atoav

No it isn't, to quote another article by the Washington post: "We were shovel-ready".

Meaning they cut forest fire prevention measures that would have been deployed before the dry season.

These measures are typically aimed to stopping spreads more than they are aimed at preventing causes (lightning is a tad bit hard to prevent, unless you want to build a gigantic grids of extremely high lightning rod towers). E.g. you cut corridors of trees through the woods and keep them clear of any flammable materials, this way the fire can hopefully be compartmentalized or at least slowed down.

I am not sure why you feel the need to defend this, when it is very clear that Doge didn't exactly deploy what anybody would call "care" in selecting what to cut.

Yeah? I live in Northern Germany for more than a decade now and in the past months I have witnessed multiple of the hottest days during these ten years, including one where my thermometer measured a whopping 37°C at midnight.

I once had a geography teacher who had the absolutely unhinged habit of asking spontaneous gotcha questions designed to make himself look good. The kind where the question doesn't contain enough information to get to the answer he had in mind. Then when someone answered the question correctly, but didn't use the exact answer he had in mind he went all "gotcha!".

Sometimes he asked the same question again and when someone remembered the answer, he still went "gotcha!" only with a changed answer.

The lesson I learned from that guy, was that sometimes a question says more about the person asking it than about the person answering it — more precisely that men with small egos bend reality to get the outcome they prefer.

The appropriate strategy with him was to ask in a Socratic way while stroking his ego: "But haven't you thought us X is Y? I would like to get it correct!", then he would squirm around and admit that yes, this is also correct.

This type of dynamic can also occur in interviews.

I think it was electric, given the scale.

No of course not. But using the heat directly is of course favourable, since you don't have conversion losses. But that doesn't mean you can't use it also to power turbines as you wish to.

The advantage of that type of storage is that it scales very well. Batteries are cool when space is an issue. But when it is not, digging out a hole and insulating it is surprisingly effective per unit of work stored there.

Use it directly, see my silbling comment.

I know someone who runs a mineral water company. His biggest expense was the energy cost for washing the glas bottles. He now built a absolutely massive solar farm that feeds directly into heating a well insulated underground water tank. At the time he told me about it (ca two years ago) he said according to his research it is not unlikely to be the biggest such hot water storage in Europe.

The amount of energy needed to test things is just intuitively huge. Boiling one liter of water takes the equivalent amount of energy as lifting 34 metric tons up a meter. Or to translate it to human scale: the same as walking a vertical climb of 1000m with a weight of 34kg.

Totally on your side here, asking for the accomplishments of a tool is strange. Isn't it easy to envision two people using the same note taking system extensively, with one achieving nothing and one really making it a tool that is essentially to their goals?

That being said, I have never seen such procrastination as with people on the lookout for their ideal productivity systems. People writing lengthy blogposts about the last 0.1% of optimization on their note taking systems as if note-taking was their main job. The thing is: a note taking system doesn't need to be ideal, because as with most tools it matters much more who is using it, how they are using it and for what purpose. A note taking system is like a musical instrument: if you constantly find yourself swapping them because "they don't work" chances are this is a skill-issue, not a problem inherent with the system.

There is immense value in just picking a simple system, sticking to it and only revisiting it if there are real tangible problems. I for example just put a piece of paper on my desk every week and write down the things I need to do that aren't appointments. For more complex things, sketches, etc. that I may need in the next two or three months I use a notebook. For long lived stuff I use whatever. A markdown file in the project folder, a text file on the server, Obsidian. This has served me very well for the past decade.

But my job isn't taking notes, my job is doing the things I need to do, taking notes is just something that helps me doing that.

We can all be pedantic, why do you have to be alive to exist?

Depends on the specific definition of the verb existing we are talking about, right?

90% of "I'm too autistic"-insecurities boil down to words being not clearly defined (or them being clearly defined, but either people using them without care or you not being aware of the definition they use). A word isn't magically stuck the the abstract concept it refers to, people can mean different things while using the same word. In philosophy for example it is very apparent that one author's definition of existence (or any other abstract concept, like freedom) may differ fundamentally from another author's.

We can all agree that sometimes the use of an word has unfortunate side effects, like turning something simple like existence into something you can suck at. This often boils down to (A) a use of the concept we are not aware of, e.g. if Paul Satré used the word existence, he has writen thousand page book on his specific meaning of the word and the author having read Satré unbeknownst to us refers to Satré's definition or (B) the author just chose a word that sounded cool and picked somewhat imprecisely.

I think here (as so often) it is the latter, but to cut them some slack: colloquially people will say things like "I feel like I am not even existing/alive". And what they often mean by that is that their life passes in full automation mode, with them barely having any present thought at any moment — wake up, commute, work, rinse, repeat. If that is your problem, doing something that gets you out of that automation state is good.

However I believe that many pasttimes can do that, e.g. playing music, climbing, a walk through an unknown landscape, etc. I am pretty certain there are indigenous people out there who probably don't even know of this problem to begin with, they simply just exist in their present moment. So this isn't generally hard for a human being. But it can be hard to some.

The examples are not good. In one example (incident report) the agent turns a generic "something went wrong" into overly precise error descriptions that may or may not spill internal details. Then it proceeds to make a promise to implement a persistent monitoring for that problem this week.

I mean generally this wouldn't be considered a bad response, but it is deeply problematic if an LLM tasked to just simplify language added both internals and promises to your customers without your knowledge.

Sure. You earn 5k a month. The fine is 10k a month. I'd like to see you "budget that in".

It is hard to "budget in" a expense that is multiple time your earnings. Especially if that expense is growing exponentially each time..

But shows that people still don't understand exponential functions, even on this platform. We are truly doomed.

With great power comes great responsibility. Beyond a certain size of corporation that may just be the only way to retain a scintilla of accountability.

But some people still appear to labour under the illusion that unchecked corporate greed will bring anything other than the end of human life on this planet.

I am for more maths in laws like these:

  frist_fine = 0.06 × anual_global_sales
  
  fine(n) = first_fine * n^x
  

And the exponent x is to be chosen by how harsh you want to be. Repeat offenders will quickly run out of money as long as your exponent is reasonably bigger than 1.

If we take an exponent of 2 a repeat offense by OpenAI would look like this:

  1st offence: EUR  1.50 billion (6%)
  2nd offence: EUR  6.00 billion (24%)
  3rd offence: EUR 13.50 billion (54%)
  4th offence: EUR 24.00 billion (96%)
  5th offence: EUR 37.50 billion (150%)
  6th offence: EUR 54.00 billion (216%)

This is what drives me to sometimes DIY devices instead of buying them. There is so much crap on the market and it gets increasingly hard to tell where the catch is. Does it only work with the manufacturers weird cloud? Which feature(s) do work without? What settings are even possible?

Really simple appliances can be very hard to find, e.g. a desk fan that can be set to spin very slow. Most fans have 3 or 5 speed settings and the lowest is already tenfold too high for my taste. Solution? Get the dumbest fan you can find and speed control the motor yourself.

On a side note: I spent the night in an alpine shelter a while back. Every piece of food that was there had to be carried there. Water was rationed.

Abundance, by it's definition would not only mean everyone, but everywhere. As I argued in my other reply, I believe that this everywhere is the much bigger challenge than the everyone.

Well yes. The land where milk and honey flows in rivers and the fried chicken flies into your mouth (unless of course you, yourself are a chicken, in which case that would be horrible).

The take of "if there would be no resource distribution problem, there would be no problems" isn't a genius take, it is literally a ancient children's story. Granted it is factually correct: If there were infinite resources and they all would be in the right places, there would be zero problems based on a lack of resources.

However the problem with this theory is everything else, the first question being:

How do you get from a system where many of the most powerful actors profit from (often: artificial!) scarcity to them giving up those power levers voluntarily?

Or phrased much less abstract: Few bosses, want to stop being above others if they have the choice. And not only do they have the choice, the mechanism some people believe would lead to abundance (AI) is in their control. Turns out the computation power possible inside a finite universe, on a finite planet, with finite resources, an finite labor is.. well.. finite.

Aside from that we already live in a world where the problem is nearly never the amount of resources, but the way they are distributed. Clothes that are produced for the west are shredded after each season as they go out of fashion, while in other parts of the world people live without clothes, with food the story is similar. The problem isn't lack of abundance. The problem is that a wealthy minority profits wildly from the inequality and if you ask me, they would rather use AI to make it stay that way, while extracting even more from the rest of us, than using that for good. Why do I believe that? Well I do not trust them when they say what they want, but instead look at what they do. Just look at the history of capitalism and where within it truly wealthy people started to contribute to society. You may be surprised if you look at the deeper causes...

This theory of abundance is a story followers of an ideology tell themselves so they can feel good about themselves, while their ideology literally starves people and burns down the planet.

Abundance for whom, exactly? And if the answer is everybody: who in charge has an incentive to do this?

Sorry to ruin your day, but if the people with money could have introduce equal society, you would have noticed their attempts by now.

A good overview on the topic.

My general issue with things like these is the simple fact, that as a lifelong musician I find the "less worse" harmonic combinations (to quote the abstract) often very boring. Aside from great composers like Bach et al I find the harmonic relationship of the notes played one of the least interesting aspects of the music, and expression, timbre, rhythm, phrasing much more important and noteworthy. A set of great musicians can play a single note for minutes and get it to sound amazing, this has always fascinated me more.

Music theory IMO has historically a too strong focus on the harmony (or the lack thereof) between notes. Not that it isn't important, but with some texts you get the feeling it wouldn't matter to the authors whether the piece was heard expressively played on a grand piano or cut together from equal leveled sine waves.

In my experience harmonies are greatly influenced by the relative levels of the notes and the overtone content within each note, to a degree you can make a supposed "harmonic" chord sound bad and a supposed disharmonic one sound good.

For all I, a Victorian everyman, know the world is built from small pistons, gears and pulleys.

Every age has their technology which they will project onto the world. A century ago one may have started to talks about everything being electrical wires and switches.

Well I also do not really know the legitimate use case for infinite scroll (other than trying to push gambling/slot-machine tricks onto your userbase).

I get lazy-loading for pages that contain a ton of media of which the user will likely only see a fraction. But some people seem to think infinite scroll is a good idea with text based content as well..

Well I have worked as a camera operator. You can pan a tad bit slower or faster and this is a non-problem (and good camera operators know that and do that without even looking at the footage). The much more pressing limitation on cameras is typically the dynamic range between darkest and brightest color that can be captured.

Additionally a frame rate of 24 fps allows me to expose at 1/48 s, which means I get motion blur. That may seem like a bad thing, but for fictional stories I find a slight motion blur much more appealing and natural than exposing at 1/120 s for a 60 fps video or even at 100 fps with 1/200 s, which makes things look like a soccer television transmission. Of course in the age of digital you can get both by smearing frames into each other (depending on the camera), but the returns are IMO diminishing.

However I already mentioned I understand 60+ fps for certain applications (be it sports transmissions, gaming, films where it makes sense), but for a train station sign both the cited resolution and the frame rate are not strictly required. Sure. It is a nice to have if it comes for free, but rarely anything ever does.

Same goes for 4K. My students want to always do everything in 4K, yet most of them won't ever notice when a media player downscales their 4K footage to 1080p. 4K is cool if you have content that really makes use of it (e.g. hard one pixel lines) and a projection situation where the resolution can be noticed (e.g. audience very close to the screen), but that is the minority of situations.

Well I prefer simply to stay out of countries that haven't got their ducks in a row when it comes to freedom. Saves a lot of hassle.

As a mediatec guy I think the idea that everything needs to be 60 fps is a pest. I understand the idea in gaming, but it is not needed elsewhere. A train stop display can easily do its job at 1 fps or lower. You do not need to display motion at all and the 1 fps you need mostly for blinking things off and on (if there is no dedicated circuit for it).

Most cinema films I watched projected from analog film looked perfect at 24 fps. Heck some anime loocks better at 5 or 10fps than it would look if the motion was fluid at 120 fps. Why would a display at a train stop need double the frame rate of a cinema classic that still looks completely convincing? Because some gamers decided they can't play below 60 fps?

So no tape saturation? That would be to me one of the most interesting bits of the tape sound, at least for musical applications.

My friends from the German CCC are mostly like (1) do not travel to the US and (2) if you absolutely must, travel with an empty device with decoy data and download all data you need once you're there.

To which analog gain would 0 dBFS be mapped?

It means instead of building a street object, with car objects that have tire objects as its children and then running through the tree to rotate the wheels you just have an array pointing to exactly the appropriate data type to accomodate the type of wheel rotation you need.

Very often the answer is indeed arrays, but it can easily be something else, depending on the problem. Data driven design is not very complicated, it just means instead of thinking about abstraction you think about the shape the data needs to be in to accommodate the most common transformations you need to do with it.

Well yes, as a designer the thing people do not understand is that e.g. for a poster there is a limited bandwidth for messages you can get across. The "uncompromising" business guy may think he is uncompromising by putting all infos he really wants to push onto the poster, but in fact that just means they are deluding every single message they really wanted to push.

In reality you always have to compromise if you aim to achieve more than one thing at once. Wanna deliver a quality product and earn money? Then you will have to compromise between the quality and the revenue in some ways. Granted if you search hard you may be able to find ways (=compromises) that are more win-win on both fronts than others, this search is the task of any good designer.

But that means you have to have at least have to have a slither of understanding of the search space.

Yes sure, but the point of something like ruff is that you don't even think about formatting anymore. It is just done for you and it is done consistently.

Well in my book it is a cost vs benefit question. Handrails are not expensive in comparison to a medical procedure, nor are they particularly hindering in the daily use of the stairs. In fact, quite the opposite: anybody who uses stairs without handrails may find themselves temporarily disabled, e.g. if a circuit breaker tripped and you have to walk down the stairs in the dark.

That means, handrails cost little and have nearly no downsides. Which is why I used helmets as a metaphor. The proposed restrictions has a lot of downsides to deal with a mostly theoretical risk.