kpil

Step 1 - don't buy a boat.

I'm not totally sure about that.

Maybe Russians outside Russia.

Of course almost everyone thinks war is bad, but many seem to think it's justified - different thing.

There seem to be a wide support for the idea that Russia is threatened (economically and to an extent military) by the global West, and also that Ukraine is not entitled to be independent and also many of the official lies about the background.

Good lies have a nugget of truth in them, and this is the case also here.

Russia's economy is not growing (compared to EU, US), fertility rate is down, the revolution in Ukraine undermines the stability of the Russian regime, the attempted coup in Belarus was also a threat, NATO is arguably expanding - lately as a reaction to the war but nonetheless, EU is expanding into post-Soviet states both offering membership but also trade agreements which undercut Russia's ambition to be an economical hub in the region, etc.

I think Volkswagen ID.4 is alright. It's perhaps a bit small. Also - I kind of like the ID.Buzz though not sure if it will sell.

Not quite normal but not "future" - the Renault 5 E-tech electric is nice but I don't think it's available in the US.

I think this is a good point. We will most likely not get novel results, but a lot of connected dots.

That is very useful but not the singularity. Which is probably good...

The CMIP7 scenarios were just released. AR7 is not yet completed but it's the input for it.

The "worst" RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5-style futures (coal-dominated, ~4.4–4.9 °C) are no longer treated as plausible given policy already in place, renewable cost declines, and observed emissions.

The policy changes have changed the projections.

Warming will continue, yes. The consequences will have to be dealt with. In some regions this will be problematic. It's still political and economical factors that determines the outcome.

It's worth noting that there is a fair amount of eschatology or even apocalypticism going on. It's built into the human mind somehow.

I spent 5 minutes just playing with the folding :-D

There is a certain difference between activating all relevant memoized facts that's in the weights and stringing them together with the help of all the stored text in the world, or displaying genuinely emergent behaviour and generating novel output.

One is really impressive and useful trick, one is AGI.

Apple's research show almost zero emergent behaviour, so I'm inclined to think most of it was already in the weights.

It doesn't take away the usefulness, it just defined the boundary. We can't expect "original research" then because it actually can't reason about concepts that are too far from whats already in the discourse. The discourse is big so we don't notice.

Unless they just swiped the workbooks of the actual mathematicians that where working on the problem using AI and it's in the "next-gen" training dataset.

The tree map folding is ingenious. I have never seen it.

As a whole it's brilliant and humbling. Both the vastness and complexity of nature and biology on Earth, and also the absurd amount of work and human lifetime that has been spent on gathering the information. It's also a testament of the power of Wikipedia.

I've had a glass of wine, but isn't it 3 half-hitches inside each other?

No, yes it's backwards.

I guess there's always the risk for a rig failure.

I looked a bit on doing the same, but came to the conclusion that it will be expensive to fulfil racing rules requiring the boat to be able to maintain speed for 5 hours ie around 25-30 NM range.

As it is now, I have about 500 NM diesel range on my boat, which is basically 3-4 days continuous runtime. Cutting it down to 25nm and 5 hours requires minimally 100kWh.

For a blue water boat, 500 NM is not quite acceptable, but can be fixed with jerrycans for a couple of dollars. An all electric blue water boat would clock in at an unrealistic 2MWh of batteries with a weight at least 20 metric tonnes. 10x the load capacity of my boat.

How the f are you supposed to type? Ideally I'd like full support for my arms from the elbow to the wrist.

In my first job - i think it was in 1997, I had my own small room with an L-shaped desk with a rounded corner. That gave a few inches of space for resting my arms - both when typing on a quite reasonable Pentium laptop, and especially when using the mouse.

Since then, the desks and the chairs has become shittier and shittier. Except perhaps when a was a consultant for an HR-department.

The U-shaped desk was probably the best ergonomically designed workplace I've had. Maybe a wheat-filled pad along the desk would have made it better.

I'm actually impressed by the amount of abuse our Oracle instances are able take from our developers.

Massive amounts of parallel single reads and writes with millisecond responses mixed with mega-joins of incorrectly indexed tables that works flawlessly "on their machine" that limp on well enough to sneak past performance testing with just the planner silently writhing in agony.

The etymology is interesting - Pebble Voting was used in the early democracies in Greece from 500 BC. Black pebbles meant 'no' and white meant 'yes'. The tradition evolved to the black and white marbles used in the Roman senate centuries later, i.e. two millennia ago. The practice has since continued – it was used in the early American republic in the 18th century, and the word 'ballot' used today for voting means just that - a 'little ball'.

The word 'blacklist' probably originated from this meaning. It was in use in England since before, but it was probably the "Black List of Regicides” that popularised the term. It was a list compiled by the administration of King Charles II England of those to be punished for the beheading of his father King Charles I in 1649, following the restoration of the monarchy of England in 1660. As this list was rather long, it was a probably a bit of a traumatic event for the gentry in London and it’s not hard to imagine that the memory of the dreaded "blacklist" stuck. A century later the word was in general use for a list of enemies, detractors, and unwanted people.

Conversely, "in the black" is the notion of having no debts or a positive cash flow. This obviously comes from the centuries old principle of using black for credit, and red ink for debit and negative balances in the double-entry accounting system codified in the 15th century.

A tangential but equally fascinating concept is the practice of forbidding - or blacklisting - words in totalitarian regimes like Maoist China. Controlling language was a key strategy to influence thought, define in-groups, and ostracize out-groups. It's a hallmark of a totalitarian systems aiming to shape thought through language. Very much not at all in line with the principles of ballot voting in a democratic system one should think.

(The last argument can be used with any word. I could find your Gallicism offensive and demand that all words with a French etymology should be removed from English to restore it to it's Old-English form before the oppressive Normand rule, since after all, the old words would just make more sense to those who are old enough to be used to it, and my feelings are important.)