Fossil fuels are globally subsidised to the tune of $11 million every minute, according to the International Monetary Fund. That money has to come from somewhere, and there's no way in hell a billionaire is subsidising some soccer mum's SUV. Which mean that the money has to come out of taxes.

So it's not particularly cheap, net. It's just that the total cost is diffused across the food you buy, the house you own, the car tags, the money you earn. All of these different taxes contribute some percentage of the cost of the coal and oil. However, collecting and distributing the money isn't free, which means that you're actually paying MORE than you would if you were paying honestly.

Still, if people want to pay more and get less, and die young as a result, that's really their business. Of course, they're making other people die young, too, but that's a democracy for you.

It wouldn't be so bad, but there are hardly any lumberjacks in the UK.

*runs away and hides from an irate mob of Monty Python fans

Seriously, it very much depends on the area. Rugby, a town-borderline-city, has fewer pubs than the Marple/Mellor collection of villages up in t' norf. This is mostly because Rugby is a run-down dump with a dying town centre and hardly anything left in it, whereas Marple (although it lost its engineering back in the 60s) is a major commuter/retirement town with just enough rational people to keep the businesses vibrant and alive.

And that's what keeps pubs open. Not the economy, but the attitude.

As music evolves, it has tended to become simpler, more repetitive, less original, and basically BORING AS ALL F.

(And those who know me on Slashdot, I think this is the third time I've used that sort of language since the site came into operation, which should tell you something about just how bad modern music is.)

If the only music out there is, honestly, turgid, then having it AI-generated simply eliminates the brain-damage induced by having to memorise and play these excuses for songs.

You cannot blame people for skipping the middleman when the middleman honestly doesn't do any better of a job.

Yeah, I fully understand, not everyone wants to listen to 22-minute metal anthems about the universe (even if it does feature Richard Dawkins and fireworks), or indeed 18 minute songs about exploding air balloons, even if I am of the personal opinion that said people should seek help. And people are going to like what they like.

But if you're going to object to AI music, then the only way that's ever going to work is if you reverse the trend and make songs that have sophistication that AI cannot match.

Personally, I have no problem with electronic music or even music wholly manufactured through complex electronics, and regard Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram as polymath geniuses that really should have been respected in their lifetimes, but I'd also argue that they actually made an effort to do precisely what I'm describing. They did not, as a rule, make stuff that was simple, unless ordered by higher-ups to do so. It would not be hard to mix their techniques with modern synthesiser ideas and generative systems to produce much more sophisticated music of decent quality.

The Beatles were capable of producing an album over a weekend.

If they'd had the inclination (and assorted supplies best left undiscussed), they were more than capable of churning out 52 albums a year. Whilst we must be grateful for small mercies (it would likely have had an impact on quality), I would argue that the 60s were not short of new music.

I'm tempted to do a recompilation of an old MCC distribution, just to mess with people now. :P (MCC was the very very first Linux distro.)

I found a few that are more recent than the one I saw.

https://portlandpress.com/bioc...
https://royalsocietypublishing...
https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1729...

According to the researchers involved (I emailed them directly), the difference is due to retrotransponsons moving the genes into a different order rather than a simple mosaic effect.

But the non-coding regions do seem to be metadata used to interpret and regulate genes, and the interpretation of genes is impacted by placement (the brain has no two neurons with the same genome - a completely pointless mechanism that is expensive on energy and carries high risk unless there's an actual benefit from it).

As a result, we cannot assume mutations in the non-coding regions are "safe". The best I'd feel comfortable with is "the effects don't appear to be harmful so far, and there doesn't seem to be any immediate health impact". Those with a better understanding of generics are welcome to correct me on this, but I think it wisest to be conservative on both optimism and pessimism.

You are absolutely right, but I will continue to say "please" and "thank you" to AI bots, just on the off-chance one of them is actually a dalek pretending to be an AI.

When Admiral John Poyndexter originally proposed a stock market for violence, terrorism, and conflicts, as a means to "predict" them, absolutely everyone pointed out that you'd get the equivalent of insider trading by terrorists, warlords, and psychopaths. Which is precisely what we're seeing.

This is why, when I use AIs, I try to use 5 or 6 that operate in sufficiently distinct ways and are trained by different people with different data sets. If all of them agree, when instructed specifically to find defects, that something is valid/good, then I can be reasonably confident that this conclusion isn't a result of a specific defect in training or process but has some level of path-independence.

This does NOT mean that the conclusion actually is correct, it just means that a NN will likely reach the conclusion that it is regardless of any of the mechanisms involved.

I have developed 5 different engineering projects this way. None of them have actually been examined by a real engineer yet. I would love to have a real engineer look at them, precisely because this will give you detailed insights into what an AI system actually can do and what it can't.

You are absolutely right, and the likely response by said officials will be "oops, have a scandal to divert your attention".

And Ukraine is only a problem area because those same officials don't take anything seriously unless it impacts their promotion prospects.

*has terrifying flashbacks to the recentish Celestial Toymaker episode.

If that were meaningful, studies wouldn't show that hedge fund managers only make a profit around 1/3 of the time. If the people who actually work in the industry and know every aspect of it better than I know machine code or C still can't get anything useful out of their work 2/3rds of the time, then the theory simply isn't important.

Not an expert in this area. But apparently it is a thing. Funnily enough the feature they are worried about is actually a security attack... ha ha. Welp, this cat is out of the bag unfortunately, so now just the criminals will have it.
1. Foice - Generate voice based on an image as an attack on voiceprint systems
https://www.usenix.org/system/...
2. Speech2Face - the reverse process. https://speech2face.github.io/
3. Predict physical attributes from voice with ML
https://www.researchgate.net/p...