thirdwave

"Why Did ChatGPT Hit a Wall?"

MIT Technology Review: "Goertzel was an influential figure in a fringe community of researchers who had dreamed for years of building humanlike artificial intelligence, an all-purpose computer program that could do many of the things people can do (and do them better)...

And yet for all of LLMs’ remarkable wordplay, Goertzel doesn’t think that they do in fact contain sparks of AGI. 'It’s a little surprising to me that some people with a deep technical understanding of how these tools work under the hood still think that they could become human-level AGI,' he says...

We saw this when OpenAI released the much-hyped GPT-5 this summer. AI stans were disappointed that the new version of the company’s flagship technology wasn’t the step change they expected. But instead of seeing that as evidence that AGI wasn’t attainable—or attainable with an LLM, at least—believers pushed out their predictions for how soon AGI would come. It was coming—just, you know, next time."

Culture takes input from religion, but contains other elements than just religious ones... Culture subsumes religion.

Catholicism could have seeped into the cultural fabric of America, they have the numbers... The Irish, the Italian migration is one factor, but most forget another huge wave of migration, the Germans, 1/3rd of whom were Catholic. And obviously the Hispanic migrants are mostly Catholic as well. That means while growing up every American would subconciously adapt part-Catholic cultural precepts along with the majority Protestan ones (that includes Catholics themselves, they will also be part-Catholic in culture, not wholly). US is a Catholi-Protestan synthesis, not Judeo-Christian synthesis.

Politico: "When Jared Isaacman was the nominee for NASA chief this spring, the billionaire entrepreneur wrote an opus proposing drastic changes to the agency... The 62-page plan, obtained by POLITICO, proposes outsourcing some of NASA’s missions to the private sector and treating the government agency more like a business. The draft, known as 'Project Athena,' not only showcases Isaacman’s radical vision for the space agency. It comes as he reemerges as a potential candidate for the position against acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy...

This has concerned some tied to NASA. It’s 'bizarre and careless,' said one former NASA official.. Isaacman’s manifesto would radically change NASA’s approach to science. He advocates buying science data from commercial companies instead of putting up its own satellites, referring to it a 'science-as-a-service.'"

Cato: "At the center of the government shutdown is a disagreement over whether to extend a temporary pandemic-era expansion of the Affordable Care Act’s premium tax credits... [The expansion s]ubsidizes insurance companies, not patients. Unlike other tax credits that individuals claim on their tax returns at the end of the year, most premium tax credits are paid in advance, directly to insurance companies, to lower the monthly premium bill. These direct subsidies allow the insurance industry to shift the vast majority of rising premiums onto taxpayers. Paragon Health Institute notes that these subsidies have been largely incorporated into insurance company profits. Since the premium subsidies were created in the Affordable Care Act, along with other industry-favorable spending increases, health insurer stock prices have increased more than 1,000 percent (compared with 251 percent growth for the S&P 500)."

"@PoliceStateUK@mastodon.me.uk

How it started:

'Starmer: If you don't like #Labour changes, leave.'

How it's going:

Message

BBC: "Zohran Mamdani wins New York mayoral race"

AP News: "Former Vice President Dick Cheney dies at 84"