• 0 Posts
  • 21 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • In Australia, “blinking yelloe” means “drive with caution” - roadway may be used bey pedestrians, slower traffic may have merged to faster, the traffic lights normal function might be impeded. Just basically a catch all for “be careful”.

    Having acid that it’s very rare that you’d find a blinking yellow on a turn across pedestrians - you’d get green arrow or light, pedestrians get green walk, and driver waits for pedestrians. It’s not rocket science. You don’t turn on red though.

    Then again we still have thrse fellas so maybe dont listen to us : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hook_turn


  • Repeating what some have already said here:

    • PBS SpaceTime is outstanding, and manages to ride the line between informative and accessible very well. Some episodes especially around heavy math/quantum mechanics are impenetrable for me but all the space stuff is great, the scripts are very well written, production value is top notch.
    • Dr Becky provides amazing content mostly geared around recent research and theories - especially with the James Webb Space Telescope being a year old now there’s some amazing insights coming out that she does a great job explaining. A bit less “pseudo lecture” than SpaceTime but still highly informative
    • StarTalk (Neil Degrasse Tyson) is great, but in a different way. It’s less formal and very much more like a podcast than a lecture or report as the prior two are.
    • Sabine Hossenfelder delivers a periodic “science without the gobbledegook” show that covers all areas but generally has a focus on physics and astrophysics. She’s semi-famous for not tolerating nonsense while also considering a sizeable portion of contemporary physics research to be nonsense. I think she’s hilarious in a parchment-dry German kind of way, and her content goes arguably deeper than the other channels listed here in terms of subject matter - I usually leave her videos thinking about things in a different way.
    • SmarterEveryDay is a general science/learning channel but really piqued my interest with a recent video about talking to NASA:

    https://youtu.be/OoJsPvmFixU?si=NrURYGlLii4Dbi1_

    The host has a background in aerospace engineering and missile test flights - so its about as close to rocket science as you can get! He knows his stuff and has a lot more practical, engineering related videos - kind of makes you think about how to operationalise the more cerebral ideas of the other channels.

    Hope you enjoy some or all of the suggestions here and from other commenters







  • The context is important here - Australia had a continuous indigenous population for over 60,000 years before white settlement. White Australia never had an agreement with indigenous peoples at large, and through relentless expansion of colonies, spreading diseases like smallpox, introducing alcohol and drugs, forcibly abducting and schooling children, heavy incarceration and a slew of other typical British colonial shit ended up leaving them disenfranchised, alienated, and excluded. Indigenous Australians prior to colonisation had a deep affinity with the land and tended it like custodians, but because they didn’t build towns or farm like Europeans, they were just swept aside without ever really being acknowledged or addressed.

    The Voice was asked for as a product of the Uluru Statement of the Heart - not long, worth a read- https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/

    It was really first and foremost about having an acknowledgement that maybe, just maybe, the settlers cocked things up and that it’d better to fix things together. It’s not asking for anything “more” or extra, it’s about correctly telling history and reframing our national dialogue to be coming from a place of partnership, instead of colonialism, so we could fix some of the very real issues modern Australians face as a result of hundreds of years of callous racism. It was a chance for white Australia and government to really listen and maybe find better ways of doing things.

    But now instead we get to try to explain to our kids why 60% of the country don’t think representation or inclusion matters while indigenous Australians will continue to struggle without a government that can listen to them.


  • Theres a lot of research going into carbon sequestration through soil and plant technologies - basically accelerating what would happen naturally by a few orders of magnitude.

    Rapidly filling artifical peat bogs (through things like algae/weeds that are genetically modified to absorb more CO2) would allow for semi-permanent carbon capture as long as no one digs it up again. Similar projects with seaweed are under research as well.

    Personally I think anything to do with carbon capture is a bandaid at best, and failing massive global cooperation and societal change, we’re going to end up needing to geoengineer our way out of the problem. Things that block or impede solar heat absorption to cool the planet - atmospheric aerosols, artificial cloud generation, solar shades out in a lagrange point, basically manipulating conditions to influence how much energy is going into the system. There’s a nonzero chance we fuck it all up but as we hurtle through temperature records and tipping points, the idea of net zero emissions actually having an impact in our lifetimes seems more and more unlikely. There’s too much inertia in the system.






  • I guess the logical response is that this presupposes the inevitable existence of a post-scarcity environment, when such a state is arguably not a certainty, or even a likelihood. We’ve been hovering at a kind of societal tipping point since the Cold War where a few different decisions could have effectively hit the reset button on society - and there’s no guarantee that any survivors in the aftermath would have sufficient access to coal, iron ore, fossil fuels etc. to rebuild even our current level of society, let alone a utopian one.

    So I think given our awareness of the relative fragility of human society, taking steps to secure it’s stability and growth is a rational choice to secure the possibility for the post-scarcity world to exist. Then it’s a question of certainty - if were 80% sure that our distant descendants will live in bliss, we could calibrate our personal sacrifices accordingly and justify more consumerist behaviour in the present.

    Through this lens the excessive consumerism of previous generations can be forgiven, as what they lacked was awareness of the consequences of their actions - they didn’t act immorally, just ignorantly. But now that we “know better” there’s a moral responsibility to do better. As much as that sucks.


  • Where it gets really challenging is that LLMs can take the assignment input and generate an answer that is actually more educational for the student than what they learned d in class. A good education system would instruct students in how to structure their prompts in a way that helps them learn the material - because the LLMs can construct virtually limitless examples and analogies and write in any kind of style, you can tailor them to each student with the correct prompts and get a level of engagement equal to a private tutor for every student.

    So the act of using the tool to generate an assignment response could, if done correctly and with guidance, be more educational than anything the student picked up in class - but if its not monitored, if students don’t use the tool the right way, it is just going to be seen as a shortcut for answers. The education system needs to move quickly to adapt to the new tech but I don’t have a lot of hope - some individual teachers will do great as they always have, others will be shitty, and the education departments will lag behind a decade or two as usual.


  • I see the most likely outcome being legislated electric charging at petrol stations(like Germany has just done), possibly with subsidies, while the bulk of hydrogen infrastructure is private investment.

    Once a bean counter finds it more valuable to retrofit a truck fleet with hydrogen and set up their own refuelling stations at distribution centres - i.e. for journeys that can be completed in one tank load - you bet the hydrogen will start to flow. From there it’ll be up to the service station network to figure out if it’s worthwhile to put infrastructure in at certain larger truck stops.

    By the time we get there, the trucks will be mostly autonomous and the driver probably just an emergency role - so they’ll run as close to 24/7 as possible and the reduced refuelling time will have a substantial impact. It’ll either be that, or some sort of massive battery bank transfer system the truck can pull into to have it’s battery swapped - but batteries are heavy, and automating that would be inordinately expensive. Hydrogen seems more feasible a fossil fuel replacement when trip length/refueling time are your main concerns



  • Way I see it a hammer is a tool, like a paintbrush or a camera or Photoshop or chatGPT.

    If you use the hammer to break a plate and call it art, you get the copyright.

    If you set the hammer up on a machine and feed it a million plates to smash, but with your direction and intent - to choose the types of plates, speed of the hammer, to use the tools to output different results - its still art and you still get the copyright.

    But if your hammer sits inside a Platesmasher 9000 which randomly takes plates as input, selects which plates to smash, smashes them, assesses the results, smashes more, then outputs a perfect smashed plate without you doing anything - that’s not copyright able. You can’t sya you deserve the copyright, as you did not meaningfully contribute to the work - the Platesmasher did everything. You cant point to the output of the system and say “the system made that and deserves copyright” because it’s just an algorithm, it doesn’t know or have intent behind what it’s doing, and can’t be assigned a right.

    What this does is stop corporations from building a million Platesmashers and claiming copyright on a billion versions of smashed plates - human intervention is required as part of the creative process to use the tools in order for there be a right in the first place.



  • I would suggest that instances should have settings that allow them to decide whether to “advertise” a community list. With configurable settings like "all, “most active”, “top X”, or even a manually maintained list depending on the admins and instances preferences.

    Then your home instance, when searching, should have it’s own settings to decide what results it’s going to ping other servers for. Big/popular/high confidence instances can have an open all/all relationship, while you might query only the top 10 communities from unknown or new instances to handle the scenario you describe.

    Federation can be binary yes/no but there should be room to add more logic around enabling search on communities from your instance and controlling the search results from other instances. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive, unless I fundamentally misunderstand how federation works!