br3d

I’m a huge Bluesky user and I don’t understand this post at all. Bluesky has a strong Block feature, which I use liberally to avoid trolls and people I don’t want to engage with, but I don’t know what’s being referenced here

Motion is also really useful for capturing security camera footage. It’s more specialised for this task than ffmpeg so could work here

Air travel is heavily subsidised, especially through very very very favourable tax rates on aviation fuel

This is a good point, but the issue is that vendors have abused this need by not just pushing security updates, but also regular rewrites that make the products more invasive/full of language model shit - Exhibit A being anything at all from Microsoft

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The same way a layperson knows how to get any medical intervention: taking the advice of a reputable qualified professional

For context, UK domestic energy suppliers don’t actually do any generation or distribution - they just retail electricity produced and distributed by others. So they can buy wholesale energy and attempt to compete on price, customer service, or other innovative products (eg Octopus’s dynamic pricing).

Normally I’d expect Tesla to do an Uber-style approach of subsiding the prices for the first couple of years to try to capture market share, as well as the more obvious vertical integration with their cars. But in this market, switching suppliers is too easy to make that worthwhile

Solar and AC is a great combo. Almost by definition, when you need AC you know the sun is shining and so the energy to run the AC is therefore free

Yep. I’m using a used ThinkPad X1 Carbon. 8 years old and running Linux like a dream

Hi-viz, you say?

I was questioning the use of the word “prolly”

“Prolly”

Totally unrelated though, and just a coincidence. The word meme in the way we use it today was coined by Richard Dawkins in (IIRC) The Extended Phenotype. I presume it’s an abbreviation of Mental Gene, or something like that. The idea was that a meme is an idea or concept that can fight for survival amongst other ideas, just as a gene tries to survive being being a good fit to its environment

One reason I’d like to see Germany held to account is their long-term efforts to push the interests of their car industry, even as it filled the world with overly polluting (and, recently, increasingly over-sized) vehicles

The idea of general intelligence (g) is that you’ve got some overall capacity that can be turned to any task. Human intelligence is probably much more like a big toolbox of skills, though, and I can’t see a version of computer “intelligence” that’s any different to that. I worry that people who get excited about AI are kidding themselves a bit as it isn’t going to be general - it’s going to be a toolbox at best: an LLM for writing, a totally different system for drawing, another for identifying birdsong, and and yet another for maths… And at that point you’ve not got some special interesting AGI - you’ve just reinvented the idea of apps

If AGI is made of components, you could argue that it isn’t “general”. Which would be fine, as most psychologists would say the same about human intelligence

A few years ago I’d have jokes about data ports being the same fitting as power sockets, but USB-C has ruined that

It’s a very American style thing. UK English media don’t do this, and it always feels strange when I see it in US media

Thing is, a lot of these aren’t that bad? Making an oxygen mask feels really different to just setting fire to the fossil fuel to shift a 3-ton vanity pickup truck half a mile to Starbucks. And lots of the others can readily be replaced. Clothes, for example: rayon from bamboo can replace a lot of polyester and nylon

Anyone in Europe looking for an alternative might want to check out Tado