Not OP but: The very essence of the program was publicity. As soon as the public lost interest (mission accomplished!), the program was canceled. We built Saturn V rockets that we never launched.

That being said, I know a lot of things were unknown. We didn’t know if the surface of the moon would interact with the atmosphere inside the capsules to combust. Some of these unknowns were downplayed. Some others were played up for dramatic effect.

The whole process of getting a person to the moon took hundreds of thousands of involved workers and the. coordinated effort of a country’s politicians and populace to fund it. I think it’s unfair to boil it down to “just publicity” but it is a big part in keeping it afloat.

Imo the pithier version is “we lose money on every sale, but we’ll make it up on volume!”

It's profoundly depressing that this is basically the model for almost all startups in the last twenty plus years. :shrug:

I think it has been a good benchmark during early development, but you’re right that it becomes less useful now that Solar is further along. Maybe some Midwestern place would be a good benchmark now? Or like England?

The white paper being discussed includes Birmingham, UK and several other cities around the world.

The Midwestern places probably lack the demand.

Because solar isn't energy dense, you will probably be told that you picked an area with low land cost to make it look better.

For England you can replace the word solar with wind and the same would probably apply

This is fascinating, I’d never realized there is this seeming-paradox! Thanks for mentioning it

I’m a massive Wikipedia fan, have a lot of it downloaded locally on my phone, binge read it before bed, etc. Even so, I rarely go through talk pages or version history unless I’m contributing something. What would you see in an article that motivates you to check out the meta layers?

Try any article on a controversial issue.

I guess if I know it’s controversial then I don’t need the talk page, and if I don’t then I wouldn’t think to check

Seeing removed quotations and sources, and the reasons given, could be... enlightening sometimes. Even if the removed sources are indeed poor, the very way they are poor could be elucidating, too.

> "I’m a massive Wikipedia fan, have a lot of it downloaded locally on my phone, binge read it before bed, etc."

Me too, albeit these days I'm more interested in its underrated capabilities to foster teaching of e-governance and democracy/participation.

> "What would you see in an article that motivates you to check out the meta layers?"

Generally: How the lemma came to be, how it developed, any contentious issues around it, and how it compares to tangential lemmata under the same topical umbrella, especially with regards to working groups/SIGs (e. g. philosophy, history), and their specific methods and methodologies, as well as relevant authors.

With regards to contentious issues, one obviously gets a look into what the hot-button issues of the day are, as well as (comparatives of) internal political issues in different wiki projects (incl. scandals, e. g. the right-wing/fascist infiltration and associated revisionism and negationism in the Croatian wiki [1]). Et cetera.

I always look at the talk pages. And since I mentioned it before: Albeit I have almost no use for LLMs in my private life, running a Wiki, or a set of articles within, through an LLM-ified text analysis engine sounds certainly interesting.

1. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_genocide_of_Serb...]

Any article with social or political controversy ... Try gamergate. Or any of the presidents pages for since at least bush lol

> it’s objectively done better than all other known systems (in longevity and impact)

I think the US is probably the country which has had the greatest positive impact on the world in the last 150 years (purely a personal opinion). But even so, we’ve only been around like 300 years total. It’s crazy to say that we have _objectively_ had the biggest and longest impact, when there are civilizations that existed for so much longer, and which made massive contributions to the world.

You might want to re-read my comment.

I made no such long term or meta claims.

I guess I’m just missing it, I’ve re-read the thread and it still seems like you’re discussing the US? What am I missing? The parent comment you replied to is

> It's really depressing how the US system seems to have existed "on belief". Once somebody set out to damage or destroy it, away it went. Pretty much without a whimper. As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.

> What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer (none that I am aware of), let alone has produced prosperity, etc. to the same extent?

The constitutional system of the United Kingdom is over 1000 years old.

There is no plausible entity arising from that arrangement that one could refer that has survived even 1/10th of that time intact. Not even counting the devolving of numerous other additional territories.

Including the Sovereign, or Parliament.

It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?

> It has kept the title, but so has France and how many Republics are they on now?

The US has also kept the title of the Senate, but I'd argue that it's been a very different institution since the 17th Amendment. Also, the Federal govt. until the Great Depression was much more hands-off (witness the overuse of the Commerce Clause since then.)

I'm not sure that the Founders would think of the present-day Republic as the same as theirs.

> What other gov’t during the same time period has lasted as long or longer

Yes, very few last 250 years.

USA has had some close calls before, the Civil War was horrific.

Nothing lasts forever, but I would not bet against the USA's system perpetuating itself this time, too

You’re right that it’s large in an absolute sense, but any sector of the US economy is going to be large in an absolute sense. It’s not a very meaningful statement. Using percentages allows comparison to other items, which for some purposes gives a more useful sense of size. For instance, based on your numbers, AI expenditure is about 1/3 the total military expenditure. I tend to agree that this is less than I expected, and generally makes me feel a bit better about the (imo excessive) hype.

It's small as a part of the economy. It's huge as a completely new thing. The US economy in total has been growing something like an average of 2.5% over recent years. Something that is all-the-growth-of-the-last-year-in-one-place is pretty significant.

AI didn’t happen in one year. Netflix’s famous recommender system challenge kicked off in _2006_! And “Big Data” was all the rage ten years ago. The category “AI” includes these things.

We both know the NN boom of the 2010s pales in comparison to the post GPT3.5 era of LLMs.

Not in terms of the progress that was made. Almost everything relevant was invented back then.

agreed! only in terms of the perception of progress to the user

Sorry, can you clarify this? I’m not understanding. I think you’re saying

- the fire marshal happened to be the route chosen in this case

- but there are many other routes

- so the fire marshal detail is kindof insignificant.

Is that a correct understanding? If so, I still wonder why the fire marshal has access?

I think what he’s saying is if the police department is trying to identify a person in a photo, then anyone from the public can try to help them out.

Whether those people use facial recognition software or not isn’t exactly relevant to the law because the police didn’t use it. And it’s legal for other people to use it. As far as the police are concerned, they could have just been the person’s neighbor…

Fire marshals are investigative, and under less scrutiny. That specific one probably just wanted it. If one wants Clearview FR, there is very little beyond ethics and the state of mind to understand the ethics preventing anyone from running Clearview FR.

This is fascinating, I binge read a lot of that website, and might try to buy some! Any recommendations? I guess the ones you already listed?

To be honest, making a business out of this might be the best way to convince regulators to close the loopholes. You could even devote N% of the revenue to closing the loopholes. There’s DEFINITELY a large moral hazard though, it would be very easy to lose your soul, or to be kicked out by the board in favor of a more malleable leader :/

Edit: after reading the article, I realize most of the “loopholes” to be changes are in disparate countries, not the _source_ country. This makes the whole idea less attractive. I suppose you could potentially still get rid of the anonymous-representative option by which people conceal their connection to different assets.