There is some amount of time to spend on sharpening that, if you spend either more or less time sharpening, net amount of trees on trucks goes down. Smart businesses look for that amount. Really smart businesses know what the amount is, and make sure that they spend very close to that amount of time sharpening.
Indeed. My point is that that right amount is waaaaay more than most people think it is. At least in my experience.
I think part of the problem is people get... I guess "speed blindness". When stuff is taking ages they just think that's how long it takes. They don't realise that they could be twice as fast if they spent some of their time fixing & improving their tooling.
Well, it certainly allows and enables the spread of misinformation.
That is, what's blocked? Things that people consider misinformation. Some of it really is, and some of it is just stuff that's politically unpopular with the powers that be (which they're also going to label misinformation). And then some of it falls afoul of various copyright laws or other such.
But certainly real misinformation is a significant chunk of that. The proxy enables that misinformation (and disinformation) to bypass the censorship/blocking. So in that sense, yes, it spreads misinformation.
I agree. I just don't agree with misinformation not being protected as free speech. Surely having an INGSOC decide what is truthful enough to be shared is detrimental to free expression and thought. Heliocentrism was also misinformation at one point.
The US is evil because it meddles in the affairs of other countries? Uh huh. Tell me about Iran.
The US is evil because of who it supports? Tell me about Iran.
And at least the US didn't murder thousands of anti-government demonstrators so far this year.
You're right in this: The US is not the shining example of goodness and purity that we wish it to be. But when you condemn the US compared to Iran, using those metrics, it looks suspiciously like motivated reasoning.
Nonviolence works where the rulers have a conscience (or at least where those who carry out the rulers' will do).
Would armed resistance be more effective? How many guns can they get their hands on? I don't know the answer to that, but my expectation is, not many. (I am open to correction.)
I mean, with dictators, that's usually what it comes down to. But it often takes years or decades of unrest and repression before someone with enough guns decides they want to be on the right side of history.
It's a fascinating if morbid process we go through every now and then... sort of, building consensus by sacrificing livelihoods and lives.
Iran is one of the most oppressive regimes remaining on this planet, so I really hope this does it. The problem is that revolutionary governments are usually not dumb and do their best to make sure that another revolution can't overthrow them too easily - hardline loyalists with benefits in the military, etc. So this probably ends with a military intervention by other countries or some other sequence of events that will spell even more misery.
The whole history of the Iranian revolution is pretty wacky. It's easy to take a knee-jerk position that "the West did it", and we definitely set some pieces in motion, but Iran wasn't really hurting prior to the revolution, which is why it caught everyone by surprise. The shah made a number of political missteps, there was some sentiment against the UK and the US, and people wanted change... but almost no one wanted a theocratic dictatorship instead. And yet...
AI interaction is fundamentally unsatisfying. (I have a theory as to why; see below.) An AI can get you results, maybe even the results you wanted, but it can't give you a genuine smile. Even when we're surrounded by things that get us results, we still want the smile. So if you're doing something where you interact with people face to face, at least some of the time, that's a decent place.
In my large town/small city, there's an ice cream shop that closes between Thanksgiving and roughly March 1st. I would love to own a business that people cared as much about as they care about that place opening for the year.
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Why is interacting with an AI unsatisfying? I wonder if it doesn't come down to information theory. AI output has too little information in it.
You compute the information in a text by going symbol by symbol. Normally "symbol" means one character or byte. But you could do it by going word by word (or word part by word part) instead. Here you can see the problem: an AI gives you whatever word is the most probable next word, given the context. That's lower information than human output, which would give a wider variety of next words, and therefore a higher (Shannon) information content.
Yes, you can change that by increasing the temperature of the AI. Can you do that enough to give human-equivalent information content without destroying the coherence of the output? (Merely high Shannon information isn't the only goal. The insane may have high information in their output, but they are incoherent enough that it doesn't matter.)
I don't think they're going to lose the House over just one thing. The economy feels fundamentally broken in some sense that doesn't seem to show up in statistics. (Affordability plus job mobility, maybe?) Tariffs are only a part of that. But there's also the brutality and thuggishness of the ICE crackdown. There's the rule by executive order, sidelining Congress. There's the constant trampling of norms and precedent (and even the Constitution). There's the rampant egomania and attention-seeking. There's the corruption and graft. There's the rambling, disjointed speech that makes one wonder if he's all there. There's Epstein. There's the "peace president" attacking Venezuela and threatening to go to war against Iran. There's the incompetence and buffoonery of the Cabinet.
It just goes on and on and on. Cutting tariffs is not going to be anywhere near enough to save the Republicans in the midterms.
you can add in that the trip to China next month will be eventless, as whatever wildly dirty deal they want from Zi will be politely ignored, some sort of cringe thing trying to trade looking the other way on Taiwan for stabbing Russia in the back, or worse.
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