That's a more natural way to consider the resonance, certainly. What I was getting at is that if we were using a 7hz tone to explore a big room, we couldn't tell if there was a chicken in there or not. We'd have a hard time sensing an elephant. Let alone exert enough of a force to harm. Because the wave is so much larger that they barely interact.
> Why use an LLM to do something that would take exactly the same amount of time and a lot less energy to just do in something like MS paint?
Can you prove that it'll take same amount of time for someone with
> My photoshop skills are near zero
to replicate the same level of quality as the generated image? From the looks of it, LLM managed to generate pixel perfect (or at least similar) font and probably took a fraction of a minute for the author to generate.
You seriously saying someone should put effort in editing a comic they didn't even cared on editing until they saw someone's comment? And somehow you equate the not putting effort to editing such comic to being fucked and starving?
AI hate sometimes makes people really lose their mind. Doing pointless random shit like this is a legit AI good application. Something that needs no creativity nor intellect to do. Just time. (And, most certainly, more than 10s.)
Two parent comments suggested that a deep level of skill is required to:
1] drag a box around the text and press Delete
2] type some new text in there in a similar handwriting font
The implication is that we're all too stupid and everything is too hard to do even tasks so simple that they take double-digit seconds to accomplish for people with rudimentary computer skill.
We can do things. Saving 5 seconds is going to hurt worse than it helps in the long run... like asking GPT what 2+2 is because you can't figure it out.
“ AI is going to utterly cripple people intellectually and motivationally.
If you can't even do the above ten second process, you may want to make more of an effort before you find yourself utterly fucked and starving.”
This does not sound like intellectual curiosity. Closer to polarized discourse that imho is making us less human.
When someone is not willing to even attempt to do a 30 second task, assumes they can't, asserts they can't, and people chime in to say AI is the only way they can achieve it, it seems worthwhile to point out the consequences.
Should we not be trying to do things?
Is it not in fact harmful to give up early on even such trivial tasks?
What happens when we actually need to do hard things?
I'd like to see metrics on that. But intuitively I'd say AI is faster.
Basically it's opening the tab and typing your thought vs speed running paint.
@sandermvanvliet what was the process and how long do you estimate it took you?
Personally it would take me awhile to find the template, the exact font and get the positioning just right.
I could make a crude one fast, and I've seen many crude versions of this meme. But matching the font is a bit more work, maybe there's a generator for it, but that's not paint nor do I know where it exists.
“Speed running paint”? You mean opening the image and dragging a text box over the existing text, changing the font to comic sans, and typing the text?
There are complicated workflows in Paint, this is not one of them.
Why have you failed though? Is the point to try to deceive people to think that XKCD actually published something else? Why not modify the xkcd one without hinding the fact that you modified it?
Because Nano Banana is better than wasting time for someone who isn't a 10 year veteran of MS Paint arts.
I'm tired of this kind of argument from anti-AI folks.
"Why not pick up a pencil instead?"
What if illustration was never "art"? What if it was always just a rote mechanical skill and the art itself was what the person was trying to communicate?
Maybe the technical aspects don't matter. Maybe it's the message we're conveying, our taste, our curation, our unique lens?
Yes. The art is "take a comic I didn't draw and replace some text." The pro-ai crowd is certainly brimming with artistic ingenuity. So much insight! Thank God they're boiling the oceans for this.
I think this should be true for many things, or at least have a fixed future date at which you re-evaluate $thing
For example with Architecture Decision Records, put a 6 or 12 month expiry on them and evaluate to see if they can be renewed, should be changed or replaced with something that covers new insights.
Unfortunately that seems a very unpopular thing to do so I’ve never seen it work and companies end up with “we have always done it like this” type practices
You cannot usefully change/review architecture decisions in 1 year. The point of architecture is to make the hard decisions that you will regret getting wrong in the future to try to get them right now (often without enough information to make them). If you decide to make a free for all an architecture will emerge that is a mess that you cannot change.
Architecture should not be "we have always done it like this". If you don't write down why though it will become that. Often there are good reasons that things have always been done like that - those reasons may or may not still be valid but if you don't know what they are it is hard to evaluation. More than once I've seen someone rethink a "we have always done it like that" and discover the hard way why they always did it that way.
I've never seen a company with a good way to write down why they do things though. When someone even tries nobody reads those documents.
It really depends on the decision, what was done, and the overall impact. If the decision is to migrate to microservices, a year in it may be reviewed and decided that the work has been far more than anticipated, and is too much for EVERYTHING to be migrated, and the decision changed.
Or it might be an architectural decision to change the hierarchy of some organisational structure. Again, it could be the correct call for the time, but as things evolve over a year, it may not be sufficiant a year later.
A year isn't a bad time to review, and if the decision is just a "yeah, duh, of course we'll continue", then it's a really quick conversation, but at least you're thinking about things.
You can review - but by the time you really know it is too late. If things are going really bad after one year then start over. However often things that will go well long term are having "growing pains" at 1 year and so "staying the course" despite the pain might be the right decision. Until you have a microservices architecture you don't know the pros/cons of it for your system - you can get insight from others, but their system will be different and so will have different problems.
Your org chart should be tweaked every year - as should your architecture. However major changes should not happen often - if at all.
A year is and is not a long time, so it depends on how seasonal the prosu is. New years celebration decorations are at one end of the spectrum, but it turns out a lot of things have a seasonality to them as well.
I've advocated for this as well but called it a lease. We agree to run this for the duration of the lease and agree to determine whether we should extend / re-sign the lease a period of time before the expiration.
Keeps from changing up too often but also gives a conscious evaluation.
It's more important to have people who actively "own" each piece of the infrastructure, and are intimately familiar with it, the rationales, the tradeoffs, etc.
Then when new knowledge/technology/idle cycles come along they can take advantage to update/refine it in sensible ways.
Often the sensible way is "leave it, it works fine". But there's a big difference between arriving at that outcome via ignorance vs. deliberation. Too often management doesn't recognize the difference, but the former as your state of affairs will eventually lead your stuff to rot.
<nods> another of my fave things for expiry dates are regular meetings — never set them to repeat forever. Six months max. That way you have to be intentional about keeping them going & talking about their value (or not ;-)
IIRC Nassim Taleb proposed that every institute (or was it policy?) should come with an expiry dates. In work context there have so many things I thought this applies (meetings, policies, email alerts etc).
- The smell…
Chicken crap is horrible.
Our neighbour has chickens, we have flies. Lots of black flies.
- Bye bye garden…
My dad has two chickens (did I mention the smell?) that free roam and absolutely tear up everything looking for a tasty bite.
- Can’t eat the eggs
This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry.
We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
> - Can’t eat the eggs This isn’t necessarily a chicken problem but mostly a problem with chemical industry. We’ve had a lot of PFOA/PFAS contamination and public health advise says to not eat eggs from backyard chickens
The research done was mid at best. They just went "oh yeah there was huge variance in the hobby chicken PFAS data so we took the average". Most of the hobby eggs had little to no PFAS in them.
Furthermore, because of privacy laws, they weren't allowed to know where the eggs came from. They say they found no correlation between PFAS contaminations in eggs and known high PFAS areas but that's actual bullshit if you can't look at location data.
It's absolutely attrocious they were allowed to publish like this and that no one called them on their bullshit.
Overall, unless you are in a place where you know you have high PFAS concentrations, it's most likely fine? You could send off a few eggs for testing to make sure, that's a 200 euro test or something. Do that once per year just to make sure and you should be OK.
Everywhere that is never tested. How do you know for sure you are on good soil, and that no contaminated soil was used under your house and garden, which no doubt were levelled before construction started?
This includes feed. Commercial animal foods literally contains waste, such as plastic, due to waste food recycling not being required to be unpacked.
Sure, you _can_ control these things, but more often than not, people don't. Semi commercial hobbyists don't have the money.
Purportedly the Netherlands, but the research was badly performed.
KNOWN PFAS contamination was around heavy industry, and yeah, if you live near those regions, maybe don't. Otherwise proceed with scepticism and/or some testing.
Fairly recent research claims that hobby (backyard) chickens tend to have higher PFAS contamination than factory farmed chickens because hobby chickens get the chance to eat (a lot of) rain worms whereas the factory farmed chickens only get commercial food, no live worms. I do agree that location is almost undoubtedly key to PFAS contamination rates.
We used them to manage the garden. It much easier to put down nets/steel wire around problem areas, then it is to clear out weed and insects, and the chicken bring their own fertilizers to the mix. They are also great at managing grass lawns.
There were several lessons that we learned. Chicken will find dry earth to use as a bath. If one do not want that then you need to remove access and solve the underlying need. They will also dig up seeds and eat seedlings, so any fresh worked soil need to be covered/restricted. They also eat some fruits and herbs, but not others.
In term of total work they did save a lot of time and the garden was in much better shape than before.
I also read something saying that roads are one of the biggest sources of microplastics, with tyre wear, and that being next to one (as most suburban houses are) significantly increases the amount in microplastics in foods grown in backyards. I imagine Chickens would be worse as pollutants tend to accumulate as they go up trophic levels.
Though like many discussions about microplastics today, where "higher levels", and what microplastics, cross over into actual health issues is vague.
What hurts adoption here in NL from what I hear (from installers so grain of salt etc etc) is that there aren’t enough people to do installs and then later maintenance.
Having looked at getting a heat pump set up in our house (built in 1902) is that even with the extra insulation we put in, the energy needs of a heat pump are huge which means more electricity is needed and what with congestion happening locally is getting to be a problem to supply all houses with enough oomph to run heat pumps, electric stoves and charging EV’s.
Even with people having solar installations this remains a problem because we’ve had almost three consecutive weeks with heavy cloud cover and fog as well as hardly any wind. So renewable power generation was down across the board.
Fact of the matter is, we adopted many energy hungry solutions without providing the necessary capacity up front.
I worked at a startup (Jedlix) where we built a platform to optimise EV charging specifically to deal with these problems (demand shifting) but there are so many hurdles to get this rolled out at a large enough scale to matter.
Car OEMs don’t provide the necessary APIs, (local)grid companies won’t provide usage data necessary to steer on so billing/compensation becomes impossible removing the incentive for consumers.
It seems so obvious that this would solve a real problem but even though the technology exists it’s not going anywhere. Maddening
Also in NL and I work for a heat pump company - I don't know the specifics but for as long as I've worked here we've never not been hiring heat pump techs. (https://quatt.recruitee.com/)
I actually am hoping that better grid coördination could help a lot with the problem you describe, there's a few companies in the space but I can't think of big ones in NL. In the UK you have Octopus Energy which has effectively made a (virtual) power plant by managing individual assets.
Hey to all you NL people (we're in Den Haag) - I've been researching solar water heaters and they look really promising? I've read they even work in winter. Is that wishful thinking in a country like NL?
If there’s no sun you’re looking at a different energy source which typically means electricity so you’re back to the demand problem when the weather is poor regarding renewable power.
I can't really comment except that when I asked our installers about it they had the perception that solar water heating was "an 80's and 90's thing". I don't know much about it beyond that.
I guess you could look up the insolation values and do the math on how much water you use and how hot it needs to be.
Jedlix had been acquired by Octopus in fact and specifically for the virtual power plant tech + EV integration.
What’s more challenging is that when it comes to EV charging in cities not a lot of people actually have their own charging station and need to use public ones. That means they’re in use all the time and “throttling” them causes availability problems.
One of the challenges would be to get people to charge their cars during the day when there usually is a power surplus (especially with solar when the weather is decent) but that’s a behavioural change that takes time.
Another problem in a densely populated country like the Netherlands is noise pollution by heat pumps. One of my friends has been in a conflict with his neighbour over just that which has cost a lot of time and money and probably can not really be solved entirely as the law is written, the distances between houses and the noise signatures of heat pumps and whatever sound-dampening enclosure they are stuffed in don't meet. This is not a problem where I live (Sweden) since we have way more space and build less densely than in the Netherlands.
Is air-con just that rare? A heat-pump isn’t all that much complicated than a ducted air-con. Here in the US, most HVAC service companies can/will service all types (pure AC, heat pumps, various furnaces, etc).
Mean daily maximum in July and August in Utrecht is 23C/73F (compare to 30C/85F in Chicago and NYC). The Netherlands is further north and a lot more moderated by ocean temperatures - it's kind of like SF in that regard except the entire country has a similar climate so AC is not a cultural expectation.
