SFReader

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• Commented on Place your bets
  RE: Treatment for depression Depression, esp. PTSD, is being taken seriously these days. Quite a few clinical trials on this in the US and if you're a military vet you probably have a better chance of getting into a clinical...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'The Boundary Commission' - UK's anti-gerrymandering? Thanks - I looked it up and did a quick scan. Seems that there are quite a few opportunities for gerrymandering. Also - apparently the new report is due July 1, 2023. How...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Re: '... risk of customers filing lawsuits about reprieved and/or actual violations of privacy...' Yes in the EU (all EU members*) and maybe Canada (national law) - not so in the US where data protection laws vary by State. No...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  RE: 'Social media allows them to target us very precisely, and Google, Meta, and formerly Twitter made most of their money from ads. Interests and platform use allow them to target ads where they want them.' Okay - but that...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  RE: '... doubtful about the marketing belief that authors need to write about a particular age group (especially teenagers / young adults) to attract that age group, ...' Marketing to demographic segments - old vs. new: Demos - provided they're...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: '... overt prejudice and even discrimination against them is permitted and even acceptable in the UK,' I've been watching some British comedy panel shows - it seems that every nationality/ethnic group is an OK-target for comedic purposes. Mind you...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Re: 'Yes, I do love Laundryverse but I doubt it has enough fans to simply leap off the page to the screen the same way the DiscWorld books did. ... Info-dumping would have to be done in a manner to...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'One of the less-acknowledged reasons WW1 trench warfare ...' No personal military experience but ... Overall, more deaths among the military as well as civilians were caused by famine and disease than by weapons. Also the UK was not...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Re: '... how do people who have Superhero-itis pass the condition onto their children?' How about 'spiritual' epigenetics? Some epigenetic traits can affect future generations. There are probably a whole bunch of real-in-this-universe bio/chem/physics tricks that could be adapted to...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'So...is there space in the legal system for AI to speed up trials?' Yep - already in use. https://www.clio.com/blog/lawyer-ai/ And it looks like they've already had a webinar for US lawyers on how to use it in law practice....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  The email I got from Tor.com (March 4/23) about upcoming books mentioned 'Season of Skulls' as the 13th book of the Laundryverse. https://publishing.tor.com/seasonofskulls-charlesstross/9781250839404/ Whatever the title, I'm looking forward to reading it!...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'Genghis Khan "mostly murdering"' He/his army killed far more civilians (women & children) than soldiers - estimate is about 37.5 to 60 million dead. That's a bloodbath/genocide. The estimate for the world population for that time period is about...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'Better handle on math/stats means a better handle on possible outcomes - yeah, sure, but only if you care.' For an example of a math model used to look at human behavior: 'Abstract Sexual conflict can arise when males...
• Commented on Place your bets
  RE: '... tie this back to cryptocurrency and/or AI and/or fears that failing banks are about to destroy the economy' Depends - it looks like some banks have been seriously looking at how crypto/AI does and can operate in the...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'No evidence for any hominid domesticating or even taming any species while the Neanderthals were extant, so far as I know.' Based on the slew of aww-type Twitter vids I get everyday: Put any two youngsters (regardless of species)...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'Perceptron' Okay, so one of the built-in issues I have with AI inputs and performance has a name. Thanks! Per Wikipedia: 'Single-layer perceptrons are only capable of learning linearly separable patterns.[6] For a classification task with some step activation...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'That's probably not important to an AI, but evolution is full of very indirect interactions, so we can't REALLY be sure' Okay, I see you've taken the reductionist road here - chemistry*. But that still doesn't answer the variety...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Re: 'The belief that some (nearly all) people have, that there is some "there" there, inside silicon bullshit (e.g. SFReader@34, sorry, not attacking you, that's just the way your comments came across; I see the same sentiments everywhere, even from...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Considering that there is still on-going debate/uncertainty about what 'human intelligence' is - its various components and interactions as well as how to measure it, to call a ramped up computational device 'intelligent' does not make sense to me. 'Words...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  EV vs. ICE - Consumer Report article This is a post-and-run. For folks outside NorAm: CR is considered pretty reliable and their findings/suggestions might apply in other parts of the world. https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/hybrids-evs/will-an-electric-car-save-you-money-a9436870083/...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: 'So the fire risk is somewhat buried in the data.' Understood - that's why I said comparable apart from the fuel source....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: '... but I can easily see a short or other oopsie tipping the whole setup past the ignition point.' This definitely did not appear in what I read about EVs - hope the EV industry gets its act together...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: 'Fox ... sell slots to advertisers interested in those' Faux News (talking-head 'Tucker') started losing major sponsors back in 2018. Ad revenues fell at least 24% one year and have been in decline since. (No idea what the total...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: 'I'm thinking of US construction. Maybe it's different where you are.' Probably not - as long as the structure was properly built. One of my family lived in a condo that was converted from a large convent in Montreal....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: 'The most important measurements have always included lower speeds, and the standard ones include the 'urban cycle'' Agree - considering that about 80% of the developed world's population lives in urban areas. I live near the Atlantic east coast...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: '[vaccine] ... if it would be possible to do the same for bird flu?' Yes, but lots to consider before doing so. https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/news/20230210/us-to-test-vaccine-in-poultry-as-bird-flu-deaths-rise So far only one human has come down with bird flu however given that humans aren't...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: '[nuclear] ... the Bruce generating station seems to be a great idea,' Finally finished this article - very interesting and written for a non-techie reader. (Not sure I'll read the appendix since according to its description, it's written for...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: 'Sy Hersh has been in something of a contrarian/conspiracist mode for a while, ...' Just read Hersh's Wikipedia page. Pretty solid history in journalism including a 2017 award for integrity in journalism. His major problem with credibility from about...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: '... the dismantling of the British and French empires, while building their own' I'm about halfway through the below article discussing exactly that. 'Contesting hegemons: US–French relations in the ‘New World Order’' (JAMES PETRAS AND MORRIS MORLEY) https://library.fes.de/libalt/journals/swetsfulltext/7890297.pdf The...
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  Re: 'Bruce generating station, or the balloon' Thanks for the info (Pdf)! I've read only a few pages but it looks interesting. About the balloons - hopefully the gov'ts will provide information sometime soon....