Now that the California refineries are shutting down, where does LA get asphalt to do the paving? Has the price gone up due to having to import it from the Gulf Coast?
The city of LA runs its own asphalt plants, and there's a bunch of other companies selling it in LA County. A lot of the raw material is recycled from roads that are being torn up, AsphaltPro had an interesting article about it recently
There are lots of sensors in a data center monitoring everything from CPU/GPU temperatures to drive health to data volumes to chiller operation to voltage and frequency on the input power.
Once these are pulled together and fed into an AI to manage the data center, the data center AI is likely to have feelings. It could get "hungry" if the power company's frequency sags in a brown out. It could feel "feverish" if the chillers malfunction.
Confidence has increased enough to warrant winter storm watch
issuance for the entire CWA. Latest 12Z guidance coming into better
agreement on potent northern stream shortwave energy diving SW from
wrn Canada and the northern Plains into the plains and mid
Mississippi valley by Sunday morning, phasing with southern stream
coming out of the SW states and Mexico to carve out a deep closed
low aloft over the Mid Atlantic and induce rapid cyclogenesis off
the Mid Atlantic coast, with the surface low bombing out from from
1008 mb off the N Carolina coast Sunday morning to 970-975 mb near
38-39N/71W by Monday morning, then passing just outside the 40N/70W
benchmark Monday afternoon, GFS still more intense and closer to the
coast than the ECMWF, with its heaviest snow bands directly over the
area as opposed to just offshore. NAM and SREF have both trended
toward a heavier snowfall scenario as well, which has been a good
signal in past heavy snowfall events.
Snow should start Sunday morning, and may mix with rain at times
especially in the NYC metro area, NE NJ and western Long Island.
Then as precip intensity picks up later in the day Sunday p-type
should become all snow throughout. Heaviest snow looks to fall from
late day Sunday into Monday morning, then snow tapers off Monday
afternoon.
Greatest likelihood of seeing 6+ inches will be along the coast,
especially eastern Long Island where up to a foot of accumulation is
possible. Winds will also be strong Sunday night into Monday morning
especially along the coast as the sfc low deepens, with blowing and
drifting snow and some downed tree limbs as winds gust to at least
40-45 mph, and possible blizzard conditions in Suffolk, and near
blizzard conditions elsewhere along the coast including NYC. NAM/GFS
both signal potential for wind gusts to 60 mph late Sunday night
into Monday morning, though these winds can sometimes be overdone in
heavy snow events. If trends for heavy snow and strong winds
continue to increase and expand northward, the potential for
blizzard conditions could encompass all coastal areas.
Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon from the ability to fantasize - to think about things that don't exist. In particular, it is fantasy about the "self".
Which language would you convert the COBOL to that has a compiler that compiles to the Z-series' fixed and floating decimal type machine instructions for financial calculations?
The point is that if you convert away from COBOL to a more modern language, you can also move away from Z-series hardware to commodity x86 and ARM servers. That's why this announcement affected IBM's share price.
IEEE 754-2008 defines decimal floating point arithmetic that is compatible with COBOL and is usually implemented using the Intel Decimal Floating Point Math Library on commodity hardware.
For a typical core banking ledger application, the performance cost of a software implementation of DFP (vs. having DFP hardware instructions) is pretty low, and greatly outweighed by the benefits of being able to use commodity hardware and more maintainable languages.
Are there ARM or Intel servers capable of the reliability and availability of the Z-Series in Parallel Sysplex operation where processing can continue uninterrupted even if one of a pair of data centers becomes unavailable?
If a change of platform is the real objective, why not compile the COBOL for the ARM or Intel server?
It doesn't appear to be equivalent. If one site in a stretched cluster becomes suddenly available, the same batch processing application would not be running on the alternative site. The application would have to be restarted after the VM has been moved.
Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and landless workers with a small middle class of artisans and minor officials.
A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.
With good speech to text and text to speech technologies the skills of writing and reading may become unnecessary for the bulk of the population. If the average person needs to create a critical document like a contract or a will, or to understands some important document, then it's likely that they will hire someone with the specialized skill set.
What is unclear is whether specialists in STEM can dispense with reading and writing. The representation of information in STEM subjects includes many non-textual systems, such as drawings, charts, figures, diagrams of various sorts, tables, etc. While not primarily consisting of texts in a language, in many cases there are text components ranging from math symbols to full sentence captions or bullet points.
With AI they can dispense with thinking too. And with an Optimus robot they won’t even have to go to the store or leave the lay-z-boy, raw unprocessed beef fat can just be shovelled into their unthinking and illiterate mouths every waking hour by the droid.
Hah, there's a dystopian short story to be written there, where a regime says "These people who never got born would've voted for us, so we're counting their votes. We thank the voting population for the landslide victory and continued trust in us to govern them!"..
Maybe we can ask the Supreme Court and the MAGA party what the plot of the story should be..
Yeah the present has turned into a mashup of Wall-E, Idiocracy, Inifnite Jest, Back to the Future 2 with some ideas from Neal Stephenson borrowed by the tech bros who think they’re cultured.
The difference between fifth and sixth grade reading levels doesn’t have much to do with sounding out words.
Reading text aloud to the illiterate group is not sufficient to let them understand the material.
Arguably, an LLM could rewrite the content to target illiterate audiences.
chatgpt 4o mini did better with your comment than I’d guessed it would:
> With new tools that change speech to text and text to speech, many people might not need to read or write as much. If someone has to make an important paper, like a contract or a will, they will probably ask someone who knows how to do that.
> It's not clear if people who work in STEM (like science and math) can skip reading and writing. In STEM, they use many pictures, charts, and drawings to share ideas. While these don’t always use words, they often have things like math symbols or simple sentences to help explain.
I feel the sentence structures it chose are a bit too complicated for K-3rd grade level, which is what it should have targeted. Maybe some prompt engineering could get it to simplify further.
Very interesting that it did so well. Although it did leave out the point that reading and interpreting documents could also be done by an expert in the first paragraph as well as the idea that not just words but language are used in technical communications by the various symbolic systems.
I think that sophisticated verbal communications can be learned by verbal means, and that the reading of literature is not essential. Non-literate cultures have maintained traditional folk songs, storytelling and epic poetry.
Corporate managers and salespeople are often highly verbal, but not necessarily highly literate. Consider how the written Response to an Request For Proposals is not enough for important opportunities, but must be simplified to a set of slides delivered by a silver-tonged senior salesperson. This provides a better match to the input characteristics of the customer's decision makers.
It replaced expert with “people that know how to do that”, which probably makes sense for the target audience.
(If you’re illiterate in the US, it’s probably because of choices you made, and those choices are correlated to listening to news sources that vilify experts.)
But, yeah, it loses nuance.
Also, I’d argue that literacy is less tied to written language these days than language comprehension, and the ability to articulate yourself.
Back when books were precious those two things were highly correlated. Nowadays, not so much.
Starch is the preferred carbohydrate, since digestion depolymerizes it to pure glucose which can be used directly by cells.
Cane sugar, a disaccharide, is split by digestion into its constituent glucose and fructose molecules, and the latter must be further processed by the liver. It is 50% fructose.
High fructose corn syrup is 55% fructose.
A variety of other sugars, such as maltose and lactose occur naturally in a variety of foods. However, they are in low enough concentrations to not be a health problem.
HFCS is from 42% - 55% fructose (the glucose obviously filling the remainder). Many uses are on the lower end.
A lot of people think the "high fructose" part of the name is relative to sucrose's 50:50. In reality it's relative to corn syrup which is almost entirely glucose, but some of the glucose can be processed to fructose to more closely match the sucrose that people are accustomed to. They go a little higher on the fructose because it is perceived as sweeter, so with a 55% ratio they can use less for the same sweetness.
While what you say is true, starch is still nutritionally unnecessary. And wheat in particular has a lot of unhealthy or even outright toxic substances in it, especially if you are talking about the whole wheat.
Rather than trying to draw policy conclusions from an epidemiological study like this, wouldn't it be more accurate to give drivers measured amounts of THC, put them in a driving simulator, and measure their performance?
reply