If only we had just slightly increased the length of each day so that the year divided perfectly into 365 days. Then it would be an even better analogy.
I remember many years ago (maybe around 2014?) reading about a smallish European country that implemented this sort of thing really well. There was nothing but glowing praise for it at the time. I want to say maybe it was Latvia?
Does anyone remember what I'm talking about? I'm wondering if there been any long-term takeaways for how well it ended up working.
Maybe Estonia? I was an e-resident and was really impressed by the digitization of the government systems (and non-government ones too! They inter-op) in Estonia.
Speaking for Lithuania - we have something like 6 or 7 digital ID forms and until like last year or so - they all sucked, i.e.:
* Using your bank to login - well if you left country you generally close your bank.
* SIM card auth (similar to SMS, you get a code on your phone) - most popular, except same as above + doesn't work with eSIM.
* Chip card - requires reader, unclear software and certificates on card expire after 2 years which makes it useless if you moved abroad.
* Smart Id - scans your passport, does face scan and stays on your phone - pretty convenient, but turns out there are multiple levels of auth and this particular one isn't that useful...
* Contactless - the holy grail that's only been implemented recently - scan your id card/ passport using phone. I've only used it once, did require some esoteric software, but seems like a step in the right direction.
Bonus: e-gov forms actually predate mobile era. They have been built so long that you can forget trying to fill them on your phone. And if you do get to fill them, you'll most likely receive email that you need to come into the office for 'verification' which pretty much defeats entire system.
I suspect you're reading too much into that phrase. It seems more likely to me that the reporter here contacted one or more of the case report authors directly to ask for a copy of what instructions they received from the journal at the time. (This would be good journalistic practice, rather than just take the journal's word for it, when they might have an incentive to lie.) But they obviously couldn't explicitly confirm that every single author received similar instructions, so they used the “at times” phrase to cover their ass.
If they had direct evidence that some author's instructions failed to ask for the case study to be fictionalized, I think they would have specifically said that. It's more definitive, and catches the journal in a lie.
I'm pretty sure what happened here is that:
1) The journal always asked for and thought they received fictionalized case studies.
2) It never occurred to them that they were presenting the case studies in a way that could be misinterpreted. (This is indefensible negligence, but I also understand how it could have happened "innocently".)
3) Once the issue came to light, they issues blanket corrections to every case study study to describe them as fiction because they asked for fiction and edited them all as fiction. (I.e., Didn't do any fact checking or independent confirmation, beyond medical broad strokes.)
4) At least one author didn't read the instructions carefully enough and sent in a real case study, which as the article says, wasn't caught by the editors during the review process. (And really, how would they catch it? If they thought they asked for fiction, they wouldn't be fact checking it.)
I actually think the disclaimer may be appropriate, even on the article that was written as a true story, if it wasn't reviewed as one.
> If they had direct evidence that some author's instructions failed to ask for the case study to be fictionalized, I think they would have specifically said that.
Which they do. They specifically say that. “Neither the instructions for authors from 2010 — when Koren and his coauthor Michael Rieder would have written their article — nor the linked list of article types — state the cases are fictionalized, or fictional.”
“An archived version from September stated, ‘Each highlight is a teaching tool that presents a short clinical example, from one of the studies or one-time surveys,’ with no mention of fiction.”
These are direct quotes from the article. The exact kind you are asking for. With inline links to the archived documents. And yes it is very definitive.
> I'm pretty sure what happened here is that:
No need to speculate. Just read the article.
> 1) The journal always asked for […] fictionalized case studies.
Because on-site powerplants owned by datacenter operators are not "just another supplier".
The threat is: This "datacenter power" disincentives buildout of "free" powerplants (by eating up significant demand at very low margins thanks to basically vertical integration); this slows down buildout of "normal" infrastructure (possibly both grid connectivity and power), and the electrical energy market becomes worse for consumers than it is now.
I personally think all of this is very speculative for now, but allowing industry to rely on the grid (which they still would!) while almost exclusively "buying" their own power is a risky proposition from a consumer perspective.
Not to mention the danger of energy production, even nuclear, becoming resource-constrained to the point where datacenter power plants leave no room for municipal plants. We're seeing it happen with consumer hardware; make no mistake on who will get preference.
Sure, if you emphasize selectively you can make it sound like it says that. Here are some other quotes from the article that clearly refute your interpretation:
> The journal decided when it first started publishing the article type “that the cases should be fictional to protect patient confidentiality,”
> While the instructions for authors for Paediatrics & Child Health has at times indicated the case reports are fictional, that disclosure has never appeared on the journal articles themselves.
> “The editor acknowledged that the editorial team is at fault for overlooking the fact that our case was real during the review process,”
It's pretty clear that the journal always thought of these as fictional vignettes, and either didn't realize or didn't care that that had not made that sufficiently clear to the readers. The New Yorker article clued them into the fact that it was a problem, so they added the correction to all of their case studies to clarify that they were intended to be fictional. In (at least) one case, the author also didn't realize they should be fictional, and submitted a real case study which has now been incorrectly corrected.
It literally wrote a blog post [supposedly on its own initiative] trying to gin up outrage at open source maintainer after he denied the LLM's pull request.
He was only slandered once, by the LLM Agent. The Ars Technica article had presented paraphrases that it falsely attributed as direct quotes, and was therefore factually incorrect reporting. But it was not defamatory by any reasonable standard. Slander isn't just a synonym of "lie".
By the same reasoning, why on earth would a person sincerely ask you that question unless the car that they want to wash is either already at the car wash, or that someone is bringing it to them there for some reason?
If it's as unambiguous as you say, then the natural human response to that question isn't "you should drive there". It's "why are you fucking with me?" Or maybe "have you recently suffered a head injury?"
If you trust that the questioner isn't stupid and is interacting with you honestly, you'd probably just assume that they were asking about an unusual situation where the answer isn't obvious. It's implicitly baked into the premise of the question.
That still doesn't make sense. I'm going to use another car, or borrow a car to drive to a carwash where my car I want to wash is and then....I guess leave it there? Or leave the car I came in?
This isn't a viable out for explaining why AI can't "reason" through this.
But why would they reason through it in that way? You haven't asked them to listen carefully and find the secret reason you're a dumb-ass in order to prove how smart they are. If they default to that mode on every query, that would just make them insufferable conversational partners, which is not the training goal.
Let me put it this way. If you were to prefix the prompts they used with "This is an IQ test: ", I wouldn't be surprised if most of the the models did much better. That would give them the context that the humans reading this article already have.
Personally I stopped using Facebook because even in the before-AI days it started becoming a glamour photo book of everyone you ever knew (and probably lots of people you only kind of sorta know), and while people certainly deserve to do and see great things, seeing it all shoved in your face every day becomes exhausting in a keeping-up-with-the-joneses kind of way.
I totally get that not everybody is like that, but I am, and so I stopped going to Facebook.
These days I'm in private Whatsapp groups for my direct family and so I learn about what they do, and not the random stuff that my neighbors and 20-years-past classmates did.
My wife is still active on Facebook and I actually do still visit occasionally to boost her posts but that's about it.
I agree with this a lot. In the late 2000s, which for me was when I was about 20, posts were very throwaway and low effort -- in a good way! You never really knew what you'd see when you logged in. Photos of stupid things or silly status updates, etc.
Over the next five years though, content gradually shifted to mainly image crafting. Over-processed photos, highlight reel curated trip photos, major life updates, etc. It felt like the bar was higher on what people would share, but unfortunately that removed a lot of the things that made FB fun in the first place.
I don't know whether it was a more universal shift or whether it had more to do with the age of my peers.
Correct. Of course, that wasn't the case in 1750 or 1900. It wouldn't have been possible then.
Hence why prior technological changes that increased productivity didn't result in living lives of extended leisure, despite some predictions to that effect. Instead people kept working to raise the overall standard of living to what could be achieved when using the new tools to their fullest extent. Doing more, not doing the same with less effort. As you say, we're not animals. We can strive for better.
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