation, etc.
• Optimisation, containing both gradient-based and black-box methods. These methods are about finding parameter values that maximise or minimise a function. Machine learning is also an optimisation problem, and is usually performed using gradient-based methods.
• Reinforcement learning, which often involves a deep neural network to estimate state values, but is itself a framework for assigning values to states, and learning the optimal policy to maximise reward. When you hear about agents, often they will be using RL.
• Formal methods for solving NP-hard problems, popular examples include TSP and SAT. Basically trying to solve these problems efficiently and with theoretical guarantees of accuracy. All of the hardware you use will have had its validity checked through this type of method at some point.
• Causal inference and discovery. Trying to identify causal relationships from observational data when random controlled trials are not feasible, using theoretical proofs to establish when we can and cannot interpret a statistical association as a causal relationship.
• Bayesian inference and learning theory methods, not quite ML but highly related. Using Bayesian statistical methods and often MCMC methods to perform statistical inference of the posterior with normally intractable marginal likelihoods. It’s mostly statistics with AI helping out to enable us to actually compute things.
• Robotics, not a field I know much about, but it’s about physical agents interacting with the real world, which comes with many additional challenges.

This list is by no means exhaustive, and there is often overlap between fields as they use each other’s solutions to advance their own state of the art, but I hope this helped for people who always hear that “AI is much more than LLMs” but don’t know what else is there. A common theme is that we use computational methods to answer questions, particularly those we couldn’t easily answer ourselves.

To me, what sets AI apart from the rest of computer science is that we don’t do “P” problems: if there is a method available to directly or analytically compute the solution, I usually wouldn’t call it AI. As a basic example, I don’t consider computing y = ax+b coefficients analytically as AI, but do consider general approximations of linear models using ML AI.

Probably many greedy reasons, but my personal favourite speculation: annexing Greenland surrounds Canada and stops any potential aid by its NATO allies in case of an invasion, since annexing Canada is one of the stated objectives of the US now.

In terms of strategy for actual national security, they already got all the access they wanted, if they wanted more all they had to do was ask. If they’re the ones doing the attacking of a common ally, though, they wouldn’t get that access. So it’s only of added strategic value to annex instead of maintaining the alliance if the goal is to attack members of the alliance.

Korean democracy is not dead yet!