civilitty
Joined 9 years ago
Karma
3,524
Submissions
1,299
Member since
Jun 24
Recent submissions
Comment · 2 years ago
Twitter is not a public outlet of free speech and you'd have to be an absolutely batshit lunatic to claim it is after everything that's happened with Musk's acquisition.
Comment · 2 years ago
It’s far more than reasonable, it might be Google’s saving grace.
I wasn’t going to bother even testing Google’s AI products unless everyone started gushing about how much better they are than GPT4 but with 60 free queries per minute? That’s worth exploring even if only to find out shortly that it’s not worth paying for.
Comment · 2 years ago
If some lab grown brain tissue were all that’s needed for sentience we wouldn’t have such a hard time understanding it to begin with.
Comment · 2 years ago
> Those systems consume very little in the way of resources
Since when is electricity not a resource?
Unlike cannabis, you can’t sell tomatoes for $2,000 a pound.
Comment · 2 years ago
TSMC doesn’t have a real monopoly, they’re just a few years ahead of everyone else in integrating ASML’s latest tech. Samsung and Intel aren’t very far behind. The more money TSMC charges the more incentive the others have to catch up but they can only move so fast. GlobalFoundries and STMicroelectronics seem stuck in the double digits.
It makes a big difference to a few competitive customers so TSMC gets paid well for that first mover advantage, but yeah it’s not well secured monopoly.
Comment · 2 years ago
> They are solitary creatures
They're not. Feral cats form colonies with complex social structures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_cat#Colonies
House cats are much more solitary creatures that are very jealous of their human slaves' relationships.
Comment · 2 years ago
In reality cats are man's best friend. Dogs are a child surrogate, except they never reach an age where they're independent. Which is probably half the appeal: they never outgrow us, unlike our children (or our cats).
Comment · 2 years ago
The best part is how it's marked as a tourist attraction on Google Maps with 14 5 star reviews, despite only one person ever visiting it.
The article kind of glosses over how inaccessible this place is. Rob Mark got extraordinarily lucky that the water level got high enough to boat to the area because unlike the jungle, the water is way too cold to survive for very long even during the summer and there's no solid ground for miles at a time like in a tropical jungle. It's all bog and peatland as far as the eye can see.
Unless the government clears helicopters to rappel people down, he might be the last person to visit the area given climate change.
Comment · 2 years ago
We're not talking about a war on drugs that "didn't completely solve the problem", we're talking about one that made the problem ten times worse and fucked up society in the process.
It doesn't matter if it had any positive impact, the negative impact outweigh them so much it's a downright crime against humanity that imprisoned millions of people in a system that constitutes modern day slave labor.
Comment · 2 years ago
The whole concept of different human species may be a taxonomic error of historic proportions despite the morphological differences we see in the fossil record. Information on the genome of archaic humans is a very recent development in a centuries old field so it is still catching up, especially at the level of educational material.
Based on my reading of the paper about the sequenced neanderthal bone [1] and a global genetic variation study [2], the difference between neanderthals and modern humans isn't that much bigger than the natural variation within the modern human genome. That difference is much smaller (on the order of 10-40x) than the difference between modern humans and chimpanzees and given the multiple genetic bottleneck events in our evolution, I think it's much more accurate to look at all the different species of archaic humans as breeds of modern humans that happen to show a larger difference with older samples because of the limited founding population and the diversity of our ancestors (of which we have very few biased samples).
Where to draw the line in speciation is always controversial but my theory is that once tool use really got going by the second stone industry, early humans started artificially self-selecting for intelligence just like we later did with dogs and eventually the modern human "breed" was born. By the million year ago mark, roughly the time evidence of fire started showing up in the archaeological record, I think the species that is modern humans was already long spreading and out competing other apes. I think shortly after this point is when we started developing clothing and moving into the colder climates, leaving evidence at places like Atapuerca.
[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/nature128...
Comment · 2 years ago
> Ounce for ounce, a wafer of a top end NVIDIA chips is the most valuable substance on earth.
I think that would still be Californium. Even if NVIDIA could fit 300 H100 on a 300mm wafer at $40,000 a GPU a wafer would be worth $12,000,000 which would be in the same ballpark as a single gram of Californium.
Technically anti-matter would cost orders of magnitude more but there's no demand for it so it's not really valuable, whereas Californium is tightly rationed for scientific research. </silly-nitpick>