Biologist123

definitely the big guys are causing havoc all of their own deep sea where they fish, with bottom dredging nets etc. And maybe there was some contribution inshore, certainly I’ve heard complaints about this in Somalia. But the more immediate causes in inshore decline seems to have been increase in fishing pressure due to demand growth (population growth, exports, tourism), loss of spawning sites due to mangrove destruction, and dynamite fishing which destroys habitat.

You don’t have to stop the family business, the resource just needs to be sustainably-managed - sustainable offtake levels, otherwise the resource itself will crash. Indeed they already have - as although catch volume is down 75%, people now catch and eat fish not consumed in the past.

> Genuinely interested: what environmental problem did you solve there?

Soil erosion.

> Are "fishing families" really the problem with fishing? I would have thought that the industrial fishing boats are not "family businesses"...

They fish different zones. Big trawlers offshore/deep sea. Artisanal fishers inshore. The inshore fisheries catch has declined 75% in 30 years in some areas.

My professional experience of environmental work is that true positive environmental impact is very difficult. In complex systems, unintended consequences are likely. Environmental problems often arise at the interface between multiple complex systems, further increasing complexity. For example, in a project I worked on, we organized for farmers to receive payments to build soil conservation measures. With the money they were paid, we believe it was mostly used for fuel, pesticides and fertilizer, all which carry their own environmental cost. So we’d solved one environmental problem, but inadvertently created another.

In another project I heard about, fishing communities were provided with better access to contraception on the hope that smaller families would reduce consumption pressure. A PhD researcher uncovered that actually smaller families increased their fishing activity as they wanted to boost the life chances of their fewer offspring. (Those results were swept under a carpet apparently).

I’m happy about this law reported on here as it will force some honesty about environmental trade-offs, and also hopefully apply to environmental organisations which have in the past been misleading in their claims about environmental benefits of their work.

The US is placing a big bet on AI to break the economic secular stagnation of recent decades. If IP is an obstacle to that, it would be great if IP laws are loosened.

This battle will be fascinating.

I first heard the expression on a stats course for an MSc programme and am struggling a bit with the idea that it’s a concept not used by scientists, as other posters also attest to. The lecturer used the expression in the context of poor scientific news reporting where correlations were used to imply causation. Such that it’s used as a cheap propaganda or marketing gimmick.

It’s also fair point, as the writer points out, that correlation doesn’t say something interesting.

What I also find interesting is that the meaning of shibboleth has moved on: no longer a test of insider/outsider status. Now a totemic belief or principle.

Good insight. In parallel, I wonder how efforts to decarbonise can ever be delinked from competition for sex in more than niche communities.

The alternative is that the agreement mentions phase-out, but only lip service is paid to that objective. At least we now know categorically where we stand.

The model is never the reality.

I gave it a piece of text from a Guardian op ed and asked it to identify the rhetorical devices used in the piece.

I suspect it would be possible to now create a GPT by uploading a file listing the various rhetorical/propaganda tricks deployed in media and then asking the GPT to analyse submitted text from that perspective.

I’m very enthusiastic about the possibility that someone will shortly build an AI plugin that identifies use of propaganda and “advertising techniques” as I browse the web. A lot of this stuff flies under my radar and having a guide to help me out is something I would really value, for me and my children.

I should add I’ve checked out whether ChatGPT can do this, and discovered it can do a reasonable job - even back in the days of 3.5.

I sometimes wonder if pieces like this are really just an insight into the writer’s coping strategies. For better or worse, they need good news to keep going. I don’t know if it applies to everyone.

I think what you and the writer of the article are complaining about is not the LLM but the dataset that the LLM is describing.

My guess is that if you created a GPT of a well-regarded book on WW1, you’d be able to have an enlightening conversation about the topic.

I carried out a work training today, giving about 20 project managers from a client company an introduction to a methodology for set up of produce cooperatives within their supply chains. Using template project management documentation which I’d uploaded to a GPT, I could lead the project managers through a questionnaire and then feed their answers as an image to the GPT, and have the GPT spit out the project documentation tailored to the project manager’s specifics.

It was sort of awesome. I say sort of because I was able to create 20 documentation sets in a day. But there was still a lot of manual copying and pasting.

Why?

The GPT goes off-piste making its own shit up after about a page or so despite having templates to use, which I had to find a work around for. Easy enough but needed a lot of repeat instructions: “now output page 3 of the concept note” etc.

ChatGPT timed me out about half way through for an hour. That got a bit stressful waiting for access again.

Previously, I’d built some software to do this job, at a cost of about 15k.

An excellent and freaky 2.5 page short story in Nature on a very similar theme. If you have the time, enjoy:

https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a

He is a well-known British writer, fondly known as the Gorgeous Moonbat. His book mentioned at the link, Regenesis, is good.

This was a brilliant video. Great story-telling, livened up with a mash-up approach. For Brits there is a major plot twist at about 12”30.

Thanks for posting. Made my morning.

I’m never going to unhear the vocal fry in that song, which I had never noticed before. Your comment should have come with some sort of spoiler alert…haha. Unfashionable opinion (for my generation): I love(d) that song.

I’ve really come to doubt human ability to exercise free will in all but the rarest of cases. I wonder if SBF really had a moment where a stop/go decision was meaningfully available to him. If we’re all automatons, what’s the point of prison?

I’ve been reading Michael Lewis’ account of SBF: he genuinely sounds unhinged.

German websites and UX in general differ from the English-speaking countries.

MBA programmes?

Thanks for the opinion. It seems to me that is the point when the entire software landscape shifts.

Sure. For example, I might not want a borrower to see any data other than their own, so using a chatbot to access their data and output it in any way they want, eg “chatbot, did I make any payments over 50 dollars to Amazon last year. If so, when and can you list them out”. Or “was my groceries bill higher last month than this? Why?”.

I also ask because it seems that once AI can process data in response to queries like this, the software landscape shift hugely.

Is that the case? I didn’t realise. Although as a tourist draw, dead trees are not exactly that appealing. A couple of years ago, I took my three year old daughter up a mountain, and she earnestly said to me: “the once’ler”. We haven’t been back.

The non-managed zone is rewilded, so it will be left to regenerate on its own I guess.

Funny, Monopoly in my childhood invariably ended with a massive fight between siblings. It’s still a ‘sort-of’ family joke.

I have heard estimates of 100 million trees dead in the Harz. The common refrain is that this was caused by climate change, but also choice of monoculture was a major contributing factor as the area was historically covered by mixed deciduous. Furthermore, choice of forest type will affect soil moisture retention, so reduced rainfall would have been buffered by better choice of forest type.

Loss of those trees was an economic disaster. I’m not sure it’s an environmental disaster yet - especially as replanting seems to be with better reference to the agro-climatic zone.

Your analogy is a bit of an odd one, as unsolicited dick pics are undoubtedly a form of sexual abuse.

In the west, I sometimes wonder if we already have a scoring system which ensures only good citizens can access housing, food and the rest.

It’s called “money”, which together with credit scoring functions to make sure you abide by the rules society sets: no pay, no play.