flagrant_taco

Of course the very real benefits of this can be abused by the gov and there are some conspiracy types using that to push their own agenda but on the whole I'm largely positive about the smart grid stuff.

There is usually a bigger of truth behind conspiracy theories. In this case there may be no reason to think the initial goal is to control what people are allowed to use energy for, but smart grid initiatives do open the door for that. The same automated systems that allow individuals to reduce their carbon footprint today could be abused to control people later.

If you notice high energy use while cooking, are you going to start eating more salads instead?

Of course, why wouldn't you? If the assumption isn't that effectively unlimited power is available on demand you adjust use accordingly.

On sunny days with excess power maybe you charge and do laundry. On a stretch of cloudy days you avoid long periods of cooking or using large tools like sellers or air compressors.

Adjusting to our environment rather that chasing convenience is a very reasonable approach to makinh a real dent in reducing our environmental impact.

The biggest benefit by far in my opinion is having the opportunity to learn how to listen to one's body again. Most of us aren't very good at recognizing the signals our bodies are sending us, from low blood sugar to adrenaline. Real-time monitors can really help people listen what those more subtle feelings might mean.

If civilization collapsed, it seems reasonable that anyone predicting it wasn't wouldn't be remembered. Anyone left standing after a collapse would have bigger things to worry about, and the medium in which predictions where published could very likely be lost in the collapse.

If someone were of the honest opinion that broad scale collapse was imminent I can only expect they would also not expect fame afterwards. Anyone sharing this opinion disingenuous is more likely to be sharing it for gain before the collapse that may never come, via book sales or speaking engagements for example.

The response is to the authors conclusions, which are wrong.

How have you come to the conclusion that the author's conclusions are wrong?

Many in this thread have rightly pointed out that the author is speaking of the future which can't be know with certainty. Are you telling issue with the level of certainty the author seems to have, or do you fished with the argument of impending doom?

My proposal was simply that data-driven decisions should be made based on accurate data.

Nepotism and bias aren't the alternative here. If you require that decisions are driven by data and you don't have access to accurate data, you should default to doing nothing. If anything, nepotism and bias sneak in when decisions are made despite the fact that no accurate data is avaliable.

The data should be accurate though. Any data-driven decisions can easily miss the original intentions if they're made with bogus information.

Looking at browser usage data from GA when Firefox specifically blocks it quite often is useless.

"appears to have 2%" is doing a lot of work he. If the earlier comments are accurate, the government stats are based on Google Analytics data that is specifically blocked or obscured by Firefox.

That 2% kind be breached, but the data doesn't accurately represent usage if Firefix is blocking GA in any meaningful numbers.

You say groupthink bubble, I say place where I don't have to brace as much for racist or sexist views being expressed.

There is a real risk that avoiding topics or people one finds offensive can make a person less resilient. Its a totally reasonable response to the internet where you have the opposite problem of being exposed to more than you otherwise would have, but creating too tight of a bubble can have downsides.

I'll see if I can find the links, it's been a while since I last saw them, but there was a very active GitHub issue on the main Mastodon repo back in 2017 or 2018 related to search. It came down to concerns over content that is considered acceptable in some cultures and child pornography in others.

I assume it's better these days, but Mastodon avoided adding proper search for years because the core devs knew there was plenty of questionable content or there and making it discoverable would put many hosts at legal risk.

Another example of why the EPA and similar regulatory agencies shouldn't be trusted blindly.

The idea that the EPA would quietly agree to this is completely ridiculous. Dupont literally poisoned the water, denied and hid it, spun off a new company to shield itself from liability when finally caught, and the EPA was going to let them import 4m pounds of PFASs to the exact same area Dupont already poisoned. Even better the EPA only puts a pause on it after the agreement is discovered and citizens raise alarms.

Years out from an expected production run, I would be surprised to see any binding agreement. A letter of intent to buy is plenty for the chip manufacturer to be able to shop that around for funding if needed.

There is something unique in web development connotation to the other fields I've worked in. The industry has made a habit of reinventing the wheel in every more complex ways.

My best guess is that this is a side effect of web being a field that's more often picked by new or less experienced devs.

What I am saying is that if the US dissolved, similar to the Soviet Union in your example, there isn't anything technically preventing Germany from being able to take over the nukes.

Do you not see a difference in comparing post-USSR Ukraine with Germany while allied with the very much alive US? Hosting US military installations that house nuclear weapons is very different from hosting abandoned nuclear weapons of a state actor that no longer exists.

It's hard to predict how that game of chicken would have played it. It seems likely that Russia may not have invaded of Ukraine had nukes, if they believed Ukraine would use them.

The entire scenario rewrites 30 years of history, everything would be different. Would Russia have invaded? Would Ukraine have made itself more of an international player if it were on the list of nuclear powers? Would Ukraine have actually used nukes after an invasion? Could their allies have pressured Ukraine to avoid a nuclear war? Would Russia be in the same position or is today if Ukraine left the USSR as a nuclear power?

US nukes in Germany are actively controlled and operated by the US military. If the US dissolved you better believe Germany would have the technical know-how to begin operating those facilities and weapons themselves, if they wanted to.

The GP didn't specifically call out Russia, seems reasonable that they may very well have had Russia + allies in mind.

It is worth noting that many countries have poured money, weapons, training, and in all likelihood special forces combat troops into Ukraine. Ukraine clearly has the numbers and devotion to fight a long, deadly fight that has in some areas devolved into WWI-era trench warfare.

It isn't as simple as the Russians struggling with a 3rd rate power, however that is measured. Ukraine has the numbers and the will, allies provided resources/training/intel, and Ukraine had the tactical advantage of protecting their homeland rather than being the invading force.

Idelaly we wouldn't have to put limits on companies from the state level at all, users should decide not to use a service if they don't approve of how their data is used.

Given that we're no way close to this and the power imbalance is already huge, we should be regulating how every person's data is used regardless of age.

The public doesn't pass laws though, our elected representatives do. Without diving down the rabbit hole of how well our current system manages to select for representatives that actually align with voters' views, there isn't a direct link between laws and public sentiment.

Parents purposely allowing children to use these services is a much more clear indicator of sentiment, and as mentioned in the article users don't seem to mind allowing their children to use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.

It sure seems like the average person doesn't care that children use Facebook and similar online services. Why should we give more power to state regulators when the public doesn't even want the regulation in the first place?

How would you define or recognize a level of intelligence or autonomy that is sufficient to raise concerns? Would you be able to recognize it before its too late?

An early GPT-4 test ended up with GPT successfully solving capchas by tricking a TaskRabbit worker into doing it for them [1]. When asked by the worker if it was a robot, GPT decided to lie to the worker and claim it had a visual impairment that made it difficult to solve the puzzle. That sounds like a level of autonomy and social engineering skills that could be concerning to a reasonable person.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/gpt4-openai-chatgpt-taskrabb...

The default position should be based on risks and unknowns, I don't think the GP was making any recommendation based on personal feelings.

The fact is we don't know how current ML actually does what it does, we don't know what we'll have next month, and we wouldn't know how to recognize an AI or AGI if we developed one. The risks and unknowns are high, the default position should be to not develop the technology unless and until someone proves without reasonable doubt why we can and should do it, and how we'll do it safely.

If the original reasoning of Sam's lack of honest communication with the board was an indication, it would make more sense if that comment tipped the board off to a breakthrough they weren't made aware of.

That's not to say it must be deeper than the usual power plays and politics, but breaking an NDA doesn't seem to fit well fromwhat I've seen.

My comment here was actually meant to talk about AI broadly, though I can get the confusion here as the original source thread here is about OpenAI.

I also don't expect the government to do anything about the OpenAI situation, to be clear. Though my read is actually that the government had to be evolved behind closed doors to move so quickly to get Sam back to OpenAI. Things moved much too quickly and secretively in an industry that is obviously of great interest to the military, there's no way the feds didn't put a finger on the scale to protect their interests at which point they wouldn't come back in to regulate.

I don't expect the government to regulate any of this aggressively. AI is much to important to the government and military to allow pesky conflicts of interest to slow down any competitive advantage we may have.

Not sure that I quite follow. Are you arguing that we should ensure that boards are always aligned with the exact same financial motivations as the investors themselves for fear of a disagreement of direction, morals, etc?

I think you're agreeing with me, if I'm understanding you right.

Why you call him an evil shill? It sounds like he actually believed it.

It's not evil to be wrong.

I was responding to this and making the point that we don't often allow it to be this simple. I raised the Germany example to make the point that most consider what the Nazis did evil regardless of whether they honestly believed in their reasoning that lead to genocide.

There are a few important limitations, Tailwind can't fully support logical properties for example because `mb-8` could mean margin bottom or block. Any use case that requires styling one element based on another gets a bit hairy too.

Both of these can be technically worked around. Config may be able to disable existing margin/padding classes and replace them with a custom set, and the groups feature helps especially for simple cases of referencing other elements.

In my experience though, as soon as config is meaningful modified or you elan on the more obscure features for groups, pseudo selectors, etc. the learning curve has just been moved from the dev who doesn't know CSS to the dev who doesn't know Tailwind.

I'm not sure how that line could be drawn. If a person does something that most would consider evil, but does it for reasons they honestly believed in which side is right?

Some of the Nazis may have honestly believed that Jewish people were the cause of Germany's economic problems, but I don't think many would claim they were anything less than evil.