The distinction between author and their estates is fascinating: the stereotype is estates mismanaging the art, but that usually happens because the estates want to be “artistic” themselves.
Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.
JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).
Comes in stages. Used to be ambitious Chinese people wouldn’t go to Chinese universities for grad school (undergrad Chinese university to overseas grad school was a usual route). Now they definitely do. Next there might be foreign grad students in Chinese universities, then foreign undergrad students. Though you would have to learn Chinese I imagine, so that barrier is there.
Virtually nobody who isn't ethnically Chinese will be able to become a naturalized Chinese citizen, no matter how sincerely they dedicate their life to productively fitting into Chinese society. On paper it's legally possible, but in practice it just doesn't happen. There is also the matter of global comprehension of the English language vs Chinese. I think these factors together severely limits the number of foreigners trying to get into Chinese universities.
Honestly the best thing about America, historically has been diversity. Mei can come here and become American within a few years. That’s only possible in America( and probably Canada too).
But now we don’t want international students. The world’s smartest will go elsewhere.
I don’t feel the same. My own alma mater is a niche school. It officially gives admissions pref to legacies, but unofficially depends on parents sending their kids as the school is not well known.
Harvard on the other hand - people go to Harvard to become elite. That only works because they get to hobnob with princes and the like. Thats the point.
The Ivy’s do a good job of admitting non-elite students. I’m glad that pathway to eliteness is there.
I’m proud of my small liberal arts Alma mater. I have no desire to network with billionaires and princes (as opposed to say, brilliant engineers and researchers).
But I’m glad the legacies at Harvard are sharing a classroom with kids from Appalachia. And that only happens if you get in the legacies.
The wild thing is that America pretends itself that it is a meritocracy while ... literally defending deeply nepotistic class based system like this.
If the Harward did not took that many legacies, they would spread out to different schools. And mixed with others there. You dont need to collect kids of powerful in one place to achieve that.
True, even non-legacies do well from a place like Harvard.
But given a full 75% of American colleges give preferential treatment to legacy students, Harvard is the most visible representation of an unacknowledged caste system.
Something about, “I deserve this more than someone else because of who my parents are” really fires me up.
> The wild thing is that America pretends itself that it is a meritocracy while
If you haven’t been paying attention, the elite have give up on that lie. They know it’s indefensible to even the dumbest Americans anymore.
Additionally the risk is over. The American people are so disgustingly impotent, they no longer need to placate them with lies of meritocracy and other false values. They can now transparently tell you “we will rule you as we wish and face no consequences”. The Epstein saga solidifies this.
If what you say is true (personally I think it's an overgeneralization) then there would be zero point to eliminating legacy admissions to begin with (since they won't be willing to socialize with those beneath them regardless of where they are). So either you're wrong, or you're right and the entire issue is a pointless one.
I mean, they definitely expelled Jewish scientists, people like Einstein and Bohr and other prominent physicists, who would have ultimately been very useful to them. Maybe their funding choices would have been different if they hadn't ousted so many researchers.
I read the Oppenheimer biography, so maybe that’s distorting things.
Oppenheimer was Jewish, but very Americanized.
Bohr was working on radar for the Nazis. Einstein had surprisingly little knowledge of nuclear physics, and famously rejected key parts of quantum physics.
The Germans had great nuclear scientists. They simply weren’t willing to spend the money it took to cold the bomb.
I mentioned two as an example, but they expelled significantly more. In 1933 they brought in laws that immediately ousted many Jews from public positions, which caused a mass exodus of intellectuals from the country. James Franck was another prominent physicist who left in protest, and he went on to work directly for the Manhattan Project.
The Nazis drawing a distinction between "Jewish mathematics" and "German mathematics" was also very real.
It's hard to imagine these policies had no effect on their ability to do research, and that it was purely a matter of funding.
"Boris Stoicheff, wrote how the mathematician Edmund Landau was 'physically prevented from entering his classroom by about seventy of his students, some wearing SS uniforms.' They demanded 'German mathematics' instead of 'Jewish mathematics.' One estimate is that the 15% of scientists in Germany who had been fired accounted for about 60% of the country’s physics-based publications."
Are American universities really turning out engineers with high GPAs and relevant coursework that are unqualified? Or even create a disadvantage for their employer?
I mean realistically you don’t know how good an engineer is until they get on projects and you see their work. But that’s true for Harvard too,
Yes. Ever do hiring, or run a significant interview system? I have. Us engineers thought the same way you did, but after a significant number of interviews, we went back over resumes versus interview performance to find ways to save costs/interview more per resource used, and surprisingly to us at that point quality of college was the biggest predictor. Lower quality schools simply had a less talented or trained pool, and it was significant.
Ideally you'd have (parameter count) * (bits per parameter) VRAM for the entire (presumably quantized, don't forget to account for that) model. So very approximately 16 GiB for a 34B model quantized to 4 bits per parameter.
You can spill to RAM in which case you at least want enough for a single active expert but really that's going to tank performance. If you're only "a bit" short of the full model the difference might not be all that large.
These things are memory bandwidth limited so if you check out RAM, VRAM, and PCIe bandwidth what I wrote above should make sense.
Also you should just ask your friendly local LLM these sorts of questions.
European countries aren’t known for strong privacy against the state. There are exceptions, but the EU’s “privacy rights” are almost exclusively against corporations.
American privacy, by contrast, is almost exclusively focused on state surveillance.
There are holes, the biggest being that foreigners on foreign soil have no privacy rights. Nor do the dead.
But I’m not impressed with the “rights” Europeans have against state surveillance.
Europeans aren’t willing to spend the money to do massive spy programs. Ok, fine. But that’s not the same as having civil liberties opposition.
Switzerland has a reputation, good and bad, for strong privacy. But that’s not the norm.
I read an article that dug into public GDPR cases, which is a surprisingly small set, and it explained they have had a near zero impact on the massive advertising and data broker industry. They mostly just have a large back log of legal cases against large US companies like Google which occasionally result in fines - but even that moves very very slowly and has little impact on their global business models. They do also occasionally charged a few smaller European companies a few grand for violations.
The key thing is that companies like Google and Meta run giant ad networks, there's many thousands of companies buying ads then collecting data in their own systems and reselling it.
The privacy issues of data retention on Google/Meta/etc social and SaaS platforms is something to care about but it is only a small piece of the puzzle of data privacy.
Ads will remain a major business for the foreseeable future as nobody is going to pay $5/m to use Instagram with no data collection.
I’ve read the GDPR has zero impacts on national security/law enforcement. It applies weakly to other state functions.
I’ve also seen cases where GDPR is used against religious groups that have a strong religious justification for keeping lists of believers. Think Orthodox Jews and the Catholic Church, which regard family trees and baptismal certificates as semi-sacred. And kept on paper or scrolls.
Not sure what to think about that. Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.
The reason why we're not keeping lists of which people believe what religion, is because such lists were extremely useful to the nazis in WW2 when exterminating Jewish people.
> Think Orthodox Jews
Pretty sure they would remember why this is the case.
> Regulating a sacred scroll like a database table seems wrong.
There is actually no perceivable or material difference between something that is considered "sacred" and that which is not. It really hinges on whether some subset of some splinter of some religion considers it so.
But, I'm not familiar with these cases you mention, I think there's some details left out that should matter. The really weird thing to me, is that a sports club can keep a list of members easily (yes they need to abide by the GDPR but it's not hard), and if somehow a "religious group" can't manage that level of organization, I don't think their opinion on what objects are considered "sacred" should count for much, either.
Another issue is that "religious groups" can have a different opinion of who are their members and who they get to keep data on, and it doesn't matter whether those records are "sacred" or not, according to the GDPR it is not the "religious group", but the people whose data is being kept whose opinion counts. It would be ridiculous otherwise. I had to email a Church to stop tracking me (which happens if you're baptized as a baby), and that should be my choice, it would be insane if they could claim "yeah tough luck, but our records are sacred".
> There is actually no perceivable or material difference between something that is considered "sacred" and that which is not. It really hinges on whether some subset of some splinter of some religion considers it so.
What? To many people, the Bible is just a book. To Christians its sacred. This doesn't mean it's immutable (the original Bible wasn't in English after all), it just means it's important to them.
For the records, the records themselves could be sacred, but the practical implications of them are not sacred. But if Catholics have a sacred record of everyone who had been baptized at a church, then that should be different from their mailing list. God did not instruct the chrich to email everyone who was ever baptized there. Plus, at some point in the church's age, there will be more dead people on the list of people who were baptized than alive people. It doesn't make sense to send an email blast to more dead people than alive, so they must trim the mailing list every so often.
Well YouTube offers a no ads version for money. I personally don’t see a realistic alternative to ad supported social media so you’d have to ask someone who does think that.
You could merely be convinced by one. That is sadly an unpaid position though.
But more seriously, this discussion has come up so many times on this site, that I could instantly find myself talking about it a handful of times at least:
And that doesn't even go into whether sites actually need to ask for cookie consent at all if they aren't collecting user data outside of functional necessity (they don't).
They should not be. That there is people willing to give their data to big corporations and foreign countries by extension puts everybody at risk. It is a matter of national security and it should not be allowed, no opt in option.
> Lately the EU Commission came up with a plan to create an inventory of every single valuable items owned by every single EU citizen: from Magic The Gathering and Pokemon cards to jewelry/heirloom, paintings, gold and silver coins/bars, cryptocurrencies coins, watches, cars, boats, etc. Anything with some value: would go in the inventory.
>The European Parliament asked the question: "Can you guarantee us this will never ever be used as a basis to confiscate these items?" to which the European Commission answered: "No, we cannot guarantee that".
Excuse me for not taking this at face value but this sounds like disinformation. Where did you get that from?
After quickly googling, it seems that the plans do not go as far as they make them out to be. The things to be catalogued are only those relevant in the fight against money-laundering. That's hardly "full commie style inventory of every single item with any value".
> And it's obvious that either taxation of confiscation is the end goal.
And? Money is, and has always been, the government's stuff, the rest of us use it because it is helpful stuff, it is helpful stuff only to the extent that some government maintains it (and when they don't maintain it correctly it stops being useful, see all examples of hyperinflation). There's a reason the Bible says "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's".
I've seen a flat that was funded by the sale of an inherited stamp collection which was valued at £1 by the tax people. When I saw the tax statement, I thought someone must have made a mistake, then the rules were explained to me and I thought it was madness.
I mean, it is very useful to keep in mind that for any question of 'can you guarantee that X government system won't be used for Y in the future' the answer is 'no', because the government is what makes the rules. That would hopefully work to prevent X being built, but I think it's better than pretending that it's possible to guarantee Y won't happen.
Ars was caught recently using AI to write articles when the AI hallucinated about a blogger getting harassed by someone using AI agents. The article quoted his blog and all the quotes were nonsense.
Even if something is AI generated the author, and the editor, should at least attempt to read back the article. English isn't my native language, so that obviously plays in, but very frequently I find that articles I struggle to read are AI generated, they certainly have that AI feel.
It would be interesting to run the numbers, but I get the feeling that AI generated articles may have a higher LIX number. Authors are then less inclined to "fix" the text, because longer word makes them seem smarter.
Most artists are terrible at business. They do dumb things for no reason.
JRR Tolkein and his estate is prime example. JRR signed away all movie rights for a nominal sum. His estate fought tooth and nail for their rights, while still allowing grey zone stuff to develop (Dungeons and Dragons).
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