melfie

Not really my area of expertise, but this article lays out her perspective on this for anyone who isn’t aware: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/

TL;DR - Many times the cost of the LHC and unlike the LHC, the gains are likely to be incremental instead of revolutionary. The same funding could do much more good elsewhere.

To your point, agreed that even small, incremental gains for science are more valuable than what we are likely to get from AI.

I have started using Copilot more lately, but I’ve also switched from plastic straws to paper, so I’m good, right?

I enjoyed Sabine’s analysis in another video that continuing to make increasingly larger models with more compute is about as effective as continuing to make larger and larger particle accelerators. Come on, bro, this million km Gigantic Hadron Collider will finally get us to the TOE. Just one more trillion, bro.

Yikes, I have a Samsung smart TV. Guess I’ll be wrapping it in tin foil after reading this.

I use Copilot at work and overall enjoy using it. I’ve seen studies suggesting that it makes a dev maybe 15% more productive in the aggregate, which tracks with my own experience, assuming it’s used with a clear understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. No, it’s not replacing anyone, but it’s good for rubber ducking if nothing else.

I use Linux for almost everything, but I do have some important software that only works on Windows, so my solution is dual booting Windows 10 with a different static IP than the Linux partition, with the Windows IP blocked from the internet in the firewall.

It’s based on yt-dlp, which I can’t seem to get working reliably with my VPN, even with manual intervention like using cookies from a browser, switching servers, etc. Guess VPN IPs hit the rate limits pretty regularly, though I don’t want to risk my real IP getting banned. I’ve seen some people suggest using a VPS, but sounds like a lot of effort. Running something like this on a server and expecting it to reliably download videos in the background isn’t going to work that well from my experience.