It's maybe been useful motivation. The problem is, it's essentially the same definition as that of "the soul."

None of your examples are examples of "not thinking." They're examples of things that you think don't think.

The problem with that is it's entirely useless for extrapolating, as much as your prejudice would like you to think the opposite. It's also generally agreed that rocks don't do arithmetic, but if you arrange them in just the right way they're actually awfully good at it.

Funny, but the entire human population spends most of their time not "thinking."

From coordinating complex movements like walking through routines like driving to work to, yes, knee jerk reactions to most things, most of what our brains do is subconscious. Only the weird justifies the effort of actual executive control. Whatever it is that we call "conscious thought" is even rarer.

Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research.

Well, you can stop reading there. I don't necessarily agree with the thesis, but the supporting arguments seem to range from wrong to kind of dumb.

It's pretty important if you're working in a developing field. The original TPU couldn't do floating point so it wasn't really useful for training. IIRC they also work best with matrices that have dimensions that are multiples of fairly big numbers (128? 256?) with later generations working best with bigger matrices.

That's great for the current focus on gigantic attention matrices but not so great if the next big thing can't be efficiently shoehorned into that paradigm.

I tried to install Platform IO to try it out, but the multi-gigabyte Visual Studio won't work on my old macbook. The Arduino 2.0 IDE isn't exactly fast and efficient, but it at least installs. A plain old text editor is fast, efficient, and installs no problem.

Arduino is powerful because it's a collection of device drivers and other libraries written to a reasonably uniform standard and mostly cross platform too. You can write firmware for an ATMega hooked up to some obscure sensors and an old RS-485 driver then (mostly) have it also run on an STM32, Pi Pico or ESP32.

Lowering prices won't help. That would lower GDP. Raising pay and raising prices would, although raising pay relative to prices is a bit of a double edged sword. The more money you've got the more you're likely to save.

The real answer is that GDP is a pretty shitty measure for this kind of thing.

Just wait until you accidentally dd /dev/null to the entire disk.

(Good thing that wouldn't actually work, until our AI overlords can correct "/dev/null" to "/dev/zero")

I wonder what the arguments from the other side are. For instance, I wonder if some of those toxic pesticides aren't present anymore at harvest (so should not cause harm), or whether some pesticides are only harmful during application (so is theoretically safe with PPE). I.e., I'd like to know whether the US is just unhealthy/unsafe as you've implied, or whether we judge risks differently and both sides are reasonable. I bet it's a little from column A, a little from column B.

To make a strong case that the US has unsafe food, I think one would need more specific evidence than "1000 agrochemicals are banned in the EU but not in the US". Why are they banned/not banned?

Yes and no.

Based on the article, the fluorochemicals are additives. They are probably spreader stickers, designed to lower the surface tension of the pesticides so they fully coat foliage and even penetrate the stomata (if desired). They may also form a waxy layer upon drying so rain doesn't wash the pesticides off--or they may be part of this general chemistry, allowing the right kind of emulsion to form so the "soapy" spreading action doesn't mean the pesticide just gets washed off (as would happen if you mixed ordinary grease and detergent). The upshot is that you need less pesticide, applied less frequently.

The fluorochemicals also don't increase the toxicity of the pesticide's active ingredients. However they are toxic in their own right. The article says this isn't a bioaccumulative pesticide, but the fluorochemicals do accumulate in the environment. So we can reduce our pesticide usage, but the price is that the environment will slowly accumulate these toxic additives. It seems like a bad bargain, but I wonder how long we could do this and not end up with a permanent problem--how long until we need to figure out other solutions to protect crops? And is the trade-off only money? Does it merely cost more money to use higher doses of pesticides with less effective spreader stickers, or does that have a different negative environmental effects? It's naive to assume this can be solved by banning the bad chemicals. You need to evaluate that with the concomitant increased use of different chemicals.

That is no longer legal in the US. Of course no regulation is perfect or perfectly enforced, but do you have any information on whether this is still happening?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The GP is not talking about LTE, they're talking about "voice over LTE" (VoLTE). The Bell compatibility checker they linked to seems like a fairly comprehensive list of phones that support it. Very old phones, like the iPhone 4 or original Pixel don't support it because the standard didn't exist when they were manufactured.

This article almost sounds like an ad to get people to buy things to keep the economy rolling rather than a serious discussion.

You've answered your question. "Productivity" in this case is GDP / capita. If an American buys something with American parts from an American retailer then they increase the GDP, which increases the productivity. It doesn't have to increase their personal productivity.

It might not even be necessary to fork much. Genuine Arduino hardware is so expensive most people use clones, lots of people use Platform IO instead of the Arduino IDE, and the Arduino core for the newer microcontrollers is not made by Arduino anyway.

But if you agreed to that spec when you bought it, isn't that on you? The real problem here is that in these laptops the processor is sold as an "Intel 268v", not a "nerfed Intel 268v" or a "low performance video Intel 268v".