robbedpeter

It's cheaper than many other additives.

Graphene flakes are all that is needed for concrete reinforcement, and it's trivial to produce, even at scale. Carbon chunks are thrown into industrial blenders with water and detergent, resulting in graphene flakes sheared and then separated in suspension. The flakes are separated, washed, and dried.

Large graphene sheets are hard. Tiny flakes are trivial, gradeschool kitchen science.

Was. They've sold out to the ad churn, laying off journalists, and some genius middle management is steering the company toward profits over quality journalism.

They're a dead outlet, unless they restructure their management to preserve journalistic integrity. That's expensive and they seem more interested in cashing out their reputation.

Yeah. It might as well be in flash.

Advertising incentivizes lying. The best presentation wins, in this current ad market.

Metrics that track good faith interactions are needed, like eBay reputation - if someone isn't 98% or higher, they're going to be overlooked or bypassed in favor of someone with a higher score.

Product reviews and ratings get gamed, because current systems don't reward good faith transactions - Amazon and Google customers purchase attention and shuffle facts around top maximize purchases. If quality reviews and curation were incentivized, there would be a thriving class of reviewers and experts playing a role in the marketplace. Their absence is glaring, and the horde of product influencers and professional reviewers underscore the deep corruption of adtech. Those people leech money from the market by selling the ability to lie. The lies are sanctioned by adtech firms, and often laundered through otherwise reliable data sources.

Any legitimate attempt to compete threatens the entire adtech ecosystem, so a majority of all consumer marketplaces are incentivized to cultivate the corruption and prevent any changes or reform that threaten the sanctified lies.

Things like Angie's List and product review vlogs and expert podcasts are stuck within the system, regardless of their intent or functionality when they start. They eventually converge into niches that support the system as a whole. Even reddit, requiring individual human dialog and interaction, has been infested by professional reviewers shilling crappy products.

You can't trust the data sources because trustworthy sources are incompatible with adtech. Google has sufficient data to fix it, but they'd lose money by allowing reform, so they maintain the ethically gray areas ferociously. Their business is not quality search, it's maximizing advertising profits, and it's more profitable to have 50 people paying a premium for scraps than 5 high quality vendors with vetted products earning those spots through quality and service.

The system is working as intended.

They shouldn't be doing stupid things like hosting anything important on Facebook.

I have zero sympathy for Australia's inability to elect competent government.

They signed up for free services like every other chump on the planet, with the same terms of service, with the same naive, zero-fucks-given attitude toward privacy, service continuity, or responsibility, and it bit them in the ass while highlighting their stupidity. This story is going to get repeated over and over until western governments catch up to social media.

Steelmanning is your own good faith attempt to understand the opposing argument so well that you can articulate it as coherently as your own position.

If you're simply repeating what the other person said, you're not using the concept to full effect.

If you're framing your own argument as a strawman instead of clarifying the opposing argument, you've missed the plot entirely (unless your opponent is arguing for the use of strawmen in debate?)

The utility of steelmanning is to minimize assumptions. Everyone has to demonstrate their comprehension. You can take it further and in order to 'pass' the steelman stage, you have to agree with your opponent's steelman argument, or have a dialog to refine it until you're satisfied that both of you understand your argument.

A cluster of many $8000+ gpus. You're looking at around 350GB of vram, so 30 12gb gpus - a 3090 will cost around $1800, so $54k on the gpus, probably another $15k in power, cooling, and infrastructure, $5k in network, and probably another $20k in other costs to bootstrap it.

Or wait 10 years, if gpu capacity scales with Moore's law, consumer hardware should be able to run a ~400GB model locally.

Web scraping is legal. Reddit users, like all other members of public forums, put their comments on the internet for the whole world to see. And collect, parse, process and manipulate. If you don't want the whole world to have access to your writing, you'd have to join a private forum.

Trying to shoehorn social media posts into some contorted post-hoc bastardization of the concept of privacy is ridiculous.

Shockingly, things that people post to publicly accessible websites are accessible by the public. We're starting to see social damage from this, with facial recognition and authoritarian governments using people's posts for tracking and oppression.

Decentralized services with strong legislation protecting personal data, and globally recognized content licensing will all be needed to prevent future abuse, but everyone currently in the planet over the age of 20 is more or less personally responsible for the massive and naive oversharing. We know better now, but 15+ years ago nobody except Sci-fi authors and fringe activists had a grasp of how badly unprotected globally shared streams of consciousness could go wrong.

Well done! This is a beautiful tribute.

Every argument for death strikes me as silly. If anything, functional immortality would incentivize people to be better. Your want relationships to be stable and mutually respectful at a minimum. Marriages would be somewhat hard to maintain - if you were in good health, mid 20s body, and expected to live centuries in that state, lifelong commitments achieve that "quantity is sometimes a quality all its own" effect.

We'll need a different scale of maturity, too - an 18 year old adult in a relationship with a 300 year old adult makes the term "adult" ridiculously ineffective in describing anything meaningful.

Age and death and maturity tie in to almost every aspect of life and culture and human experience. We don't have the cultural tools and concepts that allow for immortality to fit. If it's achieved, the world radically changes and we won't know what those changes will be until it happens. It'd be like tasking Edison with predicting how the internet would change life, or cell phones, or asking Julius Caesar to write about how the germ theory of disease might improve the human condition. We're smart enough to predict small parts of it, but there's a whole world of ideas and behaviors that get unleashed by immortality, and a non-trivial percentage of them are probably counterproductive with regards to humanity at large (immortal Putin, anyone?)