madaxe_again

I live in Europe.

I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.

I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute. From how it all went, they had quite clearly decided this was a waste of their fucking time before they even arrived.

None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.

The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.

You don’t. You have RO at the point of consumption. At any rate, it’s our approach, we store 150,000L in a cistern over the winter and use it through the summer. An under-the-counter domestic RO system can be had for like $200, the membranes last about a year with our usage, and are like $15 a pop. Post-RO storage tank UV block too because I like belts and braces.

Non-potable just goes through the usual barrels full of sand and biochar, and doesn’t need further treatment.

Since 1945? Friend, this has been the case since the invention of the pointy stick.

Sure, you’ve gotta have some known good values to compare to, but those aren’t hard to come by. Pretty sure you can get a decent idea of BF with callipers or somesuch.

Or to just give users enough usage to find categories in which it is useful for them.

I pay the $200/mo., and don’t regret it for an instant - I have a project manager, an executive assistant, a business analyst, a software developer and an international accountant, for an absolute song.

You can build your own scale with an ESP32 for like $25 in parts - Hx711, load cells, ESP32, and a handful of trivial components. I threw together one that sits under my gas bottle, so I know when it’s running low. Adding impedance would be a pretty trivial step.

Leopards, faces, and all that jazz.

This stuff cuts both ways. We talk in terms of “men this, women that”, but the reality is much closer to “people”.

In the past, societal norms provided a lot of shelter for the shitty behaviour of men - and they still do - but it doesn’t follow that men have a monopoly on shitty behaviour.

My reality is full time stay at home parent, sole breadwinner, chef, handyman, school and holiday organiser, and being constantly lectured about My Part in the Patriarchy.

I don’t see this as an indictment of women. I see it as an indictment of my chosen partner, and my decision making in this category.

And there’s the rub. As long as we categorise behaviour by gender, we’ll perpetuate a dynamic that permits shitty behaviour with gender as an excuse.

MS Bob was for adults… although there were kid dedicated areas, like the den, and I seem to remember packard bell navigator being a kid-friendly reskin.

Ideas and words aren’t the same thing, or from the same model - words are a communication layer, with robust error correction - but ideas stem from intuition, which is more of a lossy aggregative/associative model. There’s a balance to be had in each when operating a human mind, I find - let the latter suggest ideas and potential association, let the former robustly prove or disprove them. So yes, it’s pattern matching on all levels, but pattern matching within words doesn’t produce new ideas as readily - instead the idea-space is queried directly.

IMO we really are just a bunch of models that interoperate.

They’re ridiculously facile use cases for what agentic AI can already do.

I don’t trust an agent with full executive power - yet - but I am essentially using GPT as my PA. Right now I’ve got it managing a construction project with recalcitrant contractors, an international move and visa tied to a property purchase, a short term holiday rental business, and basically just popping up in my life going “the situation is this, you need to do X/I suggest you send Y to Z, the email is prepped in your drafts”. I am of course also using it for software development, and have had it resolve every digital chore in my home life.

I guess it doesn’t make for a quick elevator pitch, but I’m finding it has reduced my cognitive overhead on a whole raft of fuckery that would otherwise have me shouting at inanimate objects.

Anyway, today I have to take the cat to the vet, email a bank, go and discuss ceiling systems, and review a proposed shopping list for a maintenance visit to a holiday rental. Can’t wait for the bleeding robots to get here.

Curious on your take on this, given your domain - is the hardware the principle challenge in your opinion, or the software?

>> It will be difficult to match this scale of breadth and depth of data for physical tasks. There’s no straightforward equivalent of “just Efficient learning, generalization, and adaptability / on-the-job learning seem like requirements.

Isn’t this the idea of NVIDIA’s Isaac? Model based adaptive learning in virtual environments for robotic systems? Or is this oversold?

I don’t even see how you can share direct to TikTok with this? Or have they got their own social network for toothbrushing? Can I use this to talk with someone using the Dyson ActiveDouche?

It’s the moon-leopards in league with the bee-people. Only an IDIOT wouldn’t know this, it’s OBVIOUS.

One way I could see this working is with old bulbs - when you’re near the threshold for it flickering, perhaps sound can modulate the light.

Or perhaps the contacts need to be realistically cruddy and intermittent, and the long glass tube acts as a sounding body to trigger an intermittent contact, encoding sound into light.

We absolutely are - but we’re still at the “weirdo factory owner installs experimental electric motor” stage. You look at what’s going on in robotics, look at GROOT/Isaac, and the circle closes quite neatly. World’s going to change in ways we can barely even imagine, no more than someone in 1720 could imagine the buffet car on an intercity express train.

It took the better part of a century for people to go from “hey look a steam engine” to “why don’t we put it on wheels?”.

Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?”

TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption.

The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone.

Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.

And how many shipboard stores have been affected? Hardly something they’re going to talk about, and a far stronger candidate for attack. This could be spillover.

I certainly thought so. I have astigmatism and I cannot for the life of me read blue LED/neon signs at any reasonable distance at night. Any other colour, no problem. Blue is just a blurry mess.

Totally. Nothing has really changed since GPT-2.0, it’s a stagnant technology.

I mean, at what point do we say that wilfully refusing to absorb relevant information and then knowingly and willingly making a decision based on that lack of information is, indeed, their will?

We have something similar where I live - no glaciers involved though, just river rocks.

The river dries up rapidly in the summer, leaving the smooth exposed bedrock riverbed peppered with rounded river rocks covered with drying algae.

Where the river is partially shaded, the rocks rapidly grow moss and other vegetation on their top surface. They preserve what little precipitation there is, and catch the morning dew. They grow top heavy, and fall over. They then repeat this on the next upwards facing surface. Meanwhile the downwards facing surface dries out from the radiant heat from the bedrock and shrivels into a thin black layer of desiccated biomass, which then partially falls off at the next rotation, further increasing the top-heaviness.

Over the course of a summer, the rocks all collect themselves into the local low-points of the river bed.

Then comes the flood and the cycle repeats.

Torrents are trivial. Each individual bit is trivial. But being able to click a button that says “run model” is even more trivial.

Or even “why would I pay for a flight when I can simply walk across the country”

It’s all about the convenience, minimising the time and effort from “looks interesting” to “running the model”.

Nvidia don’t care if you do it on their cloud, someone else’s cloud, or on your own machine - they win either way, as it further propagates the technology on which they are building their future.

Strategically, it matters - and nvidia’s strategy is to basically own the entire industrial supply chain of the future - they have interests in their suppliers, their competitors, their users.

In this case, Nvidia wants the easiest route from:

find model -> adapt model -> optimise model -> run model

to terminate inside the Nvidia stack. This is a boon for DGX cloud.

The debris flow that has just happened doesn’t appear to be a glacial outburst.

Rather, the entire front face of a glacier at high elevation sheared off, likely millions of tonnes of material at least, crashed down a steep runnel, slammed into the opposing slope on the other side of the valley at the bottom, made that partially collapse, dammed the river for several minutes, and then all descended at high speed as the dam failed, with the results we see.

Some reportage is still saying there was an earthquake - there wasn’t - the landslide itself was the source of the seismic waves.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/us7000tbwb...

Indeed. Far more likely, a more economic human is engineered.

Oryx and Crake, I think, was the first time I encountered that idea.

It does reflect the will of the people, but the causal chain doesn’t stop there.

The will of the people is the result of the corporate interests that control the democratic system.

Manufacturing Consent is an excellent read - and don’t stop at Chomsky, read Bernays, who pretty much codified the system as it runs today. Propaganda is a good place to start.

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

Isochrones is the word you’re after.

Even cooler are distance cartograms, where the map distorts according to travel time.

https://riatelab.github.io/distanamo/articles/web_only/with-...

Cynically, I think the purpose is to inflate page view counts. You refresh 10x to read the comments, they report 10x user engagement, and high five each other over successfully meeting their KPIs.