I've noticed it too. When it started the overcapacity messages went away. I think they are switching to models with fewer parameters during oversubscribed hours.
Learning to formalize math to then prove Putnam competition problems rigorously in Lean would require you to have mid-to-advanced college level math and CS background. (Learning to do a small fraction of the Putnam competition without using Lean probably only needs strong highschool math and early undergrad math, with training for competitions a strong bonus.)
The administration is also pressing for a 55% budget cut to the National Science Foundation. The NSF is the primary funding agency for engineering, physics, mathematics, chemistry and computer science, among many other fields. If there's any doubt about the seriousness of that situation, the director has resigned over it. When some worried that US world leadership in physical and life sciences may be surpassed in a generation, I doubt anyone realized it could happen in one year.
>I doubt anyone realized it could happen in one year
I mean China has been modernizing their academics for a long time. See "Double First-Class Construction" [0]. But it's worth remembering that they did a lot of damage during the Cultural Revolution.
China has a highly unique language for foreigners to acclimate to. While I salute the effort for and commitment to higher education, I’m not sure this will bring the boon they’re hoping for.
I would have suggested that they create a high-quality course for introducing westerners to their language instead. It’s the sort of thing that everyone takes for granted that it exists but often doesn’t (where is the Wheelock’s for Spanish these days?) Tonality, pictography, and a highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners, let alone all three at once.
There is a ton of easily available content for learning Chinese.
In terms of government-sponsored resources, the Chinese government has created the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) tests, and has written standard textbooks for them that are pretty decent. All sorts of third parties have written their own textbooks oriented towards the HSK tests as well.
> highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners
Analytic morphology is what makes spoken Chinese so easy to learn, in my opinion. There's almost none of the complexity found in Indo-European languages, like number, case, gender and tense. The main barriers to learning Chinese for Westerners are:
* It's not Indo-European, so the vocabulary is almost entirely new.
* Tonality, though this is about the same level of difficulty as memorizing noun genders in Indo-European languages.
* The writing system. Memorizing a few thousand relatively arbitrary characters is difficult.
AI has made real time translation very feasible, I don’t think Chinese will be much if a language barrier for foreign students and researchers in the near future. You can do it all in a local model with a moderately powerful mobile GPU. We are almost at the point where you put some ear buds in your ear and some glasses could handle reading…etc…
The Cultural Revolution was pretty bad but it did put an end to religion and superstitious customs. Visit India and you will understand what Mao's goals were.
(European countries killed off 1000 years of Christianity in a single generation at the same time Mao did his giant leap experiment).
> The Cultural Revolution was pretty bad but it did put an end to religion and superstitious customs
This is actually a pretty interesting point. Most of the semi-religious customs that were killed off still live on in Malaysia - to the point where I was surprised at how un-chinese China was when I visited.
The tarrifs are an exception from the normal rules about keeping politics out of things, because they're non-toxified by partisan culture war. They came so far out of left field that nobody was pre-trained to interpret criticism of them as an attack on their identity.
As an environmentalist, I am generally in favor of gasoline tax to pay for road maintenance. Without getting into the nuance of that position - I do not disagree with the fact that gas stations in my area break down the added cost per gallon into federal, state, and local tax per gallon. In fact I support it, transparency is important.
One of the obstacles to getting that point of view across is that very few of the people in countries with a majority religion (which is most countries) see criticism of their government's history as criticism of their religion. I've never really heard a Christian complain about the treatment of the thirty years war in history books, and that's presented in an extremely negative light. The equation you're making doesn't have a lot of traction in the broader world.
It's not documenting historical facts about Israel that's problematic, it's using that history to justify calls for the destruction of Israel. Does anyone cite the Thirty Years' War to advocate for the destruction of Germany?
One issue that occurs is when person A is criticized for documenting historical facts on the basis that since person B has in other contexts used them as a pretext for something wrong, person C, after finding out about the historical facts, might independently come to the same conclusion as person B. The effect is to treat person A's documentation activity with the same approach as person C's eventual choices.
Here's how it might work, by analogy to the workflow for image generation:
"An aerodynamically curved plastic enclosure for a form-over-function guitar amp."
Then you get something with the basic shapes and bevels in place, and adjust it in CAD to fit your actual design goals. Then,
"Given this shape, make it easy to injection mold."
Then it would smooth out some things a little too much, and you'd fix it in CAD. Then, finally,
"Making only very small changes and no changes at all to the surfaces I've marked as mounting-related in CAD, unify my additions visually with the overall design of the curved shell."
Then you'd have to fix a couple other things, and you'd be finished.
I appreciate that you have given this some thought, but it is clear that you dont have much or any professional experience in 3D modeling or mechanical design.
For the guitar amp, ok. Maybe that prompt will give you a set of surfaces you can scale for the exterior shell of the amp. Because you will need to scale it, or know exactly the dimensions of your speakers, internal chambers, electronics, I/O, baffles, and where those will all ve relative go eachother. Also...Do you need buttons? Jacks/connectors/other I/O? How and where will the connections be routed to other components? Do you need an internal structure with an external aesthetic shell? Or are you going to somehow mold the whole thing in one piece? Where should the part be split? What kind of fasteners will join the parts and where should they be joined? What material is the shell? Can it be thinner to save weight? Or need ribs or thickness for strength? Where does it need to be strong?
These are the issues from 30 seconds of thinking about this. AI (as suggested) could maybe save me from surfacing an exterior cosmetic cover, given presice constraints and dimensions, but at that point, I may as well just do it myself.
If you have a common, easy, already solved an mechanical design problem (hinge e.g.), then you buy an off the shelf component. For everything else, it is bespoke, and every detail matters. Every problem is a "wine glass full to the brim"
I think you’re jumping too fast to the “vibe CADing” extreme. It’s been a while since I’ve used Solidworks in anger so I’d rather use ECAD as an example: I’d kill for the ability to give Altium a PDF datasheet and have it generate footprints or schematic components tailored to my specific pinout for a microcontroller. Or give it a pdf of routing guidelines and have it convert those to design rules tied just to those nets. Those are the details that take up most of the time (although I’d still spend quite a lot of tine verifying all the output).
In MCAD it’s less of a problem because all the big vendors like Misumi, McMaster, et al have extensions or downloadable models but anything custom could probably benefit from LLMs (I say this as someone who is generally skeptical of their vision capabilities). I don’t think vibe CADing will work because most parts are too parametrized but giving an AI a bunch of PDFs and a size + thickness is probably going to be really productive.
In your example, what about mounting the electronics or specifying that the control knobs need to fit within these dimensions? I guess its easy if those objects are available as a model, but thats not always the case.. 3d scanner maybe?
You'd get control knobs of a reasonable size, and mounting holes in an arbitrary rectangle, then correct them with the true dimensions outside of generation.
I don't know a lot about this but it seems like if the sampling performance was adequate, external checks like theorem verification would work to get "over the data wall."
There have already been good results there with DeepMind's math Olympiad work. I think the LLM portion there was only for translating from informal to formal in the training process and in the final process they still used a manual translation to a formal description and the solver was transformer based and RL trained, but I think not starting with any language base, but it was able to learn some distribution helpful in solving the problems with RL, verifier,and light scaffolding of the tree search alone.
If you don't know the answer to a problem, you're not going to be able to repeat sampling until it is correct. Random strings will saturate all benchmarks at k=infinity if tested this way.
I wonder if this idea could help overturn the negative incentives behind NIMBYism:
1. Homeowners in functional local democracies block new construction because it reduces the prices of their homes in exchange for no benefit to them, but...
2. When new, higher-density homes are constructed the total value of all houses increases much more than the total decline in the price of all old houses. This implies...
3. There is enough money available in the overall venture of new construction to compensate previous owners for the decline in prices, and although there could be many ways to accomplish it,
4. A tax on changes in assessed value that can go negative if the change is below a threshold, where the threshold is set so that the city collects net-zero revenue from this tax, would result in lump sum payments from developers (who dramatically increase assessed value) to people for whom the growth in their home prices had been depressed below the city's average by a nearby supply increase (whose assessed value would increase the least in that year if there was any truth to their objections).
For those motivated purely by fear of their home no longer increasing in value, faster than inflation, a scheme like this might help soften their opposition.
Unfortunately, the coalition of people who oppose housing is not purely financially motivated.
There our groups of people for whom low density living is all about status and excluding others, and there is no amount of money that would compensate them for loss of status and exclusion.
There are others for whom the argument is purely aesthetic or sentimental - they legit cannot imagine any type of nice neighbourhood composed the buildings that are single-family homes with triangle roofs.
Some have never lived in anything other than a single-family home, and their understanding of multifamily buildings comes from news media and cultural stereotypes. They believe that as soon as you have a multi family structure, it’s automatically a ghetto of some sort, while simultaneously being luxury housing.
Many fear increased traffic, but will also oppose any effort to limit cars.
Others just fear change of any kind.
I have been to more housing hearings than I can count, and the reasons people oppose housing are myriad. I don’t think there’s any sort of silver bullet to lessen opposition, and I suspect people have been opposing housing for as long as housing has existed.
What I think went wrong is that we gave people an unusually powerful set of tools in the 20th century to really lock down the aggregate total of floor space that it’s possible to build in a given region, so there’s almost no wiggle room. We made the default that building is unusual and bad, and put the onus on builders to justify construction, rather than forcing opponents to justify using government power to ban construction.
To get out of it, we either need to abolish this set of tools, or at least raise the default so significantly that it is higher than any foreseeable demand. Not only does this accomplish the goal of simply allowing housing to be built, but by ensuring that the amount that can be built is much higher than any amount anyone would ever want to build, it removes the leverage of landholders. No particular plot is more special than any other simply because the government said so.
> Some have never lived in anything other than a single-family home, and their understanding of multifamily buildings comes from news media and cultural stereotypes. They believe that as soon as you have a multi family structure, it’s automatically a ghetto of some sort
I grew up in single family homes and when I moved out on my own I lived in apartments
Hearing my neighbours screaming through the walls and floors did a lot to convince me that multi-family housing only works when either the homes are very soundproofed, or the culture is a lot more respectful of shared space
I bought a detached home as soon as I could and got the hell out of dense housing, it sucks to live like that
There’s a lot of romanticism or just preference for dense city living—especially at certain stages of life. But there are significant tradeoffs that many people just aren’t willing to make however hard as it is for others to understand.
I do like cities but, at this point, I can just travel to for trips and that makes more sense.
Has anyone ever tried answering the objections you listed with some form of compensation? My understanding of human nature is that people don't like to trust strangers and take what are for them risks if there's nothing to be gained from it and some (even if unlikely) potential loss.
Just imagine going to one of those meetings and asking everyone in the room to do a trust fall exercise. Even if the thought that you wouldn't catch them is totally unfounded, I bet you wouldn't be able to get a plurality. :-)
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