I have listened to many hours of the German course but the dynamic between the two students is distracting. They essentially play 'the genius' and 'the grouch'. The good one remembers everything. The bad one snorts and grumbles at every question. The acting is so forced that it completely breaks the immersion.
But I don’t think it is acting. He just only did one take. Usually someone is better then a the other. That’s what I understood from the documentary anyway. He just did the tapes because he was old and someone bugged him enough.
and the "Customer Service - Banking" scenario claims that it demos "accent control" and the prompt gives the agent a definitely non-indian name, yet the agents sounds 100% Indian - I found that hilarious but also isn't it a bad example given they are claiming accent control as a feature?
And the north star, Polaris, is a fraction the age of sharks at only 50-70 Mya (it's a trinary star system but the other two stars are much dimmer and not visible to the eye)
Also: life on earth is almost as old as the universe itself, within the same order of magnitude. 4.1 GYA (billion years ago) vs 13.8 GYA. We're old and intelligence is hard.
We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them.
We're pretty good at accomplishing things like that.
One day, there's some space sharks swimming in a sea of liquid helium and doing deep dives to get to the smaller creatures that devour the seabed of diamonds.
The next day, we're figuring out how to use space shark squeezings in our fusion reactors.
Unless, of course, the space sharks figure out how to kill us first. They will probably try if that's useful to then.
> We'd almost certainly find some way to kill them if we ever ran across any of them
There is a credible argument that what the literature terms genocidal tendencies—where conflict isn’t resolved when it ends, but when the enemy is destroyed—is a precondition for conquering a world. So if we met space sharks, barring enlightenment, they’d probably seek to destroy us, too.
That's not that early, no? There was probably enough C, H, N, O, P, S, Na atoms for life to start 10B years ago. You probably couldnt rely on iron being everywhere though but that's not such a hard requirement.
I'm sure you're correct. That said, I saw a friend who went bald at 28 get all of his hair back from Minoxidil + finasteride. Maybe his folicles weren't closed/gone but he was bald and a year later, was not.
Apparently there's also now-a-days, Micro-needling, Stem Cell Therapy, Platelet-Rich Plasma, and others. No idea how effective they actually are
Sorry my bad. It's called that way in where I'm from. The hair loss is mostly due to mechanism similar to pattern baldness but the hair loss can occur even without death of hair follicles. It could also be triggered by some autoimmune disease.
This isn’t the whole story. Many people have follicles that are dormant. Many people have success regrowing hair on bald spots with minoxidil and/or finasteride.
If you look like Sir Patrick Stewart, yeah, that’s not growing back. A bald spot might fill in with medical treatment though.
> AlphaEvolve enhanced the efficiency of Google's data centers, chip design and AI training processes — *including training the large language models underlying AlphaEvolve itself*.
Singularity people have been talking for decades about AI improving itself better than humans could, and how that results in runaway compounding growth of superintelligence, and now it's here.
Most code optimizations end up looking somewhat asymptotic towards a non-zero minimum.
If it takes you a week to find a 1% speedup, and the next 0.7% speedup takes you 2 weeks to find ... well, by using the 1% speedup the next one only takes you 13.86 days. This kind of small optimization doesn't lead to exponential gains.
That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile - it's great to save power & money and reduce iteration time by a small amount. And it combines with other optimizations over time. But this is in no way an example of the kind of thing that the singularity folks envisioned, regardless of the realism of their vision or not.
Exactly - the possible improvements may compound, but they converge logarithmically towards an upper limit absent new insight that establishes a new upper limit.
Long way to go Singularity. We don't even know if its possible.
Basically, singularity assumes that you can take the information about the real world "state", and compress it into some form, and predict the state change faster than reality happens. For a subset of the world, this is definitely possible. But for entire reality, it seems that there is a whole bunch of processes that are computationally irreducible, so an AI would never be able to "stay ahead" or so to to speak. There is also the thing about computational ir-reversibility - for example observing a human behavior is seeing the output of a one way hashing function of neural process in our brain that hides a lot of detail and doesn't let you predict it accurately in all cases.
Also, optimization algorithms are nothing new. Even before AI, you could run genetic algorithm or PSO on code, and given enough compute it would optimize the algorithm, including itself. The hard part that nobody has solved this is abstracting this to a low enough level to where its applicable across multiple layers that correspond to any task.
For example, let say you have a model (or rather an algorithm) that has only a single interface, and that is the ability to send ethernet packets, and it hasn't been trained on any real world data at all. If you task it with building you a website that makes money, the same algorithm that iterates over figuring out how to send IP packets then TCP packets then HTTP packets should also be able to figure out what the modern world wide web looks like and what concepts like website and money is, building its knowledge graph and searching on it and interpolating on it to figure out how to solve the problem.
It depend on the UUID version you're using. Version 4 (Random) will always have that value be 4 as per RFC 9562. So 99999999-9999-9999-9999-999999999999 is a valid UUID but not a valid UUID v4. If you wanted to be pedantic the website should have been named https://everyuuidv4.com/
I think object identifiers would be better, althoug they should add another arc that does not require registration, based on: (fixed prefix).(type of identifier).(number of days past epoch).(parts according to type of identifier).(optional extra parts). (I had partially written my proposal, and I would want ITU and/or ISO (preferably ITU) to approve it and then manage it.) For example, type 0 could mean international telephone numbers, type 1 could mean version 4 IP address, type 2 could mean domain names (encoding each part as bijective base 37, from right to left), 3 could mean a combination of geographic coordinates with radio frequencies, 4 could mean telephone numbers with auto-delegated telephone extensions, etc. (I had also considered such things as automatic delegation, clock drift, etc; it is more carefully considered than UUID and some other types of identifiers.)
Sounds like you're in the realm of URNs? I don't know about that description, I think there's a benefit to a short and fixed-size ID. Though maybe for the domain name example you could have an alternate form that hashes any domain that goes over 20-30 characters.
Oh okay. That's a pretty different suggestion from the comic.
Would you suggest random 128 bit numbers, then? Otherwise it's hard to see what else would serve the same role without being UUID in a trenchcoat. And having identifiers is important.
Yeah I would really like if UUID was just 128 bits of randomness and nothing else. The whole version thing sucks, and my point (which you are right in that the ordering is a little off) is that UUIDv4 is the only good one and the rest basically should not exist. UUIDv4 itself is ruined by the fact that it needs to have a version embedded in it because the other ones exist.
The values are hexidecimal, so all "9s" isn't the biggest UUID, but all "f's". Specifically, I think: `ffffffff-ffff-4fff-bfff-ffffffffffff`.
The "4" in the 3rd block is the only permitted value as these UUIDs are using the GUIDv4 format. I'm not sure what's going on in the 4th block, but the references and linked RFC in the Wikipedia article might reveal more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...
You're probably well aware and quickly fixed the issue after the photo was taken, but I just need to say it's a really bad idea to have ANYTHING in an infants crib that they can use to block their airways like that.
Glad to see she's doing well and hope you have good times with her once she's home!
We had a 2 week NICU stay for our daughter earlier this year. The nurses loved putting items in the crib to make the baby happier but they always looked at me and said, “don’t do this at home!”
Burn the oil that would have gone into cars in a power plant... You can propel an EV 2-3x as far as an ICE vehicle with the same amount of oil because power plants are much more efficient than car engines.
In addition, you offset the electricity used to refine the oil into gasoline/diesel which I saw a study once that said it could get us 25% of the way to making up the increased electricity demand from EVs.
So basically we would like to cut down on using oil by… burning more oil.
And how are EVs more efficient then standard cars if they have less range and don’t work as well in certain climates and can’t go where the electricity is not readily available?
We are already polluting the environment by burning stuff for electricity, how does any of this help?
And where to we get all the chemicals for the batteries and what do we do with them when they are useless?
> So basically we would like to cut down on using oil by… burning more oil.
For now. Until we build more renewable energy plants. Miles per ton of CO2 is better with EVs no matter how you power the EV.
> And how are EVs more efficient then standard cars if they have less range and don’t work as well in certain climates and can’t go where the electricity is not readily available?
EVs are less convenient, no argument there. But they're still more efficient. Even in cold climates. 90% of new vehicles sold in Norway are EVs or plug-in hybrids.
> We are already polluting the environment by burning stuff for electricity, how does any of this help?
Switch to renewables and then you stop burning stuff. Until then, burning oil for power is better than burning oil to propel cars.
> And where to we get all the chemicals for the batteries and what do we do with them when they are useless?
Tesla recycles 90% of the important metals in their batteries.
Do people ever give you grief about the climate impact of owning a vehicle like that?
I don't mean to judge and am genuinely curious -- I have a fairly fuel inefficient vehicle as well and it weighs on me sometimes that I maybe should try different, more climate friendly hobbies (like, stopping overlanding and pick up knitting or something...)
Yes, but the service life of a Land Cruiser 200 series is 25 years. There’s a profound amount of environmental impact beyond the gas pump, and most of it comes from building and shipping all the parts to assemble the automobile over and over again. The manufacturing process is profoundly environmentally destructive, so vehicles that have a longer service life (Land Cruiser is 2-2.5 times the average) have a role to play.
They are also one of the few petrol vehicles that are still built to this kind of standard, so they do demonstrate as the “smoking gun” that the industry itself engineers obsolescence into their vehicles and could do much better.
Somehow we’ve all been reduced to yakking on and on about fuel economy. There are 30,000 parts in the average car, and almost all of them are manufactured and shipped. What’s the impact of tens of thousands of components and built onsite for JIT manufacturing?
If we wanted to change this, we could do very easily. We would just need to put a sticker in the window of the car that says: “Designed to Last: 12 years” or whatever. That way people could make an informed decision and game theory would come in to effect. Auto makers know this information: every car has a design life of you wouldn’t have anything like the “25 year design life” of a Land Cruiser in the first place.
I consider it the impact of car and oil company propaganda, as they’ve narrowed the discussion to “miles per gallon” rather than the overall impact of design life and the constant need to remanufacture the same vehicle over and over again for the same customer throughout their lifetime.
The hidden danger is in the subtle propaganda of suggested talking points from industry that subtly moves the conversation over decades. Propaganda isn’t to tell us what to think, it’s to frame and influence the things we talk about and give us a industry favorable set of opinion talking points to frame a conversation that benefits the status quo.
The Land Cruiser is one of the last petrol vehicles that demonstrates without a doubt that we could be building to a much higher standard for viritually the same money. It was 84k when it went off the market in 2020, and Toyotas next most expensive vehicle with half the service life was about 75k. The Land Cruiser has a 10,000 usd tax because it isn’t assembled in North America, so double the service life vehicle can be delivered at the same price as the top end vehicle in a lineup. Its simply a choice by car companies not to do it.
But all we as a society can talk about is gas mileage, because that’s something the “industry can get behind.”
> There’s a profound amount of environmental impact beyond the gas pump, and most of it comes from building and shipping all the parts to assemble the automobile over and over again. The manufacturing process is profoundly environmentally destructive, so vehicles that have a longer service life (Land Cruiser is 2-2.5 times the average) have a role to play.
This isn't really true. The manufacturing is intensive but not nearly as intensive as setting fire to 1/4 gallon of gas every mile.
This impact is also significantly lower for gas cars than electric, which achieve parity around 15,000 driven miles.
There is an obvious inherent trade-off of a longer service life: you don't get efficiency improvements for 25 years.
[edit] Studies show an average gas car produces about 5.6t of CO2e in manufacture, an electric car about 8.8t of CO2e. For the gasoline car that's equivalent to burning ~600 gallons of gasoline and for the electric, ~1000 gallons.
An average car is driven 12500mi per year, and look if you're getting 10mpg, that's 6 months. How about the other 24 years 6 months? Buying a car that's 10% more efficient breaks even after what, a couple of years? [1]
If you care about the environment, take a train. Caltrain gets 100 passenger-miles per gallon average on their diesel engines and those train cars are older than I am. Once they move to electric, it should be 250-ish pax-mi/gal-equivalent based on Bart. Although I suspect probably a lot more due to the longer runs between stations.
Regarding trains, I don't think that's really accurate. Yes, a train that's completely full gets excellent effective mileage per passenger for that trip. But how often are they anywhere near full? In reality, trains and buses have to make a huge number of runs either completely or virtually empty in order to have a regular enough schedule for anybody to be willing to depend on them. We need to know the effective fuel consumption of all runs actually made per total actual passenger-miles transported over the course of at least a week, maybe more like a month.
And that's before we account for any additional trips needed for personnel movements, car and track servicing, and other such things.
Those numbers are from Bart and Caltrain's operating reports.
The Bart number may have been during peak only so fair point there, I can certainly look for the systemwide average. [1]
The Caltrain number is average over FY2016-2018, from their sustainability report page 5. [2] They completed roughly 436M passenger-miles per year, and consumed roughly 4.4M gallons of diesel. Clocks in around 100 passenger-miles per gallon. I'm sure its worse now with the COVID numbers. I think it's a fair ballpark point of comparison though, and you can consider the Bart number an upper limit.
You're of course right its a function of ridership. An average freight train gets over 400 miles per gallon per ton of cargo.
Presumably that car goes to someone else who will use it rather than being scrapped (a la Cash-for-Clunkers), right?
I've argued* that, because we drive our second car so little per year, that it makes more sense for us to buy an inexpensive, relatively gas-guzzling used car rather than a more economical hybrid. Reasoning being that someone is going to drive the gas guzzler and someone is going to drive that hybrid and better the hybrid go to someone driving a typical amount and we drive the worse one only 2-3K miles/year.
* - so far unsuccessfully, but the crazy used car market has made that moot for now.
Reasonable logic, but I feel that a moderately priced small/medium electric car would be ideal for the day-to-day short trips around town that is most of our driving these days. Unfortunately such cars don't exist yet in my market and there is not yet a significant used market for electric cars.
I completely agree!
Because I only use my car for long trips (1h or more) a couple times a month. I got a 25 years old executive sedan... Sure 21 MPG is bad, but no new cars was made for my needs. And I stay under 3 metric tons of CO2 per year.
This could be true, but isn't the whole story. Cars tend to be sold more and more as they age, for lower and lower prices. In fact, where I live (Honduras), many of the vehicles were "totaled" in the US, sold as salvage in the US, then imported to Honduras and fixed. My daily driver is an SUV that was a salvage title from Wisconsin. It has a little over 150,000 miles on it and I'm pretty sure my mechanic can keep it running over 200,000.
Amazing
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