I'll just get my coat...

Military spending has actually decreased a lot as a % of GDP in the US over time, so old narratives about this have become less true. So the anti-military-spending orgs have to abuse the numbers if they want to keep that narrative going:

https://econofact.org/u-s-defense-spending-in-historical-and...

Though, a reasonable person can still argue that the many billions we still spend on the military can be better used elsewhere. There’s no need to cook the numbers to make that point.

Healthcare spending is now 4x higher than military in the US (across the whole economy, not just government). So it’s hard to claim the problem is we’re prioritizing the military over healthcare. In my opinion, we have a systemic issue where we get poor value for money across a variety of sectors. Healthcare, education, military, housing, transit…

Why? Housing should act as a means to live decently. If my house depreciated to 0 once I'd built it, I wouldn't mind at all.

> You need socialism to do this efficiently

No you don't, you need to heavily tax empty and secondary residences and the issue solves itself in capitalism just fine.

There is always the "it wasn't as bad as in Mad Max/Fallout/..." explanation. Nuclear winter is now understood to be either less severe than predicted back in the 60s, or nonexistent. Nuclear weapons will kill people and destroy cities, but if they aren't aimed at people or cities, but at military installations such as the US nuclear sponge[0], death toll and destruction will be far less severe. Things like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower might be left standing, as seen in a few Star Trek episodes. Which would also mean that humanity would be in less of a severe turmoil than other nuclear war SciFi might have imagined.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/18e01zh/would_t... https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/nuclear-sponge/

My favorite fan theory as to why they went to a future of flying cars that’s so different from our own is that it was the events of the first movie (going back there and changing history) that ultimately led us to that different path.

Glad she had a largely fulfilling life, but also thinking this. As much as it was her choice what to do with her body, it’s probably a good idea to at least tell the healthcare professionals about things like that, even if after the fact.

That was my thought as well when she told me. Then again, when given just a few years perhaps one considers these things a bit differently. The side effects for the drugs you listed does indeed not sound like a lot of fun.

It's one anecdote. In the hierarch of significance this is below even the "one published paper" level which you certainly should also ignore even if you know enough to interpret the paper.

It's really good she lived for 50 years with an kidney transplant. But it is a massive stretch to say that she willed herself to last that long.

[1]: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/motorcycle-rallies-and-o...

[2]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33334475/

It's good to remind ourselves from time to time that new developments in technology have both positive and negative potential, and how they're applied is largely due to sociological factors. When we dissociate the issues with "technology" we allow ourselves to see the underlying issues causing potential misuse, making progress at solving those problems possible instead of a knee-jerk negative lashback against anything new.

To use like we'd use paper.

> Which LLMs do not. They fake it really well but it’s still an illusion. No understanding is going on, they don’t really know what you mean

That is very much up to debate at this point. But for practical purposes in context described here, they do.

> and don’t know what the right answer is.

They're not supposed to. This is LLM use 101 - the model itself is behaving much like a person's inner monologue, or like a person who just speaks their thoughts out loud, without filtering. It's very much not a database lookup.

> I also disagree that was an underappreciated featured of the Star Trek computers, it’s one of their defining features.

What I meant is, people remember and refer to Star Trek's ship computer for its ability to control music, lights or shoot weapons, etc. with voice commands. People noticed the generality, the shamelessness of interaction, lack of structured command language - but rarely I saw anyone paying deeper attention to the latter, enough to realize the subtle magic that made it work on the show. It wasn't just some fuzzy matching allowing for synonyms and filler words, but more human-like understanding of the language.

(Related observation: if you pay attention to sliding doors on Star Trek vs. reality, you eventually realize that Starfleet doesn't just put a 24th century PIR into the door frame; for it to work like it does on the show, the computer has to track approaching people and predict, in real time, whether or not they want to walk through the door, vs, just passing by, or standing next to them, etc. That's another subtle detail that turns into general AI-level challenge.)

> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even strange pieces of technology.

That's obviously tool calls :). I don't get where this assumption comes from, that a computer must be a single, uniform blob of compute? It's probably because people think people are like this, but in fact, even our brains have function-specific hardware components.

(I do imagine the scans involve a lot of machine learning and sensor fusion, though. That's actually how "life signs" can stop being a bullshit shorthand.)

> The most advanced LLMs frequently fail at even identifying themselves.

They'll stop when run with a "who am I?" tool.

> When the Start Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that, they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning. Yet you’re defending this monumental gap as being effectively the same thing. Gene Roddenberry must be spinning in his grave.

All I'm saying is, LLMs solved the "understand natural language" problem, which solves the language and intent recognition part of Star Trek voice interfaces (and obviously a host of other aspects of computer's tasks that require dealing with semantics). Obviously, they're a very new development and have tons of issues that need solving, but I'm claiming the qualitative breakthrough already happened.

Obviously, Star Trek's computer isn't just one big LLM. That would be a stupid design.

A tree falling in a forest with nobody to hear it: if it makes a "sound", you think "sound" is the vibration of air; if it does not, you think "sound" is the qualia.

"Understanding" likewise.

> The ship’s computer on Star Trek could run diagnostics on itself, the ships, strange life forms and even alien pieces of technology.

1. "Execute self-diagnosis script" doesn't require self-reflection or anything else like that, just following a command. I'd be surprised if any of the big AI labs have failed to create some kind of internal LLM-model-diagnosis script, and I'd be surprised if zero of the staff in each of them has considered making the API to that script reachable from a development version of the model under training. No reason for normal people like thou and I to have access to such scripts.

2. Not that the absence says much. If humans could self-diagnose our minds reliably, we wouldn't need therapists. This is basically "computer, send yourself to the therapist and tell me what the therapist said about you".

> When the Star Trek computers behaved inconsistently like that (which was rare, rather than the norm), they would (rightly) be considered to be malfunctioning.

Those computers (and the ships themselves) went wrong on such a regular basis on the shows, that IRL they'd be the butts of more jokes than the Russian navy.

Leon Theramin had invented a radio-activated passive microphone that was used to listen to people from their furniture [0].

The fact that this was only (as far as we know) used to listen in to embassies is more about the economics of scale rather than imagining new technology that didn't exist at the time.

At that scale at that time it was cheaper to have neighbors name and shame people who complained about the government. But there is little really in 1984 that's about the future of technology in the same way Star Trek or even Brave New Word is.

[0] He had also invented a television in the 1920s, which is mostly just trivia related to this question.

I haven't forgotten that Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist. But there weren't any anti-Stalinist socialist states at the time.

So you get into a stressful situation or get a flee or flight response, and your heart is not affected by it, or at least the heart rate, but your cardiovascular system may be needed because in that case the rest of your body is, and presumably you may need much more blood to be pumped out to your organs among other things.

It is a cool food for thought.

Having a ready supply of pig kidneys would be fantastic. All the sudden it wouldn't matter as much that you are a bad candidate, you might end up simply cycling through pig kidneys more frequently.

It’s a big problem, but still seems like they’re swinging for the fences when they could save people in the short term while working on organs.

"This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person"

The pig organ is the first thing mentioned, with the living person last.

Whereas:

"This is the longest time a patient has survived after a pig organ transplant."

This puts the patient first, and doesn't give as much of that kind of vibe.

Edit: Actually, that updated sentence may need some adjustment. I assume when organ transplants fail we don't just let people die with them. So maybe that's why the original sentence had such emphasis on the survival of the pig organ...

- This is the fastest Alice had driven since Bob broke the speed limit.

- This is the oldest tree still standing in the burnt forest.

- This is the most stable chemical additive to our long-lasting concrete.

Without context, to me these examples sound primarily about Alice going fast, the tree being old, and the chemical being stable. But if those appeared in articles about traffic law, natural disasters, and sidewalk design, then these phrasings might be less ambiguous if flipped (as another commentor pointed out).