Berniek

The trouble with running a trade deficit is that you have to "borrow" to finance it, so you issue bonds. But once the bonds become due you need to issue more bonds to replace those that expired. BUT the new issue is the original bond + its interest rate. So the deficit you are financing with bonds is growing effectively at the interest rate of the bond. It gets to the point where the debt is self sustaining, regardless of what you do in the "real" economy. The only way to stop the spiral is devalue the currency (the market wont let the fed do that they just bid up the dollar - its has become a global currency) so the next way to do it is force interest rates down...but that causes inflation because people can borrow and waste more without the increase in productivity, that normal investment should produce. Someone has to pay for all this political stupidity and it will almost certainly be the poorest in society and the small businesses.

The de minimis system was in theory to allow developing countries to be able to take advantage of their very low labor costs and also to save the receiving country the inspection costs. Mostly countries ("third world") have time limited agreements. Tariffs were about originally about protection of local manufacturing. But both these changed with the politics and greed. China has cheap labor costs but superb management of manufacturing. Politics are now simple. China has 3 times as many consumers as the US. China refuses to float its currency, so the major currencies can't effectively export their inflation to them like they do with other trading partners by manipulating their interest rates. The US dollar is the defacto world currency but that means countries must have reserves of US dollars. Those reserves are not piles of US bank notes they are stocks, bonds real estate in the US. These foreign reserves mean influence in the economy. The current round of tariff wars are all about long term debt and attempting to reduce the long term bond rate. But countries wont wear that because their reserves are partly in bonds. So retaliation in the form of "custom fees" occur. More than likely, the EU fees and charges are aimed at China. Already China leads the world in production in many important areas (nuclear reactors, batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels). Countries can see China becoming (if not already) the worlds biggest economy with the political power that comes with it. Sadly, its the small manufactures & businesses that suffer the most, but thats democracy and capitalist system in action

This is going to be easily overturned. The ad blockers use the dns service and that is not part of what copyright protects. Modifying the results of dns requests is not protected by the copyright law itself. The argument could be made that giving "false" or "changed results" could be modifying the websites programming but you can't have it both ways, saying that your use of a free and public service is part of your copyright rights is surely drawing a long bow. It could be managed by implementing dns on the website (encrypted) to prevent normal dns from being used and hence blocked

Philosophically, the "thundering herd problem" actually CAUSES congestion.

There are 2 ways to handle it.

1 Stop the thundering herd.(make all the clients do something different). That may make things worse. Congestion in networks is usually exponential. You can't fulfill a request so you repeat the request, it can't be fulfilled so it repeats. You can add a random delay at the client end but that is just The US governments answer to the debt problem, it kicks the can down the road in the short term but it will almost certainly come back and bite you. Mathematically it is very easy for this scenario to become catastrophically exponential when a threshold is reach

2 Stop the congestion (make the handling process faster or add processes)

The system already has a cache to handle this but if its not in the cache it doesn't help. There needs to be an extra request cache exclusively for congestion scenarios. The existing cache request is already doing some processing, so extend that to route "thundering herd requests processing". This second cache does a bit more processing as well.As each new request is routed to it, it checks itself to see if this requestor is in the cache and removes it or overwrites it. It should never contain more than one entry per client.

When no more editions are made to this congestion cache (or the rate has slowed significantly) then the requests can be forwarded and processed via the original cache system.

Under this configuration, the congestion does not become exponential and should only delay the thundering herd requests. All other requests will be handled as per normal.

Once the original cache has the information there is no need for any thundering herd requests to be routed to the congestion cache.

Some clients will encounter some delays but not all and only on the "thundering herd process".

Well one other aspect of this research springs to mind.

Most "bug zapper" design are wrong. It should consist of a light source and a single grid perpendicular to the light source rather than surrounding the light source.

The light source should also be constantly varying to ensure the insects' tilt (and hence their circling behavior) will also change the radius of their circles.

>Insects use the moon as a celestial compass cue to navigate, and mistakenly use artificial light sources instead

I think that was one of the theories being investigated by this research. The paper demonstrates that it is the actual light (of the moon or stars or sun or artificial source) they use to orientate themselves in the horizontal plain BUT that is not navigation. With a "tilt" in their orientation they will fly in circles around the light but this tilt also causes inefficiencies in their actual flight mechanism so will cause erratic directional stability as their flight path rapidly changes their spacial relationship to the light source. Whatever their navigation imperative (heat, cold pheromones,smell, sight, sound) will be affected by this spacial relationship instability.

Firstly, the conflict in the GAZA strip is war.

Pure and simple.

Realistically this war is being fought politically in the worlds media. The fight is for public opinion. So the orders of the IJC are about war. The hair splitters may want to change the nature of war to "genocide" by one side rather than condemn BOTH sides in the conflict. "but we can only take evidence from XYZ and only on matters ABC"

It seems to me to be a case of the UN wanting to have a seat at the table. They have become more & more irrelevant in matters of real importance or conflict. This ruling is pretty meaningless regardless of what your beliefs are. Its just more media circus.

We can argue about statistics and false testimony who is right and which side is credible but we are just adding to the noise.

Most terrorist organizations & actions are the direct result of one group having no political power. It ceases when that group obtains political power.

It seems to me the original attack by HAMAS was simply to ensure that there is more war and that war can be fought in the worlds media. This ruling and the whole procedure is just more of the same.

Wars usually continue to be prosecuted till one (or both) side loses the political will to continue. Does anyone here really believe Israel will lose that political will, regardless of world opinion? Hasn't in the past. Just like Russia.

Buy a home "cryovac" machine like food saver. Prepare cooked meals such as pasta sauce, stews, curry etc in meal size portions. Cryovac and put in the freezer. To use them put, still in their sealed bags in hot water and bring to the boil. You can do things like boiled, mashed rosti potatoes. Frozen beans, peas, broccoli etc can be portioned out into separate bags (either at use time or in advance). It doesn't matter what combination you choose to use, they are all in separate bags in the same pot of water. The range of meals is only open to your imagination.

Trust Crisis for AI? What after we see the board/CEO of one company fired/changed apparently for allegations of lies or manipulation that nobody is clear on? If Dropbox derives data from user data by scanning said data, then that "derived" data is no longer "users data" it is Dropbox data and can be shared. It may only be statistical in nature and not related directly to individual users but isn't that exactly what training data is? Isn't that how it works? That can be shared to train AI models can't it? Its not lies its hair splitting.

No its called unethical behavior and has become the norm for big tech.

Who is driving the company (companies)? Certainly not the board, when it can be ousted on the whim of one person. Might as well just get rid of the board (all boards in this organization) as any decision made can be overthrown by a bit of publicity and ego. Perhaps it about getting rich at the expense of any ethics? Those who work for this company should bear this in mind, they are all expendable!

Battery Technology is a bit of a handy distraction. The only solution is to move the "Duck Curve" to later in the day. So use batteries? well yes if you use them at the household WITHOUT solar. If you have solar + batteries you just increase the duck curve You can use centralized batteries but that probably means major upgrades to the distribution infrastructure. If the power companies would charge according to cost of supply (so ALL power is cheaper during the Duck Curve period) so you can charge the home battery during "duck Curve" and use it ONLY during the evening peak. But most power companies have multiple generator technology and use power generated by "cheaper" generators to subsidize the costly overnight or non renewable generation.

absolutely correct, but Firefox takes notice of ideas. They can be influenced by what is proposed as fixes or contributions. "Everyone knows" that Firefox may break some websites, just ask google. Has anyone ever come across that pretty regularly? Firefox has become a follower rather than a leader and I think the influence of contributors has done that. It is no good for Firefox going in a direction that a good deal of their contributors wont go. The users be damned!

Sort of... But Firefox is open source, so anyone can contribute. Mozilla accepted money from google to "just make google the default search engine". But they also accept contributions in programming (its open source after all) from google, Microsoft & others employees.

The google/Microsoft contributors whether working after hours or as part of their employment have some influence in the direction of Firefox.

That may be deliberate or benign (a really good direction by google, in a workers mind, will bias their thinking in other projects and visa versa)

That is one disadvantage of open source. A foundation can't avoid that unless you setup like Greenpeace and don't give the riff raff any real say.

Firefox users are "captured" by any adds on google search even though they may advertise chrome.

People that comment here are interested, most users of browsers ARE NOT. It is so much easier to use the default. Google knows this, Twitter knows this.

One of the more brilliant ideas in Firefox was containers, chrome could not implement them because of architectural constraints but rather than build on that beautiful idea, Firefox went in a slightly different direction that Chrome & Edge could follow and still protect their advertising revenue.

I know the post above was long, but I must mention the contents come from personal experience.

One thing I found, sadly, was that people I love and trust including family often become greedy and grasping when there is inheritance at stake. Bear that in mind when you make a list with access details to things like bank accounts.

You may not believe it but that is what will happen to your family.

I like to think it is a reaction to grief, rather than an innate selfishness.

Power of attorney- no real help, you are dead. Depending on your country.... When you die your estate "owns" everything and only your estate can operate it.

But any property in joint names AUTOMATICALLY becomes the property of the joint owner and IS NOT subject to any restrictions

What????

In most jurisdictions, the law says the executor of your will can operate on the will, its contents etc, but there are strict legal requirements and it is NOT automatic. A court usually has to OK it.

In Australia it is a probate court. It takes several weeks to make sure the will in question is the real and most recent.

As a general case, the courts allow the estate to pay for things like funerals etc.

If there is no will then someone has to apply to the courts for administration.

Your "next of kin" is a Hollywood dramatization and in Australia has absolutely no actual power to do anything.

Usually the "next of kin" will actually do the organizing to inform the executor (if the executor doesn't know)

So the important things to put in your "In case of Death file" Location of will Name of Executor Burial insurance details (if you have any)

Location of a secondary file for the executor with email account and website account passwords, Bank Account details, Insurance policy details Location of a secondary file for the executor with email account and website account passwords, in short everything the executor needs.

I also have a document containing the "order of my life"

This is how I have organized my life. Whose name the cars/boat/golf buggy is in, what insurance companies, Utility companies for power water and services, clubs I am members of, things like roadside assistance etc. How I buy and sell my equities and shares, who I am paying hush money to and who is blackmailing me from porn hub. Basically all the minor things I do in everyday life.

If you are uncomfortable with this topic, if nothing else investigate an "Enduring Power of Attorney" (it may be called something else in your jurisdiction).

This expires with your death but it allows the holder to make medical and other decisions should you become unable to make decisions for yourself (dementia, coma, stroke accidents that leave you in a vegetative stake) (In Australia a spouse has that right automatically but if your spouse is unable to make that decision (died in the same accident, has dementia etc) then you NEED an Enduring Power of Attorney). Your children do not have the right and your executor in the future can take legal action against them)

This is way more important than a "in case of death file"

I am more a lurker than a poster... What I have noticed is wander. Comments start to wander off topic and "evolve" into comments on some consensus comment rather than the subject of the actual comment. Having said that it is so hard to make commenters to stick to the subject. Comments become full discussions, rather than well, just comments.

Is this a concerted effort to kill browsers in favor of proprietary apps? With proprietary apps the owners have all the power over privacy, advertising search results...basically everything. Where have we heard "we have to do better" only for the big players to become infinitely worse? We badly need the federated universe to mature and close out these greedy behemoths controlling social media.

Depends what you define as progress. On a purely philosophical view point the answer is most certainly no. From a speed/operational/deployment perspective probably yes. How and what you consider and measure progress is the problem.

Consider what happens when you use output from LLM as training data for LMMs. If there is any "falsehoods" or "incorrections" then the very processes of LMM training will provide "bias" in it's output. That will then become exponential. That is the disinformation issue you mention. I would submit that this is/will/should be the paramount area for research and hence progress. In that regard there doesn't seem to be much progress at all, except to deny or cover it up.

Just like the self perpetuating myths on Wikipedia, where entries are corrected and then those corrections are repeatedly replaced because people read it in articles quoting previous (bad) information from Wikipedia.

I guess we can have an army of moderators (probably need several hundred thousand) correcting data or "preselecting" only truthful real data for training. That means for the most part its not Artificial Intelligence, its human.

oh wait we have that :D

Been there done that and reversed. Manual labor (of any sort) can be very fulfilling, particularly if you enjoy it. You can do manual labor that you love, its easy. But when you look around and see the little old men still doing the same as you and you realize those little old men are only 50 years old and will still be doing it when they are 65, then its an eye opener. If they live to 70 they will probably have arthritis and other wear and tear on their bodies. Do you want to do that? This is reality check time. If you are going to do it, do the retirement plan first. Put the nest egg away for retirement, then go for it. Reckon you can keep working when you have the flu? You can at your present job, but you will ruin your long time health if you do hard physical labor when you are sick. First think about what ELSE you can use that physics degree for. Sales in finance is probably the low end of using your knowledge. One other thing to consider, is that if you change your mind 5~10 years down the track (you did once :) )can you go back and put up with the younger brighter more recently experienced who will be your bosses?

And when you add a new account you have to do that for all the folders individually. That doesn't apply to a folders sub folder either. There is a method to copy all settings to a folder and its sub folders but that does not include sub folders of the sub folder. So you end up for a while with some folders showing up as threaded and some not. And you have to do it for each account individually. (some of us have multiple accounts for businesses and personal emails) Nightmare when deleting, because you may delete a thread rather than an individual email. For most of us it means threading was foisted on us without notice or discussion. Ever tried to find out what is being considered? Good luck with that. Surely a global button to remove all threading can't be all that hard.

Well it looks like Betterbird war is having an affect on Thunderbird itself. While not the same logo, it has a similar "feel" to the Betterbird logo. Now if Thunderbird will finally make it possible to NOT have threading as the default for new accounts or have an easy button to remove threading, rather than the cumbersome way they do it now, (listen to the endusers guys , not the sponsored contributors), we will all feel a little bit more love for the venerable Thunderbird. I do like the new logo though.

The last line in the argument reads:

assuming that Stephen wasn't playing games with me, GPT-4 not only gave the best possible answer to my query, it even knew somehow that I was referring to the Wolfram language.

Given the earlier interactions, is it not possible that the very references to Wolfram in these previous interactions provide a "bias" or inference in answers that ChatGPT gives and as noted in other comments, the need to appear courteous and knowledgeable (even condescending?) makes it provide an answer using wolfram language?

Perhaps it is unanswerable because a truly separate same query by another unrelated user to attempt to remove the bias is no longer possible, the bias in THAT question is now embedded.

Isn't this exactly the problem with these models, they actually can become self biassing based on all their own previous answers?

The wrong get wronger :)

Perhaps its because of the history and culture of self determination. Dog eat dog if you prefer. No one else was going to help you, you need to help yourself. Individuals must have a job or earn money. sink or swim. Hard lessons embedded in the culture.

Individuals (generally) don't have a safety net like most European countries.

Individual health care is only for the successful (rich). This breeds a culture of perseverance, if you like it weeds out the weak & lazy. They can't survive in this sort of cultural environment, so they are able to be exploited with low wages and conditions, which in turn allows businesses to thrive.

Add to this a critical mass of people (350 million?) and you have lots of consumers with lots of money to invest/spend. Initially fortunes were made and the country grew economically on super low wages (slavery). You now have lots of "canon fodder", workers who will do what they are told and must accept wages at any level because they must to survive. Individuals must provide for their old age, no one else will. If you can't then you just keep working. The individual drive to succeed is very strong in this environment, chances must be taken, failure is not an option. The only way to pull them selves out of this situation is by innovating and entrepreneurship.

Get at least 1 more email address and keep it only for services you pay for. The biggest problem with subscribing is the on selling of email addresses.

Get a proton paid mail account and your own domain. Setup a "catchall" address. Now when you subscribe to "something" then use the name of the "something" with your domain name as the email address. Example: to logon to Hacker News use the address hackernews@yourdomaim.com. You do not need to setup an email address the catchall receives your email. If you get spam addressed to hackernews@yourdomain.com you know Hacker News on sold your address. If you don't after a month or so change your hacker news address to your legitimate address. You cannot send from these catchall addresses, but if you truly need to you setup a legitimate email with that particular address and send it then delete it. Proton Mail have excellent spam filtering anyway. There are other providers that do the same.

The biggest problem with "unsubscribe" is that it effectively verifies that email address. You may unsubscribe from one list only to be added to lots of other lists because it is a verified email address.

I found a great way to reduce spam is to have email address that looks like a big company ie google@yourdomain.com or microsoft@yourdomain.com

Your email client needs attention. Make sure you haven't set it to save all incoming addresses and the spam filter to "ignore spam setting for emails in my address book". I am not familiar with google mail but make sure the same sort of thing is not setup for gmail. (...we don't read your emails we just extract anonymous information for market research purposes..so spam is never an affiliate?)

To solve your present problem set aside at least 1 hour a day and setup block lists. You need to ruthlessly organize your contacts lists. The problem will get worse before it gets better. I found unsubscribing just breeds more. It is going to take weeks or months, but the short term pain will be worth it.

By the way I think gmail may have limits on its spam filtering. (...we don't filter out affiliates....really?)

You could get your corporate IT to setup all lists with separate sender addresses to allow filtering, but they will probably hate you for asking...

Fully agree. I like the concept, but the concept itself produces multiple instances of any particular subject. You have to wade through a plethora of almost the same instances and then read the moderation policy on each to find out is this is the one for you, then you have to somehow tell your friends.

Perhaps, perhaps not.

Is this a way for Google to add new sites to their search data and advertising infrastructure?

When you go to the link "Chrome and Other Browsers"(from the website above), it takes you to a page which blatantly advertises Chrome, and doesn't mention other browsers. So Google!

If it was harmless or did only what it says, wouldn't it be handled by a consortium with at least Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla and the like.

History tells us that google looks after googles income.

I suspect Iphones actually cater to the way people have recently been educated. As I grew up my schooling taught me as a first principle that to learn something you had to understand it. Now my children/grandchildren are quite happy to learn about things and never seek to understand them. As consumers those same people just don't want/need to know about security or crashes or how everything connects they just want it to work seamlessly. Iphones do exactly that. As consumers they don't care that IOS is Unix based, they just want to send messages, photos text etc. You get a choice of 1 for most programmes. With Android you get multiple choice to do anything, some work some don't. Political propaganda says that this program or that is monitored by (insert choice of "nasty" government) so consumers can't tell what is correct or not so they avoid making the choice by going Iphone. By the way it is probably more likely that we do not have to understand things to use them. No? Ask people how the stock market works and you will never get 2 answers the same.

Well, 6.3V is an interesting value. The European standard voltage AC is 220V, many countries use 240V (or 230V) So we want 5V to power our whatever. Regulators need some overhead usually .6~1.2V so we need 6.2V as a minimum. BUT THAT IS DC. When you rectify AC (turn it into DC) you actually get PULSES of DC with peak of 1.414 time the AC value. To make it straight DC you need a capacitor. But as you draw current from the capacitor it can't charge up (it has a charge time constant caused by the impedance of the transformer and its capacitance) so you get ripple. The more current you take, the more ripple. So you put a regulator to keep the DC output below the ripple as much as you can. So now to do the maths. Using the SAME transformer on each of the supplies we get the peak output of 8.9V on 220V & 9.7V on 240V Now we need 5V so that gives us an overhead of 8.9-5 = 3.9V and 9.7-5=4.7V. That is plenty of overhead if we had DC but we have pulsed DC that is smoothed by a capacitor so as we draw current the capacitor can't stay charged fully so you end up with DC with ripple at the input to the regulator so that overhead needed by the regulator at the troughs of the ripple can be eroded. So you can drawer less current or give more initial overhead. The more overhead you start with the more heat the regulator has to deal with so you need it to operate with just the right amount of overhead. By the way the ripple component is like AC and its heating effects are actually reduced (the maths says its about .64 times the same value of DC). This is true for the non switching regulators, with those there is a new set of problems with the output ripple (which is usually very high frequency and easier to filter out even with small value capacitance). This may cause radio interference within the circuits but good design should eliminate that. The ideal overhead seems to be ~4V. The regulator power dissipation (it gets hot with bigger overhead) is a trade off. You can operate with less but you need a bigger transformer (to supply more charge current to the transformer or bigger capacitance and that means more cost). By the way so you have 110V or 120V AC. The 2 values are directly related to the 220 & 240V.

But why 6.3V? Well like a lot of traditional designs, the heater voltage of vacuum tubes was nominally 6.3V so the transformer design was already done. Also putting 6V battery with vacuum tubes is likely to shorten their life, (the DC equivalent of 6.3V used for heating is 4V), but the early batteries had a fairly high internal resistance so the voltage supplied to the heaters was usually much less.

A quick note is in order about values. Why pick individual values? History and experience tell us that certain values are efficient. Metric is very good for measuring distances, but not good for measuring bolts where the imperial system reigns supreme (a 1/2 inch long bolt has more useful applications than a 10 mil long bolt where a 15 mil bolt is too long). Same goes for fathoms. It is a much better measurement of depth because nearly all water bodies will have ripple or waves and waves of 6 feet make an error in depth of 1 in fathoms or an error of 6 in feet.

Turns out 6.3V seems to be efficient for both vacuum tubes and regulators!

Sorry a bit late replying-been away. It is not the competition that is bad, it that anything produced by them cannot be tweaked and so become "circular" sources. There will be no way to test for "truth", at least on an individual bot the training data can be tweaked to not use its own production as source. The competition will make the validity or "truth" of most data questionable. I guess it should be possible for an individual LMM to be trained for "truth" (reality?) but it becomes almost impossible for a LMM to discern truth when the sources it is analyzing are of generated by another LMM

The references in the comments suggest ChatGPT as providing this effect. But that is (or should be) unlikely, the "training" or moderation (tweaking?) should actually solve this problem. It should be relatively easy to separate it's own generation from sources. BUT where it will happen is when multiple instances of these language models compete with each other. ChatGPT quoting Bing or Bard output probably can't be reliably countered with internal training of ChatGTP, and the same goes for Bing & Bard and all the other myriad manifestations of these data mining techniques. (Unless they merge them togther?)