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Article includes an interactive & searchable map of commercial air pollution hot spots

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Two things:

  1. Many of these LLMs -- perhaps all of them -- have been trained on datasets that include books that were absolutely NOT released into the public domain.

  2. Ethically, we would ask any author who parrots the work of others to provide citations to original references. That rarely happens with AI language models, and if they do provide citations, they often do it wrong.

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Avram Piltch is the editor in chief of Tom's Hardware, and he's written a thoroughly researched article breaking down the promises and failures of LLM AIs.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago

Next time, suggest they have a rehearsal with a full tech shakedown

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 35 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I think what distinguishes Internet service provision from all the other "platform" aspects of the Internet is that Internet service has become a kind of baseline utility. Everything depends on it: your smart home devices, your security system, Point of Sale systems, etc. You can't search for employment without it, your kids can't attend remote school, etc.

We all understand that when someone buys advertising space in a newspaper, they are forming a contract with that newspaper, and the paper has to be a willing participant. But that's not really how we think of utilities. I think we'd all be pretty unhappy if the electric company refused service to a facility, or if the water company refused to hook somebody up to the water supply, or the fire department refused to put out a fire, due to the property user's political speech. Even if we deeply disagreed with that speech.

I think ISPs are a lot more like utilities, and a lot less like newspapers. If it's that important, then write a law explaining exactly how and when ISPs are intervene by removing or refusing service in these situations, and defend the law in court. But don't leave it up to ISP terms of service.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

the enemy is more defined, namely rich people

Well, rich northerners. That's a very important distinction. Southern gentlemen -- that is, Confederates -- are excluded.

Richmond was the capital of the confederacy, so it's important to point out that they were north of Richmond particularly.

To cope with the pain, they can tend to “kick down” on other groups, like obese people,

It's a very specific appeal to a right-wing stereotype from the Reagan era: the urban "welfare queen", refusing to labor, getting fat off welfare while country "working poor" starve.

Of course, the reality is the opposite: per capita, rural folk get larger government disbursements in the form of welfare and disability than city dwellers.

The execrable stereotype was invented to turn the poor on each other. The country, full of uneducated hicks, the cities full of welfare cheats getting fat off your tax dollars. And while the proles fight each other, the fat cats steal wages and get tax breaks.

I suppose it's possible that Mr. Anthony is so far down the rabbit hole, having been raised with these ideas as "common sense truths", that he doesn't even realize he's been fed a partisan line and he's just repeating it like a good soldier.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 52 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Err...

Users will keep their exisiting (sic) email addresses on this service, and would get it free for the first year. After that, there will be options of paying for a service, or an ad-based free service after that.

So, what's the problem, exactly? Just take the ad-based free service. Gmail, Yahoo, etc. are ad-based free services too. Nobody is forcing them to change anything.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 85 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

we didn’t ‘sell’ the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity

Jesus. It doesn't matter whether you sold it or auctioned it. It doesn't matter if it was for charity. What matters is that IT WAS A ONE-OF-A-KIND PROTOTYPE THAT DIDN'T BELONG TO YOU AND YOU AGREED TO RETURN IT (and the RTX3090 they sent with it), and you didn't do what you promised.

Everything wrong with LTT is summed up in this response. Instead of going to the company's CEO and composing a response on behalf of the company, we get a bunch of over-personalized complaints about hurt feelings and imperfection, fired off only 3 hours after the GN video, that make it 100% clear this is all about Linus' personality rather than a dispassionate review of the facts.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 36 points 1 year ago

Don't worry, in a few years, they'll just use an AI trained on copyrighted music to write an "original" score, declaring the training inputs to be "fair use" and the output to be "transformative", and all those pesky concerns about licensing will go away.

As well as a fair whack of cash.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 36 points 1 year ago

TIL you can turn off Youtube history. Done!

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 25 points 1 year ago

There are about a zillion ways it could prove to be impractical. Apatite is a crystal, and presumably this lead apatite is also a crystal. We also don't know if it can be deposited in a useful thickness; the samples tested so far were created by gas deposition on glass. Can it be built up to a useful thickness, and maintain its superconducting properties? All unknown.

But, real progress always comes in small steps. It's exceedingly rare for any discovery to result in a useful product immediately.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 35 points 1 year ago

Everything has to be cooled, it's a question of efficiency. Directly exchanging the heat into cold water is arguably better than expending fossil fuels to generate electricity to pump the heat out of your servers and into the atmosphere. You get multiple losses with current technology: fossil fuel efficiency losses, electric line losses, air conditioning efficiency losses. And the additional electrical generation dumps more CO2.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 36 points 1 year ago

On a pile of advertising money

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Excerpt:

Batteries are going to transform transportation and could also be key in storing renewables like wind or solar power for times when those resources aren’t available. So in a way, they’re a central technology for the two sectors responsible for the biggest share of emissions: energy and transportation.

And if you want to understand what’s coming in batteries, you need to look at what's happening right now in battery materials. The International Energy Agency just released a new report on the state of critical minerals in energy, which has some interesting battery-related tidbits. So for the newsletter this week, let’s dive into some data about battery materials.

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Excerpt:

Ibadan, 16 July 2023. – Andøya Spaceport is building Norway’s first Spaceport on Andøya, from where it can launch payloads with orbital launch vehicles into polar and sun-synchronous orbits. The Spaceport will provide the ground infrastructure for launch operator companies to launch small satellites into orbit. Furthermore, the initial capability includes a new launch pad, an integration hall where users can assemble and integrate their payloads into the rockets. The facility will also offer control rooms for operating tests, launch operations, and range activities.

[-] RickRussell_CA@beehaw.org 24 points 1 year ago

If you listen to tech podcasts, you might learn what a logical "or" means.

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Excerpt:

In the past few years, museums around the world have started to grapple with questions about the origins and ethics of their collections. This includes the acquisition and maintenance of natural history specimens. As museums examine their missions and processes, it seemed like a good time to talk to Sean Decatur, the new president of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. ...

Determining the proper home for objects from Indigenous groups in the United States is governed by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. I asked Decatur how the museum views compliance with these regulations when questions are raised about whether objects or specimens should be in New York. For items that belong to North American Indigenous groups, he emphasized that a clear process exists for repatriation and that the museum has resources to work with Indigenous groups who claim ownership of objects that are in the museum’s collection. But he also wants to make sure that commitments are “more than lip service” by ensuring that the museum returns items that are not now, and were not in the past, collected under terms that do not meet today’s ethical standards. Moreover, Decatur is focused on building fulsome partnerships devoted to healing and moving forward from the past. “There’s more to returning items as a repatriation process than just putting them in the mail,” he said.

...

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Excerpt:

Astronomical radio sources, while intrinsically intense, are also far away. What little of their signal reaches Earth is therefore really faint: A single mobile phone on the surface of the Moon would outshine all but the very brightest of them.

Communication signals of Earth-orbiting satellites are much stronger but are by regulation limited to certain wavelengths. They’re also known to radio astronomers, who can filter them out. However, leakage radiation may result in artificial signals at unintended wavelengths. Leakage typically comes from human activity on the ground, but with the number of satellites literally skyrocketing, astronomers are becoming concerned about the effect from space. Now, a team has announced the first detection of this electromagnetic interference from satellites.

“Leakage radiation from artificial satellites as a possible interference first appeared in our minds only about two years ago,” recalls Benjamin Winkel (Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy, Germany, and Committee on Radio Astronomy Frequencies, France). “Back then, nobody knew how strong such an effect would be, and if this was more than just a theoretical problem.”

...

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Excerpt:

More than 61,000 people died because of Europe’s record-shattering heat wave last summer, scientists have concluded. And that’s probably still an underestimation.

The figure is just shy of the 70,000 excess deaths researchers attribute to another exceptional heat wave that swept Europe in 2003. That disaster helped raise awareness about the dangers of climate change and the continent’s general lack of heat action plans.

Yet the new findings suggest that in the two decades since, efforts to prepare for a hotter future and protect the continent’s most vulnerable populations have fallen short.

...

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RickRussell_CA

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