aware of how probablilty works
In some universe, you typed that correctly. Only actually chiming in here to say I have problems with with words that end that way too, I think it's all of the single-stroke characters next to one another somehow.
I get paying, and I maybe get paying for the client once and for the service, but I don't get paying for the client and paying for the service and paying again for updates.
WoW has always amazed me because Blizzard was able to sell both the service and not just the client (which is common) but also updates. What the hell are you paying for with the service if not the updates? Because running the servers is not the hard part, the amount of data is small and the latency is not as critical as in many financial applications (to say nothing of the security) so it's relatively ho-hum. Highest grossing game of all time, possibly the most profitable as well.
Arguably operating the gear shift with your left hand is better,
Managing the steering wheel is the easy part, doing shifts well is much harder than steering. The ease of operating the shift lever is going to depend on which is your primary hand. As I'm right-handed, driving on the right side of the road and sitting on the left side of the car is optimal for me. But as you say, the manual transmission is unfortunately going away, and all we are left with in ICEVs are expensive DCTs and inferior and more expensive everything else. (Slush boxes/traditional automatics can be good, but usually aren't. CVTs are poop.)
The battery is one of the most expensive parts of the car. Why on earth would someone want their battery to wear out sooner?
Batteries degrade even if you don't use them. A battery which is rated for 10,000 full cycles might be able to do 100,000 partial cycles or more, depending on the charge and discharge rates. Why would you not want to get paid for owning a battery that always degrades?
Dispersed power can be more robust yes, but it's also potentially a greater threat, because your local fire department[s] can only respond to a limited number of incidents at once. In areas made up of a bunch of smaller towns with small volunteer fire departments, they might literally only be able to handle one major fire with the use of resources from most of those departments.
If the attack on those batteries is via internet, cellular network etc., then having them dispersed might in fact not make them any harder to interfere with. This tendency for everything to phone home all the time for updates is a security risk and then some. It solves one problem by creating another...
once you ruin the lifetime of a car you can unload the problem on someone else, what should you care as long as there's a dollar in your pocket.
There's a real need for battery systems which report the history and health of the battery, that's an actual concern. But V2G won't necessarily do that, depending on how it's implemented. Do I trust GM to get it right no, but they might if they are cautious enough in fear of lawsuits and recalls. Some low-C use of your battery that changes its charge state by 20% or so will barely affect its lifespan.
And also an inflationary currency is a very bad thing.
For one, it screws over debtholders (aka, most people), as the value of the debt owed grows instead of declining. If you work for a company making lumber, and a given board sells for $10 now, but 20 years from now sells for $5, and you sell the same number of boards per unit labour with the same relative margin, then all else being equal, your salary must be half in 20 years what it is today. But that mortgage that you took out today for $200k is still $200k (adjusted for interest and payment of principal). Which you have to pay on with a salary that is half what it is in dollars. That person is totally screwed.
Secondly, it discourages spending. The more you delay purchases, the more you'll be able to buy in the future. So everyone is encouraged to not spend. Which screws over your economy. It also screws over your tax base when taxation is based on taxing spending. Meaning you have to raise your spending-related taxes, which further discourages spending.
Third, it worsens wealth inequality. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you have no savings. If you're a billionaire, you have a lot of savings. The billionaires see their assets grow and grow, and it comes at the cost of the working class. Also, said billionaires are encouraged to keep their money as cash rather than investment, which further ruins your economy.
This is no way to run an economy.
Another thing you REALLY don't want in an economy is instability. Aka, Bitcoin's fundamental nature, because it has no fundamentals and no attempt at monetary policy. Economies are fundamentally unstable. If you do not regulate them, they swing wildly. The faster an economy moves - and economies keep moving faster as technology advances, it no longer takes half a year for goods to arrive on a sailing ship or weeks to communicate with the other side of your country - the more unstable it is. This is terrible for both individuals and businesses.
What you want in an economiy is:
* Stability
* Low and steady inflation - a couple percent, to encourage spending, slowly devalue debts, and encourage investment. Too much is bad. Too little is bad.
Yet, silver is valuable as both a monetary metal and industrial metal.
Unlike bitcoin. You summed it up nicely right there.
Right now, I want to buy tin-silver alloy, to use in casting. But the prices of both tin and silver are insanely expensive right now. So I'm not buying now. If the prices go down? I'll buy. If they go down a lot? I'll buy a lot, perhaps even to sell on my sales website. And this buying is to *use* it. Which takes it off the market. There are fundamentals behind silver.
There are no fundamentals behind bitcoin.
401ks have fundamentals behind them (comprised of companies that make products and services that people want to buy, generally as repeat-buys)
Governments have fundamentals (the ability to levy taxes, backed by the full force of the courts, the police, and ultimately, the military)
Bitcoin has no fundamentals. It's a collectible. Its value is based purely how much people want that collectible. The only reason, as was stated, that people were buying it was as a lottery ticket. But there is no reason to "own" it beyond that. It's not generating dividends or doing stock buybacks based on profits. It's just there for those who want to collect it. And its value depends on how much people want to collect it.
(Arguably its greatest power is that its holders stand to lose so much if regulation goes against them that they tend to be very politically active, with large donations to pro-crypto candidates)
Eh... I think the "used for all kind of dangerous things" started with GPT-3. I used GPT-2 a good bit back in the day, and it couldn't pass as a person, let alone reason out as a cyberattack.
Since it wasn't instruction fine-tuned, you couldn't trust that GPT-2 would ever do what you wanted. The best you could do is "cute it" with leading text and hoping that it doesn't go off on a tangent. That said, you could kinda use it for things with decent reliability. For example, you could write a long paragraph, then write: "Or, to sum up everything above in one sentence" - and then (hopefully) get a one-sentence summary.
It could sort of try to write recipes ("Here is a recipe for [X]. INGREDIENTS:"), but far from usable (I remember that one contained vermiculite
It was this tantalizing glimpse of what was to come - not YET useful, but hinting at what could come if the models improved sufficiently. I don't think many people expected how quickly it would improve.
When GPT-3 came out (but not yet 3.5, aka ChatGPT), the writing quality was clearly dramatically improved. People were writing articles about GPT-3 using GPT-3, and only copyediting to piece the (small) chunks together. For me the big "Nothing Will Be The Same Again" moment was the "TheGentleMetre" scandal on Reddit, where it was discovered that someone had connected GPT-3 to their Reddit account... but it took like a month for them to get caught, and even then only because they were posting 24/7 at a regular pacing. And it was the fact that they weren't just writing arbitrary nonsense, but that there was logic to what they were writing. For example, one person asked something like "Would you rather have a psychopath or a Nazi as a roomate?" and it made a reasoned argument about how with a psychopath, there's something mentally broken with them, whereas with the Nazi, it's an ideology and there's still the possibility of changing that ideology. Back in that era, the notion that an AI model could do this was pretty staggering.
I mean, it is a pretty impressive model. And not just from the benchmarks. Relentlessly proactive and resourceful. It's a shame it's cut off.
Reduction != None. Cities approve them because that even with any incentives offered they'll be raking in the cash, because the value of a datacentre is so high (even if you're in an area that only counts building + cooling + power interconnects + etc, but not the servers within, toward the property tax base)
You cannot simultaneously complain about consumer electricity prices and datacentres being bad neighbors due to having power plants on-site. Take your pick.
Datacentres buying power ALSO equals tax revenue, en masse, because electricity is taxed. And all of the jobs associated with providing that electricity.
A datacentre means a huge amount of income to the locality where it's at, plain and simple.
You know what property taxes are, right?
I mean, not surprising really. The military is less white than the general US population, and lower income than the US average.
I can also understand how the current administration's actions may be... less than popular.
"Once they go up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department." -- Werner von Braun
