prometheus76

I don't anything about "bradyseism", but I am having a hard time wrapping my mind around it. From the article: "Due to bradyseism, a geological phenomenon in which the ground sinks or rises due to pressure changes under the earth’s surface, the house ultimately fell into the Gulf of Pozzuoli."

How would this happen in such a uniform way, such that the precise configuration (and the flatness!) of the floor is preserved? Wouldn't this have been an uneven process that would have broken the floor apart?

It seems more plausible that this floor being underwater now is the result of a rise in sea levels. Can a geologist explain how a floor remains flat and a mosaic remains largely intact while sinking into the ocean?

And that goes back to the question I asked above: are you talking about "what is real" from a philosophical "realism" point of view, or from a philosophical "nominalism" point of view?

Realism posits that objects have intrinsic meaning that we apprehend through attention.

Nominalism posits that we cannot apprehend reality directly, but only through our minds and through language. That we only have a second-order experience of reality. Therefore, all language only has meaning because of consensus, so if we change the consensus of meaning around language, we are actually changing reality because reality is mediated through language.

These are obviously very compressed definitions of these views, but the question remains.

This conversation about AI "hallucinations" seem to point at this question. "We want AI to say true things." True to what? True to reality? Or true to language? When we ask AI a question, AI only knows how to answer the question using grammar that is probabilistically the most likely. That has no tie to "reality", but as soon as you start asking "well then what is reality that we want to map AI to?" the question gets quite slippery.

My contention is that AI, as its responses are curated by people, will only reflect the idiosyncratic worldviews of those doing the pruning.

Does your computer supply different answers if it is hungry, or tired?

And wouldn't that language need to be able to account for different physiological states? Thinking when one is hungry or sleepy is quite different than thinking when one is well-fed or fully rested.

So will LLMs ultimately become realists, or nominalists?

Identifying material on receipt is trivial. There is a handheld scanner that you point at a piece of metal and it will tell you what the metal is, which spec it falls into, and the specific chemical makeup of the material when you pull the trigger. Using this equipment (it's called Positive Material Identification) for verifying material on receipt is part of every quality manual I have ever seen.

In other words, if Boeing was using counterfeit material, it was either deliberately ignored or deliberately hidden by falsifying records. It is not uncommon to get material that has a Material Test Record that is within spec (because not all suppliers are scrupulous), but a PMI result that is out of spec. If that was what was happening here (which is what I suspect), then those PMI results were thrown out and whatever was written on the MTR were transferred to the receipt report or accepted as-is.

What you say and do in private with your friends might be in line with the current political climate, so you feel safe. However, as the reach extends and the capability for storing a detailed history of your computer use increases, you are then vulnerable to political winds shifting and some other tyrannical oligarch finding something you wrote ten years ago to a friend in a private conversation and now you are called into a kangaroo court and summarily sent to a labor camp.

If you think this is implausible or paranoid, I would recommend reading more history of the 20th Century in totalitarian regimes.

Isn't there a 14-day limit in National Parks?

It's not a proverb, it's a scripture in the Bible. 1 Timothy 6:10 and you and OP are both right, depending on the translation at play.

NIV Bible: "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil..."

KJV Bible: "For the love of money is the root of all evil..."

Just because something is distinct does not mean it is independent.

Essentially, what I hear in your statement is "if I can just teach people how I see the world, then they will see the world the same way." I firmly disagree with that assessment. Someone can be educated and yet see things differently from you.

We had multiple columns using UUID that we needed, and the Tabular memory model goes up exponentially for every column.

We were pulling the entire list of tasks (around 80,000 tasks from various projects) from Microsoft Project 2012 (MSP) and dumping it into a database every day, so that we could track progress of projects daily. MSP uses GUIDs and they are great for uniqueness, but the memory footprint they caused when reporting using Power BI became untenable after about six months.

We ended up creating our own integer table tied to the GUIDs and replaced all the GUIDs with integers in our reporting database. Our memory footprint dropped by 10X and we were able to report on years worth of data, rather than months.

I don't entirely agree that all it takes is education. Many people have grown up on farms, have lived with animals all their lives, and yet have no problem eating animals.

5 X 5 is also really fun. It's the queen side basically, with a row of pawns in front. So there's only one row of open spaces between the two sides. It really stretches my brain to play it, but has helped me get better at calculation for sure.

Because I have sunlight for a solar panel year-round, whereas I only have solar heat for a limited time.

I'm toying with the idea of building one of these to use as a pool heater. Has anyone here tried this?

I just wrapped my truck with several layers of copper mesh, so it should be fine.

In all seriousness though, no. I have no way of confirming the data transmission has stopped.

I called to turn off the data in a Toyota, and the guy wanted my name, phone number, email address, physical address and even more I can't remember right now. I was like "why do you need this info?" He said, "We need a record of who made this request for our records." I told him "do you understand that I am calling your company specifically because I don't want you to have records?" This went round and round about three times before I just gave him fake info.

It's a survey of perception, not of performance or functionality, so it's still a very relevant change.

This video explains better what I'm thinking of. He has built a 16-bit computer in Excel, and where he put the different formulas for the different parts of the computer on the sheet affected how it worked (he basically had to change his design because of how Excel calculates). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rg7xvTJ8SU

Excel has a top-to-bottom, left-to-right calculation order of cells, which can mess things up if you aren't careful.

How does your engine handle calc execution order?

I'm going to hazard a guess based on my experience of being the one who brought it to my current employer after learning it at a previous employer: it's really hard to understand for awhile, especially coming from Excel. The paradigm required to build anything more than SUM or AVERAGE can be very unintuitive and feels almost like black magic.

It takes a lot of trial and error and patience to finally grasp how Power BI handles calculations if you are used to the freedom of Excel.

That being said, once it clicks, it feels like you are a magician, and you can do really advanced analytics on giant tables, which is great.

We pull a bunch of data out of the guts of MS Project 2010 and do a lot of custom analysis on it. It took about two years to go from scratch to a set of reports that served everyone's needs that also required minimal maintenance.

Then we got purchased by a larger company, so now the work is in rolling out a similar set of reports for the sister companies, as well as rolling them up into corporate-wide reports. It's a lot of fun.

We're a Power BI house with eight companies in a holding company. Power BI also has a high-security option, which is essential for us for security compliance requirements on our government contracts. We also have a blanket license so everyone can see the dashboards, and we're about to upgrade to Premium company-wide.

It took some time for me to switch from Excel paradigm to Power BI paradigm, but once it clicked, I've never looked back.

My wife and I have been playing chess, and I'm usually reading a light book of some kind between moves. We also usually have some relaxing music playing and not many lights on. We even turn all the lights off and just play chess using a kerosene lamp or candles. It's quite relaxing.

It's clear there is a ban on generating white people, and only white people, when asked to do so directly. Which is clearly an intervention from the designers of this system. They clearly did this intentionally and live in such a padded echo chamber that they didn't see a problem with it. They thought they were "helping".

This is a debate between people who want AI to be reflective of reality vs. people who want AI to be reflective of their fantasies of how they wish the world was.

To which they reply "well you weren't actually there and this is art so there are no rules." It's all so tiresome.

My hot take is that the people designing this particular system didn't see a problem with deconstructing history.

But then it will show awkward things that cause the AI designers to experience cognitive dissonance! The horror!

Do you think no one internally thought to try this, but didn't see a problem with it because of their worldview?