Posts by pdh 165 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Mar 2014
Actually reducing atmospheric CO2 will require two things: a significant decline in the standard of living in developing countries (comparable to the sacrifices that were made on the home front in World War 2), and less developed countries remaining significantly less developed. It's impossible for me to believe that we can reduce CO2 levels and simultaneously provide 8 billion people with the lifestyle that Europe and the U.S. enjoy today.
I found a few sources saying that since wood is transparent to the radio frequencies used for communications, satellite antennas can be inside the body of the satellite rather than being unfurled outside, which is a simpler design. But that still doesn't make sense, unless it happens that wood is also opaque to the radiation that makes up damaging cosmic rays.
The Republican party has just joined the Democrats as plaintiff in the lawsuit about the shenanigans in Erie County. Both parties suing the county board of elections five days before the election, in a swing county in a swing state, is *not* a sign that the system is working as intended.
The county clerk is blaming the problems on the out-of-state contractor who was hired to print and distribute the ballots, so it may be simple incompetence on the part of the low bidder for a government contract. But it's still very messed up, and both parties will have clear and obvious grounds for challenging the results of any close race in this county. (The county is pretty evenly split between Democrats and Republicans in terms of voter registration, with Democrats having a slim majority.)
There is tomfoolery afoot in Pennsylvania. In addition to the incident in Bucks County (which resulted in a lawsuit by the Republican party, and hence the judicial override), we have:
-- Duplicate mail-in ballots sent to 300 voters in Erie County, and an additional 700 mail-in ballots delivered to the wrong local post offices, rendering them undeliverable until re-sorted;
-- Erie County clerk says they believe that even more ballots have probably been "misplaced" (her word), no other details given;
-- Hours-long lines at the Elections office in Erie County, full of people who didn't get their ballots, likely as a result of the above. The Democratic Party is suing the Erie County elections board to get more information about the overall situation (the chairman of the county elections board is a career politician, a Democrat);
-- 250 duplicate ballots sent to voters in Tioga County;
-- County election worker in Wilkes-Barre "discarded" at least 9 overseas military ballots (the worker has since been fired); 7 of the 9 had been opened and all 7 of them were Trump ballots;
-- Approximately 2,500 recent voter registrations (not ballots) in Lancaster County have been declared invalid; Lancaster County says that two other counties (which they did not name) have also seen numbers of suspicious registrations, which have also been invalidated.
These events have all been reported in mainstream local media, and are all based on information from the various county elections offices. I have to wonder how many other incidents have gone unreported.
... is unlikely to be a good strategy. Given a choice between chatting with an AI customer-service system and chatting with a human, what percentage of customers would choose AI? When you deliberately do something that your customers don't want, you have no right to expect a positive ROI.
If we ever do build something that can do AGI, I'm guessing that it won't achieve that in the same way that our brains do. Automobiles and submarines don't move like horses and fish do, and airplanes don't fly like birds do. We got useful airplanes only when people stopped saying "I want to build something that works like a bird" and started saying "I want to build a heavier-than-air craft that can fly," starting with a clean piece of paper.
But for AGI, what exactly is the goal? "I want to build a system that can.... do what?" In other words, if / when AGI arrives, how will we know? (Current systems can already pass the Turing test, so that's not a useful gauge anymore.)
> The problem doesn't really lie with the supersharers. They, presumably, believe the material they're posting, and they surely have the right to share their opinions with others, regardless of how bat shit crazy they are. Any society that seeks to limit the free expression of opinions - North Korea, anyone? - has already lost, and is not one I would want to be part of. Similarly, people must be free to read those opinions if they wish.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. And yes. The problem isn't these "supersharers," who are very few in number. It's the non-super readers who base their own opinions on what they read from random idiots on social media. The supersharers would not be an issue at all if nobody paid attention to them; and conversely, their followers would probably hold similarly ridiculous opinions even if the supersharers did not exist. Eliminating the supersharers would solve exactly nothing.
> Wind, solar, hydro, other renewables, and nuclear together now make up 39.4 percent of the world's ***electricity*** supply. It might not be too much longer until most ***energy*** in the world is generated by low-carbon sources.
So are we talking about electricity, or about total energy (which includes electricity, plus other things like gasoline and diesel used for internal combustion engines, natural gas for heating, etc)?
> they're gambling addicts with access to vast amounts of other people's money
Or they're following the momentum and attempting to profit from other people's bandwagon mentality. That can be a good strategy as long as you don't get caught holding the bag when it starts to fall apart.
Here in Pennsylvania, the Department of Transportation has been installing roundabouts in the last few years. In every case that I know of, the locals complained after a few months when they noticed that the number of accidents was not decreasing. The DoT always replies that the goal isn't to reduce the actual number of accidents -- they concede that that number will probably be about the same as it was before the roundabout -- but to reduce the severity of accidents that do happen. And that does seem to be the case: there are still regular fender-benders, but fewer higher-speed crashes.
15 year old ThinkPad W500 here, with the hard disk swapped out for an SSD. It's my every-day machine and it does everything that I need it to do. It even survived an accidental coffee spill a couple of years ago. (Almost an entire cup, poured directly on the keyboard. I gave it two weeks to dry out, then it booted as though nothing had happened.)
I'm certain there are others here with even older machines.
For this to work, the battery capacity has to be larger than what the tower really needs for backup purposes, so the operator can afford to sell excess power back to the grid or to run from the batteries down when power is expensive. If I was the tower operator, I might be wondering why I was sold such an oversized battery in the first place. I might prefer to pay less for a smaller battery that can simply act as a traditional backup.
Those "tight planning regulations" have an effect too. Standards are higher than they used to be, and that costs money. I couldn't legally rebuild the house I live in now -- it's a fine house but was built 50 years ago, and it would violate numerous aspects of the building code if re-built as-is. Same with other things -- it would not be possible to manufacture the truck that I owned 20 years ago, because it wouldn't meet current safety standards. A 20-year-old phone would be laughably inadequate now. And so on -- we're paying more for many things, but we're getting more too.
Computers though... wow. Orders of magnitude performance increases, at lower prices. (Although I am typing this on a 15-year-old Lenovo W500.)
That's probably true; the system is working as intended. Boeing screwed up, so the company is now under increased scrutiny from customers, regulators, the media, and shareholders. The extra scrutiny will continue until the Boeing re-earns the trust that has been lost. And deservedly so, as you said.
>>"can we really afford to do all these things that go on for 10 – 20 years? [...]"
> Can we afford not to?
Yes, we can afford not to. I admire the Voyager project, but let's be honest: the economic return on investment is likely to be negative. It's still worth doing in my opinion, but asking about ROI for this kind of thing is like asking about ROI for an arts project. ROI is not why we do these things.
> Tech companies might spend their time pushing the latest and greatest, however, the job posting is a reminder that not everyone is on the express train to modernization.
I have to wonder: in what way would Windows 11 be an improvement over Windows 3.11 for this use case? Other than "Windows 11 is still supported, and 3.11 is not"?
"Several states... have passed laws forbidding politicians from using deepfakes in election campaigns. The rules, however, are fuzzier when it comes to individuals using AI to create and distribute disinformation."
So it's illegal for Biden to use an AI avatar of himself as part of his campaign, but it's OK for someone else to use one as part of an anti-Biden disinformation campaign?
Depends on where you live. I'm in the northeastern U.S. Where I live, the sun has been (partially) visible on only two days in the last two weeks. And at the moment, my roof is covered in snow. Solar would be completely pointless here between from November through February, and it isn't that great in late fall or early spring either.
I remember my thesis advisor talking about this possibility decades ago. He said that weaponization was a real concern: if you can beam a huge amount of energy from space to a ground station via microwaves, then you could probably also re-target that beam to other locations outside of your borders; leading to an arms race as soon as any one nation started work on such a system.
There are fining agents (substances that a brewer can add to beer in order to help clarify it) that are basically powdered plastic. The idea is that the plastic drops out (flocculates) and doesn't make it into the finished product, but it attracts some other kinds of particles on the way down, so they are removed as well.
The Bill of Rights (first ten amendments to the Constitution) are exclusively concerned with limiting the government's power. Nothing in the Bill of Rights restricts citizens (including employers); it's simply a list of limitations on what the government can do. One of those limitations is that the government cannot restrict your freedom of speech. The First Amendment simply does not apply to individuals -- it says so right there on the box -- "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
What you said. Freedom of speech in the U.S. derives from the First Amendment, which says that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. It does *not* say that you can't be fired for calling your boss an asshole. There may be other laws that protect you in such a case, but it's not a freedom of speech issue.
Seriously, if you had $100 billion, why not drop a few hundred million on something like this -- just in case? You'd hardly notice the expense, and you'll never really need all of that money -- unless of course you're dumb enough to do something like buy a microblogging site at an inflated price, and then drive it into the ground...
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