Altair and Positron should be just as good for your Polars @ Python needs. With software like Marimo notebooks and VegaFusion, Polars/Python experience starts beating R by quite a substantial margin.
Just to put Bill Gates thoughts on AI into perspective, this was his comment on an AMA 9 years ago to the question
"What kind of technological advancement do you wish to see in your lifetime?":
> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
The old UI is worth signing up for using a completely anonymous throwaway email address. You just need to verify it once, and then you never need access to the email address ever again. I don't know why people seem to find that so difficult, but they do. It's the same reason why reddit bans are a complete joke.
I've never seen anyone say they can't figure out how to access Reddit or that it's too hard so it might not be a difficulty thing and instead the rejection of the ux forcing them to log in before they see the content that was previously accessible and that was posted on Reddit (compared to a competitor) under that assumption.
>It's the same reason why reddit bans are a complete joke.
From what I've seen they do more than trivial fingerprinting to link accounts. I'd be surprised if you didn't have to use a new browser profile at the least, and of course a new unrelated IP
Yes, it's a shame. It's in part due to scrapers and AI. There's a wealth of relevant knowledge inside Reddit, and agents aren't able to easily check there for updates on recent topics.
How ironic. The reason you can't read the comment:
"> The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test."
Is because reddit is threatened enough by "computers that can read and understand information like humans do" the he's locked out of it!
I logged in just to share the entire comment for you:
>The big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do. There is a lot of work going on in this field - Google, Microsoft, Facebook, academia,... Right now computers don't know how to represent knowledge so they can't read a text book and pass a test.
>Another whole area is vaccines. We need a vaccine for HIV, Malaria and TB and I hope we have them in the next 10-15 years.
In January after 8 years (17 years in tech overall) at the same govt IT firm in the Mid-Atlanic region I was laid off. I quickly enrolled in healthcare classes and starting my clinical rotation for low level healthcare position ($25 an hour hopefully vs. multiples in tech) in September. Also, I will be doing my clinical Radiology rotation this time next year. Still won't be making the same money but i dont see a future in creative tech anymore when anyone can type to create graphics, songs, web designs, websites, iPhone apps, etc. This note of his reinforces what I thought I should do and what I am doing is the right path.
If you're interested in healthcare IT look into becoming an Epic admin. Hospitals and clinics want RNs with a tech background for those roles, and they pay really well (~150k here in CA)
yeah in time im hoping to mix my 17 years in creative tech with my new healthcare career. Hopefully get back to the money I was making, but humbled and happy to start at the bottom again for stability and always have a job waiting if needed. At least until the healthcare field gets filled with others like me.
For what it's worth I'm also drawn to radiology tech - I guess because it's one of the most "techy" fields out there in healthcare? Hope all goes well for you.
Well not radiology technicans as they are required to use equipment on patients to get diagnostic data. AI could possibly reduce the amount of radiologists (they are doctors) jobs.
I think we all wish you good fortune and wellness on your journey. But some of us are sticking around knowing that taste is something AI will never be able to define. Let them have their (copied) graphics, songs, web designs, websites, iPhone apps, etc…
A pedo talking about AI is still a pedo and his opinion should be discounted on the spot. You know, because of him being a pedo. Unless you entertain discussing the opinions held by pedos, in which case I have nothing to add.
Well it’s just the one breakthrough that we needed — specifically, it was solving the frame problems. Now the dam has burst and we’re in for ‘turbulence’.
Yes, exactly why you should not put belief in someone who has proven themselves to make poor predictions. He's even further removed from the zeitgeist 9 years later.
You should adjust that these are the kind of the people with the most prescient accuracy for where we are going again. Their world model is more accurate.
where is the error? 9 years ago (2017) 'attention is all you need' hasn't been written yet, no llms exist. his take is literally 'it would be cool if something like llms existed', seems fine (if anything, vaguely predictive) to me.
As for Kokotajlo, he's a good SF author, but I don't think it's nearly as good a prediction as it appears at first glance.
Like any SF, he's correct about some things, and way, way off base about others. Specifically, he was mostly correct about short-term (1-2 year horizon) technical aspects, but anyone familiar with how transformers work would have guessed those. I'm not even in AI/rationalia land, but believe I was having these exact conversations by 2021. Specifically about multimodality and steam-of-consciousness ['chain of thought' reasoning]. He is spot-on about chip shortages (to my eyes, his most well-done prediction).
Other thoughts are a storytelling device, like a well-told horoscope. He makes non-categorical statements that were already happening as if they categorically will become a new thing. But really he's just going off the current trend that everyone knows, and thus will be nearly-impossible to falsify. For example, 'People who still remember 2021 think of it as the golden days, when conformism and censorship and polarization were noticeably less than they are now. Just as it is normal for newspapers to have a bias/slant, it is normal for internet spaces of all kinds—forums, social networks, streams, podcasts, news aggregators, email clients—to have some degree of censorship (some set of ideas that are prohibited or at least down-weighted in the recommendation algorithms) and some degree of propaganda.' Sounds scary! But it is literally just saying 'polarization and marketing specialization will continue to deteriorate'.... which, duh. In essence, you could make this statement for 2018-> 2021, or for 2008->2018 and 'feel' just as correct!
Other key thoughts were somewhat off. Specifically, 'It now costs an order of magnitude less compute (compared to 2020) to pre-train a giant model' is kind-of-true, in that it costs less now, but the models have gotten so much bigger that the prices haven't actually gone down much. Might be changing soon, but definitely several years off.
The scariest central prediction that the political stuff rests on is 'After years of tinkering and incremental progress, AIs can now play Diplomacy as well as human experts'. This part, as far as I can tell, is just not true and hasn't changed.
And, well, 2026 predictions are just not correct at all. Some examples:
'Mormons create a “Christian Coalition” internet stack, complete with its own email client, social network, payment processor, news aggregator, etc.' -- basically untrue. I know a few ex-mormons, such a thing is not prolific.
'The US and many other Western governments are gears-locked' The US is far from gears-locked, in fact, it's full-steam ahead to er, well, something.
'“Should I wear shorts today?” “Order some more toothpaste, please. Oh, and also an air purifier.” “Is this cover letter professional-sounding?”' -- kind of correct, but in practice most people just do the last one. I'm not aware of many that give chatgpt agents credit card access (refer to the famous vending machine experiment). But predicting this with GPT3 is not that crazy, cause people were already doing that.
How do you make beef and milk more sustainable? I'm honestly wondering. To me it seems similar to saying: we can make coal power plants more efficient. Equivalent to more "efficient" (however you want to define that) forms of animal husbandry.
It doesn't change the fact that you're still burning coal, while you could be putting up solar.
Far too many so-called environmentalists are far more concerned with stopping life rather than practical methods to reduce and eliminate harm, and they get ignored - and worse fought back against.
“If you build a solar farm generating 100MWh rather than an ethanol farm generating 50MWh that’s bad because the it’s a supper slope to banning beefburgers”
You are not stopping people from taking in calories.
In your analogy it would be the same as saying: you are not allowed to heat your home with a coal burner. Same as saying you are not allowed to eat beef. You can still eat lots of other stuff, just not beef.
The goal isn’t to eat beef, it’s calorie intake.
Now I am not saying that we should ban cattle farming or beef and dairy consumption. In the end I see this as a problem of our current system not being able to effectively reflect environmental impact in price.
Cattle farming has an environmental cost which is higher than other alternatives (chicken, soy etc.). This environmental cost is not directly passed on to the consumer.
All of the alternatives you listed will not succeed in our current system because the environmental savings they might have can not be passed on to the customer. On the contrary: usually lower environmental impact has a monetary cost associated, making prices higher for products from these initiatives.
None of what you are writing is applicable to Landes. Outside of scandinavia Landes region is some of the most intensely managed forest in Europe.
From planting to cutting is only around 30-50 years. With multiple thinnings in between. Also none of that forest existed 200 years ago and there never was anything other than pine planted there for those 200 years, in the beginning for resin, now for pulp.
And so none of it burned in the middle ages or was affected by any higher temperatures because it didn't exist back then.
Just an aside: I'm a researcher trying to classify forest disturbance types from satellite imagery.
The Landes Forest which is currently burning is really interesting in that you have all 4 of the major European disturbance types there: Human clear cuts, storm damage, large scale insect infestation and fire.
Most other forested areas in Europe only have two or three of these. For example most of the Mediterranean does not have meaningful amount of storm damage.
Just shows how badly suited the Landes Forest with its current forest management is in todays climate.
The whole damned thing was planted in the 1850s as an enormous pine plantation.
Same thing as drives wildfires in Portugal - maritime pine (and in Portugal’s case eucalyptus). Vast, dense, barely managed pyrophytic monocultures. The problem isn’t poorly managed forest, it’s the forest, period - it shouldn’t be there.
Yes, the same problem exists in the north of Spain. They long ago cut down native forests to plant vines and farm cattle, but once that ceased to be profitable they replanted it all in monoculture pine and eucalyptus.
Where native forest (oak, chestnut, hazel, etc) remains, we don't have major fires. They are finally experimenting with planting firebreaks of native species in some areas, which has been quite effective at halting the spread of fires. But realistically, we need a huge government investment to get rid of this monoculture entirely.
> It did not prevent the massive wildfire near Fontainebleau, for example.
That's a pretty great example in the opposite direction, as Fontainebleau today only contains isolated pockets of protected old-growth, and the rest has been systematically converted over the last ~150 years to highly flammable pine trees...
Yes, I'm well aware that Landes naturally should be an extensive sandy marsh.
With how natural forest disturbances are more and more starting to affect the plantation, it proves to be seen what the response will be.
The thing is that it is an incredibly productive forest (only in terms of biomass). So now there's a bunch of capital riding on it which will have a vested interest to keep it productive.
A mixed forest with oak, beech and the like, as you can find higher north. But that was during the middle ages' European "little ice age", when the winters were much colder, and the Thames and the Netherlands froze over. That's also likely the reason why the forest was cut so much to feed fires.
To be fair, that's more the Third Republic's verdict than what recent historians have concluded. For sure, Sedan was a catastrophe and the Mexican adventure was worse, but the two decades in between gave France the railway build-out, Haussmann's Paris, the creation of modern investment banks, and even universal male suffrage, which the Republic then kept ([1], [2] & [3]).
In this particular instance, everybody in this thread seems to be forgetting the region where the fires are currently raging used to be very unsanitary swamps before the pine forests were planted. These older wetlands were a major source of disease and misery for the local population. The reason why they only planted pines were because the soil there is poor & acidic. Nothing else grows really. Now of course, this needs to be rethought in the light of climate change, but it wasn't a stupid idea at the time.
Thanks. Always good to have a more complete and balanced picture.
I did in fact recently read about the infrastructure works in France (and elsewhere) during that era. (Great read so far: Liaquat Ahamed's 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World)
It’s more nuanced. He massively helped with industrialisation, for example. He was doing ok in his liberal years. But he had different phases and some were better than others.
Do you happen to know if firebreaks or fuelbreaks are used in some of these forests? Are they seen as effective? Are they costly to set up?
From what I saw online, there are indications that firebreaks do not always work, for instance when embers fly over long distances, carried by the wind, over firebreaks, and start fires on the other side. But I would guess that firebreaks like cleared areas, for instance between settlements and forests, should be able to mitigate at least some of the fires.
They are firebreaks everywhere in this forest, you can see them from satellite images, but the fire can jump, and it's mainly used as a defense line by firefighters.
I was in this forest 2 weeks ago and the ground which is layered with pine needles was so dry that it was just a question of time.
With freely available satellite imagery you're looking at a 10x10m resolution per pixel.
So basically entire tree stands have to die or crowns have to lose their leafs for it to be detectable form space.
Main insect of concern are bark beetles (ips typographus for spruce, ips sexendtatus for pines) which disrupt the cambium causing a gradual vitality decline until you have dead standing trees. In satellite imagery this is visible as irregular brownish-red patches.
On the other hand there's gypsy moths (also known as spongy moth, Lymantria dispar) which affect the leafs directly, causing large scale temporary defoliation in broadleafed trees usually in the middle of summer.
There's hundreds more insects but few have the capability to cause large scale die-off in trees which are grown in monoculture (pine/spruce/beech).
No, at the moment classifying disturbances is only done retrospective. Predicting fire likelihood is its own large area of research.
An open case is more in terms of temperate forests which are increasingly starting to burn, for example in Austria or other central European countries. These tend to be understory fires, which (for now) only rarely catch the crown.
For these fires the tree crown stays green and you can't see any change until later in the year or the next year, where the trees die due to damage the fire did to their cambium and roots. Correctly attributing this later decline to fire damage is a bit challenging.
Slightly longer answer for older text to image models you teach them how to encode images and text into the same latent space. Then you simply do a conversion, take a text input, put it into latent space and then extract the image that latent space represents.
ggplot vs matplotlib
dplyr vs pandas
And I loved that everything in RStudio was so easily inspectable. Have a huge dataframe? Just look at it right in your IDE.
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