Actually, guns do kill people. And generative AI fools people. That's what they're built and designed to do. Pretending otherwise doesn't help.
If modern guns had just been invented and murders using guns were suddenly becoming common, saying "it's not the guns fault, it's just a tool" would not be a helpful response: prevalent guns make murders much easier and more common, people would need to learn about that and decide whether to change their behaviours or laws to handle that.
Generative AI is an ideal tool for fooling people. It is explicitly designed, tuned, and built to produce that look good, that appear accurate, that are persuasive. A truly vast amount of money and work has gone into training it to be that.
So I expect the killer apps for generative AI will be individualized spam, targetted advertising, and fraud. It might - might! - also have other uses. But mostly that is what you get from a tool that can produce convincing-looking results tuned to its audience.
So cheaply-produced grifts will look more like the real thing, and people will need to learn about that and decide whether to change their behaviours or laws to handle that.
]]>Oh, you can derive it from first principles by looking at the hit tables. You see if you try to fight a demon (say) it looks like rolling dice and looking up tables, but really that lookup can be replaced by a computation. Dealing with demons is just a probabilistic computation.
(And it’s that kind of comment which could land a young Derek in quite a lot of trouble)
]]>EVs are great. But right now, EVs are only really great for people like me who own their own house with off-street parking where we can charge our car at home, overnight, like we charge our laptops.
If govts were really serious about encouraging a long-term move to EVs they'd be changing building standards not fiddling about with EV subsidies. Every new residential build should be required to include overnight EV charging ability if it includes car parking. Refitting EV charging into an apartment building's underground carpark so that my carpark's plug is billed to my electricity bill and your carpark's plug is charged to you is an expensive refit it's not planned for in advance, but is cheap and easy if it's in the initial build.
I think people - include govts - obsess with public EV chargers because they're so used to the old paradigm where you take your car somewhere to full it up. Wrong solution. Public chargers do have their uses in certain cases, but I owned an EV for year before I ever used a public charger.
]]>That matches what happened here in NZ: the "Christchurch Creche" scandal in 1991, which turns out to involve a mum who read US conspiracy theories and police lead investigator who drank the satanic panic kool-aid (and who had an affair with the mum while the investigation went on). There's a good book on it "A City Possessed", and me dropping out of Teacher's College in 1991 is not unrelated - frankly, life for male primary school teachers looked a bit shit.
But that wasn't the D&D satanic panic here. Claims that D&D was satanist was a hassle here in the early to mid 80s, the "satanic panic" of 90/91 was largely focussed on child care workers, health professionals, and other people who dealt with small kids.
]]>All of their big “reforms” from the right wing coalition parties are just rolling back things the Ardern Labour govt did. ACT wants more, but no-one else will allow it.
It’s a visionless opposition, now in power.
Which is annoying as all hell, rolling back 6 years of progress, but actually isn’t nearly as radical a right-wing coalition as it pretends to be. It’s too visionless to actually do anything that could kill the coalition. National won’t support ACT’s craziness.
For example ACT is a libertarian party that showed its radical libertarianness by having their minister raise the minimum wage by very slightly less than inflation. Yes, that is bad and hurts real people. But that’s not the radical libertarians they pretend to be.
]]>Peak power usage is daytime in summer. Most domestic power use is hot water, which could be heated daytime in winter with Solar unless you are insanely far North.
More importantly, it’s always windy somewhere, and the tides stop for no man. Wind plants are cheap, and getting cheaper.
All renewables need is a good mix of power sources.
]]>Oh, I'm still waiting for LLMs to really get going in the areas of the economy where they will make the most impact.
Like many new technologies people are still figuring out quite what to do with AI, how to best make use of it. Eventually they'll realise what it's really good at:
Scams and spam.
The ability to bullshit - to provide the surface queues that signal that what they are saying should be trusted - is the LLMs true ability. Unscrupulous people who stop trying to work on getting the LLMs to "tell the truth" and focus on trying to get them to "produce convincing bullshit" are going to make a lot of money.
]]>Slightly off-topic, but - I'm sad to hear that.
I'm one of those who expects that "A Conventional Boy" will be about my teens years (maybe with more corpses than I encountered), but 40 years on I'm still playing. Table-top gaming is still fun. It still has both the silly zaniness, and the pathos, and the inevitable evolution of in-jokes in any campaign that lasts more than a month, and... well, it's still good.
]]>I think you probably under-estimate how complicated tides are in the real world.
To start with you've (in theory) got a tidal bulge pulled around the planet by a moon (and another by the sun). But even if we just talk about the lunar tides: in the real world, you don't actually have a tidal bulge moving around the earth under the moon. The real world is far more complicated.
But tides are very hard to model accurately from first principles on any world with a coastline. When the tidal bulge of water pulled by the moon hits a coast, and the moon moves on, the bulge doesn't follow the moon, instead it reflects and slops back. And then the coriolis effect is huge.
So tidal bulges of "high tide" do not move across the planet from East to West. Instead what we find is that the ocean's tidal bulges spiral around, centered on "amphidromic" points, which are points at which there is no tide at all (like the eye of a hurricane). With the direction of spiral being different in the northern and southern hemisphere. Predicting where those amphidromic points would be is (in theory) possible, but actually the modelling involved is very hard given complicated coastlines, so really they measure to find them and apply some theory after that - tide modelling is semi-empirical.
Here in New Zealand the tidal bulges go around the islands anti-clockwise. That which doesn't really make sense for our hemisphere but is because we're between amphidromic points. That makes for an unholy mess in Cook Strait (between the North and South Islands) where the north-travelling and south-travelling tides meet - very strong currents, which reset twice a day, and have more than one stable state that they reset into.
And there's how big the tide is - which depends again on where you, where the nearest amphidromic point is, local coastline, etc. UK and NZ both mostly have very big differences high tide to low tide. The continental USA mostly doesn't (with a few exceptions), though Alaska does. In the whole of the Caribbean tides are so small they hardly exist (so those pirates "setting sailing on the evening tide, yarrr" probably didn't give a damn what the tide was).
]]>The test came from a 4-panel cartoon in the late 80s, where a character said she didn’t go to Hollywood movies unless there were 1) two female characters who 2) had a conversation about 3) something other than a man.
The year it was written there were zero big budget movies in English that passed that test. The same was true the next year.
So “it’s not the 1950s anymore” is a little misplaced - it was about the extreme sexism of 1980s media portrayals of women.
And it should really be taken holistically about a body of works: the point is not whether any one work passes this test, but how many do and how many would fail a comparable test about having at least two male characters that have a conversation about something other than a woman.
]]>We’ll hire bright young overconfident people, preferably from outside the field of mathelogical demonology, pay them peanuts, and contract them to you to projects like yours at outrageous fees.
And if they make a few mistakes, well…. not MY soul on the line. Or yours. So, we got a deal then?
]]>I’m doing Wellington-> Europe this week, my first overseas trip since the pandemic started.
London-> Auckland or vice versa is hard, but it’s the connections either end that add up. Wellington -> Auckland, then hang around, the Auckland -> London or Paris or Frankfurt then hang around, then from there to your actual destination.
(But we are spending 24 hours in Singapore and then getting back on the plane, to make the trip easier. A fairly common practice if you have the time)
]]>It also let them effectively regulate to stop people doing things that damaged the roads. Narrow wheeled carriages (which damaged the roads more) were tolled more than wider wheels.
]]>That would be Naomi Novik's "A Deadly Education". Which I'd strongly recommend.
She starts with the idea that you have a magical school like Hogwarts, where kids die routinely because there are freaking monsters around. Then she dials that up to 11 - most kids won't live to graduate, and they know it, and obviously the survivors will mostly be the best-connected kids from good families and their hangers-on.
Imagine if getting in with the cools kids at boarding school was, literally, the only thing that could keep you alive. And if you and everyone else at school knew it.
So far, so nasty. But best bit of the book is the protagonist, who may be the most angry young woman I've ever read a book about and my favorite heroine ever.
]]>I'm not sure there is a "mostly".
Inflation is what you get when the economy is running a bit too hot. Lots of demand right now, more than supply right now.
That's kind of what you expect when a economy has been stuck idling because of Covid, and has to burn a bit of rubber to get back up to speed. Add in a little supply shock (more psychological than real - Ukraine war impacted oil prices because of fear it'd impact supply far more than it impacted actual oil supply), and you get inflation. But there's a lot of little things going on - including a bit of convenient price gouging, especially by banks.
The real question is whether it persists or goes away. That depends on whether everyone raises their wages and prices because they think everyone else is, ie whether we get inflation because inflation. Or (on the other hand) whether the central bankers convince everyone that the central bankers have the power to stop inflation. If all the Wall St bros and executives close their eyes very tight, clap their hands, and say "we believe in central banks control of the money supply", then control of the money supply will come back to life and inflation will be defeated. And if they don't believe - well, then the other thing.
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