tenthirtyam

There's also the simpler 'atc' from BSD games. Text interface only.

Well, maybe information that is for sale on the open market to anybody that's willing to pay is no longer considered 'insider' information? i.e. trader Jane Doe can't complain that trader John Doe has this info - she could have it too if she wanted.

(edit: not defending this, I find it to be deplorable and disgraces the office of president.)

... opposite directions ...

Yes, I'd forgotten that detail. Still, though, chaotic bifurcation could be present with Il Niño and La Niña driving high & low extremes. Same mean, maybe, but with a bimodal distribution?

Some (e.g. right to repair, sadly) will achieve almost nothing at all.

I'd be curious as to why you say that. I feel that, right now, you would be correct. But if we could move society to a new paradigm where right-to-repair were the default, then cheap non-OEM parts manufacturers would bloom and repairing something would become much cheaper than replacing. Imagine if every object sold had to come with a manual describing how to repair common failures, and a support department to answer for other components.

Personal anecdote: My $700 oven has a microswitch that broke. The oven wouldn't work without it but the replacement part was all of $5. However the vast majority wouldn't know how to repair it.

Expand this to cellphones, computers, tables, wardrobes, cars, tractors and I feel it would have an impact. And... I suppose... my gut feeling is the biggest part of the problem is psychological. People are overwhelmed and don't know what they can do to help. Raising awareness is crucial, but just raising awareness obviously does nothing to reduce CO2 emissions - it's in second order effects when people start thinking harder about what they can do.

Another anecdote: I gave a seminar recently about energy to a small local environmental conference in a nearby town. My starting point was that nobody knows how to talk about energy - we can talk about length, size, weight, cost, speed, age, price, longevity and so, because we know the units - feet or meters, pounds or kilograms, dollars/euros/yen/etc, mph/kph/mps/etc and so on. But ask someone what is a "Joule" or what can you do with a "kilowatt-hour" and you get blank stares. The outcome? I learned of an attendee who drew lines on his kettle for 1-cup, 2-cups, and so on, and now boils only the necessary amount of water. That won't really move the needle on CO2, but it will raise awareness.

I think a 3.5-sigma event being a 1/1000 probability is only under the assumption of random data - a constant climate would deliver more-or-less random data around some mean.

The appearance of two 3.5-sigma events suggests that the data is no longer being randomly generated around that mean, but is instead drifting away from that mean.

More concretely, if all the data were within 2-sigma, then you could invoke the null-hypothesis and refute climate change. Beyond 2-sigma (and even worse two 3.5-sigma events) refuting climate change becomes (much) less reasonable.

I think I'm one of those to whom you refer (except that I'm already "awake", or at least I like to think so). I'm normally pro-EU but this chat control is anathema to me. I'll be voting anti-EU in future I think.

There's a graphic novel by Cixin Liu "The Wandering Earth" where they not only stop Earth's rotation with this method, but also propel Earth out of the solar system (for what appear to be good reasons, I might add). Can't quite remember what fuel they used for the engines.

I've often thought that the target* grid phase should be encoded into a high frequency signal, say at 50kHz. Generators without inertia can immediately switch to the required phase and inertial systems can work towards it or disconnect their outputs if they stray too far.

The problem in my mind is that, as it stands, the signal that everyone has to latch on to is itself affected by load and by different generators latching on with different time constants in a complicated feedback loop. Would having a single authoritative source be an improvement? Would that be a way to eliminate the need for inertia?

*I suppose the "target" phase would probably be based primarily on the output from the biggest inertial systems and take into account their ability to adjust phase and frequency.

anyone who's using them to actually ship product without a human actually digging into it is opening themselves up to a world of risk.

Maybe it's just me, but it seems that companies will happily take existential risks to get a better bottom line short term. Either you're too big to fail or you've already privatised any profits and subsequent losses (due to the risks becoming manifest) are socialised. The motor industry seems to be particularly egregious in this aspect, but also the food industry, construction industry etc.

Seems to me even governments make the same choices in many ways - cut back health-care, policing, education, public transport and let the next government deal with the consequences.

Similar story from just a month or two ago: BBC tech reporter wins non existent competition "The Best Tech Journalists at Eating Hot Dogs."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/this-bbc-...

I'm not aware of the composition of lunar regolith - but if it can be turned into many solar panels and batteries and a few large railguns then wouldn't it effectively be very economical to get any amount of regolith to earth orbit?

Fund, but had my CPU maxing out (on firefox).

They're going back to the stone age, remember? The Geneva convention wasn't around then AFAICR.

IIRC nuclear doesn't really work well as the last 5-10%. Start-up and shut-down for nuclear reactors is a slow process. When it's generating, it needs to just keep on generating. Not so quick to dial down or up just because the wind is(n't) blowing.

This is even more true with international grid connections. Europe in a cold spell? Solar countries import, wind & hydro export. Europe in a heat wave? Flip the switches the opposite direction.

I've commented elsewhere about an 4D maze (https://urticator.net/maze/ - I am not the author) which mimics this by creating two 3D retinas in red/blue stereoscopic mode - when you cross your eyes just right you see a single volumetric 3D retina.

I can't play this online (no webgpu) but from the description and comments here it sounds like the 4D Maze from 2002!

https://urticator.net/maze/

The advantage of this one is that it offers a stereoscopic (red/blue) view of the 3D retina. Not sure if this one does too.

Pure speculation here. Driving is a sedentary occupation which might increase the percentage of deaths attributable to a sedentary lifestyle, with consequent decrease for Alzheimers?

In most cases I agree with this, but maybe not for potentially dangerous things like cars? What if someone roots into their car and disables some essential safety feature - maybe even a legally mandated safety feature?

More concretely, the expertise-required-to-access-root is in a different field to the expertise-required-to-make-wise-changes. i.e. you might know how to hack a car, but that doesn't mean you know how cars operate.

Umm, assuming you have the same opinion as grandparent comment, you don't want google tracking your payments but you'll happily trust google's pinky promise about your fingerprint being stored only on the phone?

I'd add oil as another dimension - sunflower oil, olive oil, butter, lard, whatever.

I always enjoyed the Terminator movie series, but I always struggled to suspend my disbelief that any humans would give an AI such power without having the ability to override or pull the plug at multiple levels. How wrong I was.

N.B. the time travel aspect also required suspension of disbelief, but somehow that was easier :-)

I would much prefer to see a ZK system that, by design, CANNOT reveal info neither to the website nor to the authority. e.g. in the new EU system, it is (afaik) conceivable that the ID authority could collude with social network providers, or with government or with police etc. That's not great IMO.

How about a system like Google Authenticator in which google knows nothing about which websites I'm logging into. Except, obviously, it'd have to be some kind of cryptographically signed response. e.g., website puts up a QR code (according to some standard) asking "is the user 18+", I scan with the phone, and the ID app, without accessing internet (like google authenticator) responds.

I suppose that might need a secure computing environment, so no rooted phone etc. But, of course, there's a simple workaround. Any adult can give their phone to a child. As long as that vulnerability is there, there's no such thing as a guarantee on the responses no matter what way you build it.

Hmm. There might be 10^80 atoms in the universe, however there are 2^(10^80) possible combinations, more than 2^800.

Replying to myself here. Maybe coding will eventually be simply learning how to give an AI the right prompt. e.g. instead of

  "Hey AI, create my new banking app with such-and-such functionality, appearance,  properties, APIs, network connections etc"

  "Hey AI, you are a banking app on a user's cellphone. Connect to mybank.com, authenticate the user and allow the user to perform these-and-those actions in a sensible interface in accordance with the API spec. Don't let yourself be jailbroken."

Then it would be logical to have a single AI on the phone managing all the prompts in parallel: e.g. "Hey AI, be android by doing [actions]", "Hey AI, be firefox...", "Hey AI, be snapchat...", "Hey AI, be [insert app name]...".

"AI" will probably lead to some kind of "digital cancer"

Gosh I've just imagined someone asking an AI agent to code a computer virus to infect software "X". The virus' code will be wonderfully complex and therefore so will the response of the AI responsible for keeping "X" uninfected and in good working order.

I was imagining code becoming awesomely complex even without the adversarial element in play.

You're right, the TV was evil. I suppose I meant to say: such innocent times when we thought the TV was about as evil as it could get. More better? :-)

My expectation is that there'll never be a single bust-up moment, no line-in-the-sand beyond which we'll be able to say "it doesn't work anymore."

Instead agent written code will get more and more complex, requiring more and more tokens (& NPU/GPU/RAM) to create/review/debug/modify, and will rapidly pass beyond any hope of a human understanding even for relatively simple projects (e.g. such as a banking app on your phone).

I wonder, however, whether the complexity will grow slower or faster than Moore's law and our collective ability to feed the AIs.

One of my most fascinating reads of all time was "Brave New World Revisited" (1950s I think), a follow-up of "Brave New World" (1920s I think) by Aldous Huxley. Similarly, the point then was how the mass media and TV would eventually be used to mislead and deflect populations' attentions.

Such innocent times when we thought the TV could be evil.

I just checked and ancient.anguish.org is still online. Port 2222.