When

• the expected return becomes negative, or
• the risk/return ratio moves away from the efficient frontier with no other motivating factor.

Other than the fediverse support, are there any other differences from last year?

Every screw colony has a queen screw.

The most successful applications (e.g. translation, medical image processing) aren’t marketed as “AI”. That term seems to be mostly used for more controversial applications, when companies want to distance themselves from the potential output by pretending that their software tools have independent agency.

The Republican candidate didn’t have a medical degree? I’d have thought that was a requirement for coroner.

What about the usage demographics within each country?

In underdeveloped/exploited countries, internet usage is more likely to be concentrated among the economic elites who formerly benefited from colonialism—so if increasing adoption in those countries just follows the pattern of other internet use, it could have the opposite effect from the one intended.

• Compression algorithms can reduce most written text to about 20–25% of its original size—implying that that’s the amount of actual unique information it contains, while the rest is predictable filler.

• Empirical studies have found that chimps and human infants, when looking at test patterns, will ignore patterns that are too predictable or too unpredictable—with the sweet spot for maximizing attention being patterns that are about 80% predictable.

• AI researchers have found that generating new text by predicting the most likely continuation of the given input results in text that sounds monotonous and obviously robotic. Through trial and error, they found that, instead of choosing the most likely result, choosing one with around an 80% likelihood threshold produces results judged most interesting and human-like.

The point being: AI has stumbled on a method of mimicking the presence of meaning by imitating the ratio of novelty to predictability that characterizes real human thought. But we know that the actual content of that novelty is randomly chosen, rather than being a deliberate message.

Wiktionary runs on MediaWiki—does that have the sort of functionality you need?

Also, throwing in occasional free stuff makes it harder for customers to comparison shop: they’ll assume the free items balance out higher costs on other items without actually doing the math. (It also exploits the sunk cost fallacy.)

According to the article, the title is “The Darkness Outside Us”—I assume that’s correct?

I can think of a few reasons a translator might choose to do that:

• The original author was using language that was old-fashioned in their time (e.g., a medieval Latin writer imitating Cicero, or a Hellenistic Greek writer imitating Thucydides)

• The work in question had its greatest historical impact long after its original composition, so its language would have seemed archaic to the relevant readers (e.g., the Vedas, Avestas or Analects)

• The translator is trying to maintain consistency with canonical translations of related works done long ago (e.g., translating early Christian writings in the King James style)

• The translator wants to create a general sense of cultural distance, if placing the culture of the original work in a modern context would be misleading

They say the study was published in the “Advancing Earth and Space Science Journal”, without mentioning the authors, date, or title.

“Advancing Earth and Space Science” is the tagline of the American Geophysical Union, which has 24 journals—none of which are actually called the “Advancing Earth and Space Science Journal”. So does anyone know what study they’re actually referring to?

Historically, barter only tends to appear in communities used to a monetary economy when something temporarily disrupts the currency system. The more common pattern of commerce within communities not previously accustomed to currency is that goods are given in one direction at a time, and incur an informal social debt that may be eventually be repaid with reciprocal goods or by some other means entirely (e.g., support during community disputes).

What (if anything) does the state tax, and in what form do they require payment?

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Rather than starting from scratch, would it make more sense to make an ActivityPub plugin for the open-source MediaWiki software Wikipedia runs on? MediaWiki already has some “interwiki” functionality that such a plugin could expand on, and you’d have the advantage of being able to fork content from WP and other MW projects without having to re-format it. Plus you’d be able to leverage other MW plugins—Semantic MediaWiki in particular could add a lot of useful functionality to federated wikis, like articles that could query and aggregate information from other federated articles rather than just linking to the text.

If it’s in low earth orbit as described, it would mostly be intercepting sunlight that would hit the earth’s surface anyway (although she also says it could collect light 24 hours a day, which would imply a much higher orbit).

But solar panels only convert a fraction of the incident light into usable power—most of it is re-radiated as waste heat. In that respect an orbital array would heat the earth less than a surface array, whose waste heat is trapped by the atmosphere. (And either one would heat the earth less than burning fossil fuels.)

It’s not science fiction, but my favorite of his novels is The Years of Rice and Salt.

“I like it when companies game search engines by titling their promotional pages to mimic search query results.”

It seems like the obvious next step would be to see if the behavior of Kuiper belt objects can also explained by dark matter.