> If you want a verifiable answer your best options would be to have the heat turned to 0, [...]
I don't see how that helps? If you just want the same answer multiple times in a row, you could just write down the seed of your pseudorandom number generator?
> And one shooting your answer and hoping its the bell curve answer is going to have decent results but its also proveably going to fail in a non insignificant number of cases
Setting the temperature to 0 doesn't guarantee you get a good answer either.
Yes, though I wouldn't hold it (too much) against him when he was young and the field was even younger. In the 1950s and 1960s and even later, it wasn't clear that LLMs would eventually win at all yet alone win so hard. And Chomsky's early work is genuinely useful. It's just that it's useful formal languages, like programming languages, and has only limited applicability to natural human languages.
> With a state program sending mail to a low density state could impact the pricing structure of a high density state.
Yep, aligns incentives nicely!
> You could end up with fragmentation where cross state is more expensive or worse these friction points are enough where the monopoly breaks down because a few states don't need a monopoly and just let local businesses compete.
Sounds like a good outcome, no? Yes, down with monopolies, especially government enforced ones.
> Surely with automation, robots and general efficiency gains every where in the production chain they should be lot cheaper than they used to be.
And they are! Especially when adjusted for quality and efficiency and how seldom you have to maintain them these days. (Old time-y sitcoms had the males of the show always tinker with their cars for a reason: the stereotype existed because cars _needed_ constant tinkering.)
> Surely they could sell them for right price.
Partially that's because the models from the bad old times are outlawed these days. You couldn't legally sell a Model T these days. Partially because even if you could, you couldn't produce the Model T at the scale that would make it cheap: no one would want such a crappy car at any price.
In the US, they also have annoying tariffs and other import restrictions. So you can't get the cheap and cheerful cars from China (or India or Brazil).
But getting away from cars: for a few decades it was almost a proverb that China would sell you junk for cheap. (And before that Japan had the same reputation. And sometime in the 19th century Germany had that reputation in Britain.)
So if you look around a bit: you can still often buy the low quality stuff from the bad old days, just from a different part of the market.
> This millennium is also entirely, utterly, absolutely defined by the short-sighted ideas of the economist.
I think you give them more credit than is due.
(And for all their faults, I don't think you can accuse them of eg having caused covid or started the war against Ukraine or turned China towards greater autocracy again.)
> [...] the field from which it draws its name [...]
The Economist was founded in 1843 and draws its name from a then-current term for something like a 'free-trade liberal' (with perhaps a fiscal conservative bend). Not the modern day field of economics.
Their big beef at the time of founding was a fight against the Corn Laws, a protectionist tariff against importing grain into Britain.
Yes. Though with Excel for most business users the choice was between
- lobby the IT department for at least a quarter, then wait at least one quarter, and at the end you get a buggy implementation of your idea that doesn't quite work
- or: spend a weekend hacking together a quick and ugly, buggy spreadsheet prototype of your idea that doesn't quite work.
Well, so far any gives level of capability has started with (expensive) frontier models, but everyone else, including the cheaper models, usually quickly catches up and the frontier keeps moving forward.
Fable-level capability will most likely be available for pennies soon enough.
Living in Singapore at the moment.