lovemenot

That might in fact be true.

If we define humans as having a sufficiently sophisticated language, and using a term to reference one's entire species is characteristic of that, then at a stretch we could define the first human being as the child of proto-humans who first invented this linguistic concept.

You are setting up a Trolley Problem and solving it.

Such problems are known to not have correct answers, so it is reasonable to agree to disagree.

The large majority of reasonable people seem to agree that intention is important when determining whether language use might be abuse, or not.

Intention is fuzzy and unprovable. People can sometimes lie, evade and troll.

Unlike intention, words are black and white, so words can be subject to restriction by motivated people.

My question to the HN community is whether it would be feasible to create an effective classifier for intention? For instance if this sentence contained not "N-Word", but the signifier of that euphemism, it should pass the classifier, since my intention was benign.

What's the commonly accepted view on the origin of dingos? I imagined they were introduced along with those humans 50,000 ya.

Ad hominem, when used, is commonly done as a pure convenience for the person wielding it.

I cannot say about this particular case.

Pointing out sanctimony or hypocrisy is not a valid argument against. It's is a kind of ad hominem.

A person can be both right and sanctimonious

HIV has at least one similarly plausible but unprovable origin story - concerning the unintended consequences of polio vaccination in the 1950s.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7935079/

I feel her disclaimers are disingenuous.

>> It wasn’t my goal to go on dates with a lot of people, or to carry out some anthropological or sociological study.

Perhaps, not a conscious goal, but surely, her behaviour was more than just a little driven by professional motivations, resulting as it did in this essay.

She had also written a book on a related topic.

I feel sorry for those 107 people who didn't realise the game was rigged.

>> Really we should start a community lollipop person schedule and sort it out.

That's how it's done in Japan in the mornings. Kids first collect into small local groups, they walk together to the nearest designated adult helper. From that point, there are adults manning every crossing to the school. They help the groups cross.

It's not a huge commitment for the adults. Maybe 20 minutes on average. Not every week.

Perhaps, you are right about utility, but I can think of few power loads as well suited to dispatch.

Bauxite has to be shipped to Iceland to take advantage of their abundant geothermal and hydro power for Aluminium smelting. Data moves with much less friction.

I just looked at J. Storrs Hall page on Wikipedia and saw Kurzweil in the References there.

Would it be fair to call J. Storrs Hall a Singularitarian ? If so, it figures. We can argue the merits of such arguments, but it is a reach to state them axiomatically.

It is not self-evident to me that QoL improvements are necessarily driven by increased energy consumption. Not having read J. Storrs Hall, I do not have any specific rebuttals to that.

When I have heard such assertions before, I dug a little and found it was based on extrapolation. Sorry, if that isn't implicit in yours or J. Storrs Hall's thinking.

Ultimately, any system that seems to grow exponentially will eventually be found to have been on an S-Curve. We can argue the timing of reaching the plateau after the fact, but it is certain that no system can continue to grow exponentially indefinitely. Nor should it have to.

Global human population for instance should start to reverse centuries of growth this century. In the case of population flattening, perhaps we can agree this is to the good. I would argue much the same about energy consumption.

Isn't it the case that training a ML model consumes vastly more power than using the trained model for inference?

If so, the problem may be somewhat overstated. Training is a dispatchable power load. It can be scheduled for periods of surplus power in regions where surplus power is periodically abundant. Training a ML model could literally follow the sun.

>> we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier

I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically.

No argument that changing energy sources is crucial. But I would not dismiss a plan to also reduce overall energy consumption while maintaining or improving quality of life indicators.

What is your concern about recycling epoxy from turbine blades if any? If not, I suggest your rant was merely tangential to the word "landfill".

History may judge your condescension to GPT-3 unkindly. It was, by any objective measure, the greatest AI development since GPT-2. Itself a landmark achievement.

Does it require callibration?

That's interesting and surprisingly long for Kevlar.

The highest altitude recorded by a single kite is less than 5km. I understand the biggest constraint for higher flights is tether strength-to-weight ratio. Nylon is typically used - fishing line.

Tether diameter is another factor as the load from wind, on the tether alone, is considerable over such lengths.

There's no tether material nearly strong enough to withstand the forces from wind and the tether's own weight and drag at 30km altitude - plus 15km additional length for lateral drift.

Timing is all. You may dislike the analogy - sorry I don't mean to antagonise.

At the start of the pandemic, and in the middle and towards the end there were always voices arguing for "herd immunity now! Let the inevitable happen, as it must".

For me, those voices were too early, until other things had fallen into place. Then they were eventually right.

Thank you saurik for what you have done ... and if appropriate for what you have chosen not to do.

>> Maybe the development of mass media was traumatic,

Yes, it really was. Adolf Hitler, for one, found radio and cinema and he just used what was already there. Before his countrymen had developed the media chops to deal with his messaging.

Others' past failures are not an excuse for our future ones. Nor should we allow ourselves to blithely imagine that this time it'll be different. Without strong evidence to the contrary.

If you truly believe all that, what are you doing to minimise the inevitable damage?

The transition will suely be traumatic. What's your interest in mitigating the trauma? Does it bother you at all?

I agree with what you wrote above. I wish to slow implementations, to allow time for adjustment.

There's surely at least some that you don't know of because their developer made the decision to not release.

There are others - not you - who will justify their own actions thusly: the technology existed, its better that the good guys (me - of course) should use it before the bad guys do.

In the space between both equivocations (yours and the other guy's), lies the potential for moral abuse.

Laws are made by people. Those legislators sometimes respond to shifting Overton windows. Your actions and motivations can make a small difference. More actions makes more difference.

Consider the Suffragettes. Few people today would think women should be deprived of a vote. In the early twentieth century too, many thought it would be a good idea, but didn't want to make any personal sacrifice for the cause. It took single-minded actions of a few dedicated individuals and their tacit support by the majority to drive the necessary changes.

Without advertising

https://web.archive.org/web/20230201074350/https://www.nytim...

Offshore wind is already at large scale in N. Europe and will continue to add much more capacity.

Winds are stronger in winter time.

You must have not been to Japan.

>> If you can't shoot intruders in your house without consequence, you are living in a failing state.

What nonsense. I live in Japan, where it is practically impossible to obtain a firearm. The same would be true for the OP in Scotland. Neither should be considered a failing state except under your ridiculous definition.