simplymath
Absolutely not.
OpenAI (like many other tech monopolies) dissolved their trust and safety team months ago:
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/17/openai-superalignment-sutskever-leike.html
I appreciate that you curate the RSS feed. I get very little time for social media these days and I’m glad there’s someone here populating feeds with content.
I’m not a huge fan of cynicism and non-contributory comments when this space is meant to be better than the toxic sites we all fled. There’s a plethora of options for tailoring your feed to exclude unwanted content, none of which require attacking other users acting in good faith.
Thanks to your profile, I found several new communities I will happily follow now. Keep up the good work!
Sweden is basically Europe’s version of the American Midwest. For example, it’s a 10 minute walk across nothing but parking lots to get from the high density housing to the grocery store. Stockholm has around 6 story buildings and a housing crisis, which obviously follows from the lack of high density housing. Instead, all of Southern Sweden is one giant blob of suburban sprawl and SJ (Swedish national rail) is as useful and cost effective as Amtrak.
Denmark is Copenhagen+ lots of suburban sprawl. Transit… existed.
Germany is very much about cars, even if their transit network is robust. You’ll never hear a German say anything good about the trains though.
France has 300km/hr high speed rail that takes you most places you’d want to go, but you have to switch to local regional trains for smaller destinations. No complaints. €2 tickets one weekend a month too.
Belgium is up there with the Netherlands re: trains, but their bike infrastructure isn’t nearly as safe. It’s also like a day to walk across the whole country, so that’s not super impressive. All of BENELUX (Belgium Netherlands, Luxemburg) is half the population of the DC-NYC --Boston corridor, which also has a billion transit options (bus, train, boat, car, plane).
Honestly? You generally can’t go wrong with the Krushevkas of Poland and the Baltics. High density housing with jobs, shopping, schools, and services close by and access to transit anywhere. The soviets really loved their street cars that are still hanging in there and provide service every 10 or 15 minutes , often using nuclear power (Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania Slovenia).
Western Europe is alright but Ljubljana just turned their entire old city into a pedestrian only zone, leaving the main road for busses only. You’d never see Paris do that to the Champs-d’Elysée.
Belgrade built a whole new city across the Danube with high density housing after ww2. Unfortunately, they forgot to place the housing near any jobs which causes transit problems to this day. They also tried this thing out, which failed for the opposite reasons.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_City_Gate
Overall, Western Europe has the same affordability crisis as the US, but with lower wages and higher taxes. Granted, rents are generally lower too, but there’s a lack of high density urban housing everywhere that’s not already been gutted and turned into an empty city filled with nothing but tourists and airbnbs (Zagreb and Prague come to mind).
By Northern European standards, both Portugal and Spain are poor, so they’re great to visit, but not really ideal for escaping the US. They’ve both been building out high speed trains like crazy in preparation for some EU rules that will finally tax the pollution from airplanes in a couple years. And Lisbon inherited lots of the EU financial services sector from London during Brexit, but going that route means you’ll be gentrifying a 500 year old city to work for British hedge funds.
In general, though, the trains are pretty good, but that has a lot more to do with the logistics of trench warfare than being a thing targeted at helping working class people. That is, you can often find cheap flights that will get you to your destination faster and cheaper than the train. It’s not like there were daily passenger rail trips between France and Germany in 1904. Being able to move civilians in addition to artillery shells was just a happy byproduct.
Be 18. Get scholarship. Study literature. Drop out. Run away. Join a protest movement. Be homeless at MIT for a while. Find job. Get hurt at said job. Get workers injury insurance payment after 2 years of recocery. Go back to school for math. Be good at math. Found tech related non profit. Spend 6 months in Kurdistan, setting up wifi. Finish math school. Fuck it, get masters because good at math. Get hired by foreign company oversees to work on self driving cars. Doesn’t work. Won’t work. Quit. Go to Greece, teach refugee kids how to us MS office. Watch neo Nazis burn down refugee school and computer lab. Suddenly it’s March of 2020 (COVID) and nothing to do because Nazis and no more computer lab. Oh fuck. Find PhD program in “trustworthy ai” to figure out why car not work. Prove car never work. Get PhD. Get paid to critique AI and play on super computers while working from home and having zero day to day oversight. Get paid to travel the world. Get paid to shit on Google, Facebook , Openai, and Tesla.
I went from homeless to visiting my 40th country in 10 years, while having a PhD.
No regrets.
What? Anarchism is generally anti-statist and socialists sure love to shoot anarchists. By the logic of AES, Anarchists should support Assad and not the YPG since one is “anti-imperialist” and the other exists due to US military support.
COVID research made generic sequencing for viruses and bacteria incredibly cheap. You can run a PCR test for most things now for $10 (USD) or less. This opens a whole world of highly specific diagnostics and cheap, hyper-personalized treatments.
Also, MRNA vaccines are being tested for several other diseases and it seems very promising.
People who use LLMs to write code (incorrectly) perceived their code to be more secure than code written by expert humans.
A sketchy USB device from Alibaba with 0 documentation is significantly less safe than grabbing a ROM, which are widely available and have known file hashes. The security risk alone from a no name USB device is probably not worth it unless there’s a save file you reeeeeeeeally care about, as another user mentioned.
