Earw0rm

Only if they haven't yet reproduced.

It underlines much anti-immigrant sentiment today, in that immigrants are a self-selected sample of the hardest working and most motivated people from their country of origin, whichever country that might be.

There's a lot of Americans here in London, from all over the US, and virtually none of them are anything at all like the stereotypical flyover-state USian - and yet in the US itself, there's plenty of those. Heck, go to any of the countries where smart, hard-working immigrants are said to come from and you'll find plenty of dumb, lazy or just not-that-capable people

So it's almost inevitable that e.g. a Somali who ends up in Leeds is going to be smarter, more motivated and harder working than both the average Leeds native and the average Somali.

Because it needs to fetch implements, access cupboards, use appliances. Otherwise it's basically a Thermomix.

I'm not talking about a long term storage drawer for the laundry system, more like a large pull-out in which dry, folder items are dispensed. And I wouldn't put a suit in a washing machine full-stop, I don't know what they have where you are but the ones in this country would wreck a suit jacket very quickly, we take jackets for dry-cleaning once a month or so.

A robot capable of preparing meals also has a similar hazard matrix to a car.

Absolutely no way I'm having something cloud-connected - with human-body level degrees of freedom and the actuator strength to pick up a knife and chop a carrot - or anything else it might want to chop - in the house.

Plus, anything that smart is connected by definition. It doesn't need wi-fi, it's got eyes. Open-source-ness is somewhat moot when we're talking about intelligence models at the scale needed to make something like that viable, at least on current tech.

A better solution to laundry? That I would buy. Not even putting it away, if you could throw stuff in at the top and have a drawer at the bottom where it emerges, ironed, folded and sorted, that would be 95% of the problem solved.

The IBM PS/2 play. And we all know how well that one worked out.

This was inevitable on the day the Web ceased to be a third space and became an integral part of day-to-day life.

Some time between Facebook opening to the general public (mid 2006) and the launch of the iPhone (early 2007).

"Online" was no longer a meaningful distinction from there on out.

Think it's a filter effect. The areas getting hit especially hard happen to overlap strongly with the most online, which is a relatively small part of the economy overall - and, if you get cut, you've got a bunch more time to to talk about it, which amplifies things further.

Plenty of other areas doing OK for now - construction, healthcare especially - there's no shortage of money around, it's just not going into tech projects outside of the AI bubble.

Yep, taking your winnings if you're up 300% isn't a bad idea, but timing things right on a short is much harder.

Right, but at least with supply-chain attacks the dependency tree is fixed and deterministic.

Nondeterministic systems are hard to debug, this opens up a threat-class which works analogously to supply-chain attacks but much harder to detect and trace.

Both the RAM (for the better) and the house (for the worse).

Yep, we had a few later-generation 486s in college. They would run Windows NT4 with full GUI - not especially well, but they'd run it. And they'd do SSL stuff adequately for the time.

ISTR the cheap "Pentium clones" at the time - Cyrix, early AMDs before the K5/K6 and Athlon - were basically souped-up 486 designs.

(As an aside - it's very noticeable how much innovation happened between a single generation of CPU architectures at that time, compared to today. Even if some of them were buggy or had performance regressions. 5x86 to K5 was a complete redesign, and the same again between K6 and K7).

It would lose by a country mile, a 386 can handle about one instruction every three or four clocks, a modern desktop core can do as many as four or five ops PER clock.

It's not just the lack of branch prediction, but the primitive pipeline, no register renaming, and of course it's integer only.

A Pentium Pro with modern design size would at least be on the same playing field as today's cores. Slower by far, but recognisably doing the same job - you could see traces of the P6 design in modern Intel CPUs until quite recently, in the same way as the Super Hornet has traces of predecessors going back to the 1950s F-5. The CPUs in most battery chargers and earbuds would run rings around a 386.

Would you like to go visit Italy? Of course, who wouldn't. But understand that the CO2 burden of a return flight from India to Rome is somewhere around 2-3x what the planet can sustain, per person, per year, and that for all the hype, carbon-neutral aviation fuel is so far nothing more than a dream. And you're telling me that you've seen all the wonders of the world within a short-haul flight from home?

So once in a lifetime? Sure. But if people do this routinely, the planet pays, which means someone somewhere pays. Our environmental debt is like a maxed-out bank loan at this point. And those people will paying the price will almost all be poor. Tell me what's more likely: a future where the poor get to fly to Italy every year, or a future where the rich and not-quite-rich do that until we really do run out of room on climate.

In my city we're using electric two-wheelers increasingly. It requires good road design, low speed limits (20mph or even 25kph), high standard of driver training, and well-designed vehicles with good brakes etc. With those things in place, it's possible to operate them safely, and on 1/20th the energy budget of full-sized EVs. 20mph doesn't sound like much, but in a big city it's fast enough to cover a lot of ground, and do so in relative safety.

Two related but often confused concepts. Standards of living, quality of life.

We definitely need more of the latter, and for it to be distributed more evenly across the globe. The former, however, hits an asymptote. The upper middle classes are, in general, a lot happier than the desperately poor, having perhaps 10x their wealth. Billionaires, who have 1000x more again, aren't much happier.

So the question becomes, if we want to avoid scarcity, how much do we overbuild - such that scarcity is a physical and mathematical impossibility - and how much do we make society a bit more adaptive? A simple example - do we build enough electricity that people are guaranteed to always have enough to charge their heavy EVs, or do we overbuild a bit less, and encourage some percent of the population to work remotely or use light transport at times when energy availability is a little compromised.

I'm here for a prosperity that gives everyone on the planet four weeks' paid vacation each year, hell, why not eight weeks if we can. I'm not so much here for all those vacations being long-haul aviation - it's enormously more impact on the planet for a tiny gain in quality of life.

We did, but some kids got killed or badly injured as a result. It was pretty common where I live.

And while speeds are a bit lower now, the median driver attitude and aggression level seems to be a lot worse. I'm not sure whether that's because of phone distractions, or they're stressed out by exploitative employers, or have cooked their brains online, or some demographic change in who does the most driving, but when I'm on foot, being driven AT is not an uncommon experience at all.

It's cars. It was always cars.

Nuclear subs are a "money no object" technology, as our supposed insurance policy against Soviet invasion and/or armageddon, it's whatever it takes.

That technology is so expensive, so far from economically viable, that only two countries (US & France) are even using it for aircraft carriers, despite its potential huge advantages over oil (stay at sea for years at a time without refuelling, no need for vulnerable supply ships etc.)

In a given spot yes, the UK continental shelf is pretty big though.

Fall back on your domestic battery, which stores a thousand kettles' worth of energy.

If it's going to stay still and cloudy for a full week, from Jersey all the way up to Orkney, consider running things leaner than usual for a bit. Microwave instead of oven, showers every two days instead of every day, e-moped instead of eSUV to work.

(The outrage some will be feeling at this demonstrates exactly how spoilt we are in the West.)

The opposition to nuclear waste hazards isn't so much about "now" as about the far future. Hot alpha emitters which stay that way for 2K, 10K, 100K years.

Granted, there's other stuff in deep mines and mountains whose chemical toxicity and carcinogenicity is perhaps the equal of plutonium's radioactivity (lead, asbestos, mercury) and whose harms are similarly subtle and hard for unsophisticated people to detect, but as an environmental pollutant it's worse if it gets out due to sheer persistency.

And also granted, where long-term views are a concern, CO2 is going to continue to screw things up for at least 200 years, maybe not 2000.

But most of the eco-folk have argued for energy efficiency, for not treating the planet like something we can just do whatever we want to. Unfortunately the trend is in the other direction, with capitalism demanding endless growth even when the gains are negligible. So people buy trucks even when the marginal utility over a compact car with 25% of the energy consumption is wafer-thin, and fly long-haul for almost no advantage over a short-haul trip.

A lot of this depends on the scale - and cost (two way relationship) of domestic battery rollout.

An individual uses (broad rule of thumb average) somewhere in the 300-500W range to participate in society at a modern level. A warm and well-lit home, cooking a couple of meals, hot water, an EV with enough charge to get to work, TV, laptop and so on. This is before we consider industry and infrastructure.

It's possible to bring those numbers down a bit, but not a lot. Even with fairly aggressive optimisations (Passivhaus, ebike, low-energy cooking), below 100W it gets tough.

But on the flip side, this means a 50kWh home battery can keep a family home running for a day, and 100-200kWh longer than that. 100kWh is affordable today as a home upgrade, and if people adopted a little more of a flexibility ethic with respect to availability, 200kWh will comfortably run a four-person home for a week.

Granted 200kWh domestic instals aren't affordable yet, but by the time these NPPs are online - five years? - they likely will be.

I share your surprise regarding LLM, is it fair to say that it's because language - especially formalised, written language - is a self-describing system.

A machine can infer the right (or expected) answer based on data, I'm not sure that the same is true for how living things navigate the physical world - the "right" answer, such as one exists for your squirrel, is arguably Darwinian: "whatever keeps the little guy alive today".

I have experienced it myself but this was some years ago, may not be current. Think it was things they were trying to deprecate, which are now fully gone - was around the time they introduced Hardened Runtime, 2018-19 ish.

The bigger difference is that Apple isn't just checking for malware, it's checking for conformance with various APIs, manifest requirements and so on. Not as strict as the iOS App Store, maybe, but it will refuse to notarize if it detects use of unsanctioned API calls.

You don't even need signing for Microsoft's system to do what it does - it can operate on unsigned code, it's all hash based.

It's more akin to an enforced malware scanner, at least in principle, kind of mandatory VirusTotal with a stapled certificate.

In practice though they use it to turn the screws on various API compliance topics, and I'm not sure how effective it is realistically in terms of preventing malware exploits.

There was, due to lead compounds in vehicle exhaust. Nasty stuff.

These days, tyre microplastics and diesel particulates are still a concern, but there's little hard science around the hazards of eating them in small quantities - there's microplastic in basically everything, to some degree, so you're not making it appreciably worse - and agricultural farm machinery is a worse diesel PM offender by far than a street's worth of modern cars.

It seems pretty clear to me though that being good at intellectual tasks / the sort of usefulness we ascribe to LLMs doesn't strongly correlate with awareness.

Even just within humans - many of the least intellectually capable humans seem to have a richer supply of the traits associated with awareness/being than some of the allegedly highest-functioning.

On average you're far more likely to get a sincere hug from someone with Down's syndrome than from a multi-millionaire.

But I'm more interested in this when it comes to the animal kingdom, because while ChatGPT is certainly more useful than my cat, I'm also pretty certain that it's a lot less aware. Meaningful awareness - feelings - seems to be an evolutionary adaptation possessed by k-strategy reproducing vertebrates. Having a small number of kids and being biologically wired to care for them has huge implications for your motivation as an animal, and it's reasonable to think that a lot of our higher emotions are built on hardware originally evolved for that purpose.

(Albeit the evolutionary origins of that are somewhat murky - to what extent mammals/birds reuse capabilities that were developed by a much earlier common ancestor, or whether it's entirely parallel evolution, isn't known afaik - but birds seem to exhibit a similar set of emotional states to mammals, that much is true).

I've also experienced this, to an extent, but on qualitative topics the goodness of an answer - beyond basic requirements like being parseable and then plausible - is difficult to evaluate.

They can certainly produce good-sounding answers, but as to the goodness of the advice they contain, YMMV.

If by task you mean the written, intellectual variety, maybe.

Because failure to solve it is political and intellectual laziness and cowardice.

It's like jets falling out of the sky because the guy that bolts the wings on is only half doing his job, we can all see it and know about it and yet.. nobody wants to speak up.