pbmonster
1d ago
Sure. The funny thing is there a whole lot of Amish, Mennonites and other off-the-grid communities that don't generally bother to get birth certificates - or any other government documents. They would have a hard time formally proving their status.
They almost always have a large community vouching for each other, but that's pretty informal evidence...
pbmonster
2d ago
Interesting, that's not my experience at all! I've had good "text game" with many women who turned out to be bad dates, or who turned out to be good dates but absolutely not wife material.
In my experience, there's absolutely no way around meeting and talking/interacting if you want to know if you have potential. The AI would need to watch those meetings, and be trained on data like that.
pbmonster
2d ago
It could be that you and I are just using too much load on slow exercises
I suspect this might be the culprit. How/when are you hurting yourself on slow controlled movements? Are you pushing reps to failure (or close to it)? Are you sure your form was still good when you injured yourself?
I'm only doing slow and controlled now, and my injury rate has been much better. But I stop (and reduce weight before continuing) the moment I feel my form slipping, which happens far earlier than failing a rep.
pbmonster
2d ago
My assumption is that an AI would be extremely good at this - if it had the training data. Far better than a person could be without meeting the candidate.
The problem is the training data. I haven't gone on nearly enough good and bad dates to show the AI what I like and what I don't like. So I can't let the AI choose my wife. Yet I knew I had found her when I first met her.
pbmonster
3d ago
An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which,
Same for dating, in theory
The problem - a little more so in the case of dating, but not much - is that people/employers don't know what they want. Some might think they do, but they don't.
In the end, it's all vibes. "They know it then they see it", and they especially know what they don't want when they see it.
The AI won't help with that, at least not until it has a good training set of people who vibed in the past.
For casual snapshots of groups of friends etc. phones are great.
To be honest, I mostly take photos of my kids, and sometimes of people climbing/skiing. Both situations can have challenging lighting and object that don't stop moving around. The phone software has been absolutely amazing at eliminating motion blur and/or underexposed images, something I've previously struggled with even at 1/120s. And yeah, I often miss having the tele lens, but I've gotten used to moving in to take the shot - or with having a shot of nice landscape that has some action in it.
Most importantly, the ergonomics of taking photos on a phone are shit tier compared to any halfway decent camera that has a viewfinder and where the body has been designed for the task of taking photos.
True. Getting a phone with a hardware shutter button is absolutely essential. The rest can't be helped, I think.
I've gone the other direction and bought a real camera a while ago. I got fed up with the overcooked processing phones do.
I know what you mean. The good thing is you can turn that off - either feature by feature, or all of it. Or use an alternative camera app if you want to set exposure and ISO yourself (and those apps aways only produce traditional stills), export un-edited stills from the short videos the main camera app takes before it starts AI-editing them, or tell it do AI-slopification by default but also always save RAW images. At least that's the state of the art on Google Phones.
Luckily there have been good lightweight mirrorless cameras on the market for over a decade.
I'm sure for many use-cases a modern mirrorless takes far superior pictures, especially when used by a experienced photographer. But the AI has been amazing for normies.
pbmonster
3d ago
It's good enough to tell similar but distinct varieties of flowers apart too.
In my experience, Google Lens generally can't, but apps like Flora Incognita (which instructs you to take images of the leaves, the flower, the stem, the bark, ect.) can. Flora Incognita also tells you a certainty percentage, which is really helpful.
In my garden, Google Lens has an almost comical inability to distinguish my carrots from yarrow - and it won't warn you that it's less than 50% sure. If you only feed it flower pictures, flora Incognita has trouble as well, but tells you it's less than 40% sure until you take pictures of the leaves and stem.
pbmonster
4d ago
I have barely changed how I use a smartphone since I bought my very first over a decade ago
I have the same feeling. But for me, something else changed: the phone takes on more and more additional duties. Within the last two hardware generations, I've completely stopped bringing my DSLR camera and my outdoor GPS unit (for mountaineering).
Modern smartphone camera sensors and lenses are decent (when compared to compact cameras), and modern camera software is - frankly - completely insane. The combination of the two now easily beats my skill level on a DSLR camera that has orders of magnitude more sensor area, lens diameter and aperture diameter. I'm generally a software skeptic (progress in software development over the last 10 years has resulted in very little "real" value being created), but camera software amazes me. Instead of taking a still image, phones now always capture a short video instead and distill the final image in post - a mostly automatic process that results in sharp, correctly lighted and color balanced shot.
Replacing the GPS unit was more trivial. OLED displays are more readable in the sun, the GPS chips got a bit faster, and again, the quality of the software/data got orders of magnitude better (the free offline geo-data available today is vastly better than the commercial data of a few years ago). Route planning and terrain analysis also got so much better. Used to take a PC and skill and experience, now everybody can do it on the phone with 30 minutes of instructions. Also, if you have the right smartwatch, you won't be taking a device out of your pocket at all anymore.
pbmonster
8d ago
Is this true? Perhaps my perspective is skewed by living in San Diego
Probably, it's the location I would expect to look the best in that respect.
I personally know dozens of people who are fully fluent (in the sense of being able to competently converse about a wide range of topics) in both Spanish and English. When it comes to second-generation Latinos in most parts of the country, or at least in the Southwest, my perception is that bilingual fluency is actually very high.
In my experience, many of those people actually can't e.g. do their standard white-collar job in their second language. If you want to have a country with dual national languages (as opposed to making Mexico an imperial possession as someone suggested below), you need a lot of people who can do that well, since a lot of national/federal institutions need to be run in both languages.
At least you would need those people, traditionally. A lot of that might shortly be superfluous, since language models work well across languages and federal institutions might be a thing of the past!
But just imagine being in the Army, and working alongside an integrated Mexican auxiliary battalion - or integrating US special forces into a Mexican-led theater. You'd really want at least everybody above O-2 being bilingual. Messing around with interpreters under fire is pretty much unacceptable.
pbmonster
9d ago
I agree Mexico is the much tastier target. In my personal assessment, Mexico is more culturally compatible with the US than Canada.
That's an... interesting proposition. To start, how do you expect the language integration to work out? Just have dual national languages? National languages on the state level? How do you feel about Spanish slowly (or not so slowly) creeping north, possibly displacing English in the southwestern states within a few decades?
Language is extremely important for the national consciousness. And unfortunately, both the old stock and the new citizens don't exactly have a great history/culture of bilingualism. The number of people being actually fully fluent in both languages is currently extremely low (when compared to existing countries with multiple national languages).
My prediction is you'd have independence movements solely based on language, and quickly.
Sure, but unlike the Suez, there's mountains/hills in Tehuantepec. Hundreds of feet of elevation difference, a canal would need many dozens of locks, maybe hundreds.
I can see a high capacity rail line, but digging a canal to rival the one in Panama is madness - especially as long as the one in Panama exists, and acts as economic competition.
pbmonster
10d ago
Yeah, I was seriously considering picking one up for cheap in order to benefit from the image damage the brand took from the recent politics... but the cars just seem to suffer from inconsistent quality.
Some drivers really love their Model 3, have zero problems for the first 100k miles and give glowing endorsements to everybody who will listen. Lots of taxis use them, which is usually a good sign. Others are at the dealership all the time, and often for dumb expensive stuff.
Coming from Toyota, I don't like the risk. I expect my used cars to be solved problems.
pbmonster
13d ago
For quick object identification while looking at the night sky, I like Google Sky Map. Point your phone at the sky, and the screen will show labels for everything you see. When it came out, it was one of those magic moments of modern technology for me. It uses GPS, the phone accelerometers and the clock to know exactly what you point at, and the UI is pretty.
If you get her hooked, there's no way past Stellarium for proper nerding out during the post briefing. You can put your point of view anywhere, run the time forward and backwards, have planets/starts leave traces as they move, ect.
Sure, but there's always false positives, the only question is how low the rate is.
And your kids are going to live with you for 18 years, so you need quite a lot of 0s to make reasonably sure the turret isn't going to blow their heads off by accident.
It's a difficult problem. Maybe one brings over a friend. Maybe they wear silly monster masks.
pbmonster
13d ago
The tech exists. (Semi-)automatically killing/maming people really isn't that hard. It's different levels of illegal, depending on locality, but the real problem is false positives.
Most people just don't want to live in a mine field, no matter how many fancy hightech safeties there are.
pbmonster
15d ago
No, if your opponent shoots himself in the foot (and splatters blood on you, which is irritating and expensive), you respond by shooting him in the kidney and try to dodge the blood spray.
When the US put tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum, the Chinese put tariffs on American soy beans, which directly hurt the republican heart land and didn't really hurt their own farmers all that much - Brazil was still selling soy beans after all.
Effectivity, this is a step beyond the standard prisoners dilemma. You can choose where you defect, and the gain/loss can be very asymmetrical. It also can be more than monetary gain/loss, since the payoff might be in geopolitical position or voter opinion instead of trade balance.
pbmonster
29d ago
The Euros keep failing them in large numbers in their road-worthiness inspections at around 4 years. Depending on the exact country, it seems 20%-30% have "substantial deficits" which require major repair work. Worst EV in class, every single time.
The biggest problem is certainly brake rust from under-use (which you can mediate yourself, and Tesla could probably fix that by software update), but the reports I've seen also all mention suspension problems and faults with the headlight systems.
I wanted a used Model 3, but major repairs at 4 years is kinda scary. I've driven my Toyotas all well past 15 years of age, and I'm not confident the early generations of the Model 3 will get anywhere close to that.
Interesting. Are hard, clear fruit spirits (usually double-distilled straight off the fruit mash and not treated or mixed after) also called Snaps in Sweden?
Anyway, I can warmly recommend drinking those after dinner, neat, as well. I like plum best, but Williams Christ (a type of pear) is a well-deserved classic, too.
pbmonster
1mo ago
I am vociferous in my endorsement
That's enough for me to give it a try! After 15 minutes of research and several false starts, I've now settled on the Zelsky translation. I found an ePub with 2334 chapters. Does that sound about right, or do you recommend something different?
pbmonster
1mo ago
I've only learned about xianxia through this thread, and I'm intrigued. Have you read "Cradle" by Will Wight? Is that "western xianxia"? How does it compare to Reverend Insanity?
I'd call Cradle "power fantasy slop", but reading stuff like that is my guilty pleasure. Maybe I should give the "eastern OGs" a try...
pbmonster
1mo ago
Yeah, I would. Destroying the Nord Stream pipelines is easier to defend. You can argue it was more about preventing your common adversary from selling than your good ally from buying. You can argue you're just making sure your good ally is following the agreed-upon embargo (with the stern implication that you both knew that this ally was always in danger of smashing the defect button if the economy got rough enough).
Then, of course, you can also always pretend that it was the work of an Ukrainian crack squad, that they (tragically, really) slipped their leash, and that there's really not much you could have done to stop them in the first place. Your intelligence counter-parties and the political elements they advise will see through that, but they'll understand. Support it even, maybe. The public won't see through the lies, and if they do, they'll have forgotten all about it a week later.
Germany imported less from Russia in 2022 than they do from the US now, and it caused a minor energy crisis and cost spikes when they stopped importing Russian gas. They had to build terminals to receive US LNG. Or am I wrong about that?
No, absolutely! But all those new floating gas terminals are agnostic to who's LNG carrier docks and delivers gas. Any country with gas liquidation tech can now sell to Germany - and that's most of the counties with gas wells.
Specifically, the US doesn't operate a single large LNG carrier. Those are built/owned/flagged/operated by third parties, and they can just pick up gas for Germany from somewhere else.
Gas delivery by LNG carrier is a mature global market. Japan, South Korea and India have historically imported a lot of their energy needs this way. Now the EU does, too.
pbmonster
1mo ago
the United States can probably credibly threaten to throttle German and thus European domestic arms production if they so choose
Not by LNG exports, at least not without significant direct embargoes. Qatar, Norway, Algeria, Canada, ect. all ship a lot of gas, and would supply gladly. The US could increase global gas prices by not selling to anyone, but the Germans would spend too keep their at least their MIC running. And at the end of the day the US really likes selling gas...
No, if the US really wanted to put the hurt on the EU, they could stop selling them chips and sensors.
But I don't think those steps are very realistic, measures like that would be unimaginably antagonistic.
I disagree. I'd call full page images in an A4 photo book and 14"-20" framed pictures a "standard use case" for high quality photos. If I take my DSLR in medium-challenging lighting conditions, a large number of shots won't have the image quality to be printed at those dimensions. Sharpness/blurriness, insufficient exposure, ISO-noise, ect. will be a problem in a percentage of shots - and often, in the most interesting shots, of course.
More options
Context Copy link