Batteries are great when they have charge. What happens if the generator doesn't want to start the first, second, and third time? How many start attempts do you get before the batteries are dead?
The hand-pumped air compressor is the tool of last resort. You can try an engine start if there's someone there who's able to pump it. You don't have to worry about how much charge is left in your batteries or whether or not the gasoline for the 2-stroke pump engine has gone stale. It's the tool that you use as an alternative to "well, the batteries are dead too, guess we're not going to start the engine tonight... let's call the helicopters and abandon ship"
The data center where I work has large diesel generators for power cuts. They are electric (battery) start. There is no capability to start them manually. The batteries are on maintenance chargers that keep them in good condition. The generators are started and tested every two weeks.
Could the batteries be dead and the generators not start? I guess but it's very unlikely. I get that on an oil rig it might be a matter of life and death and you need some kind of manual way to bootstrap but there's not much that's more reliable than a 12V lead-acid battery and a diesel engine in good condition.
Also, the data center is probably in a city, surrounded by infrastructure that could be used if necessary. An oil rig is in the middle of an ocean, and has to rely on itself.
It's unrealistic, and if one power station is unable to use their batteries to start their emergency generator (through the absurd incompetence you describe, or more likely through a major fire, flood or assault) the grid can be started from a different one.
While I don't generally agree with the ethics of how the research was done, I do, personally, think the research and the data could be enlightening. Reddit, X, Facebook, and other platforms might be overflowing with bots that are already doing this but we (the general public) don't generally have clear data on how much this is happening, how effective it is, things to watch out for, etc. It's definitely an arms race but I do think that a paper which clearly communicates "in our study these specific things were the most effective way to change peoples' opinions with bots" serves as valuable input for knowing what to look out for.
But what does the study show? There was no control for anything. None of the data is valid. To clarify: how does the research team know the bots were interacting with people and not other bots?
I agree that the study was performed unethically and should not be published but observational studies are totally fine things to do.
A lot of research is "hey we looked at stuff and found this data that wiggles its eyebrows at some idea so we should fund more rigorous study design in the future." An individual paper does not need to fully resolve a question.
The reason not to publish this work is because the data was collected unethically and we don't want to reward or incentivize such work. Nothing to do with the quality of the data itself.
> how repulsive is a world in which human value is used like a number
On the surface, morally, I agree with you.
But when it comes to practice, things get tougher. Whether capitalist or communist or random utopia, ultimately most of it comes down to: how do we decide, individually and collectively, how each person spends their finite time on Earth? While imperfect, in most places we use money as a way to compensate individuals for the time they’ve spent performing an activity that they wouldn’t have spent time doing on their own. They can then trade that money for the product of other peoples’ labour (things that they wouldn’t have done on their own).
Distilling it down to a dollar value sucks, but is essentially acting as a proxy for “how many hours of how many of the right peoples’ lives gets spent on solving problem X?”. Problem X could be an individual problem: how many hours of how many oncologists lives should be spent trying to cure this specific person’s cancer? And given a finite supply of oncologists and a finite number of hours each one can work in a day, how do we divide their time between different patients? This scales up to national and international levels; people work, the governments take some fraction of that compensation and redistribute it to others in order to take on tasks that people and companies don’t want to do on their own for free. But there’s a finite amount of that money too, stemming from there being a finite number of humans qualified to solve specific problems and finite time from each of them.
But we're talking about people willing to sacrifice people for a hypothetical scenario of doomsday to avoid.
Yes, allocating funds to research is something that has to be done to distribute resources given they're not infinite. But that's a real scenario. Not people pulling bayesian bs in a bad way with random numbers they agree with. It's a completely different scenario, even if resource allocation is necessary in our lifes
If I’m interpreting what you’re asking correctly, yes. The velocity factor of a cable doesn’t spend on the metal it’s made of but rather the insulator material and the geometry of the cable.
For fibre the velocity factor depends on the refraction index of the fibre.
I think you’re confusing “smart contracts” with “legal contracts”. They’re not entirely different but exploiting a loophole in a smart contract doesn’t necessarily meet the standard of a legal one.
> To form a contract, there must be: a) an offer and acceptance of said offer; b) consideration for the offer, or some value exchange; c) an intention to form legal relations; and, d) a certainty of the terms of the contract
The people who made the smart contract almost certainly wouldn’t tick all four of those boxes definitively. It’d be an interesting civil case probably!
Well that was a fun thought on a Sunday night. I work in AgTech. The thought that all of the engineering work I’ve put into the last 6 years is really a bunch of trickery that plants have inflicted on me and my coworkers really makes me smile. And that smile, like the author says, is just enough of a dopamine hit to get back up in the morning and keep at it!
Yeah it's especially a bit humbling when you realize that the vast majority of critters are some form or another of carnivore/omnivore and there's only a trace few herbivores and they're all the "pests" like aphids that we are constantly doing battle with... Except when they are things like cows that we ourselves eat.
Plants are naturally a bit protected from animal predators by a simple economics of scale: proteins require nitrogen, we can't get it from the air even though it's abundant there, we need to get it from nitrogen fixing bacteria but those are farmed by plants in their plant roots... But plants are mostly cellulose and don't have much nitrogen by proportion. But then they are also actively protected by being extremely effective poison manufacturers, using their rigid cell walls to put things at high pressures, growing around pests, cutting off resources to leaves and regrowing them after the predator moves on, and attracting predators of their predators like ladybugs.
But the networks of interdependence that we eventually form should perhaps not be put into a traditional exploiter/exploited juxtaposition. “How can I tweak myself so that you find me indispensable?” is a question both the humans and the plants are asking of themselves vis-a-vis each other.
> And then, is it really impossible to develop an objective metric for the level of visible detail that is maintained? Is that really psychovisual and therefore subjective? Is there really nothing we can use from information theory to calculate the level of detail that emerges out of the noise? Or something based on maximum likelihood estimation?
I think you'll find something similar with audio, image, and video compression algorithms in general. The majority of these are explicitly designed to spend more bits on the parts that humans care about and fewer bits on the parts we won't notice. E.g. MP3 uses perceptual coding/masking: when there's loud sound at frequency f0 and a quieter sound at nearby f1=f0+(small delta f) most people won't hear the sound at f1 so the codec just throws it away. You'd be able to see the difference on a spectrogram but you wouldn't be able to hear it.
Yeah, if I squint and think back to the reasoning from previous generations of tech like this it’s that they don’t want people to be able to make bit-perfect recordings to save and share. By putting DRM on the broadcast stream they’re trying to make sure that it’s only usable as a one-time broadcast.
> Europe to be able to make business again freely.
I mean… Europe isn’t particularly well-known for being particularly business friendly. There’s a lot of good there for sure but there’s also a lot of barriers. And I say this as a Canadian who is also disappointed by the overall business environment at home.
The hand-pumped air compressor is the tool of last resort. You can try an engine start if there's someone there who's able to pump it. You don't have to worry about how much charge is left in your batteries or whether or not the gasoline for the 2-stroke pump engine has gone stale. It's the tool that you use as an alternative to "well, the batteries are dead too, guess we're not going to start the engine tonight... let's call the helicopters and abandon ship"
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