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oldandtired commented on After a trillion tons of CO2, the Great Barrier Reef hits record coral cover   joannenova.com.au/2024/06... · Posted by u/bilsbie
JoeAltmaier · 2 years ago
Last time something like this was claimed, it was by stretching a report of limited recovery over small sections into "fully recovered"!

Data or it isn't true. Didn't see any data here. So just another propaganda piece by the pollyanna crowd "there's nothing wrong with the planet, and folks should just quit complaining!"

Oh, here it is. The reefs continue to be in decline with no relief in sight. That 30% is what they've declined to. Not a recovery. Over two thirds destroyed. Periodic bleaching events continue to utterly demolish local ecosystems.

https://www.aims.gov.au/monitoring-great-barrier-reef/gbr-co...

oldandtired · 2 years ago
I have watched this dispute for many decades and the reality is that there is ebb and flow in the lifecycle of such things. The biggest problem is that people do not have sound memories of what has happened in the past.

The Great Barrier Reef is a good example of the dire calls about its impending destruction. As far as the [experts] of James Cook University are concerned, I have serious doubts as to the abilities of the researchers there. Far too much politicing going on.

Because it affects them more, the locals are more involved in caring for such without the interference of the [experts] who make their [expert] claims. The locals know just how silly many of these claims are and are now in the habit of not informing the [experts] so that the actual environments are protected.

oldandtired commented on Hawaii home mistakenly built on Bay Area woman's land to be torn down   sfgate.com/hawaii/article... · Posted by u/Stratoscope
ghaff · 2 years ago
And certainly more minor property line disputes happen all the time--including situations where the infringement probably seems inconsequential relative to the heat it sometimes causes.
oldandtired · 2 years ago
Certainly. My middle son was looking at buying a property in a near by town. He asked me to come an look at it. We had the actual shire plans for the blocks and while looking at the property lines, we measured the actual fence to fence widths. The block was being sold by the owner of an adjoining block and when we measured we found that the fence line had been moved by about 20 to 30 cm. On querying the owner about this, he was somewhat angry that we were questioning where the fence was as he was the one who had it built.

From what I could see, the builders most likely kicked the boundary peg out of the ground and just put it back willy nilly.

As a consequence, I did advise my son to have nothing to do with the property and we did inform the real estate agent of the problem. This would put legal responsibility on the estate agent if it was sold without the boundary line being corrected.

Due diligence is necessary if you are doing this kind of thing.

oldandtired commented on Hawaii home mistakenly built on Bay Area woman's land to be torn down   sfgate.com/hawaii/article... · Posted by u/Stratoscope
oldandtired · 2 years ago
This scenario happens far more often than most people realise, putting up a building on the wrong plot of land. If you are not going to do your due diligence then you will suffer the consequences.

If you build on the wrong plot, the only person to blame is yourself.

oldandtired commented on Beyond velocity and acceleration: jerk, snap and higher derivatives (2016)   iopscience.iop.org/articl... · Posted by u/EndXA
oldandtired · 2 years ago
Here in Victoria (Australia), we commonly see road signs stating that "speed kills" whereas the reality is that it is the jerk that kills.
oldandtired · 2 years ago
I didn't think my play on words would cause such controversy about acceleration and jerk. Mayhaps I should not be making "Dad jokes" here.
oldandtired commented on Beyond velocity and acceleration: jerk, snap and higher derivatives (2016)   iopscience.iop.org/articl... · Posted by u/EndXA
oldandtired · 2 years ago
Here in Victoria (Australia), we commonly see road signs stating that "speed kills" whereas the reality is that it is the jerk that kills.
oldandtired commented on Stupid Slow: The Perceived Speed of Computers   datagubbe.se/stupidslow/... · Posted by u/zdw
oldandtired · 2 years ago
One of the basic causes for slowness is how the underlying language implementation does procedure calls.

Decades ago, I looked at how Microsoft handled procedure calls and returns of data. I found the same problem elsewhere.

The problem was related to copying of data. A single API call could involve (at the time) up to 100's of copy actions of the same value for each subsequent internal call. The actual processing of that data was minimal in the scheme of things.

This has been a problem amongst many others over the decades and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future.

Things that we did as a matter of course when resources were restricted have been dispensed with once those resource limits were exceeded. The lessons have subsequently been forgotten.

oldandtired commented on What can LLMs never do?   strangeloopcanon.com/p/wh... · Posted by u/henrik_w
oldandtired · 2 years ago
Far too many people (including AI researchers themselves) fail to see that all LLMs are actually simple machines. Extremely simple machines that are only mechanically following a relatively simple programming path.

Now before anyone gets too caught up with objecting to this notion, I would seriously suggest that you spend time with observing children from new-born to 2 years.

I have been observing my latest granddaughter sine her birth about 16 months ago and thinking about every public LLM system current;y available.

There is an insight here to be obtained and that insight is in the nature of real intelligence.

On the whole, no-one actually knows what intelligence is or what sentience is or what it means to be cognitively conscious. There is still much research going on and nothing actually definitive has come forth yet. We really are at the beginning in terms of studying these areas.

We can certainly produce some incredible systems, but none of them are intelligent per se. Solutions to certain kinds of problems can be achieved using these systems and there are researchers who are seriously looking at incorporating these systems into CAS and theorem provers. These systems though only provide an augmentation service for a person as does every mechanical system we use

But there is an essential component necessary for the use of all LLMs which many seem to not be cognisant of and that is these systems, to be useful, require humans to be involved.

The questions we have to ask ourselves is: what can we use these systems for and do these uses provide benefits in some way or can these systems be abused by various parties in obtaining control over others?

There are benefits and there are abuses. Can we do better or will we do worse by using them?

oldandtired commented on Gerrymandering Denies Incarcerated People Fair Democratic Representation   truthout.org/articles/ger... · Posted by u/wahnfrieden
oldandtired · 2 years ago
For the duration of their incarceration, why is there an expectation that those incarcerated have a right to vote anyway. Of course there are people who are in prison who shouldn't be and there are those not in prison who should be (including many politicians).

In a relatively ideal (of course there is none) world, those who have basically abused the citizens of an area should not have a say in the politics of that area that then affect the citizens of that area.

Once those incarcerated have paid their dues and served their time, they become eligible to partake again as citizens and should have the same voting rights as anyone else.

oldandtired commented on Ask HN: ChatGPT (LLMs) replacing programmers? Ridiculous    · Posted by u/MichaelRo
oldandtired · 2 years ago
Over 40 years, I have seen many "programmers" who should never been in the business. Some of these were marketed as "guru" programmers. I suppose such idiotic systems like ChatGPT and its ilk could replace some of these.

However, anyone who has had to build the required skills to actively get real work done will probably find that they will not be replaced by such systems in terms of skill replacement.

What is more likely to happen is that the pointy heads in upper management will replace them because of the usual lack of foresight and intelligence on the part of the pointy heads.

So, yes, all sorts of programmers will be replaced by these systems and we shall see the systems produced become more garbage faster than we have already seen.

oldandtired commented on Google Scholar PDF Reader   scholar.googleblog.com/20... · Posted by u/gerroo
felipefar · 2 years ago
I was also unhappy with how reference managers handle annotations. So I rolled my own app (https://getcahier.com), with highlight management integrated in the application. This enables me to extract highlights according to topics, organize them in notes using document elements (like collapsible notes and outlines) and use them to plan more complex arguments. This makes it much easier to read actively.

On the paper organization side, I would also like to find out a better way of doing it. What helps me a lot, from a more methodological perspective, is to categorize books according to time period, school of thoughts, or perspective.

oldandtired · 2 years ago
Doesn't support Linux though or any of the unixes. Looks good though.

u/oldandtired

KarmaCake day585October 13, 2016View Original