bttrfl

It is bad because I have a loan. It was worse because I had no money. It can be better because I could repay the loans. ... It is going to be a disaster but let my grandchildren worry about it.

Invincible is just one of many books showcasing Lem's profound understanding of AI and its limitations servicing the mankind.

I recommend Tales of Pirx the Pilot, the collection of short stories, many of which paint AI as a true reflection of human intelligence with its flaws, quirks, instincts. From AI crashing a starship during a landing to an android "dying" rock climbing.

There is also a preface he wrote to his book called Golem XIV which gives reader a historical overview of the evolution of AI. Golem is of course the name of the model and XIV is its version, just like ChatGPT 4, but many iteration later. Lem describes how each iteration was more and more expensive to build, but more and more intelligent and useful. Until it became more intelligent than men and... lost all interest in affairs of our kind. As always, he was on point.

The fact that others are kicking an old lady to death doesn't mean you should join them. Do what you think is right even if it doesn't change anything. Avoiding flights isn't a big price to pay.

This could be a chicken-egg thing. If the top apps had no Apple payments perhaps they wouldn't be on the list. For an established games the discovery is probably less important though I'd imagine that lots of people buy apps just because they are top apps.

You can enforce it using trade bans, don't need military for that. Also, if this would be a global policy then the costs would go globally for everyone making it much easier to cope with since all the competition (on company but also state level) would have the same obligations.

I'm rooting for something like this too. As for the carbonfact and their focus on promoting eco brands, I'd like them to present an alternative metric if/when possible.

Measuring each individual product is complicated and doesn't have to reflect brand's entire emission output. If a company is 10% manufacturing and 90% marketing then the methodology used by carbonfact will be underreporting the emissions.

Some brands (inc. Nike) are already disclosing their total emission. Others might be forced to do so in a near future by regulators. Would it be possible to have a metric calculated simply as 'total emissions / units sold'?

"Global survey finds 74% also want climate crises and protecting nature prioritised over jobs and profit" - I find the results highly optimistic, but hard to believe. I'm working frequently with data and surveys and what people say they want is rarely what they really want or do.

Still, I hope this will give politicians some courage to tackle the problem with full strength.

I'm well aware of that. I remember reading a story about one of the cities in Asia which forbidden car traffic with driver only. Soon there were passengers for hire standing by the road.

If AWS can charge their clients by milliseconds then I'm pretty sure an airline can add a zero to a 10th ticket booked on the same passenger's name.

The number of products/services taxed progressively wouldn't have to be huge to make a difference. You don't need to progressively tax an electric toothbrush just energy consumption, but all products should be taxed based on their production externalities.

taxes on usage/consumption could be progressive.

Using X costs you Y Using XX costs you YYY Using XXX costs you YYYYYY

This way water, electricity would still be cheap for most and would incentivise to stop overusing it.

You could still get a cheap flight once a year, but you won't be able to fly every weekend.

Why don't you start with an idea and self-awareness of your strengths?

You might be good at puzzles. Or stories. Maybe visuals ain't your thing and you can write a text based game - there are great engines for that. Maybe you're a great dev and can start hack your own Dwarf Fortress and keep on doing it for the rest of your life.

Gaming and tech behind is so varied that whoever you are, you'll find something that plays to your skills.

even if it would be the worst one, optimisation based on just one metric is usually a bad idea.

I've stopped playing chess as a teenager having reached ~2360. I was national youth champion, a vice-champion, 5th in the world at one point. I played 100+ games every year. Each game could last up to 5-6h. Some games were exhausting, some not. After each game you had to prepare for another one - study your opponent's games, prepare openings and variants. This effort took tool on some and older players were visibly weird, plenty were alcoholics. I used to say that football (soccer) players have bended legs, chess players have bended minds.

Anyway, if you want to make chess your profession (you don't need to be a GM to make a living), keep your mind healthy!

Why?

This is a good advice but on gov level. Governments don't need to be anti car, they just need to stop being pro car and incentivise their use. Stop subsidies, stop tax benefits for both users/producers, stop building new roads, stop turning free spaces into parking lots etc. and be pro something else.

Just make 99% of the car traffic infeasible (slow, expensive...) and market will come up with alternative ways to make 99% of activities that today require a car feasible without them.

It's an excellent opportunity to remind everyone about a truly great book by Lem: "The Futurological Congress" [0] and its interesting movie adaptation "The Congress" [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

I'd love a dual, absolute/category, scale to make my decisioning easier. If something is green on an absolute scale then it's a smaller problem if I pick a product labeled red on on category scale. But I do know that I shouldn't do that.

Dual scale would make it possible to differentiate between two similar products - an "eco" cotton bag could be orange/green while a single plastic use bag could green/red. This way every one would know that an eco bag is worse than a plastic one unless you use it a lot.

Finally, producers would be motivated to optimise environmental impact of all kinds of products because having a red label would be shameful.

CO2 footprint would be nice, but CO2 isn't only environmental factor to consider. I'd rather have colour-coded stickers with two scales - absolute and relative within a product category.

A sticker on a diesel car would be RED/RED and a sticker on a tiny EV car would be RED/GREEN.

A sticker on an apple from a domestic market would be GREEN/GREEN and an apple imported from a country 1000s miles away would be GREEN/ORANGE.

Ideally, the labeling would be a reflection of a fiscal mechanism to charge for externalities in the entire chain - from production to a sale and disposal.

Funny thing, the more people comment that it doesn't load, the more trending the post is and more traffic it gets and the loading wheel spins even more and more.

Were those phone numbers collected using "We need your phone number to increase your security" (or similar) or just added by users to their linkedin profiles?

Every time I read stats like this I wonder what are the externalities the PR team decided to omit. One day you hear that farmed fish are eco, the next day you find out that gigantic trawlers are depleting Antarctic oceans for feed.

I tried to google the possible environmental downsides of lab-meat (taste/health aside), but couldn't find anything. Any suggestions?

I run a company offering form analytics [0] so I have seen plenty of real data on how people use forms. One stupid issue I've seen over and over again is a lack of trimming of email/username/password strings, say:

'john@doe.com '

resulting in errors like 'invalid email'. Since whitespaces are invisible to users, they can't figure out what's wrong.

[0] https://www.useitbetter.com/features/form-analytics/

I'm not a fan of advertising, but at least money spent on promoting your business build your brand and in theory you should benefit from that in the long term.

It seems that restaurants don't have clients these days and are at mercy of delivery companies which, at least some of them, employ hostile tactics to hijack any attempt to contact restaurants directly.

this got me curious as I wasn't sure how much is "a lot more". Turns out the population in the year 0 was 190M so there are 40x more people now [0].

Anyway, according to the previously cited wikipedia article, the Three Kingdoms War, the deadliest ancient conflict, took toll of 40M people. but that happened over 96 years. That's 416k per year and 0.2% of global population at that time.

WW2 caused 14M deaths per year which was "just" 0.07% of global population.

Not sure how accurate these numbers are.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth

It's your right to be pissy. Let's drop the "global" then.

I counted 18 wars with upper deaths range above 1M between 500BC and 1800AC. There were 29 of them after 1800. I didn't bother to sum the casualties. Full list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll

Technology is neither source of good nor evil. Just like a hammer ain't to blame or prise. It's about its application and how tech is developed and applied is decided based on "politics" if you want.

However, ever-evolving technology leads to globalisation and acceleration of processes. With shitty tech we can make lots of mistakes and pay small, local consequences. Shitty nails result in a shitty coffin. Shitty fridges result in an ozone hole. Our margin of error for doing the "politics" right is shrinking every day.

What if all this is because we took a giant environmental credit that we won't be able to pay back? It's hard to argue that child mortality dropped, literacy increased and so on, but at the same time we are facing existential threats due to warming, lack of water, loss of biodiversity and so on.

We are also enjoying a relatively peaceful period (despite what's happening in Syria and tens of other places) on a global scale, but history shows that every single global conflict gets more deadly. Will we survive WW3?

Let's not prise the day too early.

This is now happening on Linkedin as well. People give access to their accounts to bots or sales people to like, share and contact people.

The decision might seem strange, but I think the rationale behind it is sound:

"Covid-19 variants to be given Greek alphabet names to avoid stigma" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/01/covid-19-varia...

why is it downvoted?

you might want to check MicroAcquire