- Flip the back and recent apps button in three button navigation. It's such a weird decision - like only left handed people should be able to comfortably use three button nav. Literally hurt my thumbs to use the phone.
- The quick settings panel is just abysmal compared to Samsung with massive pill buttons that have virtually nothing in them.
Surprised no one has said the following; study AI and try make a meaningful contribution to the field. It may sound trite, but the most likely way we solve the climate crisis is by solving AGI first, hoping it doesn't cause a doomsday scenario itself, and subsequently hoping 'it' will coordinate an effort to reverse the damage we have done.
As an AI researcher, I feel like this is misguided advice. The field is overrun with people, and it's almost impossible to make a meaningful dent anymore. Even if you have a group of experienced researchers and large compute reserves, most people are content with chasing SOTAs, because the green-field low-hanging fruit of yesteryear is over (and has been over for a while). Sure, you can learn some AI and then look for climate-applications[0], but then again, why not enter that field as a software engineer in the first place. Learning AI and is just an unnecessary detour if you want to end up in climate change.
No, because that's not the right way to search for meanings. You probably need to help out the search engine and provide the context that you would like to know the meaning.
The correct answer appears if you search for "sota abbreviation" [1] or "sota meaning" [2].
So you make a brilliant AGI, it points out the obvious -- we should stop consumerism and lower rich countries' standard of living before physics forces us to. How then does it get any political power to achieve that? It won't be taken more seriously than any individual human.
Seems quite likely to me that the AGI hucksters won't deliver the goods before we're able to make the planet inhospitable for ourselves. Risky bet, in any case.
Both MAS and (the earlier) EWC facilitate continual learning through passing a bunch of samples through the network and collecting gradients to determine which weights are 'important'. Future weight changes are then regularised by these importance values so that the network retains its ability on past tasks. EWC uses square gradients as importance values, whereas MAS uses absolute gradients... Other than that they're the same lol (I think), how the MAS paper got so many citations I have no idea.
This this a clear cut case and amazon should process the refund, however, in general refunding is a hard problem for Amazon to solve due to the sheer volume fraud that occurs.
For anyone unaware, go to telegram and do a public search for 'refunding'. There are hundreds of channels where you can pay someone to refund >£10,000 of stuff for you for a 10% fee. Afaik, the main method that 'refunders' use to defraud amazon is to (1) initiate a return (2) modify the return label so UPS accepts it into their system but (3) deliver it to the wrong address. So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house.
I wouldn't be surprised if >1% of macbook and iPhone refunds are fraudulent in this way. Someone in a cybercrime lab they should write a paper about this whole ecosystem because it is a huge black market.
What you described is not a hard problem, it is an expensive problem because Amazon does not want to hire human labor to deal with returns. Almost all other retailers do it, and they all have 3% profit margins.
> So it looks to amazon as being successfully delivered to the return warehouse, but what actually got delivered was a brick, to some random house
but how amazon does not check the quality of the return?
I mean, even if UPS confirms that the package arrived to right address, wouldn't someone from amazon warehouse check if the package is valid?
Well there is nothing for them to check. From what I've read, they wait two weeks then mark the package as 'lost in transit'.
I think for the last-mile of delivery, couriers rely on the actual address written on the package, not the address that the barcode scans to. I might be wrong though.
For returns you have to print a barcode and put it in the box. You don't get your refund until they physically scan the code in the box. Maybe it's not standard everywhere, but this process has been around for some years now. If the package never gets to the return center, no refund would be processed…
That's interesting, maybe it's different per country or perhaps even city/region? The two times I've ever returned something, I had to put a little printed barcode thing into the box with the returned item. Just did this a couple months ago.
Hmm, maybe I'm wrong then. Though I could imagine that if this happened to you legitimately that you would have some legal recourse to get your money back; you fulfilled your end of the return by posting it, its not your fault the courier screwed up.
Amazon UK usually refund you as soon as the package is scanned into the shipper's tracking system. I've dropped off a return at a Hermes point and received a refund notification while walking back to my car.
There is the caveat that they will recharge you if the item isn't in good condition, but if they never receive it, I guess they can only assume the shipper lost it.
Do you have and references on your last point about algae? I have this (totally unsubstantiated) idea that plundering the oceans of fish along with rising temperatures will result in the oceans sequestering incredible amounts of CO2 via algae blooms. Never found much to read on the topic though - in what ways could this be negative feedback loop?
What's weird is that a couple of weeks ago Coinbase launched trading in Tether on Coinbase Pro. You would think this exposes them to much risk. I've been scratching my head about why they did it.
I'm convinced that something similar is happening to Boris Johnson's tweets at the moment. Every time he posts, many of the top responses are exact copies of each other saying something like "the country is behind you, my prime minister <3". It's clear to anyone that these are 'fake', and I'd imagine it has the effect of making people thing that the conservatives are trying to artificially bolster his reputation.
Connor Leahy, who I think is a sort of BDFL figure for ElutherAI, mentioned in a Slatestarcodex online meetup I attended that Google donated millions of dollars worth of preemptable TPU credits to the project. There is a video of the meetup on YouTube somewhere. Struck me as a really smart kid with a lot of passion.
Haha Connor (although one of the main participants) definitely isn't a BDFL - we don't have any BDFLs :)
We don't really have much of a hierarchy at all - it's mostly just a collection of researchers of widely varying backgrounds all interested in ML research.
I'm not sure what a BDFL figure is, but Google does not give us millions of dollars. We are a part of TFRC, a program where researchers and non-profits can borrow TPUs when they're not being used. You could say that we are indirectly funded as a result, but it's nowhere near millions of dollars and it doesn't reflect any kind of special relationship with Google.
they'll probably run it on scientific clusters of various universities, or on collections of idle lab desktop machines. Both of these tend to sit idle a lot of the time, based on my experience at uni in Europe.
> An issue that I basically never see come up is - why not administer the vaccine earlier on (pre-approval) to the most vulnerable? if P(death|vaccine) < P(death|covid) then it seems really barbaric not to give it.
Not sure, but I would think it comes down to hospitals not being overrun in the case of a widescale negative response to the vaccine. But since the whole thing is a game of probabilities, I do share your view.
You could distribute it in limited batches to only the most vulnerable which should reduce any risk of that. I think the most vulnerable are in any case most likely to already be heavily using the health services anyway (and would be the ones engaging them the most if they caught the virus).
Because of ethics in drug development. And these rules are there for a reason. Not sure what could have been done better with Covid vaccines, we have three now roughly a year after the first cases. All of them work and are either certified or on the track to soon be. We even have four if you include the Russian one.
Summing up the ethics part: Studies include volunteers in a controlled environment. Just administering un approved stuff to people means using people as guinea pigs. I don't want that, and it is doubtful we would have gained anything. Because now it is "simple" distribution and production problem.
'Because of ethics' and 'these rules are there for a reason' are not arguments, they're 'shut up' encoded. Present arguments please.
The progress of the vaccine has been incredible compared to usual, but that doesn't mean more could have been done. Every death is a tragedy.
People are constantly used as guinea pigs... as long as there is informed consent as per the Nuremberg code it's fine. Not suggesting anybody would be forced or ill-informed.
So back to my argument - you can make a reasonable guess at estimating P(death|vaccine) vs. P(death|covid) and set a big margin, then offer people to VOLUNTARILY agree to take it who are most at risk of dying.
The average age of death in the UK is 82 mostly with co-morbidities. I am sure many of these dead would have been happy to take the chance.
And in the case of the mRNA vaccines this not some trivial difference - some were developed within weeks/months, but took nearly a year longer to pass all testing.
It's really obvious that pandemics need different handling than the 'lock down and loads of people die anyway, both from the virus and the consequences of lockdown while ruining the economy + wait 2yrs for a vaccine to be fully distributed' approach we've got.
I hope lessons are learned from covid (I'm actually optimistic they will be, in countries other than the one where the virus emerged anyway).
So you never asked anyone. The problem is, if you ignore ethics, which of course says a lot about your priorities, still two fold.
First, you have development. That was arguably the fastest vaccine development in history. Not sure what could have been done faster here.
Second, you have production and distribution. Ramping up these two doesn't make much sense before you know whether or not the vaccines work. Now they are ramped up really fast. Going "fast and breaking" things may have resulted in more people being vaccinated early on. But this small benefit would have caused tremendous issues in a couple of weeks / months. The goal is to get millions vaccinated, not just a few elderly so that some people can go out partying again without feeling bad.
>So you never asked anyone. The problem is, if you ignore ethics, which of course says a lot about your priorities, still two fold.
This is offensive and I suggest you re-read my post (as well as the HN comment guidelines). I am not ignoring ethics, I specifically mention informed consent. I also have no idea what you mean by 'so you never asked anyone' - this is a hypothetical??
>The goal is to get millions vaccinated, not just a few elderly so that some people can go out partying again without feeling bad.
You're also strawmanning me pretty hard here.
> But this small benefit would have caused tremendous issues in a couple of weeks / months.
Not even sure how you come to this conclusion (you seem 100% certain that distributing the now-proven safe mRNA vaccine early would have caused tremendous issues, somehow).
You seem to want to be aggressive to me and strawman me as somebody who doesn't care about covid victims (my grandmother is 85 and has serious comorbidity risks thank you very much) so I am not going to respond further but I suggest you focus on arguments, not insults and dismissive comments. You can go to reddit and much of the rest of the internet for that.
So we agree to disagree. No problem for me. Regarding distribution, I saw way to many rushed logistics and supply chain initiatives in my life to know how things turn out when people cut corners for some limited early successes. I am happy authorities seem not to do that right now.
- Flip the back and recent apps button in three button navigation. It's such a weird decision - like only left handed people should be able to comfortably use three button nav. Literally hurt my thumbs to use the phone.
- The quick settings panel is just abysmal compared to Samsung with massive pill buttons that have virtually nothing in them.