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Nope. The main cost of the old climate.gov was the salaries of the folks writing the articles and pulling together the resources. They were not getting paid exorbitantly and are quite interested in still getting paid. Source: I am one of those people.

The site wasn't (isn't) about the data. It's about articles that contextualize the data. The money raised has allowed them to stand up a new site with all the old articles (which truth be told were all still nominally accessible via the internet archive) and will help fund them to create new ones. So it will stay relevant by paying the people who in the past worked for NOAA to creation the content, to now create the content paid for by donation.

I think the point is that there has been a push to move away from this data continuing to be available from these sources.

There has not.

Attempts have been made starting back in 2005 https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/senate-bill/786...

And I dare you to find another attempt in the intervening 20 years.

Santorum's bill was laughed out of Washington. It stands alone.



You do understand how this isn't an example of what I'm asking for, right?

In 20 years worth of history - you can't identify a single piece of legislation or a single executive action to demonstrate an ongoing threat to NOAA? You have to immediately jump to the tautology of "Project 2025 is dismantling NOAA because an article two years ago said Project 2025 was going to dismantle NOAA"?


haha yeah why would i believe something Project 2025 stated, haha silly me

If there is an active attempt at privatizing NOAA then you should be able to point to specific, real-world things that are happening to effect this change.

The grass is there to keep the dirt in place.

If you want to get pedantic we can't simulate anything with complete accuracy in the absence of a theory that encompasses all the known forces. Which we don't have. (Damn you gravity. Can't you just get along with the others)

To a useful level of accuracy we can certainly simulate water. And we can do the same for a single proton for some definitions of useful (but not other definitions).


It could be that once we truly understand math in a complete way it would lead inexorably to the definition of one and only one possible universe with only one possible set of rules and c and G would simply fall out naturally. I'd agree it seems unlikely given our current understanding of math and physics (and their relationship to each other). But given both are incomplete it remains a possibility. The one theme that seems to hold true as we dig deeper and deeper into how the world works is that the fundamental rules seem to get more and more unified.

Please tell us more about this. I’m not familiar with any definition of mathematics that would support the idea that it can prove statements about our universe without access to observed facts.

Are there any papers where this possibility is explored? What does it mean to have a complete understanding of mathematics?


But the metaphorical goal is to cover distance not get fit or to make the best use of what you trained for. A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner.

At least if the metaphor is about coding as a means to creating usefully functional code as efficiently as possible. Careful coding by hand may eventually be a hobby activity.

Personally, while I do get some satisfaction in coding by hand it was always the production of something useful that I found most rewarding. I was never someone who wrote code for a hobby. With LLM's I'm more productive. And I find that very satisfying.


> A trained runner on a bike is faster than a trained runner.

Not true if they kept going the wrong direction.


I had a box set up as NAT (running amazon linux) when we moved from a local datacenter to AWS in 2012. Shut it down last year. It had not been rebooted. Should have grabbed a screen capture of the uptime. Part of me wanted to leave it to reach 5000 days....


Perhaps LLM's do replicate the important features of "neurons and synapses and learning" and perhaps a "statistical modelling of our words" is pretty much what our brains are doing? Most of the counter-arguments I've seen boil down to "but humans are special" which I'm not sure I find compelling.

Not saying LLM's are conscious. Just that much of our amazement about their behavior seems to say more about us realizing the things we can do are not magic, rather than them being so amazing.


Tell me about the techniques you use to ensure all the code you use is 'correct'. and then explain why those techniques can't also be used by an AI.


I read and understand the code using my brain, by constructing a mental model and reasoning about it. An AI can't do this because they don't have mental models and don't do reasoning.


I am out of my depth here and don’t know anything about how other people reason and construct mental models, but I mostly talk to myself about the problem and then do something at the end of that. There’s no point where I like have the whole solution in my minds eye (for programming topics, maybe for a drawing or a sculpture or removing a transmission or something I can do that).

Following the output of agent “thinking” simulation lines up pretty good with what I’ve been doing for 20ish years, but of course I may just be a moron who isn’t good at computers.


I don't think I would conclude you're a moron. I don't think you really "hold everything in your mind's eye" when you understand something. I don't know how I do it or how it really works (nobody does). But the fact that the agent logs resemble how I might talk while thinking doesn't really give me much confidence (since chatbots can resemble all kinds of behaviour they're not actually doing).


There is simple correctness but there are also second order effects to consider. How does this particular implementation allow you to grow, and in which directions? What does it prevent? If you don't already have an opinion about this, then the LLM is going to do something and you're going to have to live with it, because it has no idea that it is "making a decision". And now, neither do you!

This is why LLMs do their best work at "leaf nodes", building on existing infrastructure but not designing new patterns on their own.

LLMs can't introspect, reason, or build internal models of the world. You can get very far without that, but there are some subtle ways it will bite you, and it's a fundamental limitation. Hallucinations are one: they are the feature, not a bug.


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