Gregory's Server
|
Hours after British polls closed, David Lammy (Labour) warned, "If we do not deliver for working people, then we will be out and nationalists will be on our tail. That is the lesson that we see across the world." Lammy is now UK Foreign Secretary under Prime Minister Keir Starmer. (Source: SkyNews)
Show previous comments
@SteveJonesnono1 the purpose of the system is what it does https://www.anildash.com//2024/05/29/systems-the-purpose-of-a-system/  This is a problem domain where the constraints and effects are pretty much entirely comprehensible in terms of known physical models. Any suboptimal behavior is entirely a matter of nobody having spent the time to apply known models. But sure, let's instead spend the time hooking up ML, CV to evaluate results, and waste tons (literally) of plastic training a model to learn a poor approximation of what we already know. But this is a general pattern that's terrifying...  The proponents of this kind of shit want to throw away the whole concept of having and using scientific knowledge obtained by experiment, with documentation of how it was obtained, evidence supporting the resulting models, falsifiability, etc., and replace it with a worse version of the way humans tens of thousands of years ago came to believe things about the world: simplistic pattern recognition.  @dalias I agree with your general argument, but my uneducated guess for routing and timing for 3D printing is that it would be full of NP complete optimization problems where heuristic solutions are appropriate? If so, maybe throwing an AI at it is an expensive but not entirely misguided approach? Yesterday I encountered a "wrong-on-the-internet" rando professing his excitement for "using machine learning" in #3dprinting to throttle speeds in the right places to avoid quality loss. While completely not worth engaging with, I feel like this is a useful example to understand why this idiocy is so infuriating...
Show previous comments
 @dalias at least in part, this is testament to our collective failure to make actual engineering accessible to normal people. I can believe that for a lot of people a usually-good-enough ML solution is easier, even though we know itโs profoundly stupid and wasteful.  @dalias Can you tell us more about why machine learning isnโt a good fit for this? Though I didnโt even know throttling speeds could possibly improve quality. Knowing little it sounds possible? But what tipped you off that it would not work? James Timpson, from the ubiquitous shoe repair and key cutting shops, has been made a Lord and given the role of Prisons Minister. Putting someone who chairs the Prison Reform Trust (and makes a point of employing ex-offenders in his business) in charge of the prison system is ... actually quite sensible?  Patrick Vallance (off of all those COVID presentations) is now a Lord and is the new Minister for Science. I'm not sure I can cope with the new government policy of putting people who know what they are doing in charge of things. The UK's new foreign secretary, David Lammy, has previously called Trump a "neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath", so that's definitely a step in the right direction. I don't care what you think about the Labour Party: the news that the awful, cruel, sadistic Rwanda scheme is now permanently cancelled is brilliant. Just that alone makes the years of canvassing worth it, but there will be much more that makes it worth it too.  To continue, please select all squares with politics in them. *clicks bathroom logo, seitan steak, french fries, solar panel, red-blue color scheme, a photo of a rainbow, a pizza* Oops, something went wrong. Your IP has been blocked. "no politics" is the perfect non sequitur e.g. *whacks the croissant off your breakfast plate* "i said NO POLITICS!" makes you wonder what this is about. is it because the croissant is french? does this relate to the french not wanting to co-invade iraq in 2003? or is it because the croissant looks both like two dicks and the horns of satan, and thus promotes homosexuality? or is it due to the flagrant use of butter in the recipe, alluding to Jim Field Smithโs butter-carving satire Butter?  @lritter it is easy to say that "everything is politics" but there is a larger/more precise problem, which is that the act of deciding what is political is politics. if someone is politically strong, they can declare the act of eating croissants political and now everyone who just wants to eat their croissant has a problem to navigate gonna publish two nice big 600 page hardcover tomes, one titled "politics", the other "no politics" and they are both just filled with noise textures Taz says "vote tactically today to make all the leaflets I ate worth it". #dogsofmastodon #ukpol #ukpolitics  I would do the whole "I voted today" thing, but I'm a massive nerd so I voted weeks ago via a postal vote and I'm going to spend the whole day canvassing... Ah well. Do your bit in favour of somewhat stemming the horrifying freefall of living standards and social conditions in the UK, folks! it's becoming depressingly clear that speculative execution is an inherently insecure - and unsecurable - feature. it speeds single threaded systems up massively, and obliterates any hope of keeping processes safe from each other in multiprogrammed environments.  "but we can't go back to the days when computers ran in lockstep with memory! how slow would things be if we did that?!" - well, all the mitigations for speculative execution are going to slow things down to that point anyway. and hey, now that CPU speed has hit a wall even with all our architectural hacks, maybe now the semiconductor companies can go and spend the money where it really matters - on RAM that can keep up with modern processors, rather than on ensuring processors only rarely have to slow down for RAM  @millihertz Iโve kind of come to that conclusion too. And relatedly, that there are probably a lot of vulnerabilities weโre not seeing because computer security researchers are rarely electrical engineers. If you're in the UK, pinch your nose and vote tactically today. Most of the time that will mean voting Labour, but check the polls (such as YouGov's MRP) for the best-performing left-or-centrist party. I can entirely understand reluctance, especially if you're a member of a marginalised group: rhetoric in the UK is, in technical terms, 'fucking dreadful' right now. But the reason it's become so dreadful is because the right has used bigotry as a tool for building power. Get rid of them. Another thing I'd like to remind you of: there is nothing morally compromising about voting for a party that you don't see eye-to-eye with. Voting is harm reduction. It does not require you to stop advocating for whatever ideas you want to advocate for. I can absolutely promise you that whatever state of the world you favour (albeit fascism, but fuck off if that's your preferred state of things) does not lie on the other side of letting the worst of two evils run rampant. Today we're launching a new #Mastodon feature that will highlight writers and journalists that are active on the fediverse when their their articles are being shared. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2024/07/highlighting-journalism-on-mastodon/
Show previous comments
If someone's answer to your simple question in a technical topic is "it depends," there's a very good chance they actually know what they're talking about and you should listen very closely to whatever they're about to say next The first truthful thing I've heard from them, given that Scottish people seem to have 'eradication of the Tory Party' at the top of their list of priorities right now.
Show previous comments
 @jenniferplusplus Yep. Similarly, whenever some big-brained car fanatic says that cyclists should pay tolls to cross a bridge, I point out that the toll should be negative on the basis of avoided cost. @jenniferplusplus this used to be a thing in Canada. Bus pass costs were a tax credit. They killed it in 2017 though :(  @jenniferplusplus One of the major failures of thought in capitalist nations is that public transit should be a profit-making (or at the VERY least profit-neutral) enterprise, instead of a service like roads. |
