If you cared exclusively about the quality of the results you'd probably be using one of the meta engines that works with google (i.e. startpage). You're not so far away from the unwashed masses who definitely just use whatever is the default.
[...] and high inflation for basic products is driven by population growth. This is basic supply and demand logic.
Supply and demand is one reason why prices of goods can rise, but that explanation comes with conditions.
To draw a math analogy, you can use linear regression to find the optimal slope and intercept of a line that best explains the data, but that only works when the underlying mechanism giving the data is itself linear. You should only use that method and that explanation if the original condition (the underlying mechanism is linear) is met.
Supply and demand is conditioned on there being only one product under consideration in a sea of available products. It's 'sorta like doing thermodynamic calculations by taking a source sample from a very large isothermal bath - so large, that taking the sample makes negligible changes in the bath that can be ignored.
When *all* products rise or fall together, the conditions for supply and demand no longer apply. Another way to look at is is to note that food prices have gone up even though there is plenty of food available, the population/demand for food hasn't changed appreciably, and the source amount of food hasn't changed appreciably.
Under those conditions, rising prices are due to monetary policy. If there is a constant output of product, more money is injected into the system will "dilute" the value of money relative to the product. 'Sorts like adding water to chicken soup. It makes the soup thinner, there is more water per noodle than there was before you added extra water.
That's the fundamental cause of all the inflation we've been having. It's not supply-and-demand, the conditions for that explanation are not met.
Inflation is caused by excess money in the system, nothing more.
This site doesn't have me, but if it did, so what? If you've made any political contributions, you can look that up at various sites, but since they're either left-wing or apparently bipartisan (OpenSecrets), nobody bats an eye.
If they somehow linked my pseudonymous slashdot handle with my name, THAT would be doxing. (Except my slashdot handle isn't pseudonymous anyway)
Suppose I didn't vote, but VoteRef shows that I did. That indicates voting fraud, someone entered an absentee vote in my name.
Suppose the lot across from me is vacant, and VoteRef shows that several people registered and voted using that address.
VoteRef is useful for identifying and combatting voter fraud. Lots and lots of theories on how vote fraud could occur, having the data open and available for everyone can lower the temperature, and reassure people that the voting process is secure.
Posting intermediate results (vote totals) should be banned, it opens the door to election cheating.
Note: Not saying that cheating happens or did happen, only that in a security sense posting intermediate results makes cheating easier.
Also Note: This is relevant to the article, an AI system that predicts the outcome in real time before the polls close.
If you know your candidate is losing, you can calculate by how much and arrange to have the minimum number of fake ballots delivered to push your candidate over the winning line. A smaller number of fake ballots makes it less likely that the ballots will be discovered as fake, and the "very slight margin of winning" reduces suspicion.
We already have accusations of fake ballots entered, ballot box dumps in the middle of the night, extra boxes found late in the evening... all of these give the viewer low confidence in the election outcome. We also have cases where registrations exceed the number of people living in the county, zillions of examples of registrations from non-residences and so on.
If you don't have real-time intermediate results it's much harder to gauge how much effort you need to swing the ballot count, or even if you need to cheat or whether cheating will do any good.
Don't start counting until *all* boxes from remote polling have arrived, don't accept extra boxes once you start counting, make the "percentage of votes counted" public, but don't publish the actual counts until you're done.
That rule alone would go a long way towards installing confidence in our elections.
Intel had veto power over all of the board makers bios configs and they didn't use it. The processors microcodes are also incorrect causing them to run unsafe and unnecessary voltages regardless of which board they're on.
I just read the summary and I feel like I just got dumber. I've used ChatGPT a few times, and its helped with some general knowledge stuff, but anything else? No clue...
AI is currently a good choice for assistance in writing.
If you look over the reviews of the current AI listings for writing, you find that Ai really shines at the very fine grained level of writing. It will give you words, sentences, and even paragraphs that appear to be really well written.
But in review after review, everyone notes that after a paragraph or two the writing starts to have flaws, and after a page or two it just doesn't have the level of writing expertise that a human would have.
Things like "take this paragraph and make it more tense/faster/slower/descriptive/visceral" seem to work well. Things like "analyze these paragraphs, and write a new paragraph in my same style that says *this*" work OK as well.
Things like "give me five other phrases that describe *this*" work really well, as does "give 5 other words that mean *that*".
What's missing from all of these are the implied "...and I'll choose the best one".
Right now AI can be used as a tool to help your productivity, but it's still at the level of a productivity enhancement tool. And not something that can be used for completely writing something, at least not more than a page or two of text that holds together.
In the context of this story one might say that editors bias lead them to discuss the propaganda efforts of India but avoid similar discussions for other countries just as guilty. Facts are often only as important as framing or relative relavance.
Musk said DT will provide a green card fix personally for him.
Musk is a US citizen, why would he need a green card?
That is probably all you need to know.
Your post makes no sense whatsoever so... no, it's not all I need to know.
Hate Musk if you like, but consider finding defensible reasons for hating him.
Just sayin'
We can and do have laws on murder that do NOT depend on science, but we use Science to convict or acquit, but that isn't encoded into the law itself.
The law, not the courts, ought to be science agnostic. The courts ought to use rules of evidence, which is a foundation of science itself
The duality here isn't a duality, it is a misnomer of purpose.
There ought to be NO law that depends on science. For a law that is based on science is destined to be changed when science ("settled science") changes.
Laws ought to be written for purpose, and when those purposes fail, or the law itself fails, the laws are automatically nullified. How many stupid laws are still on the books, because they were short sighted and limited?
I cringe every time someone says "There ought to be a law", because someone does or doesn't like something.
something goes wrong?
The doctor, obviously.
I don't think "The AI made a different diagnosis" would be a legitimate excuse to use in court.
As it happens, I'm in the middle of looking at all the AI offerings for writing. This is off-topic from the article, but I note that some of these are pretty good. There's websites full of AI generated stories, and some of *those* are pretty good as well. The first one I selected (randomly) was sort of a modern retake of "Magic Incorporated".
Go check out some of the features here, or here. They're quite impressive.
I've been using AI as a tool to help writing instead of a crutch to write for me. 'Sorta like I use Rogets, when I know the meaning I want but are stumped on the word, or want to avoid using the same word twice in close proximity. I just today typed "Give me a few words, single words only, that can be used in fictional writing to describe getting tackled to the ground. Words such as "pow"", and ChatGPT helpfully gave me a list of useful alternatives that I didn't think of.
To go back on topic, doctors *should* be using AI... but as a tool and not as a doctor. Medicine is a very wide field, the doctor's knowledge is dated (from the year he graduated), and the AI might consider alternatives that he doesn't know about.
But the ultimate decision should rest with the doctor, any AI suggestions should be confirmed as the source of the problem, and so on.
AI should be used as a tool, and not a replacement for a real human.
(And of course, anyone who uses the AI to do their job for them is an abject fool, and we'll probably see a couple of these in flashy news stories before the government stomps on it with regulation.)
Yet you don't even care about Krita and Gimp, you enjoy being enshittified and you know it.
Gimp takes all the interesting and useful image processing features and presents them to the user as... numbers and named options.
Taking the simplest action, paint (with the pen tool), you can set the numeric value of size, spacing, hardness, and force... among many other options such as fade length and smooth stroke. You can also set the "Incremental" and "dynamics" flags.
I noticed the complete opaqueness of all of this while viewing a YouTube video tutorial about another graphics program on a tablet, where the user hit the "options" button for the brush and was shown a popup palette of *images* that showed the effect each of the options would have on the brush, and he could select the image emblematic of the effect he wanted to change and change the "amount" of change to be applied to the current brush.
For example, the "size" image implied that it would change the size of the brush, and as he moved the slider the brush size changed dynamically.
Completely intuitive, no need to even "name" the options hardness, force, or incremental.
On Gimp, you first select the *number* of the size you want, then look over to the brush to see how big it actually is.
It does this with everything, which slows down the creative process a *lot*.
Gimp is completely non-intuitive. It's a graphics program for people who like to spend their time reading a book-sized manual before doing anything useful.
(As an emblematic example of how non-intuitive this is, the program is "Gimp" and everyone calls it "Gimp" and the help menu has a link for "Gimp online", but the name in the menu is "Gnu Image Manipulation Program", which means if you're the kind of person who scans for the program he wants alphabetically you won't find it, have to stop and root around with your eyes and evaluate entries until you find it. Gimp throws sand in the gears of productivity everywhere.)
We could also just slow down at night. Having 'night-time' speed limits on roads that don't have overhead lights would make all kinds of sense, and would not require even more expensive tech in new cars, and would mean people would not need to have black out curtains on their houses just so it does not feel like they are at a rave all night due to passing traffic.
I remember reading about a the 55mph US national speed limit years ago, and it was pointed out that this particular speed limit wasted 250 person-years for every life it saved.
Clearly there's a trade-off here, we don't want everyone going 5mph to reduce fatalities to zero, but we should also optimize for best results.
Driving safety in the past decades has been almost completely driven by improvements in road safety (Denver barriers &c), car safety (airbags &c) and a little bit legal (clamping down on drunk driving). Lane following software is almost certainly safer than human control, and autodriving will likely be much safer than human control, and the entire driving fleet be able to learn from the past mistakes of any one unit.
Does it make sense to reduce speed limits in the face of these upcoming changes?
Given the 250 years per life saved, is your position proportionally correct?
> the cost to produce Black Rock City in 2023 was $749 per participant
For those who've been, what do they spend that on? Does everyone get a personal porta-potty? Catered gourmet meals? "Free" beer, or just a free tow out of the mud?
They sponsor a lot of art. IIRC, the "Belgian Waffle" (several years ago) was given $200,000 to create their exhibit.
There's a lot, and I mean a *LOT* of art at the festival, much of which is truly breathtaking. Every year the "Temple" is breathtaking, and "The Man" is pretty impressive too.
Additionally, the infrastructure is top notch. They've got a lot of skip loaders, tractors, and backhoe-like things that run around and help setup and strike the event. Also lots of electrical infrastructure that powers the management (lights and power for central camp, ranger radio stations, lights for the man, and on and on.)
Additionally, that $749 is for a full week, so roughly $110 per day to attend the event. They rent a lot of porta-potties which are cleaned frequently (maybe twice a day?), there's water trucks that go around spraying water on the roads to keep the dust down, they've got a free medical center staffed with doctors (possibly volunteer) with at least a working X-ray machine (determined experimentally when I accidentally got injured).
Did I mention their infrastructure was top notch? Go talk to some of the organizers or long-time volunteers some time, they're available, approachable, and highly knowledgeable.
(Apropos of nothing, Burning Man (infrastructure) gets power from solar panels. A few years ago the solar panel rebates federal and local added up to more than the price of the panels, and Burning Man has free labor, so for several years they set out solar panels, then after the event they donated the panels to Gerlach, the local "out in the middle of nowhere" town next to the event. IIRC, they had done this enough times to put Gerlach completely electrically independent, meaning that the town doesn't need to run generators to power the town.)
Not 10 minutes after this Slashdot article posted, I received the following E-mail from Maid Marian:
Support Black Rock City & Beyond
Hi,
If you’re getting this email it’s because you've probably had a ticket to Burning Man in the last 20 years.
Either Burning Man is still a huge part of your life, you F **#$% ing hate Burning Man, or maybe you’re ambivalent. Wherever you land, it’s probably been just as impactful for you as it has been for many of us.
What started for me in 1995 at the edge of a dry lakebed — where a tall man wearing a bedsheet and holding a plastic flamingo told me to "drive 12 miles to a black mountain and then left until you see five pointy things" — has evolved from a bunch of weirdos with guns into a global institution reimagining and reinventing what the world could be like if we did things a little bit differently.
Burning Man now is a worldwide cultural phenomenon that, since 1986, has been built and experienced by nearly a million people, both in Black Rock City and at more than 80 annual official events around the world. You may be one of those people. Whether or not you come to Black Rock City regularly, you are part of the community and we value the ways you have contributed to make Burning Man happen. Thank you.
It’s a little-known fact that revenue from tickets does not support the cultural movement that Burning Man has become. We do not want to raise ticket prices. In the name of Radical Inclusion, we actually prefer to lower them. But, the fact of the matter is that the cost to produce Black Rock City in 2023 was $749 per participant while the main sale ticket price was $575. You can read more about this inflection point and the reduced ticket sales in 2024 and how this has forced a much larger fundraising goal to keep operations going. Or explore the summary financial information going back 10 years to see how the higher-priced tickets have been subsidizing the event for some time, and how the drop in those sales threatens Burning Man.
The plan for 2025 and beyond is to flip the script. It’s time to think about the most Burning Man way to close this gap.
No, we won't go towards corporate sponsorship, additional RV fees or merchandise sales. Instead, we will turn to the community and invite participation and support to help fill the gap. Yes, we have reduced the number of regular year-round employees on staff, and we’re diving into the budget to trim what is already a lean and tight Black Rock City infrastructure and nonprofit management. But that alone isn’t enough.
Now is the time to ensure that Burning Man can persist into the future — not just as an annual event in the desert, but as a cultural institution that will be here decades from now, empowering future generations to reimagine the world they live in.
I would certainly prefer that our focus be solely on pushing the edge, rather than having to raise money all the time. But as we continue to provide containers for the future to be prototyped, we operate in the context of the default world, and that requires ongoing charitable support year after year to keep this thing going.
You already know we're not a normal nonprofit — we never wanted to be “normal.” But we are a nonprofit and to keep doing what we do, we need your help.
F-*&$ commercial sponsorship! \/
Contribute today so we can:
Prototype new ways of living, working and being together
Support art and artists through grants
Get Black Rock City off fossil fuels
Nurture Burning Man culture around the world
Capture the DNA of what we are doing to hand off to the next generation
Get funky and bring more cacophony of chaos
We are moments away from announcing the Black Rock City 2025 theme — one that’s rich with creative possibilities! Simultaneously, community-led Temple and art teams hopeful for an art grant are hard at work on their proposals for the 2025 event. We urgently need your support to finish 2024 and prepare for 2025 and beyond.
If your friendships, community, family, or personal life have benefited or could benefit from the magic, creativity, and inspiration of Burning Man, I urge you to please support the movement with a gift today.
How much would you pay to keep corporate sponsorship out of Burning Man?
Listen, I am happy to fundraise — it’s an important part of who we are and what we need to do. But, let’s not get so tangled up in that part of the process that we lose sight of what my colleagues and I are driven to do with you. We’re facilitating the building of a massive city on a dry lakebed. Our relationships and friendships with 1,000 temporary seasonal employees help further drive and facilitate 10,000 volunteers directly related to the city infrastructure, who in turn are in service to the 75,000 participant creators of one hell of a magical Brigadoon appearing and disappearing in the middle of the desert. And then THAT brings collaboration, communication, empowerment, resilience, self-reflection and joy back to the world.
I don't want to raise ticket prices. I wish we could offer Black Rock City as a gift for free. I want more art. I want ephemeral pop-up cities around the world thriving with life and possibility. We are not in service to consumption. We are in service to social interaction. Let’s realize the cultural impact that the experiences we have at Burning Man events can have in the cities and towns we all live our day-to-day lives in. This is the long game toward a cultural shift, and I believe strongly that Burning Man has a role to play.
As our dear friend and OG Burner Larry Harvey once said:
“We think Burning Man has great application to the world, but a larger iteration can only occur as people incorporate the essential ethos of it. The Ten Principles are meant to describe that ethos, that way of life; and then, by their own inspiration and by collaboration with others in the everyday world, people will find applications that are as various as the many gifts they bring to it. It has to be culturally transmitted that way.”
He also spoke about money not “being inherently good,” nor “irretrievably bad,” and that money can be made “to serve non-monetary values in a way that’s self-sustaining” to the culture.
“If there is a moral here, it is that money isn’t moral. It is not inherently good, it is not irretrievably bad; it is like water as it tumbles in its pell-mell progress through our world. But money can be canalized by culture; it can be made to serve non-monetary values in a way that’s self-sustaining.”
It is with these words in my heart that I ask you to join me as I am turning my annual donation into a recurring monthly donation.
Whether or not you regularly attend Burning Man, I hope you’ll join all of us in supporting Burning Man in Black Rock City and in the cultural work that we do out in the world.
Stick with us as we unfold the story together. \/
Thank you,
Marian
P.S. Why aren’t we all covering the logos on our trucks like we used to? Let’s make that a thing again. )*(
To stay youthful, stay useful.
