Brainstorming things you can do about it:

(US) tell congress you want NSF funding to grow, not cut in half.

(US) tell your state gov to start (resume, really) funding state colleges and growing their research offices.

(World) tell your government to increase research funding and support recruiting efforts. Help people get out and continue to do good work.

(All) consider donations and support for professional societies around academics. (Not just in the US; I suspect strengthening these institutions world wide will help.)

(All) let folks know that the US government is gutting weather reporting, basic research (in basically every field), training for future researchers, and ending experiments that have been running for decades. If there is a cool thing you’d like to see in the future, chances are a republican just broke it.

(Folks with far too much money; kinda shocked you’re on here) donate to colleges to create grad student/postdoc/faculty positions. Earmark it carefully so that additional positions are created instead of administrators relabeling previous positions to move money around.

I’m going to make a mildly stronger claim. I think this game really is quite moddable by a non-coder. What you need is to implement a different ruleset with new win conditions; everything else can be done with copying existing files into the correct file structure. New win conditions are specified by a pretty boring JSON file, docs here:

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv/blob/master/docs/Modders/Mod-file-structure/5-Miscellaneous-JSON-files.md#victorytypesjson

See here for an MVP for a mod of this type (probably replaces/strips away too much, but you should be able to find the vanilla files in the github linked in the OP):

https://github.com/yairm210/Unciv-minimal-base-ruleset/tree/master

Which is all to say, this is much easier than doing address lookup imo.

By testing it out in the app?

I’ve also tried getting AI to program really simple things, like using js to find particular elements in a webpage (which I don’t control and involves far too many lines). It did fine.

It’s not ready for commercial use, but it makes hacking around unfamiliar code more accessible.

Kozy asked for a different rule set; essentially changing a few numbers related to non-combat victory (shorter research times, lower policy points required, etc). Identifying these numbers in a complicated code base, especially for a non-programmer, could be very difficult. For the non-programmer, understanding how the code works isn’t very important. You just need to know what to change, and perhaps make sure you don’t change more.

I think this is exactly a case where getting a novice programming friend to make a mod would make sense. Equivalently, to vibe code.

This is making a classic media literacy mistake.

The argument being made is that we can disregard the source if the thing that the headline is about is a real phenomena, regardless of if the actual anecdote is true. I don’t think you can ever disregard the source; we should always ask who told this story and why.

Also, OP definitely made a choice providing this url instead of another. Sensationalist headline? Mistake on their part? Lack of English language alternative?

That sounds like something easily modded; like a couple of integers somewhere. It would be cool to do (and seems vibe-code accessible if a model can hold the full script in context?)

You can be selective with this power; works well for a lot of folks. Have a smallish in group where you’re always upstanding, enjoy all the benefits that our tribal brain craves, and also enjoy the material benefits.

Some folks would have easier access to their drugs though. Pre war on drugs might have some benefits

Thank you!

I think it’s kinda interesting still, in that it shows people are (must?) drive so much. But yes, agree that per cap seems like the wrong statistic for any kind of safety.

Maybe more fair would be transit fatalities per mile traveled (any method)?

downvoters: is it wrong?

I would love to see the source on this one. It sounds fascinating.

As a civil matter, the publishing houses are more likely to get the full money if anthropic stays in business (and does well). So it might be bad, but I’m really skeptical about bankruptcy (and I’m not hearing anyone seriously floating it?)

Plantifs made that argument and the judge shoots it down pretty hard. That competition isn’t what copyright protects from. He makes an analogy with teachers teaching children to write fiction: they are using existing fantasy to create MANY more competitors on the fiction market. Could an author use copyright to challenge that use?

Would love to hear your thoughts on the ruling itself (it’s linked by reuters).

Depends on the content and the method. There are tons of ways to encrypt data, and under relevant law they may still count as copies. There are certainly weaker NN models where we can extract a lot of the training data, even if it’s not easy, from the model parameters (even if we can’t find a prompt that gets the model to regurgitate).

I also read through the judgement, and I think it’s better for anthropic than you describe. He distinguishes three issues:

A) Use any written material they get their hands on to train the model (and the resulting model doesn’t just reproduce the works).

B) Buy a single copy of a print book, scan it, and retain the digital copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

C) Pirate a book and retain that copy for a company library (for all sorts of future purposes).

A and B were fair use by summary judgement. Meaning this judge thinks it’s clear cut in anthropics favor. C will go to trial.

I’m still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It’s so very easy to claim the kids aren’t all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren’t from people using better prompts? Let’s hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.

I think it’s fine for this to be poorly defined; what I want is something aligned with reality beyond op-eds. Qualitative evidence isn’t bad; but I think it needs to be aggregated instead of anecdoted. Humans are real bad at judging how the kids are doing (complaints like the OP are older than liberal education, no?); I don’t want to continue the pattern. A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I’d rather learn from that mistake.

A handful of thoughts: There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings? Some kids have AI earlier; are they much different from similar peers without? Where’s the broad interviews/story collection from the kids? Are they worried? How would they describe their use and their peers use of AI?

One of the more important knowledge repositories right now… and it’s tied to a corporation. We should probably be supporting alternatives.

Anybody know of data backups? Do we have the whole thing on the internet archive?

As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We’re also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious ‘oh that’s a problem’ than the AI stuff.