I feel very meh about “wake up the world”, firstly because AI capabilities companies are going to do it for us, and secondly because whether it’s good or bad depends a lot on the quality of what we funnel the world towards

These two points seem contradictory. AI capabilities companies aren't going to do the good thing for us. (Or maybe you think they are? But I'm a bit surprised if you think that.)

Things like how shadows cast on oil barrows (I think)

Yep. If you have a sattelite picture of an oil tank with a floating lid, you can compare the shadow cast on the ground against the shadow cast on the lid to see how full it is.

When the charity sells the stock, what cost basis do they use? Market price on the day they received it?

I've donated £5000 again.

Thanks! It mostly did better at object recognition than me. I imagine I'd have improved with the full res unscuffed images, but I still don't think I'd have recognized the fridge so quickly (though admittedly it wasn't helpful). The only place I thought I'd have done better was when it got confused by the door in the mirror.

I'm interested.

Hm, I think I'd bet against this:

• The instruction referred to "the doorway on your left", not "on the left"; "on your left" is even worse in context.
• It doesn't give a coherent world model that the rest of its instructions follow. e.g. if it thinks I didn't take a photo from that door when it asked me to, then its instruction "walk straight ahead past where that bedroom doorway was on the left" gets me past the kitchen again.

Overall agreed, but I note that the video (which I enjoyed) is a significantly different challenge - when the dad starts sliding the bread around the table with his knife, he doesn't give the kid a chance to say "ah, I see the problem! You need to dip the knife in the peanut butter..."

The EU executive, on the other hand, where most of the real power lies, is apolitical, and the individual commissioners are appointed by member states, not by political parties.

What does apolitical mean in this context?

Like if Fred's business costs $1m to start and creates $100k/year surplus value, it gets paid off in ten years

Oh, not quite. "Costs $1m to start" sounds like it's talking about the cost to Fred. Some of that will be e.g. wages paid to construction workers. For this accounting to work, we need to talk about the costs to society versus the value to society. (The costs to society being similar to those from Tom's shop - space, time and materials.)