People, including the subject of this post, are more powerful in life on the basis of their literacy, numeracy, confidence, wide familiarity with a broad range of topics and social skills, notably their command of speech acts and attuning to/clicking with others.
The biggest educational determinator of life outcomes is literacy and the biggest determinator of career outcomes not already set at birth is social fluency.
Some suggested reading for the OP that other commenters haven't already touched on:
How Stanford teaches AI-powered creativity (2025) - by Jeremy Utley, director of executive education at the Hasso Plattner school of design: https://youtu.be/wv779vmyPVY
> People are more powerful in life on the basis of their literacy
sometimes I feel it works the opposite way: I feel recently (in the last 5 to 10 years), the people who know less clamour forcefully for simplistic solutions, and end up being liked more, and being more successful. They can sometimes appear stronger and more genuine than people who know more, and therefore have more doubts (the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know...)
Thanks a lot for the recommendations, that's useful, I will definitely have a look at that.
I'd be surprised if it's acceptable to give that question an honest answer.
Precise historical examples of specific acts of rebellion against legal systems perceived to be unjust, like the 1943 Amsterdam civil registry bombing (for which the Wikipedia page is illuminating alone) show the problems with such acts: even if everybody in a particular urban centre goes along with the rebellion, the long-term results are minor. As Kotkin says, successful revolutions need an ideological throughline that can produce coherence by itself.
The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to serve as a vital component of the UK's home heating infrastructure. The UK would have significant affordability problems with making up the difference from other gas exporting countries and would likely just have rationing and rolling outages instead.
"Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
>> The UK is extremely dependent on American LNG to […]
> "Extremely dependent" seems to be overstating things a bit - 11% of imported gas comes from the US with is about a fifth of what we import from Norway and a third of domestic production?
If the GP wants to hold to his logic, then the US would be "extremely dependent" on Canada, given that 25% of all crude oil refined in the US comes from their northern neighbour:
Pipeline-based providers are still a significantly greater percentage of the UK's overall gas consumption
Could the UK not rebalance its imports from LNG to more pipeline-based gas? It seems like the UK has managed to cut out Russian LNG imports completely already.
That sounds very heavy handed and risky. If it happens at all, maybe later? It's still a volatile time. The administration still does not have total control over the States and various judges.
The UK faces real structural problems with the inflating cost of living regardless of government, roughly halfway attributable to failing the lower-level challenge of continuing to import adequate quantities of diesel at affordable prices and the rest mostly coming from an aging population. Spot diesel has come down from the price spike of covid to approximately 1.3x the 2019 price.
Almost all physical goods have diesel prices contribute to their sticker price in a significant way. The diesel exporting countries are all incrementally increasing their domestic consumption, leaving less for the world market year on year.
The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
Tens of millions of people, held hostage by a clique of crabs in a bucket.
I would say "so diesel uses should be encouraged to transition to electric where feasible", except the government has also dropped the ball on electricity prices and is now looking at increasing taxes on EVs.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms, largely because the government is disproportionately drawn from a class of people who don't want those policies. The media of the upper middle class of the UK has sincere column after sincere column of hating the rest of the population and calling for better controls over the cattle.
This is spot on, though. I joke that instead of state controlled media we have a media controlled state.
> The UK government isn't trying much policy for tackling the causes or the symptoms
It doesn't know what it wants, nor how to prioritise between conflicts from vague pre (and post) election statements. It certainly doesn't want to make the hard compromises that are actually required.
That said...
I wouldn't want the job of trying to balance the books, fix the housing backlog, modernise our energy infrastructure, integrate social and medical care, address social cohesion, manage persistent inequality, improve our global competitiveness etc etc etc
Any one of those goals is probably accomplishable merely via delegation, assuming you can pick the right people (good luck!). To achieve all of them likely isn't. It may well be we cannot have all of them at once. Note that I just grabbed a subset of things that seem relevant, certainly not all of the things the government should care about.
I'm not saying nobody could run this country more effectively. I do strongly suspect the market for that kind of skillset is out of our current price range
CAD and machining are different fields, true, but I see a lot of the same flaws that Adam Karvonen highlighted in his essay on LLM-aided machining a few months ago:
Do any people with familiarity on what's under the hood know if the latent space produced by most transformer paradigms is only capable of natively simulating 1-d reasoning and has to kludge together any process for figuring geometry with more degrees of freedom?
Well, they couldn't generate 2D artwork if they weren't capable of working with multiple output dimensions.
An interesting thing about transformers is that they are world-class at compressing 2D image data even when not trained on anything but textual language ( https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10668 ). Whether that notion is relevant for 3D content would be two or three figures over my pay grade, though.
Commenting on the link you provided: is using a LLM the right approach for this? Why not train a specified model to generate accurate CAD drawings, rather than offloading the task to some LLM that, while it might have some knowledge of machining or CAD conception, will probably fail, because that is not really what it was built for.
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