Everybody is saying that the Great Lakes region is a climate haven, but it's intensely vulnerable to both polar vortex events coming down from Canada and wet-bulb heat waves coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. The middle of America is flat; there is no natural barrier to stop a frigid or sweltering airmass from moving in. This has already happened multiple times within just the last few years.
In terms of death toll, a power outage during a severe deep freeze (with subzero temperatures and -50 wind chills) or a wet bulb event has a far greater lethality potential than wildfires. The most deadly wildfire in California history was the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise; it caused 85 deaths. The Oakland Hills firestorm of 1989, immortalized in SimCity and several made-for-TV movies, only caused 25 deaths. By contrast, the 1995 Chicago heat wave caused 740 fatalities, and even the 2024 polar vortex event that barely made headlines killed more people (90) than the Camp Fire.
(Also note the low absolute numbers of even very severe, headline-grabbing natural disasters in developed countries. And that good construction can mitigate almost all of them. You are probably better off, in strict actuarial terms, by settling in a place where you can make a lot of money and then using it to prepare your home for disaster than by settling in a place that is cheaper but where you can't afford the latest building technology.)
It wasn't because of the adversarial link farms, though, which are usually handled by trying to identify fake links and take them out of the computation in a preprocessing step. (There are many others parts of Google's '00s ranking algorithm that relied upon backlinks as well). It was because the web scaled to the point where PageRank couldn't process it, because the exact matrix solution to it is O(N^3). They replaced it with an iterative graph traversal algorithm from a set of ~1000 seeds which were themselves chosen through the original PageRank algorithm. I suspect this is published somewhere, because Gemini alludes to it when I ask what's the algorithmic complexity of PageRank.
Interestingly this is a common pattern that Google uses. Come up with a heuristic algorithm that works well enough to get your first million users. Then, train a machine-learned algorithm on the actual behavior of your first million users to scale to your next billion. Assistant's NLP was similar, where the first version had all these linguists hand-inputting grammars for all the different ways you might say a command, and then they just trained a much simpler neural net mapping utterance -> command once they had enough users to get dense training data.
A minor comment: on a dense graph, one iteration of the power method would be O(N^2).
One would typically need many iterations for adequate convergence. If the number of iterations required is linear, then yes it would indeed take O(N^3). But it was never that bad.
However, the web-graph is very sparse, so per iteration cost is around O(N). That can still be quite a beast though.
Have fond memories of trying out Pagerank iterations on then new fangled infra called Mapreduce. Not for computing the pagerank for ranking pages, for experiments on some other large graph.
At that time (somewhere between 2004-07), computing Pagerank on the web, without preprocessing, got you all the porn sites at the top !
I've had a couple of reports that this applied to. It's incredibly disruptive. "I've got to fly back to India to renew my visa." "Okay, when will you be back?" "I have no idea, it depends when I can get an appointment. It could be next week, it might be in a month." "[State department] We're pausing all visa appointments." "Well fuck."
Meanwhile I've got a tech lead who is 12 hours away from the rest of the team. He was at least willing to work US-East hours while in India (basically staying up all night and sleeping during the day), but there was a huge amount of management overhead and inconvenience for the employee involved.
I've worked at companies where we transfer people to Canada during periods like this in the same time zone. Sometimes they enjoy it so much they don't want to transfer back to the US.
At least the procedure used to be that one would try to get an appointment at the US consulate in one's home country and then arrange the trip around it. Also, at least in my experience (but importantly, not with this administration) was that one was never required to leave the US.
The main constraint is re-entry into the US and being able to travel outside the US. If one stayed here, there was no problem switching schools, programs, jobs, adjusting status to permanent residency or naturalization. On the other hand, for re-entry, one needs a valid visa stamped on a passport which necessitated a trip to one's home country. This stamping visit could be unpredictable.
Ideally, one would like to travel freely to see family and friends but I see a lot of comments implying that one is forced to leave. It might be true now but a lot of comments here are conflating several issues together.
The first time it happened (2023) it was a non-issue; he did exactly as you said, appointment happened as planned, and then he was back on his scheduled plane trip a week later.
Everything post-2025 has been a shit-show. There's no predictability or clear guidance, either from our lawyers or from the state department.
Predictability matters a lot in business. If you know what the procedure is and how long it will take, you can plan around it. If the rules change in the middle of the game you're left scrambling to keep up.
Predictability flew out the window with the last election. I simply do not understand how any business leaders supported this, but I suppose the ability to bribe their way out of chaos was appealing.
It's beneficial for the largest firms, the ones that can forge personal relationships with the administration, because it's detrimental to all other businesses. Competitive advantage and all that.
Honestly, this is kind of the point. Making foreign labor so unbearably difficult to work with will force companies to hire domestically. At least, hire more domestic workers than they would have otherwise.
You are a great person. Thankfully you work at a non-profit and donate all of your money to charity, otherwise if you work for personal profit or company profit you may be a hypocrite.
One is the obvious one, to produce things. AI can somewhat help with that, although less than you might think because it's largely producing knowledge output rather than physical things. If AI lets one knowledge worker do the work of 10, the effect of that is to free up 9 knowledge workers to take up manual labor, it's not to make manual laborers 10x more productive.
The second purpose is to distract people from attempting to work on their own interests and instead corral them into working for others'. You see examples of this in the form of acquihires (where they obviously don't need you to do the work, they already have a competing product, but they do need to take your product off the market), and in bullshit jobs, and in think tanks and consulting firms and legal machinery. It's a form of social control and a means to maintain social order, not a requirement for actual productivity. When you don't give people a job to do, they start working for their own interests, and their own interests frequently conflict with others. And we've seen that over and over again: the Great Depression nearly led to a fascist coup in the U.S. [1] and did result in fascism in Germany, Italy, and Spain, and large communist movements in France and China. The COVID pandemic and subsequent lockdowns led to widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and other countries.
Popular discourse concentrates almost exclusively on the first purpose, because the second one is icky to talk about. In reality most people are individually better off being independently wealthy and not working, but society can only absorb so many free agents with their own ideas and wills to power. (This is also why retirement and stay-at-home parenting are broadly institutionalized: it's okay for people to not work when they no longer have the energy to work, it's only dangerous when people are not working and yet have the energy to do things other than working). But the second reason actually has more explanatory power. If you assume that the true reason for employment is to take people out of the competitive will-to-power market, lots and lots of irrational moves suddenly make sense, like high-paid executives, bullshit jobs, bureaucratic incompetence, projects where billions are invested and then the whole thing is canceled, competing internal divisions, people not getting fired for doing nothing, etc. The whole point is for them to do nothing.
There's a Chesterton's Fence [2] issue at work here. Many people, particularly young people, grow up with the first explanation for work and take it at face value, and then a new technology comes around that saves all this work and they're like "Of course this is a good idea! I want to be part of it!" But if the actual purpose of work is to distract people from pursuing their own interests, this is incredibly dangerous. The actual consequence is going to be widespread unrest and quite possibly war.
Yann LeCun's response is interesting. I've heard that the transformer architecture underlying LLMs is actually really effective for robotics, but progress is a lot slower here because instead of just scraping the web and Anna's Archive, you have to outfit workers with motion-capture suits that record their every move, and then have them physically do enough jobs that you can gather good training data on how the job is done. This is a little challenging when no blue-collar worker wants to be replaced by a robot.
Long-term there's probably a lot more potential, and much bigger markets, in robotics than in LLMs, but it will really take the long term to get there.
Biden gets Russia and Ukraine stuck in a quagmire in Ukraine, so Putin retaliates by getting the U.S. and Iran stuck in a quagmire in the Middle East. Wars are won by the countries that stay out of them. The Russia-Afghanistan war played a very significant role in the downfall of the Soviet Union.
The irony is that China is the big winner from all of this, simply by staying above the fray and making trade deals with all the countries that more bellicose superpowers start fighting. When your adversary is making a mistake, let him.
His strategy was to give Ukraine just enough weapons to prevent annihilation without giving them so many weapons that would allow them to win. Hence, quagmire. The weapon sales also came with conditions like not allowing them to strike deep within Russia itself, all of which prolongs the war without leading to a clear victor.
But Russia and Putin can end the war at their earliest convenience. Your perspective discounts the agency of the aggressor, places all agency in weaponry (as opposed to the will of the defenders) and doesn't acknowledge that the Biden approach offered a continuous off-ramp that should have been taken. I'm not sure how allowing Russia to not suffer defeat means that they must continue their barbaric war against Ukraine.
They can't, really. Putin's domestic power base will not let him suffer a defeat. His power is predicated on seeming all-powerful; once he doesn't, then other internal threats within Russia which have been kept at bay by fear will be emboldened, and the Russian state collapses. This is a worse security outcome for the U.S. than having a hostile dictator in charge of Russia; with the status quo, at least the enemy is visible, we know who has the nuclear launch codes, and his future actions can be reasoned about, while if a nuclear-armed state descends into anarchy we have no idea who the threat is and they have no incentive not to launch.
The mistake here is in seeing this as a clash of two nation-states that are each unified actors. Humans have agency; states are social constructs. It is quite possible for a state to disintegrate if the ideas holding it together are proven false. The Soviet Union did just that 35 years ago, and it could easily happen again this generation.
> Putin's domestic power base will not let him suffer a defeat.
Too bad though, don't start wars man. No one is going to throw you a bone if you start a war that no one else wants happening. If you star a war, you need to be able to finish it. It's like that Seinfeld line about the car reservation, except wars. You don't get points for being scary, you get points for winning.
> This is a worse security outcome for the U.S. than having a hostile dictator in charge of Russia;
I disagree... bigger picture we don't want this kind of thing festering, it never works out well. It's not managable, despite people acting like these things can be managed. They can't, and that's why we're seeing this situation. Similar to Hamas in Gaza. It was left to fester, thought it had more clout and power than it did, and look what happened. Nothing good.
> The Soviet Union did just that 35 years ago, and it could easily happen again this generation.
Russia is going to fall apart, we're going to be left with Muscovy, God willing.
Not honest-to-god Tesla tiles, but a friend of mine put up Chinese knock-offs that he's pretty happy with. I think the problem here is "Tesla" rather than "solar roofs"; friend has a non-Tesla solar roof and it looks great, produces great, and has required little maintenance since he put it in 4 years ago.
Also - 90s tech generally didn't try to charge you rent for existing. Either you paid them a price for some fairly tangible benefit to your life, or they gave you the service for free fueled by VC dollars (which we now recognize as nurturing dependence so they could charge you rent for existing, but it felt very different in the moment).
I think a lot of the complaints about tech these days come from the feeling that it's trying to own your life rather than improve your life. Things like tractors that won't go if you don't pay their subscription fees; cars that won't go if you don't pay their subscription fees; music collections that you don't actually possess and that go away if you don't pay their subscription fees; photo & backup services that make all your childhood memories go away if you don't pay their subscription fees; proprietary defaults that auto-opt-you-in to these services so you don't realize you can't access the photos without paying their subscription fees; SaaS vendors that hold your business hostage until you pay their subscription fees; search advertising that holds the path to your customers hostage unless all your profits go to them; search/AI engines that are ~70% accurate but don't provide any good way of seeking out alternative information; E-commerce platforms that take your money but give you junk instead; building contractors that take your money but give you junk instead; insurance companies that take your money but don't actually pay out claims; rent that keeps increasing by the maximum amount each year but never bothers to service habitability concerns with the place; and so on.
I think a lot of the frustration today comes from the feeling that people are treading water not to improve their lives, but to make somebody else rich, oftentimes people who aren't working at all.
AI is now more powerful than the people doing the prosecution. After all, those folks are using AI to make their legal briefs, and also for burning peoples' houses down with drones for that matter.
Welcome to our 21st century dystopia. Hope you survive.
It's not that "AI" is too powerful because bad prosecutors use fucking ChatGPT to write their briefs. It's that there's too much investment wrapped up in the technology for it to be challenged. Same reason Flock won't be held accountable for mass stalking, or we never hold our commanders-in-chief responsible for war crimes. If you're sufficiently powerful then the law is a battlefield between you and other powerful entities to slug it out, not a set of binding principles that apply as written. There are no meaningful powers that want OpenAI punished, so it won't happen. The law and Constitution will be reinterpreted to make it so.
This is typical at the college/university level - when I attended 20-25 years ago, we were expected to learn the material through readings outside of class, and then class time was spent on discussion, application, questions, and working through problems.
IMHO there's a lot to recommend this style. A lot of students learn better when they can wrestle with the material at their own pace, on their own time, in their own setting. It quells a lot of anxiety about "I'm not following what the teacher is saying, am I stuped, will I look bad in front of all my peers?" And then class time can be spent identifying holes in your knowledge and getting instant feedback from an expert, which is where they are most useful.
Although obvious, I think it's worth stating that this method mostly (only?) makes sense for higher education, where students are conscious, involved and engaged in their curriculum.
I think it makes sense as soon as students have the fundamentals down. You have to be able to read, listen, make connections, think critically, devote sustained attention to a task, and manage your time effectively. Some students develop these skills in elementary school, and then starting in middle school, the flipped classroom approach can work. Some adults never develop these skills. Although arguably, people that never develop these skills will likely be sitting there zoning out in a traditional classroom lecture and not actually learn anything.
In terms of death toll, a power outage during a severe deep freeze (with subzero temperatures and -50 wind chills) or a wet bulb event has a far greater lethality potential than wildfires. The most deadly wildfire in California history was the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise; it caused 85 deaths. The Oakland Hills firestorm of 1989, immortalized in SimCity and several made-for-TV movies, only caused 25 deaths. By contrast, the 1995 Chicago heat wave caused 740 fatalities, and even the 2024 polar vortex event that barely made headlines killed more people (90) than the Camp Fire.
(Also note the low absolute numbers of even very severe, headline-grabbing natural disasters in developed countries. And that good construction can mitigate almost all of them. You are probably better off, in strict actuarial terms, by settling in a place where you can make a lot of money and then using it to prepare your home for disaster than by settling in a place that is cheaper but where you can't afford the latest building technology.)
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