insensible

When I saw it on the website my first thought was a little gasp of recognition from the Apple II days when I used to go into the 80-character mode my dad had installed the expansion card for. The narrower text looked just like this. I had the same experience then: reading text in the wider type felt strange after a while and I preferred the narrow setting.

“Put it there voluntarily.” Perhaps a focusing question is: which 10% will die?

I spent the summer in a rural area of a country whose very name you have been conditioned to be disgusted to hear. Low air defense coverage in this sparsely populated area. Mobile internet was down for days for all but extremely limited traffic to a few domestic internet services, because there was a need to prevent enemy drone systems from using mobile internet for command and control. Palantir AI threatened my family’s life and more than “severing fiber optic cable” was required.

So what would exclude military adversaries from consideration? I happen to believe that the country that the west so detests would not engage in such use of AI against civilians (and if you disagree then your reason for fear greatly increases!), but I have personally experienced that there is indeed a path to mass death should entities engaging in terrorism arm themselves with AI.

Definitely not claiming that the 10% claim is accurate or good behavior, but I do think I have a substantial counterpoint to the claim that there’s no path.

And then there’s the Orthodox Church, which included the Roman Church until the pope insisted on changing the Greek text of the Symbol of Faith in a way that altered basic theology. And hasn’t changed much at all.

Also, Berry wrote a foreword to one of Joel Salatin’s books. Modern intensive rotational grazing imitates nature, improves soil, and produces an important crop very profitably at scale.

In the sense that publishing marketing-driven press releases is a conspiracy between the publishers and the marketing team, I guess?

When using an LLM for details like this I keep it out of the mode of generating prose as much and as long as possible. I get better results when I work with bullet points. I think this helps me keep the right frame of mind when reading the responses. It’s easier to scan the facts or points for accuracy. And I think it might help the LLM to be less creative with those points, but I don’t rely on that.

You think it’s funny but it taint.

Ruby is a great utility language target for LLM-generated tools.

Trekkies are experiencing a major regression from Deep Space Nine.

Going on your Slavic username: as an American who moved to a country without forced-air HVAC, it’s been quite a revelation to discover how backwards forced air really is.

I fully agree that this was a big miss on the human operators’ part. But it’s a small business and I have repeatedly seen so much worse than this. Vendors charging money to allow customers to connect AI to systems must have a robust story for protecting them from disaster. Everyone involved needs to be working hard to limit the impact of mistakes and surprises.

That “but..” is a big key to the difference between Russia and the US in this conversation. The US has a severe cultural propensity for rule-following and reporting things, but in Russia there’s an interesting mix of people seeing society as a commons, seeing personal responsibility as foremost, seeing laws as guidelines that may or may not correspond to reality, and seeing reporting something as fairly extreme behavior. And this includes people at all levels.

1) Russia is generally very safe, and 2) I agree that the violence amongst children is crazy. It’s a great place to homeschool and free-range and I have not found a way to send children to school in a way that’s acceptable to us.

Good morning from Russia, where I moved my large free-range family (from the US) with the topic of free-ranging children very high on the list of reasons why.

My children cross town by themselves to attend classes, it’s normal to see children walking or riding public transport by themselves once they turn about age 7.

There’s crime and bullying — we have always homeschooled successfully and have had negative experiences with classrooms here — but in my opinion it’s not as bad as the places I’ve lived in the US.

And the streets are definitely safer. There are some risks like gopniki enjoying causing random trouble like pepper spraying strangers, but I believe that type of danger is a threat mostly to young adult men and almost certainly not children. Our daughters can safely do what they need to do with appropriate precautions (that do not include staying within single-digit meters of a vigilant adult at all times else CPS!!!).

I’m interested in what may exist for Byzantine notation.

So test it separately.

Yes, the factors to consider include:

- cost of the effort

- probability of success

- trade-offs in the case of success or of failure

- the possibility of only partial success creating an even messier situation than the existing one

Having a way to do the whole thing on a much smaller timescale and budget lets decision makers focus more on those externalities, and also can simplify them. This kind of bit rot is somewhere (often everywhere) in many fast-moving businesses, as a natural consequence of the value tradeoffs we have had up to now. Now there are machines that can speedrun the grunt work of clearing them.

She should have sent it! The first person to disrespect a child is the loser, and shouldn’t be the child’s parent.

I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.

Why not? I kinda like the idea of PGP signing parties among humans.

For a very long time now, homeopathic remedies have been regulated by specific US law, called HPUS, and are labeled accordingly. They’re actually required to include examples of what they treat even though many in the homeopathic community would rather it be labeled more generally.

If you are of the opinion that there’s something that needs to be changed about this arrangement, your lawmaker is the one to contact.

What we don’t understand yet is what that means. We have never had such a thing before and it’s not clear what the patterns are that will make the best use of its known attributes with the least exposure to downsides — whether those be related to the tools, the end users, or the business stakeholders, or any other parties. Volumes more nuance to understand, and we’re just getting started.

The idea is that the crops are more profitable per unit of time spent. The pasture operations are very low labor.

I have never seen a permaculture designer, or anyone, make such a claim. We aim to reduce maintenance by design, using methods that overlap with Lean Manufacturing and other process study, but it would be absurd to claim that it’s possible to reduce gardening to zero maintenance. Fukuoka was more extreme than many permaculture specialists by quite a large factor but he put his maintenance right in the title of his signature work: “one-straw revolution”.

Permaculture designer here. That’s a pretty good take. Biggest aspect missing is that once you abandon the “parking lot” approach to farming, you get many niches where you can profit from multiple crops on the same land. The farmer in the article is grazing under productive trees, for one example. Another opportunity is to stack a bunch of berry bushes of graduated height next to rows of trees. And to graze chickens after a larger animal, yet another enterprise on the same land. And with all the added fertility from the grazing, now you can sell a cutting of hay you didn’t have before.

The profit per unit area can become very high.

I’m a permaculture designer and have run a small vegetable farm. I have visited Polyface twice and spoken personally with Joel Salatin both times. I’ve read several of his books. I think that Polyface shows up in this discussion very much on the side of the systemic safeguards the article recommends. His farm is full of systems and safeguards a great many things by design. He plans for every risk he can think of and adapts his system in response. He got the farm from his father and has largely transferred it to his son, and they have built a business training both interns and the interested public in their methods.

Safety measures ≠ world-dominating industrial scale.

You’d probably enjoy the book Turn the Ship Around about a Navy submarine captain who transformed a low-performing crew into a strong, cohesive, autonomous crew.

Yes, it’s a mistake to design your company’s output in a way that results in shipping a defective product.

Looks like an Orthodox Christian family? If so I will write your baptism names down at church if you are willing to share them.

Right, don’t use that, but there are well-implemented timeouts in network libraries, etc.