(Spoilers for Interstellar)
I sat next to person on a flight a few weeks ago who, upon talking about physics, said she thought the movie Interstellar was "amazing" and "scientific". I agreed with her, thinking she was talking about the realistic black hole simulations. No, she was talking about scenes where the main character reaches back in time as a ghost to influence his daughter.
This person was a first-year Ph.D. student in medicine.
So yes, even when science fiction is done relatively carefully, some people will take as "scientific" the parts which have been stretched for better storytelling.
There are a few examples in history of civilizations running out of critical resources, usually accompanied by other conflict and calamity. In the most extreme historical cases, these civilizations go extinct in ways that left us with poor documentation, so there may be an anthropic / selection bias which obscures the exact causes of civilizational collapse:
What's the practical difference between "text" and one-hots of said "text"? One-hots are the standard for inputting text into models. It is only recently that we expect models to learn their preferred encoding for raw text (cf. transformers). By taking a small shortcut, the authors of this paper get to show off their agent work without loss of generality: one could still give one-hot instructions to an agent that is learning to act in the real life.
The last time CM was mentioned on here I looked up his old videos about Fauci. In a video from Sept 2020 he made a very confident claim that NYC had already achieved 70% infections and thereby herd immunity. That turned out to be untrue:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xEFfbEMFHhtgseKz3/covid-6-10-somebody-else-s-problem
So my prior for him is now skewed toward "pundit" rather than "honest inquirer."
Immune response is generally associated with age and lifestyle. What can you tell us about those factors?
it means contact tracing becomes easier and lockdowns more effective.
I read that oppositely. If the serial interval is shorter, contact tracers need to work faster to inform those exposed, lest those exposed become infected and transmitting. Likewise, lockdowns would only become more effective if the time each person is contagious is reduced. IIRC the delta variant, according to Indian accounts, is significantly contagious for three weeks from the date of infection as opposed to the usual two.
Re: quarantines for fully vaccinated travellers
The problem a national government has in setting quarantine standards for vaccinated people is that there are so many inconsistencies to vaccines, and the topic is wrapped in geopolitics.
I'm happy that this was done before release. However ... I'm still left wondering "how many prompts did they try?" In practice, the first AI self-replicating escape is not likely to be a model working alone on a server, but a model carefully and iteratively prompted, with overall strategy provided by a malicious human programmer. Also, one wonders what will happen once the base architecture is in the training set. One need only recognize that there is a lot of profit to be made (and more cheaply) by having the AI identify and exploit zero-days to generate ... (read more)