If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.
I wonder what is the general use for the Mac Mini, MacBook Air, iMac, and MacBook Pro? People generally seem to do all the lightweight stuff like social media consumption on their phones; and desktops/laptops are used for the more heavy-weight stuff. The only reason I’ve ever used a Mac was for IOS development.
I was looking at notebooks at Walmart the other day, and I was amazed that they almost all had less or the same amount of RAM as my phone.
I think SSDs are also soldered to the mainboard on most apple products.
The Earth has carrying capacity limits. I think we’re probably over that, temporarily, mostly because of fossil fuels. We turn fossil fuels into energy and food, degrading that environment and decreasing the Earth’s carrying capacity at the same time. It’s like we’re playing a game of Jinga to push population higher at the expense of our foundation.
What happens when rich nations become poorer? The world’s current predominant economic system cannot function without growth. What will the elites do to maintain the status quo? Perhaps push for banning abortion, contraceptives, and taking away women’s rights and autonomy?
Where I live, I would still need to pay for a VPN to use torrents. I’ve been banned from an ISP before for torrenting (thankfully, I had multiple ISPs available for me).
At the moment, I just “pay” legally because I get a few “free” streaming plans from my mobile provider and ISP. Occasionally, I just use a free streaming site if I really want to watch something that’s not available to me. Every once in a while, I try anonymous p2p such as Tribler or torrenting over I2P, but it’s still extremely slow, unfortunately. I’ve never used Usenet, but I think it’s about the same price as a VPN or seedbox would be?
It’s also trained on data people reasonably expected would be private (private github repos, Adobe creative cloud, etc). Even if it was just public data, it can still be dangerous. I.e. It could be possible to give an LLM a prompt like, “give me a list of climate activists, their addresses, and their employers” if it was trained on this data or was good at “browsing” on its own. That’s currently not possible due to the guardrails on most models, and I’m guessing they try to avoid training on personal data that’s public, but a government agency could make an LLM without these guardrails. That data could be public, but would take a person quite a bit of work to track down compared to the ease and efficiency of just asking an LLM.
I use LLMs just about every day. It’s better than web-search for certain things, and is useful for some coding tasks. I think they’re over-hyped by some people, but they are useful.
Most CEOs are also conmen and not any smarter. It’s mostly just a nepotism racket at the executive level.
Decarboxylation happens when heat is applied (smoking or vaping, for example), turning THCA into delta-9 THC.
Delta-9 gummies are the real-deal. I can’t tell the difference between THCA flower and regular flower (I’m pretty sure it’s just uncured bud). They also make THCA concentrates.
A lot of the “elites” (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological “progress,” because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable “progress,” which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I’ve seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of “intelligence.” I dunno if they’ve fallen for their own grift or not, but it’s obviously a very convenient belief for them.
Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.
I’ve never heard of or had a HVAC “tune-up.” If it’s a standard air-to-air heat pump, you likely do not need one. You just need to change or clean the filters regularly, and maybe clean the coils once a year at most. I’m guessing that’s what the mean by “tune-up?” Modern cars do not need “tune-ups” either.
you can buy a house even on a median salary or lower.
I think think this very regionally dependant. Median household income and house cost in Austin, for example, is ~$70k and ~$650k, respectively. I grew up in a very small rural town, very far from any cities, and even though houses were much cheaper, they were still unaffordable to most people unless they could land one of the few available union jobs (most jobs available were in manufacturing and paid near minimum wage).
Things may be getting better, slightly, for the median person, but inequality is soaring, and a more dangerous problem IMO. Money is power, so inequality is a direct threat to democracy. It’s also inequality, not poverty, that has the largest effect on crime rates, and social decohesion in general.
Yeah, that’s my thinking as well. All these billionaires seem to be becoming doomsday preppers (Zuck, Altman, etc).
After reading about “effective accelerationism,” which many of these people seem to subscribe to, I think they’re worried “technocapitalism” and AI will cause a collapse of society. I.e. they’re purposely funding and promoting projects they think will cause a societal collapse. It’s a really wierd cult-like ideology and worldview. I think they’ve fallen for their own grifts.
But yeah, I’m personally more worried about the destruction of U.S. institutions (which Trump and Republicans publicly admit they plan to do), and the potential social unrest, federal-state conflict, and economic havoc it may cause.
They wouldn’t against Israel, for the same reasons they wouldn’t against the U.S. if the U.S. did the same. I’m pretty sure the U.S. is violating international law ATM in regards to the border they share with Mexico, and I expect no action will be taken against them.
Nah, Java is alright. All the old complicated “enterprise” community and frameworks gave it a bad reputation. It was designed to be an easier, less bloated C++ (in terms of features/programming paradigms). It’s also executed fairly efficiently. Last time I checked, the same program written in C would typically take 2x the time to complete in Java; whereas it would take 200x the time to complete in Python. Here’s some recent benchmarks: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/fastest/python3-java.html
I haven’t had a chance to try Rust yet, but want to. Interestingly, Rust scores poorly on source-code complexity: https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/how-programs-are-measured.html#source-code
Stuff that is used and immediately disposed of like trash bags, paper towels, and toilet paper. You need to be a little more careful with the cheapest trash bags and toilet paper, but it will still get the job done.
This seems like the most plausible explanation. Only other thing I can think of is they want to develop their own CoPilot (which I’m guessing isn’t available in China due to the U.S. AI restrictions?), and they’re just using their existing infrastructure to gather training data.