Overzeetop @ Overzeetop @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

I just hope Gaza can hold out long enough for Trump to win the US presidency and restore peace to the region. Only Jared Kushner has the knowledge and charisma to bring the two sides into harmony like he did in 2019.

Hilarious. Our money already works this way. In the US, the federal reserve targets 2% by altering their policies, and other governments do similar. It’s not perfect because it’s not a defined loss like his stamps or check marks, but it works the same way. If your dollar today is worth 98c of the one you got last year but the wage for you fixed amount for work is $1.021, then it has the same effect.

And rich people don’t hold dollars, for just that reason. They hold assets which (they hope) will increase in value at least as fast as this drop in dollar value. US I-bonds are a perfect example, and the sale of treasury bonds are keyed to this drop in value.

This is also why regulators fear deflation - it leads to hoarding and loss of liquidity because nobody wants to buy today what will cost less next year.

His personal financial utopia is already with us and it sucks. It’s the treadmill which beats down every wage earner who needs to save for anything - to buy a house or car, take a dream vacation, or retire.

I tend to agree with you, of course, but I wonder if the large study were re-run with mass as the cause it would show similar distribution against the 6000lb+ vehicles. Mass tends to reduce braking deceleration and I didn’t see that as an explicit parameter. The “cause” is more salient to the second, smaller study which shows the “kneecap and hood carry” physics reduced hip and head injuries compated to the “body block and throw” mechanics of the flat- fronted cars.

Not to defend the Mack-Truck styling - I don’t disagree at all with the smaller impact study - I question the original implied hypothesis that the prevalence of large flat fronts as the cause of increase in deaths following the nadir in 2009. Of course anecdotes are not evidence, but I live in a college town and have since 2000 and the actions of pedestrians have changed substantially over the years. Specifically, the advent of smartphones has resulted in risky behavior both in pedestrians and behind the wheel. In 2009 less than 20% of phones were “smart.” Few of those were connected to the internet and fewer still to social media and entertainment services. Since then, the prevalence has increased to 80% and the consumption of media by orders of magnitude (measured by data usage and hours engaged). The original study implies the increase in pedestrian death solely due to nose geometry, but the quantity of impacts and conditions may not be as causative as the article seems to claim.

I guess that’s the question. For low speed impacts the body is pretty well protected compared to the lower extremities because the energy of impact is more readily absorbed without serious damage.

How do deaths scale with vehicle mass and did the study control for that …it seemed to be a (pretty critical) omission.

That’s actually surprising. I would think damage to lower extremities (delicate knee joints) would be far more severe from a concentrated impact area than a large area impact distributed over the entire body - when it occurs with a low speed impact.

Every for-profit platform does this. Every product package on the shelf does this. It works because someone always finds a way around the prohibition, and we are shirking it responsibility of teaching others-everyone- how to identify it. Magic tricks don’t become uninteresting by making them illegal, they become uninteresting by telling everyone how they work.

You do realize you’re getting fed that content because you interact with it, right? I get the odd run of uninteresting content, too; I don’t interact with it because it’s not what I want to watch.

The problem is not TikTok, it's people who are easily influenced and distracted by sensationalist content. I will tell you that TikTok is nothing but vocal and instrumental entertainment with some stand-up comedy and British sit-com style clips, but that's because I don't follow or wander off into political discourse or "news" areas.

This reads like ChatGPT-produced tripe and the author's page, https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/author/yves-smith , does nothing to dispel this conclusion.

R’amen

If you were to send him a get-well basket of fruit, would you include or exclude apples?

advanced settings

I agree. However, for the "what's a computer?" crowd, manually adjusting the screen brightness is pretty advanced. They intentionally obfuscate settings they (a) don't want people messing with - like the ability to show the entire right-click context or uninstalling Candy Crush and (b) which are likely to lead to screwing up their system - like entering their own namerserver IP address or opening ports in the firewall. Still, if I were in a room with Hitler and the person who decided to create the Settings app without all the control panel functions included, and had a gun with only had one bullet, Hitler would still be alive.

It's the same as Apple devices. You save something and it puts it where it can be found the same way you saved it...but not necessarily where you think it should be or where it makes sense. The entire ecosystem (both of them) are designed to be insular - you stay in the box and things just work. Yes, people have lost stuff in both cases - usually through their own fault, or the fault of someone who doesn't actually understand how the system was set up to work.

If we treated MS the way most users treat Apple, there would be little concern. You turn on the device, do things using the MS core apps, and when you go to set up a new device all your stuff auto-populates. It's just that Windows users tend to muck around with things, use non-Microsoft software, and - especially long time users - expect things to be where they used to be. In trying to make their system more streamlined (and Apple-like, both insular and user-friendly), but allowing the system to be used in a more traditional, manual fashion, you can make things go bad. It's like adding an automatic transmission to a car but leaving the manual clutch - it can only end in tears.

Indeed! It makes the benchmarks that much more disingenuous since pros will end up CPU crunching. I find video production tedious (it's a skill issue/PEBKAC, really) so I usually just let the GPU (nvenc) do it to save time. ;-)

a toy for professional workloads

[rant]

I think this is one of those words which has lost its meaning in the personal computer world. What are people doing with computers these days? Every single technology reviewer is, well, a reviewer - a journalist. The heaviest workload that computer will ever see is Photoshop, and 98% of the time will be spent in word processing at 200 words per minute or on a web browser. A mid-level phone from 2016 can do pretty much all of that work without skipping a beat. That's "professional" work these days.

The heavy loads Macs are benchmarked to lift are usually video processing. Which, don't get me wrong, is compute intensive - but modern CPU designers have recognized that they can't lift that load in general purpose registers, so all modern chips have secondary pipelines which are essentially embedded ASICs optimized for very specific tasks. Video codecs are now, effectively, hardcoded onto the chips. Phone chips running at <3W TDP are encoding 8K60 in realtime and the cheapest i series Intel x64 chips are transcoding a dozen 4K60 streams while the main CPU is idle 80% of the time.

Yes, I get bent out of shape a bit over the "professional" workload claims because I work in an engineering field. I run finite elements models and, while sparce matrix solutions have gotten faster over the years, it's still a CPU intensive process and general (non video) matrix operations aren't really gaining all that much speed. Worse, I work in an industry with large, complex 2D files (PDFs with hundreds of 100MP images and overlain vector graphics) and the speed of rendering hasn't appreciably changed in several years because there's no pipeline optimization for it. People out there doing CFD and technical 3D modeling as well as other general compute-intensive tasks on what we used to call "workstations" are the professional applications which need real computational speed - and they're/we're just getting speed ratio improvements and the square root of the number of cores, when the software can even parallelize at all. All these manufacturers can miss me with the "professional" workloads of people surfing the web and doing word processing.

[\rant]

It's a very nice logo. And it lights up. Hard to argue with their pricing, really.

lol - I love when this gets (re-) posted periodically. The first time I read it I was thinking “out in the desert” when it said it was outside Phoenix. It’s not. It’s a single block (1 street x 1 ave) of space *in the middle of Tempe Arizona * with a 4 lane highway on one side. This is not a “no car utopia,” it’s a more-profit apartment complex that is using the “walkable city” greenwashing to cover the entire parcel with dense apartments (and limited, doomed retail) and not have to set aside mandatory parking to cut into profits. Last I looked, a 3BR rental was something like $35k-40k a year in rent.

Don’t get me wrong - the concept is nice, with good massing around the alleys and public spaces. This took planning. And it’s ~1/2 or 3/4 mile walk to a pretty major shopping area (across said 4 lane highway and a massive parking area at the mall). And that last part is good because there aren’t enough units in this development to support more than 1-2 restaurants and a bodega…it’s only about 1/4 to 1/3 the population needed to support a standard grocery store. And - as advertised- there’s no parking and Tempe isn’t walkable so you’re not getting any substantial outside customer traffic.

You sound like you live near me. Except that one of our SB candidates actually got fired as the school district Superintendent for violently yelling at one of his subordinates over trans policy, and now he has an axe to grind and want to be on the school board to exact his revenge. We've got a second candidate who is supported by Moms For Liberty and has zero take on the actual policies except for some fear that trans kids are planning some mass molestation of cis kids if they're allowed to use the bathroom of their gender selection (ignoring that most trans kids I know would rather never step foot in a public school restroom for any reason if they could). If they both get on it will be a certified shit show.

It is illegal to use copyrighted material

It's illegal to reproduce copyrighted material*. That includes changing the format as well as things which fall under "derivative" works, but not creating a new work in the style of someone else's (unless it falls under the derivative definition). Many voice impersonators exist and the way you impersonate a voice is to listen to (usually) recordings of that person and practice producing the same sounds that they use for common phonemes (as well as vocal tract shape and larynx positioning to alter the vocal pitch production and overtones which represent vowel shapes). ML does, effectively the same thing without requiring a human to do the listening and practicing.

That said, I think this type of use should be strictly prohibited. In fact, I think it should have severe criminal penalties for any specific voice, not just celebrities. Having the ability to simulate accurate, regional-sounded voices is extremely valuable in the general sense, but imitating or mimicking a specific person's voice without their explicit consent and/or direction has very few, if any, legitimate uses.

I didn't think that voice mimicking would count as valid for any law, but Google tells me of the "Right of Publicity" and there is (again according to Google) case law involving Ford and Bette Midler. So while it's not a copyright violation to reproduce a voice, it may still run afoul of some laws.