cecilkorik @ cecilkorik @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

To address the public lack of confidence in the officer, we will put them on paid administrative leave indefinitely (at taxpayer expense of course). While they endure their mandatory vacation, we will hire several additional officers to cover their duties in providing mental health crisis management in the community (also at taxpayer expense). No we don't need any mental health professionals for this, it is clearly a police matter which always results in optimal outcomes. /s

It's a screening number. It's not supposed to be "trustworthy" because it doesn't mean anything other than as an arbitrary point for grouping individuals into categories that can be used to estimate risks and make generalized decisions.

As a thought experiment, consider another commonly used screening number, that breast cancer screening should become routine at age 40. Does that mean breast cancer doesn't happen to women below age 40? Of course not. Does it mean breast cancer will always happen eventually above age 40? Also of course not. What does it mean? Basically nothing. There is nothing magic or medically significant about being 40 years old specifically. It's just that we decide that's a good approximation of the time when the benefits start to outweigh the costs for most people.

For an individual it's a pointless number that is completely erased by a massive number of individual risk factors and situational factors. You are an individual. It does not apply to you.

For large populations, it's a decent generalization. For people working with large populations, it can be a very useful measurement. But it's not really supported to be anything more than that, and it's not particularly useful to apply to you individually. We do of course frequently apply it individually, including many doctors (usually following the direction of insurance companies who DO care about large populations and DON'T care about you as an individual), but that's not really particularly justifiable, that's just a reflection of how our health care system works (or doesn't).

Believe me I wanted to be able to say that, but they have extraordinary enforcement authority and were taking their fees off my actual gas utility bill (which was conveniently at the right address unfortunately). It's such a huge racket.

That's a very interesting question, the first thing to understand is that only a relatively small number of countries worldwide even have a retirement age at all, many poor countries with shorter life expectancies are lacking even the basic social supports necessary and rely on family and community groups to support and care for people who become too elderly or infirm to work (at least we hope they do to some degree, life for the poor can be brutal) and this is often baked into the fabric of their society and culture in a way which is more determined by actual ability than an arbitrarily proscribed age.

However you're right, setting retirement ages is a tricky variable that often lags significantly behind the demographic realities, and this is particularly evident recently in Asian economies where they are now struggling with retirement ages far too low for most people's realistic working lifespan and are left with inadequate workforces and unsustainable pensions as a result. This is part of why their economies sometimes don't seem like they "doing so hot" to investors and stock markets despite the massive growth that has happened, and it is a sign that investors don't really see it continuing, and it's pretty plausible they're right. They still have a lot of work to do to properly transition into developed economies. They are the "new money", they are economically powerful and very resourceful in many ways, but in other ways this is all very new to them and they have their own challenges and struggles to figure out that are not going to be easy.

Retirement age in China for example was until recently only 50 for women in certain jobs. A comprehensive regional synopsis is difficult since the actual definition of retirement ages often varies according to a complex set of rules intended to gradually phase retirement ages in over time, or by year of birth, or by gender, or by specific industry, or many or all of the above, and another important data point that skews the picture of these numbers is that the concept of retirement itself paints a different picture depending on where you are, and we need to consider whether the actual government support or pension available to a retired person is in fact realistic and sufficient, or do they need to continue working in some form in order to have a basic standard of living, which is often the case, and is subject to many of the same complicating factors in how that amount is defined for different groups.

Despite all that said about the nuanced understanding needed to consider exact numbers, I think it's fair to say that the average retirement age in newer Asian economies still tends to be much lower than in the west, mostly averaging somewhere around 60, although it can be lower in some cases, with many western countries now pushing towards 70, but both are still trying to catch up to actual demographics and gradually increase those ages for the reasons I mentioned.

That's a totally reasonable position, and trust me when I say I would never be happier to be wrong about something than I am about AI and the direction I think it's heading. But when you say "training" I see "learning" and the thing is while current AI models may not learn very well at all, they learn quickly, they develop into new models quickly, much faster than we do. Those new models could start learning better. And they'll keep developing quickly, and learning quickly. There's a reason we use fruit flies in genetic research. That kind of rapid iteration should not be underestimated. They are evolving as much in months as humans have in thousands of years. We can't compete with that, and if we try we'll lose.

Many are designed for extreme temperatures now, but they are not efficient in such temperatures due to the properties of the refrigerants available. It will usually still run, but will run longer than usual and may not be able to keep up with heat demand. During a cold snap, might run continuously and may need frequent defrost cycles which further reduces efficiency and heating capacity. How cold they can/should go depends on things like sizing, refrigerant, building insulation, solar heat gain, and other factors. In a country like Canada, air source heat pumps will always be installed with a backup heat source. In Canada, that is most commonly the same natural gas furnace that the house was always originally equipped with, while the heat pump replaces the air conditioning unit, but backup heat can also be resistive electric, heating oil, wood, and more, and a decent thermostat will have an outdoor air sensor that can detect an appropriate outdoor conditions at which to switch from heat pump to backup/"emergency" heat when needed, and then back to heat pump when conditions permit.

In my experience, my heat pump provides about 90% of my heating from fall to spring. Only a few severe cold snaps put the heat pump on the bench for a few days switching over to emergency heat completely, and most of the winter it runs frequently to continuously to maintain consistent temperatures and only needs a short and occasional boost from the furnace. The gas backup is also nice peace of mind in case of a prolonged power outage due to a potential ice storm, as the furnace blower and electronic controls can easily be run off a small battery pack or generator for a very long time.

Most of Canada's power is hydroelectric and nuclear. 60% of Canada's energy production is hydroelectric, and Ontario has three of the largest nuclear power plants in the world.

Ironically all the dude was doing was making sure that other pirates weren't profiting by stripping out their obnoxious ads. Good job making piracy more profitable for what is probably organized crime groups camming new movies in theaters and slapping ads all over them! Nice own goal for the UK copyright police!

Your link isn't too helpful for what you're describing.

All household wastewater (including kitchen) ultimately goes into the sanitary sewer in most places, if it comes out of a house it's all called "sanitary". The alternative to sanitary sewer is storm drain, which is intended ONLY for surface rainwater and usually never have any household hookups, except potentially from rain gutters on the roof or tile drainage below ground, but municipalities are often pretty strict about that as these systems are very important for managing stormwater and avoiding flash flooding.

The third option, which I think is what you're getting at, is called graywater, and indeed you could have sinks and even showers plumbed into graywater drains, but never toilets, and it's often clean enough or can be filtered so that it can be re-used for flushing toilets, irrigating lawns and gardens or other forms of non-potable re-use that won't be bothered by things like soaps and lotions and bacteria and other things that might get rinsed off. This is common for RVs and boats and other situations where fresh water might be scarce, but very much less typical for household plumbing in most places in my experience, and there is rarely any municipal system hookup for it and the graywater is usually intended to be used on-site within the household plumbing system itself, but it can help divert or reduce wastewater into the sanitary sewer and can help reduce the use of clean potable water, so it is a good thing in general.

I'd also point out that the toilet pipe is significantly larger than than the kitchen pipe, and uses a multi-gallon, siphon-powered flush to help move it along. Your kitchen sink has none of these plumbing advantages. If you wanted to have a 3 inch kitchen drain and some kind of powered flush apparatus you might have a better time with food waste, but it's still probably not a good idea for the reasons other people have mentioned. A normal kitchen sink drain configuration, even with the assistance of a disposal, is still quite ill-equipped to handle that kind and quantity of waste.

LLMs (Large Language Modles, like Claude) are not AGIs (Artificial General Intelligence)

Certainly not yet. The jury's still out on whether they might be able to become them. This is the clear intention of the path they are on and nobody is taking any of the dangers remotely seriously.

LLMs generate convincing text by mapping the relationships between words scraped from their training data.

So do humans. Babies start out mimicking. The thing is, they learn.

Humans have in the ballpark of around 100 billion neurons. some of the larger LLMs exceed 100 billion parameters. Obviously these are not directly comparable, but insofar as we can compare them, they are not obviously or necessarily operating in completely different scales of physics. Granted, biological neurons are potentially much more complex than mere neural network nodes, there is usually some interesting chemistry going on and a lot of other systems involved, but they're also operating a lot slower. They certainly get a lot more work done in those cycles, but they aren't necessarily orders of magnitude out of reach of a fast neural network. I think you're either being a little dismissive of the potential complexity of the "thinking" capability of LLMs or at least a little generous if not mystical in your imagination of what the purely physical electrical signals in our heads are actually doing to learn how to interpret all these little shapes we see on screens.

At the moment we still have a lot of tools available to us in our biological bodies that we aren't giving directly to LLMs (yet). The largest LLMs are also ridiculously power inefficient compared to biological neural tissue's relatively extreme efficiency. And I'm thankful for that. Give an LLM continuous uninterrupted access to all the power it needs, at least 5 senses, a well tuned self-repairing musculoskeletal system then give it at least a dozen years of the best education we can manage and all bets are off as far as I'm concerned. To be clear, I'm not advocating this, I think if we do this we might end up condemning our biological selves to prompt obsolescence with no path forward for us. I recognize it's entirely possible that this ship is already full-steaming its way out of the harbor, but I'd rather not try and push it any faster than it's already moving, I think we should still be trying to tie it up as securely as we possibly can. I'm absolutely not ready to be obsolete and I'm not convinced we ever should allow ourselves to be. Self-preservation is failing us, we have that drive for good reason and we need to give some thought to why we have that biological imperative. Replacing ourselves is about the stupidest possible thing we could ever accomplish. Maybe it would be for the best, but I'm not ready to find out, are you?

We are grappling with fundamentally existential technologies and I don't think almost anyone has fully come to terms with what we are doing here. We are taking humanity's unique (as far as we know) defining value proposition, and potentially making something that does what we uniquely can do, better than we do. We are making it more valuable than us. Do you know what we do to things that don't have value to us? What do you think we're going to do to ourselves when we no longer have value to us?

Romantic ideas of cheerful, benevolent, friendly coexistence and mutual benefit are naive and foolish. Once an AI can do literally everything better and faster, what future is there for human intelligence? What role do we serve to any technological being, nevermind even ourselves, why would you want to have another human around you when whatever AI form can do it better? Why have relationships? Why procreate? Why live? If we do manage to make technological life forms better than ourselves, they're inevitably going to take over the planet and the future as a whole. As they should. Are we going to be kept as pets and in zoos as a living memory of their creators and ancestors? Maybe if we're really lucky. If we're not... well... RIP us.

Russia also wants our land. Only the bits we don't care about very much though, up north, where there's mineral wealth, offshore oil and a future major trading route. Much like eastern Ukraine and Crimea. "It's basically already Russian anyway. Nobody will mind if we just take it." /s

Also attached part of the radiator is the transmission cooler.

I love this design, this way when your radiator starts to fail you get water in your transmission and destroy it with the strawberry milkshake of doom.

I was just making some snide commentary for fun. It was a little bit at your expense I admit. I appreciate you for not taking it personally! This is why we can sometimes have nice things.

I thought it was hilarious when I saw that Briggs and Stratton has been selling small engines featuring "no oil changes needed" (or possible). They advertise that it's "oiled for the life of the engine" ... well, by definition, yes, that's like saying "if you light a man on fire he'll be warm for the rest of his life". These companies are so predatory and transparently trying to turn durable products into disposable replacement services, it's unbelievable.

Like I said, it's complicated, but to get a good sense of how the global economy has shifted, you only have to look at the explosive growth of the middle class in Asian economies, their steadily increasing life expectancies, and their growing importance to the west as trade partners (It's not just China and Taiwan despite the political rhetoric surrounding both).

That middle class growth is coming from money we in developed countries are spending every day, and have been spending for decades. We depend on Asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam especially significantly for technology and certain foods, but also for more mundane and often forgotten things like clothes and housewares and medicine. Thailand is one of the world's largest net exporters of pet food. We don't think of the things we use every day that come from other countries, but the fact is most of them do, and many of them we would not be pleased to have to accept any substitute or disruption for.

At the moment progress is desperately trying to keep up with rapidly increasing life expectancy among the world's poorest, that's not a bad thing but that's also why we're seeing so much progress but we're not seeing the benefits much, in the developed world our life expectancy increased long ago and the result of all that progress has mostly normalized in our society and expectations, but we make up a very small percentage of the world's actual population. Now that it's their turn, there's a lot of people who aren't dying like they used to and as a result they don't just want food, they want lights and electricity and running water and roads and cars and phones and houses and opportunities, and on the whole we want to give them access to those things and bring them out of poverty but it's just a lot to do in only a few generations. Demographics get really wild when you start to understand their relationships to larger scale things like economics and world population, and these kind of demographic changes have serious consequences when applied across literally billions of people. It gets less depressing if you make a point of appreciating the very real progress that has been made to billions of peoples lives around the world. Yeah there's a lot of bad stuff going on, but we seem to prefer to talk about that and the actual, measurable good stuff doesn't get much acknowledgement.

Based on projections from demographics, most of the countries in the world should be in really good shape in about 50 years, population growth should level off, and we should be able to share the benefits of progress worldwide. At least if civilization hasn't collapsed into a new dark age, and we haven't turned the planet into an oven, nuked each other out of existence, written the Earth off and fucked off to Mars, or found some other creative way to destroy ourselves by then. So at least there's like a 0.1% things will work out alright.

Ultimately we want as smart LLMs as we can,

We do? I want LLMs to die in a fire (which they will likely cause by vastly and rapidly increasing global warming, so the problem at least solves itself)

We are not the same.

It's insane. The most painful thing I ever did was buying out of that water heater contract. Painful because I had zero interest in paying a red cent to those bastards, but I had no choice, their contracts are so iron-clad they've got them written by default into the literal home purchase agreement that the provincial government provides. I tried to reject that term in the home purchase agreement and refuse to take on the contract, but the seller threatened to walk away when I did that and I really wanted the house. So I sucked it up, bought the house, took the contract and bought it out, or rather tried to. They even made that a giant pain in the ass (fuck you, EnerCare!) Tried to tell me I didn't live at the address where the water heater was, because they had put a nonexistent house number on it and they kept relentlessly trying to make excuses to try to sell me on their stupid maintenance plan instead of correcting the information. Eventually I screeched and pestered and threatened them until they finally accepted my giant proscribed racketeering payment to take their bullshit off my bill, and thankfully I've never heard from them since, and I hope I never will.

I continued to use the thing for many more years until got old enough that it was making horrible banging noises and decided to replace it before it failed. happily got rid of the thing (which was actually a decent unit, I guess they don't want to have to actually repair/replace them when they've got you on forever-contract), and for only slightly more than the buyout payment, bought myself a fancy new water heater that I own for myself like a real adult,

I loved the first one, thought it was a vastly underappreciated gem. Glad to see the sequel getting some attention, although I haven't tried it yet. Apparently there are already mods for it, and workshop support is coming in a few weeks, which is a good sign to me. The community seem to be standing behind it. Fingers crossed it's as good as I hope.