Overzeetop @ Overzeetop @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

A proper leader would ensure all of his subjects are treated before him. If he wishes to speed his own process he should fix the system, not circumvent or commandeer it.

Whether you take the stick out of your dog's mouth or you tell the dog to give it to you, you're the taking the stick. Breaking up and selling off IP is exceedingly commonplace.

We've already established they are whores, Tencent has simply been unsuccessful, so far, in negotiating their price.

I’m about 99% sure that this is exactly what credit card companies do.

Would, uh, that be God's ineffable plan? (with apologies to Pratchett and Gaiman)

I was speaking personally, not generally, in the last comment - which is why I conditioned it with the fact that I'm not a "nothing to hide" proponent. There isn't a single thing in your list that affects or worries me based on the information in my phone. I'm certain that others are more susceptible, which is why I think privacy is important and there should be not just strict data privacy laws, but mandatory jail time for executives and the corporate death penalty for unauthorized leaks. US politicians are just so completely up corporate butts that it will never happen.

FWIW, my watch doesn't even have a battery - its fully mechanical. And, yes, I'd leave my phone unlocked if it weren't required for payments.

I'm not a "nothing to hide" proponent; I'm just lucky that I'm also not interesting enough to be much of a target except for financial crimes against me.

My guess is petrol scooter or motorbike, which is probably 2.5-3x the best automobile.

My guess is that approach would do relatively little to mitigate the overall environmental impact. If you raise fees enough then private airplanes, with much higher CO2 per passenger, become more desirable. To make air travel "worth it" airlines - who have fleets of aircraft with 35-50 year useful lifespans - would dial back to business and first class only.

Spitballing it, I'd say we could reduce flying passenger count by 80% but only see a 10-20% reduction in net CO2 generation. And then, to offset the loss in 80% travel, you would need to find an alternative travel source that is only 12-20% of the use of an aircraft per passenger mile for actual traveled miles just to break even on net passenger travel. 20% seems to be the marker for national rail vs most air travel, so we're at best break even. And for passenger ocean ships, the net cost per passenger in CO2 is higher than flying, so it's a lose-lose for any trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific travel (not to mention the week travel time each way).

That’s what a contract is. In promise to pay and you promise to deliver. Would the corporations only accept $650M each if it ended up costing them $100M less to make each one? No, of course not, they’d bill the full $750M because that’s what they bid. Finding out that you underbid or under negotiated is a risk of contractual business.

Corps need to put their big girl panties on and deliver. Maybe pay the executives less next year instead.

Wait until people find out what their smart watches are already cataloging. 🙄

In that case we’re going to need a bigger Death Star.

Michael Bolton

I'm assuming you're being facetious. If not...well, you're on the cutting edge of MBA learning.

There are still some things that just don't get into books, or drawings, or written content. It's one of the drawbacks humans have - we keep some things out our brains that just never make it to paper. I say this as someone who has encountered conditions in the field that have no literature on the effect. In the niches and corners of any practical field there are just a few people who do certain types of work, and some of them never write down their experiences. It's frustrating as a human doing the work, but it would not necessarily be so to a ML assistant unless there is a new ability to understand and identify where solutions don't exist and go perform expansive research to extend the knowledge. More importantly, it needs the operators holding the purse to approve that expenditure, trusting that the ML output is correct and not asking it to extrapolate in lieu of testing. Will AI/ML be there in 20 years to pick up the slack and put it's digital foot down stubbornly and point out that lives are at risk? Even as a proponent of ML/AI, I'm not convinced that kind of output is likley - or even desired by the owners and users of the technology.

I think AI/ML can reduce errors and save lives. I also think it is limited in the scope of risk assessment where there are no documented conditions on which to extrapolate failure mechanisms. Heck, humans are bad at that, too - but maybe more cautious/less confident and aware of such caution/confidence. At least for the foreseeable future.

I'm not a programmer. Open source garbage isn't in my control either.

The future is already here. This will sound like some old man yelling at clouds, but the tools available for advanced structural design (automatic environmental loading, finite element modeling) are used by young engineers as magical black boxes which spit out answers. That's little different than 30 years ago when the generation before me would complain that calculators, unlike sliderules, were so disconnected from the problem that you could put in two numbers, hit the wrong operation, and get a non-sensical answer but believe it to be correct because the calculator told you so.

This evolution is no different, it's just that the process of design (wither programming or structures or medical evaluation) will be further along before someone realizes that everything that's being offered is utter shit. I'm actually excited about the prospect of AI/ML, but it still needs to be handled like a tool. Modern machinery can do amazing things faster, and with higher precision, than hand tools - but when things go sideways they can also destroy things much quicker and with far greater damage.

I sat in a room of probably 400 engineers last spring and they all laughed and jeered when the presenter asked if AI could replace them. With the right framework and dataset, ML almost certainly could replace about 2/3 of the people there; I know the work they do (I'm one of them) and the bulk of my time is spent recreating documentation using 2-3 computer programs to facilitate calculations and looking up and applying manufacturer's data to the situation. Mine is an industry of high repeatability and the human judgement part is, at most, 10% of the job.

Here's the real problem. The people who will be fully automatable are those with less than 10 years experience. They're the ones doing the day to day layout and design, and their work is monitored, guided, and checked by an experienced senior engineer to catch their mistakes. Replacing all of those people with AI will save a ton of money, right up until all of the senior engineers retire. In a system which maximizes corporate/partner profit, that will come at the expense of training the future senior engineers until, at some point, there won't be any (/enough), and yet there will still be a substantial fraction of oversight that will be needed. Unfortunately, ML is based on human learning and replacing the "learning" stage of human practitioner with machines is going to eventually create a gap in qualified human oversight. That may not matter too much for marketing art departments, but for structural engineers it's going to result in a safety or reliability issue for society as a whole. And since failures in my profession only occur in marginal situations (high loads - wind, snow, rain, mass gatherings) my suspicion is that it will be decades before we really find out that we've been whistling through the graveyard.

I get it...it's hard to say something you know is incorrect, accuracy of language going to shit and other modern problems, and I feel that. I think of it as more of a "internal lighting that illuminates the device interface." In dealing with non-technical people on a daily basis, I find it's much more productive to allow/ignore this sort of colloquialism unless it's that specific thing I'm trying to fix/undo/explain. I barely even flinch now when people refer to the large box on their deck as the "CPU." ;-)

The use of the term backlight is common, but even Amazon refers to it as a "front light" (it's edge-lit, of course, as you say). Bit like using a floppy disc as the "save" icon, or walling wireless networks "wi-fi" despite having nothing to to with "fidelity". We all know what it means.

So - honest advice. I remember magazines - some with more ads than articles. You just flip past them. It’s different now because websites know your scrolling rates and FB wants you to engage. It’s why I actually click though a couple of ads every so often. Merrill? Great shoes. Osprey? Yeah, nice backpacks. Anycubic? I’ll probably want a new resin printer some day. Sure, with 2-3 clicks I can - and do - switch to the chronological “friends” feed that is exclusively friend-posted content with some paid ads (not engagement content) to pay the bills.

As for private browsing, I hear you. But, also, your IP is part of your online fingerprint. You don’t need cookies or tracking pixels from previous sessions active for FB to know - through the aggregation data they buy (possibly even from your Internet provider) what you’re looking at.

[Disclaimer - this next bit is anecdotal, no data to support the following theory.]I had a friend who suddenly was getting a ton of MAGA and alien conspiracy ads of his FB page. He doesn’t track his outgoing IP but I suspect that he was just re-assigned an outgoing IP that has previously been used by someone else (his locality is very red, politically, though he ie not). I know for my IP I’ve had my IPv4 for at least 7 months. It’s one reason that my wife, daughter and I all get intertwined ads on what we search.

To attempt get around this, one option is a vpn. Add to that a separate private browser (it’s how I did my online Christmas shopping, and it’s kind of a pain). You’re still in danger of machine fingerprinting, but it’s usually too much hassle for just marketing to wind its way back to you.

I don't know why, but I somehow assumed that you were getting traditional mini-splits as your transition. I had to replace my boiler system (in the US) because there were no heat-pump boiler replacements, only forced air. My conversion was from oil, common in the 1950s/60s when my house was built, but my house isn't serviced by gas, and domestic oil service is getting more expensive to maintain due to fewer vendors and higher fuel oil costs. It would have been nicer if I could have just dropped in a boiler replacement using heat pump technology.