I don't know if I agree here. When I ask an LLM a question it always leads to a whole lot of other questions with responses tailored to my current level of understanding. This usually results in a much more effective learning session than reading a bunch of material that I might not retain anyway because I'm scanning it looking for my answers.
I think you've got cause and effect backwards. Employers used to offer incentives to stay in a company and grow organically. They decided that was no longer going to be the deal. So they got the current system. There was never some sudden eureka moment when the secret engineers club decided they wanted to have a super stressful life event every few years just to keep up with inflation.
As I said in another response, I think (at least partly) a contributing factor was the essentially limitless salary budget that VC funded startups and the FAANG companies had. You had software developers who could suddenly make more than doctors and lawyers and of course many of them sensibly acted in their own best interest but that left other employers saying "we're not going to invest in employees who are only going to turn around and leave for salaries we can't pay" and "if we have to pay those kind of salaries, we're not going to hire junior people we want experience."
Once a company hires and trains a junior, then they have a senior.. and they don't want to pay them a senior salary, but apparently other companies do.
The math remains simple: if you already have an employee on your payroll, how in the world are you not willing to pay them what they can get by switching at that point? That's literally just starving one's own investment.
The real issue is that the companies who were "training" the juniors were doing so only because they saw the juniors as a bargain given that they were initially willing to work for the lower wage. They just don't stay that way as they grow into the craft.
Its not all that surprising that the country with 20% of the population of earth has some smart people in it. What is, I think, surprising and fascinating is how China has been focusing on doing more with less - their underdog position w.r.t. hardware has pushed a huge focus on model efficiency and distillation, to the benefit of us all.
I think its a distinct possibility that while the first AGI to say 'hello world' might do it in english, the first open source AGI running on consumer hardware will probably say it in mandarin.
You wouldn't expect a civil liberties organization to have an opinion on containing a dangerous pandemic? In addition to working at the ACLU the people doing their work are also humans.
Should the ACLU defend the rights of someone to blow up nuclear bombs in their backyard?
That’s a clear curtailment of their civil liberties. And assuming they’re in a rural area may not harm anyone else either.
This is an obviously extreme example but the point still stands. Any civil liberties organization cannot focus absolutely narrowly on that question in every situation but has to apply a broader approach.
Surely you see the difference between someone having Strategic weapons in their garage, and the government forcing someone to take a medicine that they don't want to take, right?
All individual rights are balanced with the rights of other individuals/society. You can be given the choice to vaccinate or be forcefully quarantined. This has occurred many times in the US and the right of the state to do this has been upheld.
While corona was weak we will eventually seem some dangerous bullshit spread and the anti-vax dipshits are going figure out exactly what their rights entail as they are being drug from their house at gunpoint with the express will of the majority of the population.
Quarantine powers are subject to the “strict scrutiny” standard. Freedom of domestic travel is as fundamental as freedom of speech in Constitutional law. This has been thoroughly adjudicated many times and in many contexts by the US Supreme Court, including many attempts by the government to exploit regulatory and taxation loopholes to indirectly effect that outcome.
It is unambiguously unconstitutional to prevent everyone from traveling, even for quarantine purposes. It must be evaluated on an individual basis subject to judicial review to establish that the individual presents a clear and present danger, and only for a very limited duration. No different than restrictions on speech.
This is the reason no State anywhere, regardless of who was in power, instituted hard lockdowns during COVID. This is known to be settled law to such an extent that attempting to prevent the population from traveling without clearing the strict scrutiny standard would be met with an instant Federal court injunction, likely coupled with a withering public statement questioning the competence of the State’s Attorney General. There was no upside in taking that risk.
The idea that you can forcibly quarantine someone solely because you don’t like their choices is wishcasting, not based on credible Constitutional foundations.
There's a big difference between quarantining people who you know have a dangerous disease for a few weeks until they're better, and quarantining the entire country for years because you're not sure who has a dangerous disease.
Unlikely, freedom of domestic travel is subject to the strict scrutiny Constitutional standard (international travel is a more open question). Banning freedom of travel for the entire country would be equivalent to banning freedom of speech for the entire country, from a Constitutional perspective.
Interestingly, the myriad freedom of travel cases happened so long ago and were so decisively settled as a strong right that everyone has kind of forgotten about them because there is little interesting left to decide. Not as controversial as questions around the meaning of speech. But I think the last significant questions were addressed around the Second World War.
Yes, the government has quarantine powers, which have been broadly established. They did not necessarily have the right to go about it how they did in 2020, which was through OSHA rules and other "soft power" rather than through their power to quarantine people. Almost nobody was actually quarantined in relation to COVID.
A broad, sweeping quarantine in relation to COVID would have been so unpopular that you can see why they went about it in a "softer" way, but sometimes the government can't have its cake and eat it too.
Those vaccine mandates were broadly ruled illegal, even in light of the quarantine power. These sorts of civil liberties are complicated, and the ACLU found themselves on the wrong side of this one.
> Should the ACLU defend the rights of someone to blow up nuclear bombs in their backyard?
If someone actually went to court over this, I would hope/expect that the NRA would send some lawyers. The ACLU isn't that into the second amendment and has never been. However, nobody has gone to court over this. They did go to court over vaccine mandates.
By the way, the only grounds the government would have to stand on here are radiation-related. It is broadly legal to use explosives on your own property unless you're too close to someone else's property. It is also broadly legal to build your own weapons.
Advocacy organizations shouldn't aspire to extremes. The ACLU should offer reasonable and practical help and commentary on civil liberties. Otherwise, you get the modern NRA that fights every law about firearms.
There's a lot of fluffly language here that isn't saying much.
Linear algebra is not something that takes years of patient study to gain basic competency. It had almost no prerequisites and can be understood enough to understand least squares in a focused weekend or two.
Thank you for the encouragement. I'll will take a week or two and spend some time with some focused learning. Do you have any recommendations where to start?
fuel cells have trouble being cheap, lightweight, high efficiency, and long lasting, all at the same time. I think this could have better scaling on all those dimensions, plus could use natural gas or propane or other fuels for when you don't have hydrogen
