It's interesting that mining gold and silver is similar to printing more money; we usually think of inflation as represented by debasing coinage but there's been a few circumstances where flooding the local economy with precious metals is the same effect.
We sometimes see similar localized effects when wealthy foreign governments and NGOs go into poor countries to "help" with foreign aid and investment. When done correctly this can boost the local economy in a sustainable way, kind of priming the pump. But often it just dumps a lot of cash in, causing price inflation as the supply of goods and services fails to keep pace with the supply of money.
Outside influence heavily distorts local economies and needs to be done extremely carefully or you end up making a few people rich and starving everybody else.
Heifer International presents a good face on doing this by introducing livestock, providing education to the new owners, and imparting an in-kind donation requirement so as to perpetuate and spread the gains.
Likewise charities that build clean water infrastructure, small scale solar, cell phone infrastructure, insulated cooking pots to reduce fuel use, and build infrastructure and training for basic medical care – these are all things that support increases in productivity by removing barriers and introducing efficiency into people's lives enabling them to do more, for their children to attend more school, for them to lose less time to illness and malnutrition.
Where just giving away food or money, especially on large scales distorts and ruins economies. Likewise introducing significant export markets when a local economy isn't ready.
> Early data from a sub-district pilot showed sharp reductions in extreme poverty and improved wellbeing with minimal inflation, showing direct cash is a scalable tool to accelerating the end of extreme poverty.
That is an organization judging it's own success while a program is accelerating.
And if you measure poverty by how much money someone has and then give them money saying you've fixed poverty is tautology.
If your plan is to build a client state on perpetual welfare, well sure it's easy to be successful. But you can never leave and it's very possible that if you do leave things will be worse than if you had done nothing at all.
Whereas if you distribute a bunch of goats and chickens among a community and spread some education about raising goats and chickens, there's a good chance you've made a one shot permanent improvement to the quality of life of a community.
The criticism for giving direct aid in food and cash isn't that things are worse for the people you're giving them to while you're giving it to them... it's that you wreck the local economy for food and everything else because nobody can sell food when food is free and you can't price things correctly when money is pouring in. The money always stops and the aftermath is a disaster.
You can imagine every year the price per bushel of the wheat you grow drops and your mortgage stays the same. When your whole economy is like that no one wants to borrow or lend money and investment slows.
I'm no expert, but having read some archeological papers that do make conclusions like that, the evidence is often quite compelling and well-supported. The context we find something in can convey a lot of data, and conclusions that aren't supported by the evidence are frequently argued against by other archeologists. Granted, if you only read the university press releases or the popular summaries thereof it can be somewhat misleading, but that's more down to the journalism than the research.
Is there a changing taste hypothesis? It's honestly the first time I've heard that suggested as the explanation, versus the more plausible to me idea of reconstruction from incomplete evidence.
Eh, that's overstating the case. There's clearly some aesthetics that are more appealing to more people but for many architectural movements in particular the reason that they look that way is for the way that specific ideological reasons interacted with material constraints and the intended message. Brutalism in particular was intended to be cheap and honest; given the constraints many of these buildings were designed under, it makes sense. There are some quite appealing brutalist buildings; a core tenet of the style was integrating the buildings into the natural landscape, in contrast to the artificial styles that had previously been popular. The post-war shortages limited the available materials, shaping the constraints they were operating under. Raw concrete was honest, cheap, and was allowed to weather naturally.
There's a lot of ugly brutalist buildings, but there's a lot of ugly buildings in every style. At lot of them look cheap because they were supposed to be cheap; to a certain extent looking inexpensive was intended. In some cases the hostile nature of the institutional building was part of the point, conveying strength unstead of offering a pleasant experience, but there's also some quite pleasant brutalist buildings that have a lot of nature integrated into the design.
Interestingly to me, generative AI is often used to get results that commit the opposite error compared with these statues: they are, essentially, too confident in their choice of details. For any random topic, the average member of the public is likely to believe the AI's results are more accurate than can be backed up by the evidence.
Unfortunately, I am also worried that is the case.
There was an era where there were a lot of completely free sites, because they were mostly academic or passion projects, both of which are subsidized by other means.
Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs.
And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche communities by offering them a much easier way to create a community and then killing it off.
Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages. There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon.
And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI into the mix.
There is an awful lot of "looking for my keys under the street light" going around these days. I've seen a bunch of projects proposed that are either based on existing data (but have no useful application of that data) or have a specific application (but lack the data and evaluation required to perform that task). It doesn't matter how good your data is if no one has any use for things like it, and it doesn't matter how neat your application would be if the data doesn't match.
I'm including things like RL metrics as data here, for lack of a better umbrella term, though the number of proposed projects that I've seen that decided that ongoing evaluation of actual effectiveness was a distraction from the more important task of having expensive engineers make expensive servers into expensive heatsinks is maddening.
The importance of having good metrics cannot be overstated.
On the "applying X" problem - this almost feels to me like another argument against fine tuning? Because it seems like Applying can be a surprisingly broad skill, and frontier lab AIs are getting good at Applying in a broad fashion.
The Arabian desert is technically considered to be part of the Sahara, climate-wise, and participes in the same cycle [2].
This article is about researching evidence for ehat those transitions looked like, focusing on evidence that dates around the end of that particular dry period, pre-Holocene.
> Prior to the onset of the Holocene humid period, little is known about the relatively arid period spanning the end of the Pleistocene and the earliest Holocene in Arabia. An absence of dated archaeological sites has led to a presumed absence of human occupation of the Arabian interior. However, superimpositions in the rock art record appear to show earlier phases of human activity, prior to the arrival of domesticated livestock25.
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