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Comment Re:I think it may be a good idea... (Score 1) 234

4.0 GPa is actually a lot of pressure!

If students are being subjected to 4 GPa of pressure (40,000 bar), that's a real problem. I mean, that would crush their bodies beyond the limits of molecular cohesion, rupturing all cell membranes and turning all of their bodies' water into high-density ice. If the university is regularly murdering students this way, they should be stopped.

I'm not sure how pass/fail grades help, though.

Comment Re:What SHOULD humans learn now? (Score 1) 83

It's a good question, but I think framing it as what humans need to do to be able to live alongside ASI is the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it is "What do humans need to learn how to do to have fulfilling lives?".

Of course that question also depends on what makes sense for humans in a world run by benevolent ASI. We don't need to bother thinking about humans' role in a world run by malevolent or even disinterested ASI because there will be no role.

Comment Re:Block AI in schools (Score 1) 83

Your point about primary sources is correct. However, educators did *not* consider Wikipedia equivalent to other encyclopedias. They explicitly did not trust it, while they considered traditional encyclopedias more reliable.

Sort of. When my kids were in public school in the 2000s and 2010s, book encyclopedias were sometimes grudgingly accepted as source. Not always, and it was often made clear that they weren't proper sources (because they're not!). The solution was to use Wikipedia but to follow the reference links to the primary sources it cites and use those.

I thought that wasn't just a good answer, but a strict improvement over accepting hardcover encyclopedias, both pedagogically and as a matter of scholarly principle.

Comment Re:Great (Score 1) 175

CA is also:
#1 in homelessness AND #1 in per capita homeless spending!

CA is #6 in homeless per capita among states. #1 is NY. I can't find any good nationwide numbers on homeless spending; it doesn't seem like anyone collects that data. However, I did find numbers from CA and NY, and NY spends nearly three times as much per capita as CA, so CA is definitely not #1.

#1 in poverty

Per the official poverty measure, CA is #22. That's arguably not a great measure, though, since it assumes the value of a dollar is the same everywhere. Using the supplemental poverty measure, CA is #2, behind Louisiana (#3 if you include DC, which falls between LA and CA). LA is high because people are actually very poor. CA's poverty rate is high even because though incomes are relatively high, housing is very expensive. Anyway, not #1.

#1 in highest taxes (excluding property tax the only tax stat they are middle-of-the-road)

CA is #11 in percentage of income collected, though it does have the highest marginal rate. It's important to keep in mind that CA's tax burden is more progressively allocated than most other states. If you're middle-class, your tax burden in CA is about the same as someone in TX or FL. If you're poor, CA is cheaper. If you're rich, CA is more.

#1 in lowest in adult literacy rates

#6, not #1. LA, NM, MI, TX and NV are numbers 1-5. Well, that's "average literacy score". If you want to look at percent with literacy skills at or below PIAAC level 1, then CA is in a three-way tie for #2. #1 is NM, #2-4 are CA, TX and MI. Either way not, #1.

Personally, I wouldn't want to live in CA, mostly because of their ridiculous gun laws, but it's a pretty decent place to live by most measures. It's best if you're highly-educated and highly-skilled, because while it costs a lot to live there, you can also make a lot of money.

Comment Re:High price. (Score 1) 34

$899 to start. Enjoy your oligarch tax.

Jesus. Hard to believe Pixel started out as a cheaper Android option.

You're thinking of Nexus. Even by the end of the Nexus era, Google had shifted towards the flagship device market. Pixels have always been aimed at the flagship market.

If you want a cheaper option, look at the Pixel "A" series devices. They launch in the spring and generally have the prior year's CPU, less RAM, cheaper cameras and more plasticky build quality, but the prices are quite a bit lower. They still offer the same seven years of OS updates, though.

Comment Hotter nights (Score 5, Informative) 109

I live in a "high desert" region, in the mountains in northern Utah. Years ago I built a really nifty semi-passive cooling system for my house, which relies on the fact that even though the days get quite hot in the summer (~100F), as soon as the sun goes down the temperature drops, generally down to the low 60s, sometimes the low 50s or even 40s. Or at least it used to.

When I had to replace my HVAC system 10 years ago, I had the installers add an extra 8-inch vent pipe to the roof that comes down into the HVAC room and connects into the air return. Into this pipe I inserted an inline electrically-controlled baffle. I also installed a high-volume fan, the type used in greenhouses for plant ventilation, in the ceiling of my laundry room. It pushes air from the house into the attic, creating negative pressure in the house. When I open the baffle on the roof vent and turn on the HVAC fan and the attic fan, the effect is to draw air from the roof (from outside) and to push it through the HVAC system to my entire house, and to draw hot air near the ceiling and push it up into the attic (which is well-ventilated to the outdoors).

I then designed and built a set of ESP32-based microcontrollers, one each to control the vent baffle, the attic fan and a thermocouple that is installed in the roof vent, near the top, and I wrote some software that runs on an RPi and talks to the microcontrollers (via Wifi) and my smart thermostat (via its API). During summer nights, whenever the exterior temperature falls below the interior temperature and the weather forecast says the next day will be over 70F, the RPi turns on the fans and opens the baffle, drawing cool air into the house all night long.

In past years, most mornings I woke up to a house temperature in the mid-60s, and not just the air temperature; most of the house's thermal mass, especially that large amount of ceramic tile on the floors, had cooled to that level. Outside temperatures typically reach 80F by 10 AM, 90F by noon and 100F by midafternoon, but when the house starts at 65F in the morning, it typically takes until 4PM to reach 75F, at which point the AC has to begin working to maintain that temperature. The AC has to work a bit (not much) until maybe 9 PM when the exterior temperature falls. So vast majority of my summer cooling is done by running a couple of fans at night. If we were willing to accept 80F in the house, the AC might often not be needed at all.

Not this year.

This year, nighttime temperatures rarely fall below 70F. My system rarely kicks the fans on until about 4 AM, and even then there isn't much cooling going on because the temperature differential isn't large enough... and even when the house does cool a bit, it only cools the air. It's not cold enough long enough to significantly cool the tile and other thermal mass components. My AC sometimes runs during the night, consistently starts running by 10 AM and runs off and on all day, every day. I've adjusted the thermostat to 78F and I'm considering going to 80F, though I probably won't because my wife would complain.

Also, half of my state is on fire. Last night I disabled the system because there's a 15,000-acre wildfire 10 miles from my house, and if the system ran it would have pumped smoke into the house.

Of course, all of this is ultimately only an inconvenience to me. I can afford to run the AC all day every day if I have to. Not cooling down at night is a real problem for those who don't have the resources I do.

Comment Re: Tap A to disbelieve (Score 1) 77

IE: The 1 billion user stat is ONLY counting "people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live". Y'all don't seem to be reading past the first half of sentences.

You just quoted the relevant part that proves you're wrong again, I used emphasis to denote it since you don't seem to be able to figure out which partr it is. The claim upthread was that it was only connections from the app, not that it was only connections to the app or gemini website. If you go looking for Gemini on the web, not "AI Mode" from search results but at gemini.google.com, that also counts. You don't seem to be reading past the first half of sentences. What's fucking pathetic is that you got upmodded for it by someone else who also didn't read the thread. People like you are why post counts rarely break 100 around here any more.

Your original comment, at the top of the thread was:

I can believe it if and only if they are counting people who went to Google search, got a shit AI search result, and then told the AI it was shit

Are you claiming that this original belief is correct? Or have you admitted it's not, and are now discussing the other claim that it was "only app users"? If the latter, you're correct. If you're still maintaining that it must include people who submitted followup question so the AI result (or just "told the AI it was shit"), then you're incorrect.

Comment Re:More evidence we made the right decision (Score 1) 175

This is why when people say the market decides they are wrong. If you can't sway a companies positions or politics by refusing to shop there then there is no way the market decides anything.

The problem with the above is that you are mistaking "yourself" for "the market."

"Everyone isn't doing what I want them to, obviously 'the market' is broken."

Comment Re:Makes no sense (Score 1) 175

This is absurd on so many levels.

To start with, it's not like the lawsuit has anything to do with what state they're based in. The California AG happens to be leading it, but it's a coalition of 12 states. It's not as if they could escape the suit by moving to another state. This is purely a pressure tactic, nothing more.

I believe they can. States can only sue companies that operate in their state. If Paramount moves to a state that isn't in that coalition, the other 12 will have a difficult time collecting.

Actually moving would be incredibly expensive. Build entirely new studios. Relocate all their employees. Lose a whole lot of employees who don't want to relocate.

And exactly who's going to employ all those who refuse to move? California unemployment isn't exactly stellar these days.

And anywhere else they moved to would be a worse place. They're located in Los Angeles because that's the heart of the film industry. That's where the workers are. That's where all the other companies that support the industry are. Trying to operate in Georgia or Tennessee would be much harder for them.

Your information is...dated. There are thriving film industries in Georgia, for example. It got so good California got scared of it. Granted, things have scaled back a bit in recent years, but that's tracking the overall decline of the film industry. LA is even worse.

Even if they somehow decided it made sense to move, that's not a decision you make quickly or lightly. It would take long and careful planning to choose a new location and prepare for the move. But here he is, saying they're going to start moving in less than two months, and he hasn't even decided what state to move to. Is anyone really supposed to take this seriously?

Please, don't take it seriously. Then, when it happens, it'll be far more shocking.

If in spite of everything he really tries to go through with this, expect a shareholder lawsuit and calls for the board to fire him. But he'd have to be crazy to really do it.

Shareholders have this odd habit of wanting their CEO to do things that increase the profitability of the company. Given how many businesses are fleeing the anti-business climate of California for Florida, Texas, and other business-friendly states -- and thriving in those new states -- they might just give him a raise.

Comment Re: drop in the bucket (Score 1, Insightful) 175

Why do you people have so many weird fantasies about California? Obsessed much? It's fucking weird, dude.

No state has ever gone bankrupt. California's economy is the fourth largest in the world.

Take your meds. Reconnect with reality.

And yet, with all that economy, they still can't make budget

One could be forgiven for saying they can't afford to lose a single dollar of potential tax revenue.

Comment Re:Excuses sound a little... fishy? (Score 1) 123

I had to look up the rules for larger "mandatory" vessels... and the result surprised me. Large vessels are required to have VHF radios and maintain a watch, but not on channel 16! They're required to maintain a watch on two channels, the bridge-to-bridge channel, 13, and the Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) channel, which varies from location to location. I guess the theory is that if there are distress signals that the vessel needs to respond to, they'll be routed to the VTS channel by the Coast Guard.

Either way, it sounds like Zuck's crew wasn't maintaining the required radio watch.

If they were monitoring the Coast Guard VTS channel and the boat that came to help was monitoring channel 16, the latter could easily have arrived before the Coast Guard forwarded the request to the VTS channel.

So I would say it is at least somewhat plausible, but only if his yacht falls into that larger vessel category.

So... I dug some more.

Yes, his vessels (both of them, the yacht and its tender) fall into the large vessel category but Frederick Sound has no VTS, so both were legally obligated to be listening on channel 13 and channel 16. And large vessels aren't allowed to use one dual-channel radio like small vessels do (mine does!); they have to have two separate radios monitored by two separate people. This isn't because dual-channel radios are unreliable, but because they don't want the crewman who's using one radio to communicate to miss messages on the other channel due to task loading. It's about keeping the two crewmen unencumbered enough to effectively monitor both.

I've never learned much about radio requirements of large vessels, so this was interesting :-)

Comment Re:potentially criminal act (Score 1) 123

And the BS about being on a different channel. You are expected monitor VHF channel 16.

Large vessels aren't required to monitor 16, at least when in an area with an active Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) operation.. They are required to monitor 13 (the bridge-to-bridge channel) and the VTS channel (the frequency varies; it's never channel 16). But if the Coast Guard was calling them they'd be calling on the VTS channel, which Zuck's crew should have been monitoring.

So, you're right in substance, just not about the particular channel.

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