Kevin_P
1yr ago
Sorry for snapping at you but that was one of the examples I was thinking about when I wrote the post. It makes a lot of assertions but is very short on actual numbers. There's a chart but it's on a 100 year scale and far too zoomed out to read off the emissions numbers for any given year. And maybe I'm just not reading the references properly but I looked up a few of them and couldn't find anything in there that directly says how many gigatonnes of CO2 were emitted vs how many were forecast by RCP8.5.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Limiting to things that I've known people to forget or not think of:
-
Chargers (this is the #1 forgotten item among people I know)
-
Plug adapters, if traveling somewhere with a different electrical system
-
Mouse (you CAN work on the trackpad for two weeks, but it's much less comfortable)
-
Work shoes, if traveling in comfortable shoes (somehow shoes are much easier to forget than shirts or trousers)
-
Download or print out your tickets and hotel reservations
-
Spare phone, if traveling somewhere where roaming is expensive (it's often much cheaper to buy a local sim card rather than paying roaming fees for data)
Obviously also ID, bank cards, phone, laptop, clothes etc as others have said - but those are obvious enough that you're not realistically going to forget them.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
They've changed core aspects before. THAC0 was probably the defining element of pre-third-edition D&D.
Kevin_P
10mo ago
In Japan where I now live (I feel like I throw that into every post but here it's perhaps relevant) theres a term called 紅白 or kouhaku (literally "confession")
I know this is being a bit pedantic, but you're thinking of 告白 (kokuhaku). 紅白 is the red vs white singing competition at new year.
Kevin_P
10mo ago
I got 30,246 and also got avulse wrong. Maybe there are a handful of points for speed?
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Mostly money. From the administrators' point of view it's all about the tuition fees. And not just for the masters students, in some humanities programmes even the PhD students have to pay.
From the professors' point of view, postgraduates help support their supervisors' research, plus they're much more interesting to work with than undergrads.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Specifically Frontier (Elite 2) and Frontier: First Encounters (effectively an expansion to Frontier but sold as a separate game to try and wriggle out of a contract). The original Elite didn't have Newtonian flight.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
The Oxford English Dictionary is usually a good place to look. The full version has sourced examples for early usages of all different senses of a word.
Unfortunately it's a paid service but someone here might have access, most likely through a university.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
My favorite illustration of this is something called Centaur Chess.
Early chess engines would occasionally make dumb moves that were obvious to human players. Even when their overall level improved enough to beat the top human players they still often did things that skilled players could see were sub-optimal.
This meant that in the late 90s / early 00s the best "players" were human-computer teams. A chess engine would suggest moves, then a human grandmaster would make their move based on that - either playing the way the computer suggested, or substituting their own move if they saw something the computer had missed.
But as AI continued to develop the engine's suggestions kept getting better. Eventually they reached a point where any "corrections" were more likely to be the human misunderstanding what the computer was trying to do rather than a genuine mistake. Human plus computer became weaker than the computer alone, and the best tactic was to just directly play the AI's moves and resist the temptation to make improvements.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
"Only have access to the good stuff" is probably best accomplished by limiting access to GPUs at all.
This is already happening. The US government has already banned Nvidia from selling high-end chipsets to customers in China. One important point about the bans is that this not only bans the current top-end chips but also anything they develop in the future with similar capabilities - so in a few years it will cover high-end gaming cards too, and gradually extend lower down the range as time goes on.
That's currently in the geopolitics sphere, but it's easy to see it being rolled out to other customers that the people in charge don't want to have unfiltered access to modern AI tools. If the masses want powerful GPUs they can use an online service like GeForce Now or Dall-E that restricts any sort of dangerous/undesirable behavior.
Kevin_P
7mo ago
I think you might have misunderstood. The one that has to pay is the developer.
End users aren't being charged, so there's no reason for them to mess with firewalls or DNS settings. Maybe a tiny handful might try to support the devs by blocking Unity's tracking beacon, but 99%+ will just hit the Install button as usual.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I've read several times here that the climate forecast often described by news articles as "business as usual" (RCP8.5) is based on outdated assumptions and that actual emissions are already well below that forecast.
The explanations seem reasonable, but when I've tried to look for data to confirm / quantify it I havent had any luck.
Does anyone have a good source with numbers for forecast emissions from RCP8.5 (and possibly other forecast models) directly compared against actual emissions since the forecast was made?
Kevin_P
11mo ago
That wouldn't help. The idea is that the basilisk tortures a simulation of you, not the original meat version. There's no reason it couldn't do that after your death (at least beyond the standard objections to the basilisk scenario).
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Just doesn't exist. Private universities weren't really a thing back then (government-funded universities didn't charge tuition fees until the late 90s) and although the Labour Party screamed about it at the time they made no attempt to reverse the policy when they came back into power.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I'm not going to tell you to move or not to move. If you have the money there's nothing wrong with spending it on something that will improve your quality of life.
But this:
I wonder if by moving to the pricier place, the higher rent will light a bit of a fire under my butt and result in faster progress in my work that ends up paying more dividends on a net basis. That might even be true after the first 15-months when rent will basically double.
... is wishful nonsense, as you seem to have already figured out based on your following paragraph.
You can use the same logic to justify any sort of spending, not just housing. And other things too - eating that extra dessert is actually good for my diet, because gaining weight will make me more focused on exercise tomorrow.
Ironically the motivation trick will probably work better in the opposite direction. Tell yourself, "if I put in the extra effort over the next 12 months, I'll treat myself to a nicer apartment this time next year". That way you're linking the effort to the reward in a much more direct way.
Like I said at the beginning, this doesn't mean you shouldn't move. If the nice apartment is worth the extra cost then go for it, you don't seem to be hurting for cash. But don't justify it based on second-order effects that will probably never happen.
Also you can simplify the two short-term financial effects you mentioned. A $x discount per month for 15 months plus a $1500 one-time cost is pretty much the same thing as a discount of $(x-100).
Kevin_P
1yr ago
That's their "standard" rate, but they also have a 70% royalty rate (30% Amazon cut) that applies to most books in practice. You just need to price your book between $2.99 and $9.99 USD and allow it to be part of Kindle Unlimited.
(The reason for positioning the lower rate as the standard one is probably because a bonus for including the book in KU sounds nicer than a penalty for not including it, even when the practical effects are exactly the same)
Kevin_P
1yr ago
I remember some posts at the previous place talking about an Islamist (Taliban?) leader that was radicalized when he studied in the US and was horrified by American attitudes to casual sex, homosexuality etc.
Does anyone remember the guy's name and have a link and/or more details?
Kevin_P
10mo ago
“Equality of opportunity is morally undesirable.” Pro
I'd be interested to hear where you're coming from on this one. Is this the "social mobility hollows out the working class" / "desegregation destroyed Black America" argument or something different?
Kevin_P
1yr ago
52 weeks in a year, 26 bi-weeks, 26 * 16667 = 43,334 USD/year. Which is... pretty low, these days, even by startup standards.
You're out by an order of magnitude. It should be 433k, which seems unrealistic even in Silicon Valley.
What if they are millennial versions of Ted Kaczynski, taking the maximum expected-value path towards acquiring the capital to do a pivotal act?
Or maybe just taking the maximum expected-value path towards becoming insanely rich?
The collapse was dramatic but it's a consequence of the same high-risk strategy that had FTX valued at 32 billion USD a few months ago. If that's the upside then their actions can be rational even if the chance of success was quite low.
EDIT: Also SBF may have lost most of his money but according to this article he's still worth around $600 million US. So even if the company failed, rationalism still seems to have paid off for him personally.
Kevin_P
11mo ago
I'd argue that the situation with the antivax movement supports the grandparent's point. Doctors and epidemiologists have always been against it but for the rest of the Blue Tribe the standard reaction was always "roll your eyes and move on" rather than TPTB doing everything in their power to crush it.
Obviously the red/blue coding isn't the only thing that's caused the change, but I don't think it's irrelevant either.
Kevin_P
1yr ago
Why would I buy AI-generated imagery from Shutterstock when I could just make it myself?
Aside from the time savings that other people have mentioned, the other big advantage of Shutterstock is that it handles all of the relevant copyrights. Using AI art generation is probably OK from an IP rights perspective, but there's still a chance that a generated image will be close enough to the source material that the original artist could sue.
Using Shutterstock already insulates companies from the risk of traditional artists giving them a copied picture. I can see how people would see the same service as valuable for AI images too, at least until the legal issues get straightened out.
I'd advise against this part, it's a whole lot of effort for very little gain. You'll hardly ever need to write characters by hand. 99%+ of the time you'll be typing instead which is based on pinyin - you just enter Latin letters and choose the right characters from a list based on the sound.
Much easier to just learn the basics of how stroke order works and then focus on reading and typing. Copy the characters from your phone on the rare occasions that you have to write anything on paper.
More options
Context Copy link