But, when the (sad) alternative is that person keeps driving without insurance and the unfortunate victims are left with the full bill, I think the absurd insurance may be better than not?
2,740 karma · joined June 29, 2016
But, as soon as I could get an LCD with DVI-D input, I never wanted to go back to a CRT. I just got whatever high resolution Dell LCD monitors I could find. I was much happier with perfect pixel addressing and zero bleed for rendering my text terminals and source code. I didn't care about color rendition and hardly cared about ghosting from scrolling.
One part is purely practical, making it easier to keep the living space clean when you are coming in from the farm etc. Places with messy winters have similar concepts for muddy boots, snow boots, etc.
Some regions also have (or historically had) real risk of parasite transmission from soil and short grass. Taking off shoes reduces the chance of bringing their eggs or tiny larva into your living space.
I can imagine some cultural practices here being early memetic/evolutionary in nature, much like some religions codifying what are essentially food-safety rules from a time before microbiology was scientifically understood. We think about the parts we can see, but also have some instincts and practices that seem aligned with threats we can't actually sense.
I've always worked in high-trust organizations where we depended on each other operating on the diligent side of things, making conservative choices to never wander into the murky area in between. It is horrifying to me how many people seem complacent about or even complicit in a different objective, which seems hell bent on wandering as far into the murk as one can without being caught.
When the person who has a duty of diligence starts rubber-stamping AI outputs, they're veering off into that same murk. They accidentally or wantonly trust the agent as if they have delegated their duty of care. But the AI tool has no such duty and no capacity to care.
I think this worker who has turned themselves into an outsourcing middleman needs to treat the results just like "found code" in a USB drive they found in the parking lot. Its origins and purpose are unclear. It could be flawed or obscurely inappropriate for the intended application, it could have legal entanglements, or it could even be subtly adversarial. The review task to figure this out is not simple. It is not something you do by skimming the result, or worse, asking some other AI tool to review and summarize.
The person importing such code to a project needs a different kind of diligence to try to screen it. For a lot of people, I think this review may be impossible or at least no less laborious than doing the original work themselves with the required diligence.
And, I think this importer needs to be fully liable and responsible for the outcome. But, instead, I think we're seeing frequent appeals to blame the machine and act like it is an honest mistake to let things pass because they've been rubber-stamping the imports. A lazy desire to claim credit for appearance of success, but shirk responsibility for detected failures.
I also thought it was silly. It would be a bit like talking about Poe and then that time I was a little kid and saw the scoop of ice cream fall off and splat on the ground. Yes, I learned something about entropy. No, I didn't really resonate with the existential horrors of a good Poe story.
Now, maybe if I'd been halfway into an absinthe stupor when I dropped the ice cream, I might have been able to close the gap...
I only implied that implied psychological traits of a fictional character are not evidence of the same psychological traits in the author. It's merely evidence that the author is capable of observing or imagining such traits in others.
It's one thing for a biographical analysis to look at the person's real life experiences and relationships.
It's another thing entirely when you start conflating the characters in the fiction with the author's own character...
I think the whole idea of PIM is to be able to scale up and do work locally within the memory module, without the bottleneck of the system memory bus. This only works for embarrassingly parallel workloads that don't actually depend on the bisection bandwidth across the global memory.
If you start talking about PIM that is all interconnected, your application is back to being bound by the system memory bus. Maybe it's a new package design, but you're basically building yet another NUMA interconnect architecture, not a PIM architecture.
I assume PIM is only going to work well for chunky streaming over the data within that particular memory module. Something that address and operate on whole rows at once and has minimal buffering between the RAM access ports and the PIM register state.
A lot of SIMD code can be on two array operands, and I expect this PIM approach only works well if both are stored locally in the same memory "local" to the PIM and where it can efficiently interleave at the natural addresisng and access widths. Too much random access or needing "remote" data sounds like the point where PIM fails and you need the elaborate memory IO controllers and caching subsystems of CPUs sitting on top of the distributed memory modules..?
Potential as in possibility, not as voltage. It's an awkward phrase...
For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall.
Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.
The water and power utilities are themselves large distributed systems. They need communications between elements just to function properly. They don't exist in a single location where people can go locally manage them in some air-gapped, offline fashion.
There is no option of not having a communication network to monitor and manage these geographically distributed elements. The question is which communication network you would use, and how you would secure it. Whether it is telephones, radio links, or people running around as messengers, it is still a communications network.
Will some "dedicated" network be any safer? If anything, I imagine the fantasy of a private network will lead to even less security. You cannot physically secure the entire signal path. You really need to treat it as untrusted and build your security on top with encryption, authentication, authorization, etc.
I had the pleasure of reading Neuromancer in a college course on Gothic horror, so we read it alongside the likes of Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Freud. And we looked at it through that lens. To me, the core theme of Gibson's storytelling is that the human condition persists. You'll have this spectrum of personalities and behaviors regardless of the technological backdrop. To me, this is an antidote for the delusional fantasy that one clever plot device is going to bring Utopia and somehow erase our evolved human foibles.
I'm not sure we have any disagreement, except perhaps in the subtext of your latter paragraphs. I don't think the shallowness is a flaw. I am not disappointed to find technology normalized and trivialized as set pieces for stories that could otherwise exist in almost any era. I think that's the whole point...
The optics would just be a slight attenuation much like the rest of the camera housing, film reel, operator, etc. So really a summation of all the exposure types you can imagine.
The tech devices were also used as markers of uncool rich people. Symbols of excess disposable income, rather than carefully invested aesthetics.
In the seedy areas, the implants and augmentations were depicted across an array of cool and uncool characters. Some character were meant to think they themselves were cool, while the narrator or the main characters saw them as part of the uncool backdrop. Try-too-hards, wannabes, etc.
It could be an allegory for some artistic types who go on a sort of creative bender and work compulsively, nearly suppressing their regular personality and lives. The machine is somehow a tortured, artistic soul. But it could also just be some ironic malfunction, or could itself be an art installation built intentionally but anonymously out of orbital scrap.
That orbital machine certainly is tuned in a way that tickles Easter eggs in the human mind. But it also just seems to loop endlessly, like a forgotten, automated factory.
There is another similarly ambiguous scene, where an artificial construct represents the knowledge and speaking style of a deceased hacker. It is hooked to a doorbell to respond to visitors, but the narrator tells us it also scans the empty alley as snow falls. The scene is poetic, but it does not tell you whether the construct has a mind and is appreciating the snow versus just being triggered by motion and just trying to localize a potential visitor. Any answer you have there, you brought yourself. The book isn't telling.
That ambiguity seemed like half the point with Gibson. And it also seems prescient for our current LLM-meets-humanity moment too.
The scifi backdrop wasn't inherently cool. It was often soulless and dystopian. The crass commercialism and the teeming masses were often depicted as uncool, at least to the narrator's eye.
The coolness was found in the counter culture niches, in the urban underbellies, and in the little noir vignettes where the poets and rebels infiltrated.
It was stated that most shielding would turn high energy photons into much more harmful showers of particles, worse than the original photon going directly through tissue. Was this an untested myth?
HDPE has been around since the beginning of the space race, so it seems like someone ought to have considered this before? Has the understanding of particle interactions improved a lot since then, such that HDPE shielding would not have been considered before?
But, as a long time but infrequent user, I really dislike the changes towards "non-destructive" UX that just seems to spawn endless layers and other forms of pixel buffer limbo that confuse me. Lately, it feels like I'm being slow walked by a passive-aggressive tool that wants to waste my time and mental energy.
I wish there was a "novice" or "casual" user setting option to go back to a much simpler UX, where I am operating immediately on the selected layer. Where a pasted object can be dragged but anchors as soon as I touch something else, etc. Where filters preview but then "apply" immediately. Where undo can revert some recent changes but otherwise the effects accumulate destructively into the current layer.
A naive user may never have to learn about layers, but they are still there when desired. I don't want a layer spawning on their own. I'll make the new layer before I start changing things, and I'll think deliberately how I want that layer filled. Then, I'll resume actions that immediately mutate it.
In the mid 90s, I got myself a DEC Multia (small Alpha-based workstation) to run Linux. It was fast at some things, but useless to browse the newly emerging web. Netscape Navigator wasn't available as an Alpha binary, and the emulated x86 was just as slow as an early Python based browser. Running Netscape on a 486DX3-100 was night and day like visiting the future. Some other native programs went the other way, with the Alpha beating the 486 dearly. But the web browser became more and more significant.
In college, I was also told I should covet Sun hardware. At my first job, I got issued a Sun Ultra workstation of some sort. I was appalled at how slow it was for my FOSS C programming workflows with autoconf/make/gcc etc. I started bringing in a Dell notebook with a Pentium-MMX running Linux, and it ran circles around the Ultra for actual day to day tasks. On the other hand, when I had to run certain commercial tools like Purify, the Sun was useful again.
I also had exposure to supercomputer centers at the time, doing portability work for our HPC codebase. It was often crazy how slow these platforms were for development work. There may have been a little bit of neglect by the vendors or IT groups in terms of what hardware they dedicated as front-end service nodes on these big machines. But, there were also dramatic differneces in the operating system behavior, tuned to get one user-level job running and get out of the way. They were terrible at multitasking, and this showed through in CLI/scripted interactivity too.
Sometimes, I wonder if some of those platforms could have survived if they jumped on the Linux bandwagon and kept developing their hardware. But maybe their fate was sealed because they depended on the bundling of their proprietary OS and hardware, neither of which was able to adapt to the new order...
For IAL2 identity proofing, Login.gov is only for US persons, i.e. validating US-issued credentials. Meanwhile. ID.me has support to validate foreign passports.
So, if TreasuryDirect supports foreign customers, it makes sense to offer ID.me, but it seems inappropriate not to offer Login.gov for customers who are US persons!
It's quite different than just reading a lot of text from other authors and passively absorbing diction and style. Instead, it means getting detailed reinforcement signals in the context of your own active writing effort.
This can start an ironic reinforcement learning pattern where the writer gets tuned to write in the LLM's "corrected" form. Imagine a traditional professional writer, in a long-term partnership with a particular copy editor who gates their output.
The problem with this kind of feature is that it falls apart if you're the type who leaves things unread or gets them all the time. Then, it is little more than a beacon to say "phone still exists"...
Many of the debates in the comments seem to come down to whether people believe prediction and extrapolation are synonymous.
These things can definitely erode the targets. Tomography experiments have to think carefully to optimize the set exposure angles used during a session, because the target degrades more with each shot.
Or maybe some kind of hybrid of x-ray microtomography and spectroscopic analysis all in one.
But, maybe the energies involved would be about the same destructive power as some microtome slicing technique...
A similar analogy is how 2-phase commit protocols enact (virtual) escrow.