858 karma · joined April 27, 2019
Figuring out how to radiate a lot of waste heat into a vacuum is fighting physics. Ordinarily we use a void on earth as a very effective _insulator_ to keep our hot drinks hot.
It doesn’t constrain what you do in contexts other than where you use someone’s likeness to misrepresent their position.
The harms are restricted to the scope above.
It’s a story about how humans can’t help personifying language generators, and how important context is when using LLMs.
I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.
I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.
The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.
This conception of "citizen" is even more depressing to me than Homo Economicus. There are values aside from wealth, and not everyone is a money grubbing sociopath.
It's the opposite of engineering, where you understand a problem space and then try to determine the optimal solution given the constraints. This starts with an assumption that the solution is correct, and then tries to engineer fixes to gaps in the solution, without ever reevaluating the solution choice.
Don’t get me started in how “agent” is a term of art that means absolutely nothing, encompassing everything from a plain old shell script to a full language model.
There are two sides to this. The first is, hospitals are owned by investors, and have to increase profits. The typical playbook of trying to acquire at least a local monopoly to price-fix is in play everywhere.
The other side is: to achieve high profit margins chase wealthy customers and cater to their preferences. Headhunt star staff with increased salaries. Build shiny new hospitals and prioritize private rooms (HIPAA provided a great excuse here). To woo investors turn administrator into a CEO position with commensurate pay.
None of this incentivizes providing quality health care to non-wealthy people at a fair price. It incentivizes trying to get rid of lower income patients as quickly as possible to make room for high income or well insured patients who can be billed more.
Same as housing, this issue is everywhere in the western world. We can try to tackle it by itself (transparent pricing would probably help a great deal), but the root issue is bigger: the rich are getting what they want on both sides of the equation. They don’t want affordable healthcare.
Sweden had a very powerful monarchy (the dominant Baltic power at one point) and an aristocracy but never a revolution. I’d expect a lot of wealth inequality based on inherited wealth.
Providing drivers for all the hardware and peripherals that all work together in all the permutations is properly hard. I’d argue it’s the root issue.
Google can test each ChromeOS release against their Chromebooks to make sure everything works. If something fails, someone in Google can root cause on a matching hardware configuration easily.
This is not feasible for a general desktop Linux distribution because there are too many permutations. If the distribution is targeted at non-technical users the matter of root causing an issue on a hardware configuration the maintenance team can’t replicate becomes intractable.
A solution might be to literally only support Google Chromebooks, to constrain the possibility space, but even that is a big undertaking if the goal is to match ChromeOS for quality.
1) Those mice must have been completely out of it. 2) This probably isn’t helpful to humans unless given under sedation. Or maybe that extreme a dose is equivalent to sedation, I’m not sure anyone has taken 30 _grams_ of psilocybin to tell us?
At least for straight USB-C to Ethernet adapters, despite all the manufacturers there are really only two chipsets, one by Asix and one by Realtek. If you manage to get one of each you cover all the likely bases.