Intermernet

This has been less true for the last 50 years. Archaeology as a field is very aware of this cultural bias, and the old school are mostly dead. Think of it like the doctors of 150 years ago prescribing "cucaine for ill humors". It's a pendulum, but it's settling.

These days it's seen as a dynamic decision tree. If such and such people had so and so technology, then the logical ways to achieve that are x, y and z methods. Let's look for evidence for those things and weigh up the probability of each. Importantly, let's not allow cultural bias to cloud that analysis by consulting with the closest living relatives of said people.

The problems are, amongst others, maintaining that lack of cultural bias, recognising that you have to allow for unknown paths to technology, and being aware that every deductive step exponentially expands the decision tree whilst simultaneously clouding the certainty.

This is why modern archaeology is actually highly averse to saying things are "true", but it's also very strong on saying other things are almost certainly "false".

Most things in this tree of dwindling probability are "false" , and it takes serious evidence, linking a bunch of deductive steps, to flip the consensus to "true".

This is true, but archaeology has been settled for a while now on what constitutes sufficient evidence. Believe it or not, it's actually a pretty new science.

No judgement, but what theories of Hancock have been proven to be true?

Thankyou. I was going to point this out. Chris (ClickSpring) is the first to say that his methods are not proven, they're just highly believable given the technology of the time. I did some archaeology at uni and I know we're not meant to say this, but sometimes things are just so obvious even when there is no physical evidence of it.

Archaeological proofs have the unfortunate property of having each deductive step being fairly obvious and limited, but proving those steps can be literally impossible.

This is a bad take. CO2 will not harm your personal health in the short term, in the amounts measured in current atmospheric readings. You personally have a higher percentage of CO2 in your body every time you breathe. You currently breathe about 430 ppm of CO2. Toxic levels are above 5000 ppm (40000 is regarded as immediately dangerous).

You're arguing the right side but you're using the wrong arguments. This is actually counter productive.

The problem is that there isn't really a middle ground. The damage is done and no actions taken now will have a quick, politically measurable effect. The people arguing against action are relying on the delay between action and effect. If you can't see it now (despite actual measurable data being available for at least the last 2 decades) then it must be a lie.

I'm still not sure what the climate change denialists see as the goal of "big climate". All of the money and profit is on the side of continuing to fuck the climate. All of the projects to alleviate the problem are expensive and have very little profit to be gained, but apparently it's a conspiracy of academics on minimum wage in various university research centers who are determined to take the money from our wonderful oil and mining benefactors (who have nothing but our best interests at heart). What's worse is they want to push technology that gives us energy for free! Must be a bunch of communists or something!

The warcraft 2 demo had Easter eggs. One voice sample was "in the retail version I'm much funnier".

If we get one based on warcraft 2 you can then play warcraft 3 safely.

"Job Done!"

"Work Complete!"

"Are you still touching me?"

Apparently John Wood read the lines in reverse order to make the enunciation weird. If you train a model, feed the lines you want in reverse word order, then split on silence and reverse them again, you should come close.

Imagine Davinci putting ads for the Medici money lending services into his paintings. That's where we're at now.

PCP is still in active development. It's very cool, but probably made obsolete by otel and others. I used it on servers and services regularly until a few years ago. Very lightweight, robust and powerful.

https://github.com/performancecopilot/pcp

This is a bit tricky as it couples the user's password with the disk encryption key. If a user changes the password they would then need to change the encryption key, or remember the previous (possibly compromised) password. A better option is to force the user to record a complex hash, but that's never going to be user friendly when it comes to the average computer user.

Basically, we need better education about the issue, but as this is the case with almost every contentious issue in the world right now, I can't imagine this particular issue will bubble to the top of the awareness heap.

As a rule, I don't down-vote, so I'll reply instead. You're being obnoxious. Please stop it.

I don't invest in index funds, and yes, many companies don't live up to any reasonable moral standard.

The extra charges you are describing are a "cherry on the top" for the card issuers. They could easily survive without those charges (in many countries they do). They also act as a convenient diversion. If you think that's the way they make money you will avoid looking into the other ways they make money. Namely, exhorbitant interest rates on defaulted loans by those who were "sold" credit cards with no practical means of ever servicing the debt.

I appreciate the pedantism, and I'm sure I would happily spend hours at parties discussing similar inanities with you :-)

Who knows? Do NeurIPS have a pedigree of original, well sourced research dating back to before the advent of LLMs? We're at the point where both of the terms "AI" and "Experts" are so blurred it's almost impossible to trust or distrust anything without spending more time on due diligence than most subjects deserve.

As the wise woman once said "Ain't nobody got time for that".

That's like asking "what does rent have to do with property prices?". Just because you've managed to be on the top of this perverse social summation of usury doesn't mean it isn't predatory and a net negative for society.

Credit cards are one of the most insidious ways that banks extract money from those living closest to the margins of poverty. The benefits you gain are a fraction of the profits gained from raking the most vulnerable over the coals of bankruptcy. They're a financial instrument of torture and I refuse to have anything to do with them. I'm not by any means rich, but I'm 48 years old, have zero debt, and will spend the rest of my life avoiding debt.

Finance is not a zero sum game.

Almost all of Pratchett's greatest characters are highly flawed, morally complex and anti-heroic. This is the main point. This premise includes everyone from Cohen the barbarian, through Vimes, Rincewind, Susan, all the witches, Moist Von Lipwig, all the way to DEATH.

That's one of the main reasons that Terry's work comprehensively bridges the genre gap between "children's books" and "modern philosophy".

CB could be called a "midtagonist", but apparently that would be someone who really likes a particular type of fly-fishing lure.

People who don't enjoy debt?

Not that big, but absolutely enourmous distances between them. The inter-city highway infrastructure is lacking in EV chargers, but it's getting better.

This is great, but it doesn't differentiate between "Natural Lawson" and "Lawson", which my partner and I have dubbed "Unnatural Lawson".

Just brainstorming here, but would a distributed search index be possible / usable with current network speeds and latency? I'm not sure how to set up the data structure to not require many high latency jumps, but maybe someone has solved this problem.

Comment of the year.

True, but the usefulness of local models is actually getting better. I hope that the current unprecedented madness is a factor of the potential of cloud models, and not a dismissal of the possibility of local models. It's the biggest swing we've seen (with the possible exception of cloud computing vs local virtualisation) but that may be due to recognition of the previous market behaviour, and a desperate need to not miss out on the current boom.

Over the last few decades I've seen people make the same comment about spell checking, voice recognition, video encoding, 3D rendering, audio effects and many more.

I'm happy to say that LLM usage will only actually become properly integrated into background work flow when we have performant local models.

People are trying to madly monetise cloud LLMs before the inevitable rise of local only LLMs severely diminishes the market.

Authoritative or Authoritarian?

Just nitpicking here, but 1984 is a critique of totalitarianism. The only references to systems of government in the book refer to "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists".

Orwell was a democratic socialist. He was opposed to totalitarian politics, not communism per se.

Yes, but you missed "for cheap" ;-)