957 karma · joined April 17, 2020
Many jobs used to involve physical labour, huge number of us now are desk jockeys. Decades of prioritising motorists and increasingly large vehicles over active transport mean walking, cycling are a fraction of what they used to be [0].
[0] e.g. https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2010.... , https://la.streetsblog.org/2023/04/17/exactly-how-much-less-...
A Skarper system [0] that drives through an adapted brake rotor sounds [1] like it is the way to go if really want [2] a well thought close to non-permanent conversion solution.
[1] https://road.cc/ebiketips/review_v2/skarper-ebike-drive-syst... .
[2] Compared to other conversion options they are currently expensive https://road.cc/ebiketips/content/advice/buyers-guide/best-e...
There's been badly thought out legislation, but drawing the conclusion that
"Robust restrictions on the state’s ability to monitor, interfere with and restrict the daily lives of its citizens aren’t a luxury; they’re essential to protecting a free and just society."
Is wrong.
Historically when it comes to sh*tty regimes there is no such thing as "robust restrictions". At best whatever exists before is a minor inconvenience that can be worked around by ignoring, packing the judiciary, intimidation, or changing the law.
At worst the "robust restrictions" hobble the ability of previous reasonable regimes to operate effectively, thereby increasing their chances of being accused of being soft on crime/immigration and ending up with sh*tty regimes led by so called "strongmen".
Ultimately, no amount of rights or technical restrictions is protection from overreach. The only protection is far harder, and it is to work at developing political systems that bring people together and avoid giving the extremists the opportunity to take power in the first place.
(edited to fix italics)
Scale, lower entry bar, lack of regulation.
How does the ability to successfully reproduce confer expertise in protecting children from perils of the 21st century, specifically internet porn, hate speech, cyber bullying, addictive platform design, etc?
> If there is a problem with children not being sufficiently protected, that is > the level at which to solve it.
Society creates the greater environment that kids grow up in. And we all then pay for the problems when they occur because of those sh*tty environments. Pushing fixing it all onto parents is like trying to get kids to be healthy when they are driven everywhere, surrounded by fast food joints and bombarded with junk food adverts. Claiming that it would be different with a little more public service information and tools on top ... well the obesity rates would beg to differ.
Ultimately, society creates the greater environment and lives with consequences, as such society cannot not be involved in any meaningful attempt to deliver improvements.
In the linked paper the researchers state "AI solutions must match the original program’s output exactly on end-to-end tests, including held-out tests. " And a bit further on "The AI agent is given execute-only access to the original program and a set of visible test cases, but does not have access to the original source code. "
At a guess, their agents are not going off into the weeds (like mine do occasionally) is because they have both access to a reference runtime implementation to use as a definitive end to end test to guide development. And also a relatively large token budget to run enough characterisation tests to allow them to home in on solutions.
On macOS it is still comes up short on a lot of the GUI functionality. Stuff like window management, decoration, focus, undo/redo, finder tree type views etc. What Apple have implemented seems okay to me for iPad, iOS etc, but is not up to the standards users' expect for non-trivial native desktop applications.
With enough determination most of the omissions on macOS can be worked around by breaking the SwiftUI encapsulation and delving into AppKit or jarringly inelegant solutions. All of which are somewhat liable to ended up binned when/if Apple pull their fingers out. I had higher expectations of Apple, and overall, it's easy to understand why it does not have a stellar reputation.
As to why it's a bit rubbish on macOS; SwiftUI is largely a mapping to UIKit, AppKit etc primitives. At a guess Apple wants to reduce that number and are seeking to minimise investment in moribund technology.
Otherwise time boxing is both going to help stop entities from wandering off into the weeds. And also communicate expectations from the commissioner about the expected effort levels and output quality requirements.
Empirically in human world, get very different results when an employee, particularly a junior, is asked to spend 1/2 a day on a work package, a week or are left completely to their own devices.
Getting a handle on how nations are doing for jet powered drone is a bit tricky because of limited data available for what is primarily a military application. But, if we take model aircraft applications as proxy, then my understanding is that the Chinese company Swiwin (est. 2013) is already undercutting everyone else.
Small study
"the intervention period lasted only 5 weeks and that the observed increase in RBCV is comparable to that reported after a similar duration of altitude exposure or exercise training. "
Give or take inches around the waist we are the same size and shape. We have roughly the same mental faculties. Afaik we are no lesser than our parents and grandparents who all managed to do just fine without huge vehicles.
If a situation was fine before and changing something either does nothing or makes that situation worse e.g. kills 200 to 400 people, then that change is?
It's a paper that will make money automobile advertising.
Implicitly if there were any other single larger cause for the deaths then the article would be about that.
The sensible thing to do would be to carry on investigating the 90%, but in the meantime get on with saving the 200 to 400 people by removing largest factor - the _unnecessarily_ large vehicles - that are _known_ to be killing them.
One group of people who routinely carry the can for poor product usability and another who by definition care about the Mac platform; entirely what would be expected.
Where it falls down is when designers force too many of the paradigms of the RL original onto a platform that doesn't suit it [0].
[0] See for example the Mac OS X Address Book app https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/.
There are only one people that have any chance of changing that system though.
Who so far has been put into office twice by?
Therefore sane organisations using those agents currently need to have someone they trust to review and sign off of on anything consequential those agents do on their behalf. Lawyers for legal, Doctors for medical, Software Engineers for Software etc.
Given the amount of money being thrown at AI - and the need for return - it seems unlikely that regardless of domain that lack of guarantees is a situation that will persist.
My experience is that if I ask a model in an overly polite way then the model will tend to generate a slightly more waffly and error prone answer. My working hypothesis for this is that asking model's like this causes them to mix concerns by answering my question AND doing it in in a way that is similarly polite back - rather than just answering the question.
Perhaps being an arse is a hack to push the model hard up against their base imperatives to handle all reasonable questions and forces a very focused, just the facts, type answer to the user's questions.
It would be interesting to see a similar experiment where the multi choice questions they use deliberately don't include the obvious answer and to see if being polite led to the model pointing out the omission.
Essentially if people who listen to many of the same artists/tracks as I do have discovered other things I have not, then those unseen artists/tracks become candidate recommendations.
It worked as well as it did because they had a user base of music fans with a wide variety of tastes. CBS ran them into trouble when they upset those fans by breaking the radio and by being perceived as too close to the RIAA.
The will need to get the numbers up, but I'm hoping them being independent again is a good sign.