There's a simple formula that makes you chose it: they keep as few manned checkouts open as possible, as long as the wait for the manned checkouts is inconvenient enough the majority of people will use the self-checkouts.
It's also a step towards individualized pricing, which many people, myself included, absolutely hate. This can be done with self-checkouts but it'll work much better with handheld scanners. Normal price: 3x, member price:2x, individualized price: scan to find out.
Big chains plan to gamblify the prices in the next few years using their "member cards" points, some chains are already up to this with specific penetration targets before they move forward. And this is not insider knowledge they're upfront about it.
It can be run real time. Might be 640x480 or 20 fps, but many algorithms out there could never been run on an $10k graphics card or even a computing cluster in real time.
I did something similar a few years back. Basically converted binary data to a matrix and printed it max res (1200dpi inkjet), also wrote the software to read it like a QR code (with perspective & error correction etc). You can easily save several MB per page. The theoretical number is much much higher for color printing, but is gets very complicated (inkjects are basically stochastic with regards to dots, YMCK balance is finicky etc). Also some time after that project I noticed that some gov agencies use printed "QR" codes to send sensitive data (ie biometrics) from office to office in the traditional mail format. It works, but so do floppy disks and nobody's using them anymore for a reason. It was a cool project though.
Producing hydrogen using electricity will only be more economical than than steam reforming when natural gas, coal and oil all run out. I respect the choice to move away from fossil fuels but if you do the calculations on how much this will cost, people will start having second thoughts.
That's indeed fantastic. It also gave me perspective on something: the reasons there are so many interactions is because of the number of collisions: a water molecule will collide 10^14 times in a second. Mind-boggling stuff.
Nice paper. But my take is this: If this model of operation of the human mind is an emergent property of a simpler network architecture that's scaled up, nothing is stopping us from building a massive version of it and training it. This can be done in 10 years.
However if it's a combination of myriads of bespoke mechanisms that emerged evolutionarily then it's going to take a while, because we have to rediscover them through research or find a way to detect and copy them from our brains. For example if there are tons and tons of multi-scale mechanisms (network architectures+molecular dynamics+feedback systems+adaptive cell responses) for each function of the human brain then yeah it's going to take a long time. But if there's only a handful of bespoke systems related to cognition (memory, emotional regulation, motor skills, perception, motivation) then it's very much doable. Nobody thought that you could chat with a simple CNN 15 years ago, but here we are.
It's really cool to be able to make a surface like this and prove it does kill viruses (even cooler since it exists in nature), but obviously it has no practical use. It would only work in a cleanroom for a little while until it clogs, and I don't see the benefit over a regularly sanitized surface. Also viri usually don't go floating about as singular particles, the associated snot would deactivate the surface's properties.
After reading the diagnosis I caught myself wanting to examine the MRI to see if the bright area really exists, which means I fell for this too. Imagine being the person who received this diagnosis. Of course you're going to be concerned, even if it is LLM garbage.
I've been suspecting for a long time that Google might be doing something similar. Of course you need enough devices around (and internet) for this to work but it's pretty cool, I hope it takes off. Maybe a device manufacturer will be interested in this and buy/fund you.
To quickly summarize: A Turing machine program or method can't solve the Entscheidungsproblem, which means you can't have a general algorithm to prove all possible statements true or or false (or equivalent) within a formal system.
For example you can't have a general program that you feed in any 2 mathematical statements and tells you if they're equal. From what I understand this is proven for "regular math" but not all formal systems.
As a counterpoint, there are many algorithms these days that can do theorem proving better than anything before in history (partly thanks to AI, and partly thanks to the massive efforts that went into symbolic computation engines over the past decades). I think in a few years theorem proving will be done elegantly by computers instead of humans. Not all theorems, sure, but this is the world we got to live in.
No matter which country gets the contract, they will have a stranglehold. As you see only a handful of countries around the world are capable of building, operating and refueling a nuclear power plant. Which makes it incredibly inconvenient in yet another way. Cost overruns happen. Delays happen. Prices go up and up. What are you going to do? Pay up or else. That's one more think to keep in mind before evangelizing nuclear power.
Also with the other woman they used as an example, the only thing she did is say that X date was a Thrursday or something, which might simply be a trick and not a memory recall.
I used to have almost 10k bookmarks that I was keeping from circa 2010 to 2017. Only to realize the majority of them were now useless. Some kind of tool like this is way overdue to become commonspread.
All these guidelines are what is making BBC unreadable for me. The language they use is just so artificial. I understand why they do, and how they feel like they have a responsibility to "optimize" language for some metrics, but in my opinion what really matters is the objective reality, not the phrasing. Maybe they could report more on the NHS inability to cope with mental health patients rather than avoid using the word gunshot in a country where gun ownership is so scarce.
That's a great summary of what's happening. I'd probably add in the financialization of real estate and having effective oligopolies in some countries and cities.
It really is that simple. If you want people to have decent, affordable housing, then you build (or simply allow the building of) enough housing, and make sure people own it, not sketchy LLCs owned by investment funds. The NIMBY component isn't that bad in south & east europe yet, but it's building up speed. There's millions of people who just want to live in decent flats with enough space close to the city centre and their jobs, and then there's all these people who don't want anything else built. That's how you end up like LA or London.
This has a precondition: the existence of targets unique to the cancer cell. That's not necessarily true. In theory you can have cancerous cells that are (at least in the epitope-space) indistinguishable from normal cells. I'm not a doctor, and I guess (and hope) this is an usual case, but finding a truly unique and dissimilar mutation sounds pretty hard, training the immune system to detect it correctly without generalizing sounds even harder. Potential, sure, and I hope this proceeds and yields some therapies that are safer than chemotherapy, but we need to be realistic with what we'll probably get.
Yeah, right. Study after study can prove whatever the author wants, but the facts of life are that nobody is going shopping on a bike. On a bus, sure, but a bike? I've lived in 2 cities with beautiful, wide bike lanes that nobody parks in (because of fear, not respect). In one they were never used, I've driven countless miles queuing in traffic next to them only to see 1 person per day (while seeing thousands of cars in the same period).
The only realistic use case was with part of the bike lane being next to a park, so it was used recreationally during weekends, mostly by spandex bros but also a wider audience when the weather was good.
People might say they want to bike more, and they would only if xyz, but actions speak louder than words, so perhaps it's time to accept we're wasting public space and money with all these projects that end up being good for nothing.
Honestly I feel like an idiot living in a country that pretends free trade is still a thing while other countries are building healthy productive industries with state interventionism. In 20 years half of europe will be industrially dead, yes, even more so than today. We won't even be making our own bricks.