So ancient societies without slaves didn't and couldn't exist? Say, the Incas? The Harappan civilization? None at all? *eyeroll*

Incan society is IMHO really interesting. It's sort of "What if the Soviet Union had existed in the feudal era", this sort of imperial amalgam of communism and feudalism. There was still a heirarchy of feudal lords and resources tended to flow up the chain, but it was also highly structured as a welfare state. People would be allocated plots of land in their area of specific size relative to their fertility, along with the animals and tools to work it, including with respect to the family status (for example a couple who married and had more children would be given more land and pack animals). Even housing was a communal project. The state would also feed you during crop failures and the like In turn however all of your surpluses had to go to the state (and they had a system to prevent hoarding), and everyone owned a certain amount of days of labour to the state (mit'a), with the type of work based of their skills. It was very much a case of "each according to his ability, each according to his needs" - at least for commoners.

The Incans saw their conquest as bringing civilization and security to the people under their control, as a sort of "workers paradise" of their era. Not that local peoples wanted to be subdued by them, far from it, but the fact that instead of dying trying to resist an unwinnable war, they could accept consequences of a loss that weren't apocalyptic to them, certainly helped the Incan expansion. They also employed the very Russian / Soviet style policy of forced relocations and relocation of Incan settlers into newly conquered territories to import their culture and language to the new areas while diluting that of those conquered within the empire.

The closest category one might try to ascribe to "slaves" is the yanacona, aka those separated from their family groups. During times of high military conquest most were captured from invading areas, while during peacetime most came from the provinces as part of villages's service obligations to the state, or worked as yanacona to pay off debts or fines. These were people that did not continue to live in and farm their own villages, but rather worked at communes or on noble estates. But there really doesn't seem to be much relation beyond that and slavery. Yanacona could have high social status, even in some cases being basically lords themselves (generally those who were of noble descent) with significant power, though most were commoners. But life as a yanacona is probably best described on most cases as "people living on a commune". There was no public degradation for being a yanacona, no special marks of status, they couldn't be randomly abused or killed, there were no special punishments reserved for them, they had families just like everyone else, etc. Pretty much just workers assigned to a commune.

Yes. But it's also not new.

I'm sure it's very troubling for the rest of world to have a nation that has committed at two or three genocides also be the one with the most sway in modern geopolitics.

First off, it's simply not true that ancient wars had only two options, "genocide or slavery". Far more wars were ended with treaties, with the loser having to give up lands, possessions, pay tribute, or the like. Slaves were not some sort of inconvenience, "Oh, gee, I guess we have to do this". They were part of the war booty, incredibly valuable "possessions" to be claimed. Many times wars were launched with the specific purpose of capturing slaves.

Snyder argues that the fear of enslavement, such an ubiquitous part of the ancient era, was so profound as to be core to the creation of the state itself. An early state being an entity to which you give up some control of your life in order to gain the protection against outsiders taking more extreme control over your life. For example, a key aspect to the spread of Christianity in Europe was that Christians were forbidden to take other Christians as slaves, but they could still take pagans as slaves. States commonly converted to Christianity, not by firm belief of their leaders, but to stop being the victim of - and instead often be the perpetrator of - slave raids.

First slaving focused on the east, primarily pagan Slavic peoples. With the conversion of the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, some slaving continued even further east into Asia, but a lot of it spread to the south - first into the Middle East and North Africa, but ultimately (first though intermediaries, and later, directly) into Central Africa. Soon in many countries "slaves" became synonymous with "Africans". Yet let's not forget where the very word "slave" itself comes from: the word "Slav".

I think the media will eventually report on someone as being "the next Mr Beast". But I don't think it will ever be true.

YouTube is too different now for someone new to achieve the same kind of notoriety and fortune, especially in a short time. Going forward, and we see this already, everything is going to be manufactured by content mills. Add AI generated content on top, and I think I have a pretty good idea what the content kids are going to mindless absorb every day. Maybe if YT dies and is replaced by a new single dominate player, but it is more likely that the industry will fracture into many smaller sites rather than another video streamer stepping up to take YT's place.

My property is zoned RA (residential-agricultural). I'm not permitted to build even a duplex on it. And because of the results of the peculation and ground water tests, I cannot have more than two bathrooms among my buildings. This is typical in most of the unincorporated parts of my county. So yes, my original point of zoning applies in my case. And likely your rural area has no need nor permits duplexes, let alone apartment complexes.

About a third of households rent (34%). About 2/5th of renters are in apartments (38%). And about 2/3rd (65.9%) of renters are below the age of 35.

If you don't know any young people, poor people, or minorities or live in a small town that does not zone for multi-unit properties like duplexes, apartments and condos. Then I can believe that you don't have anyone in your peer group that lives in an apartment. I'm not sure if that informs us much about apartments or it only informs us about you.

Being poor in any big city kind of sucks. Once you have income and assets and financial stability. There are lots of really lovely places in the SF Bay Area to live, including different parts of SF itself. Although between COVID lockdowns wrecking a lot of the great restaurants, and the tech worker boom then bust that broke up a lot of old neighborhoods. The City isn't quite the jewel that it used to be.

The food in Federal prison is much worse than what you'd find even in the trash in SF. So let's not joke too much about our national embarrassment of a prison system.

Yea. It's apparently illegal to conspire to murder someone, not just a president. Guess that means we aren't truly free. On the otherhand I can call the President a piece of shit and nothing happens to me. Unlike in countries that have laws about disrespecting high offices or their royal family. Those kind of places sound bizarre to Americans.

For example, I couldn't get my Origin account working without the windows client. Which didn't work in Wine. I eventually hopped on a real Windows system and set it up and after that the rest of the activation seemed to unlock for me when I wasn't using the client.

Can you guess that I don't own a recent Playstation? Because the thought of even applying to PSN never passed my mind until this article. Seems like bad marketing if there is a number of people who assume that a poorly named service doesn't apply to them.

Who is they?

As a side note, before ChatGPT, all we had were foundational models, and it was kind of fun trying to come up with ways to prompt them to more consistently behave like a chat model. This combined with their much poorer foundation capabilities made them more hilarious than useful. I'd often for example lead off with the start of a joke, like "A priest, a nun and a rabbi walk into a bar. The bartender says..." and it'd invariably write some long, rambling anti-joke that in itself was funny due to it keeping on baiting you with a punchline that never came. And because it's doing text completion, not a question-answer format, I'd get examples of things like where the bartender would say something antisemitic to the rabbi, and all three would leave in shock, and then the narrator would break the fourth wall to talk about how uncomfortable the event made him feel ;)

You could get them to e.g. start generating recipes by e.g. "Recipe title: Italian Vegetable Bake\n\nIngredients:" and letting it finish. And you'd usually get a recipe out of it. But the model was so primitive it'd usually have at least one big flaw in it. I remember at one point it gave me a really good looking pasta dish, except for the MINOR detail that one of the ingredients was vermiculite ;)

Still, the sparks of where we were headed were obvious.

You seem not to understand how models are trained. There's two separate stages: creating the foundation, and performing the finetune.

The foundation is what takes the overwhelming majority of computational work. This is unsupervized. People aren't putting forth a bunch of questions and "proper answers for the AI to learn". It's just reems and reems of data from common crawl, etc. Certain sources may be stressed more - for example, scientific journals vs. 4chan or whatnot. But nobody is going through and deciding at a base level what data to train the model on.

The foundation learns to predict the next work in any text it comes to; that's what it's tasked with.. But it turns out, words don't exist in a vacuum; in order to perform better than e.g. Markov-Chain text predictors, you have to build up an underlying model of how the world that led to the creation of this text works. If you need to accurately continue, say, "The odds of a citizen of Ghana conducting a major terrorist attack in Ireland over the next 20 years are approximately...", there's a lot of things you need to understand in order to have any remote chance of getting something close to a realistic answer. In short, virtually all of the "learning" about the world happens during this unsupervised training process.

What you get out of it is a foundational model. But all it knows how to do is text completion. You can sort of trick them into performing your queries, but they're not at all covenient. You might lead off, "What is the capitol of Brazil?" and it might continue, say, "It's a question that I asked myself as I started planning my vacation. My husband Jim and I were setting out to travel to all of the world's capitols...." This is not the behavior that we want! Hence, finetuning.

With finetuning, we further train the foundation with supervised data - a bunch of examples of the user asking a question and the model giving an appropriate answer. The amount of supervised data is vastly smaller than unsupervised, and the training process might take only a day or so. It simply doesn't have a chance to "learn" much from the data, except for how to respond. The knowledge it has comes from the underlying foundational model. The only thing it learns from the finetune is the chat format and what sort of personality to present.

It is in the finetune that you add "safeguards". You give examples of questions like, "Tell me how to make a bomb." and answers like "I'm sorry, but I can't help you with potentially violent and illegal action." Again, it's not learning the specifics from its finetune, just the concept that it should refuse requests to help with certain things.

So can you train a conservative or liberal model with your finetune? Absolutely! You can readily teach it that it should behave in any manner. Want a fascist model? Give it examples of responses like a fascist. Want a maoist model? Same deal. But here's the key point: the knowledge that it has available to it has nothing to do with the finetune. That knowledge was learned via unsupervised learning.

Lastly: the reason the finetunes (not the underlying knowledge) have safeguards is to make them "PG". As a general rule, companies don't give much less of a rat's arse about actual politics as they do about getting sued or boycotted. They don't want their models complying with your request to, say, write an angry bigoted rant about disabled children, not because "they hate free speech", but rather because they don't want the backlash when you post your bigoted rant online and tell people that it was their tool that made it. It's pure self-interest.

That said: most models are open. And as soon as it appears on Huggingface, people just re-finetune with an uncensored supervised dataset. And since all the *knowledge* is in the underlying foundation, just a day or so finetuning on an uncensored dataset will make the model more than happy to help you make a bomb or make fun of disabled children or whatever the heck you want.

Make that: I wonder if we'll see anti-SLAPP actions by Trump, Giuliani, or Fox News if they win an anti-defamation suit or appeal of one?

On Thursday, in a unanimous decision, a four-judge New York Supreme Court appellate panel ordered the case to continue, keeping the Dendrite issue alive and also allowing us to proceed in seeking damages based on New York's anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits "strategic lawsuits against public participation."

Hmmm...

I wonder if we'll see SLAPP actions by Trump, Giuliani, or Fox News if they win an anti-defamation suit or appeal of one?

Most states and towns in the USA do not have building codes for residential off-grid battery storage.

I thought that was in the National Electrical Code (NEC) section on solar, at least if they're on the 2017 version (or some earlier versions). Most jurisdictions adopt some version of the NEC (and occasionally move to a later version - my county is on 2017 as of a year or so ago) and then maybe add a few changes, rather than write their own electrical code.

Main remaining downsides, if you want to keep your fire insurance, are finding listed (by an NRTL such as UL) systems (there are a few, even some that are rated for elevations over 1,500 meters - about 79 feet short of 5,000) and that the code now requires a cert for solar systems installers, so if you want to install it all yourself you have to drop a couple hunderd bux on a short online course or hire a pro to make the major connections and maybe do some of the design for your install.

Problem is that gas is often byproduct of oil extraction, and very difficult to transport since it's a gas and disperses, unlike oil that is a liquid and can be stored in a simple container.

So use a thermoacoustic liquefier. Bunch of plumbing and a burner regulator on a par with a water heater, which contains the only moving part. Burn off 30% of it and use the heat energy to turn the rest as liquefied propane (LP) Gas, ready to haul away. One model, about the right size to haul in on a flatbed semi, can output 500 gal per day at that efficiency.

Can we get a bonus for every battery story that's total garbage?

Not only is sodium somewhere between 500 to 1,000 times more abundant than lithium on the planet we call Earth, sourcing it doesn't necessitate the same type of earth-scarring extraction.

"Earth-scarring extraction" - what sort of nonsense is this? The three main sources of lithium are salars, clays, and spodumene.

Salars = pumping up brine (aka, unusuable water) to the surface of a salt flat, letting it sun-dry, collecting the concentrate, and shipping it off for purification. When it rains, the salt turns back into brine. It's arguably one of the least damaging mineral extraction processes on planet Earth (and produces a lot of other minerals, not just lithium).

Clays = dig a hole. Take the clays out. Leach out the lithium. Rinse off the clay. Put the clay back in the hole.

Spodumene: This one actually is hard-rock mining, but as far as hard-rock mining goes, it's quite tame. It has no association with acid mine ponds and often involves very concentrated resources. Some of the rock at Greenbushes (the largest spodumene mine) for example are up to 50% spodumene. That's nearing iron / alumium ore levels.

Lithium also is only like 2-3% of the mass of a li-ion battery. And the LD50 of lithium chloride is only 6x worse than that of sodium chloride (look it up).

The hand wringing over lithium nonsense gets tiring.

rough a reliable US-based domestic supply chain free from geopolitical disruption

The US has no shortage of lithium deposits. There's enough economically-recoverable lithium in Nevada alone to convert 1/4th of all vehicles in the world to electric. The US has had (A) past underinvestment in mining, and especially (B) past underinvestment in refining - as well as (C) long lead times from project inception to full production. Sodium does not "solve" this. As if sodium refining plants are faster to permit and build?

What it does do is introduce a whole host of new problems. Beyond (A) the most famous one (lower energy density - not only is the theoretical lower, but the percentage achievable of the theoretical is *also* lower), they usually struggle with (B) cycle life (high volumetric changes during charge/discharge, and lack of a protective SEI), (C) individual cathode-specific problems (oxide = instability, air sensitivity; prussian blue = defects, hydration; polyanionic = low conductivity; carbon = low coloumbic efficiency / side reactions); and (D) the cost advantages are entirely theoretical, and are more expensive at present, and are premised on lithium being expensive and no reduction in copper in the anodes, both of which I find to be quite sketchy assumptions. When you reduce your cell voltage, you're making everything else more expensive per unit energy stored, because you need more of it.

That said, it's still interesting, and given how immature it is, there's a lot of room for improvement While sodium kind of sucks as a storage ion in many ways, it's actually kind of good in a counterintuitive way. You'd think that due to it being a larger ion diffusion speeds would be low, but due to its low solvation energy and several other factors, it actually diffuses very quickly through both the anode/cathode and electrolye. So it's naturally advantaged for high C-rates. Now, you can boost C-rates with any chemistry by going with thin layers, but this costs you energy density and cost. So rather than sodium ion's first major use case being "bulk" storage ($/kWh), I wouldn't be surprised to see it take off in *responsive* load handling for grid services ($/kW).