• 18 Posts
  • 314 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • and I believe they are also unionized? Or just have more labour protections.

    Well first off there are two Aldis in Germany, Aldi Süd (south, I think this is the one active in America and Austria) and Aldi Nord (north). Since they are different companies, they will have differences in how they treat labour organisations.

    Genrally speaking they will both of course oppose them though, as companies are wont to do. For example two month ago Aldi Nord fired a member of the works council (something like a union rep, but independently elected by all employees), which is a rather… uncommon occurrence due to their legal protections. Their lawyer is optimistic.

    The companies are unionised to a degree, for example the aforementioned work council had 4/19 members coming from Ver.di, a cross-occupational union for service workers of all kinds. It’s not uncommon for big employers like the Aldis to have several unions active among their staff, but all employees being union members is also rare.

    Overall though it’s probably mostly the labour protections by law that you are seeing at work here. For example the possibility to create these work councils, which can have quite a lot of influence on company policy, is mandated by law. You have to announce a company wide meeting and then the quorum to elect a representative at that meeting is three(!) people, no matter the company size.





  • You might be a few years behind. We have robots outpacing human performance in specific tasks using neural networks.

    Might well be behind here, but to my knowledge we don’t have a single robot outpacing a single human in most tasks. They don’t do one-shot learning from their mistakes, they don’t learn new movements randomly. Because most basically just use static weights when operating, because you don’t really want an industrial robot to get ideas. But even test systems that can learn usually just have an equivalent to the movement model of a brain, maybe a vision model, just like an LLM is just a language model. You would need a system that has all of those, plus the other brain areas, especially a prefrontal cortex like model for integration.

    I’m sure people are working on it, but I haven’t heard of anything successful yet. I imagine there might be a being like that in secret which is currently tortured in some billionaires tech dungeon. Poor thing.

    Also, LLMs can perform on tasks they weren’t explicitly trained for. This line is not as well defined as you make it sound.

    Yeah but that’s coincidental. It’s the model weights, prompt, and the RNG aligning. They can mock reasoning, because they do it by what they always do, predict more text, but it’s not like this has any effect on themselves. They aren’t really understanding a mistake when you point it out and growing neurons and synapses, i.e. they won’t have different model weights the next time you ask the same question. They can only really change when the powers that be release an update, which includes new training data, and hence model weights.









  • Europe didn’t really “ditch Windows” though or did it. You see news of some places switching to Linux or planning to switch

    Yes, that is correct. The nature of the EU itself and many of its members individually is rather decentralised, so you will see it happen bit by bit. But there is an increase in national governments interest in doing this over the last decade or so, and them doing it will make it easier for businesses and state/regional governments to follow. A keyword to look up is “Digital sovereignty”, that’s what they usually call it.