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Asvarduil Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
9y
16,112
Subscriptor
shawnce said:
4 laws is all you need I thought
To paraphrase something someone said in the Wacky Pony Lounge:
We understand neither natural intelligence nor natural stupidity. Our efforts to artificially recreate either of those things can only go so well. //
Bongle Ars Praefectus
12y
3,516
Subscriptor++
gmerrick said:
Can we come up with another word for this. Clearly these constructs are not Artificial Intelligence in any sense of the word. Smart Frames or some other phrase would be better. It's like Tesla continuing to call their self driving software autopilot.
The New Yorker had a good essay yesterday arguing that you can consider them extremely lossy, extremely advanced all-text compressions of their training set. They do their best to reproduce things that look like their training set, sometimes successfully!
I hadn't really thought much about lossy text compression before because it kinda feels useless to not be sure you got the words back that you put in. But these are very fancy lossy text compressors and feel a decent bit more useful.
But the good news is that Microsoft appears to be backing away from GDI, and its “Xandr” ad system will no longer be using the GDI blacklist to cut off sites.
The Microsoft-owned Xandr, a major advertising company, previously abided by a secret blacklist of conservative news compiled by the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups. Now, as Microsoft appears to be taking steps to distance itself from GDI , the company has, for the time being, deleted flags such as “false/misleading” and “reprehensible/offensive” for right-leaning websites, data show.
“I just checked in Xandr’s platform again and can confirm that all rejection flags have been removed from domains,” a senior executive in the ad industry, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, told the Washington Examiner.
Xandr had labeled 39 conservative domains as, overwhelmingly, “false/misleading,” the Washington Examiner reported on Friday. Townhall, a website under a Christian publisher called Salem Media Group, was flagged as “reprehensible/offensive.”
If you treat grocery shopping like a chore, all you will notice are the bruised apples, long lines, grim yellow lighting, and bitter chill of the frozen aisle.
But a grocery store is only as tedious as you make it. Disneyland also has long lines and a hellscape parking lot, but you probably don't treat your visit like a chore — you go in wide-eyed and open to the magic.
Think about it. Your grocery store is a place made up of fresh fruit, birthday balloons, Skittles, live lobsters, flower arrangements, and hot-n-ready fried chicken. It's kind of the perfect place for a date. //
You can learn a lot about someone from what they add to the shopping cart. Does your date consider a protein bar to be a treat? Do they opt for the generic cookies or scoff at anything below the Milano shelf? Do they pair an energy drink with a can of spray cheese? This information can save you a lot of time sifting through potential partners. //
But the most important information that you can glean from a grocery store date is whether this person is willing to bring their energy and excitement to something very ordinary.
Dr. Tamitha Skov
@TamithaSkov
·
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Talk about Polar Vortex! Material from a northern prominence just broke away from the main filament & is now circulating in a massive polar vortex around the north pole of our Star. Implications for understanding the Sun's atmospheric dynamics above 55° here cannot be overstated! //
Our star is ramping up its activity, getting rowdier with sunspot and flare activity. It has flared every day this year so far, and it spat out several X-class and M-class flares in January 2023, the biggest and second-biggest eruptions the Sun is capable of.
This is nothing to be alarmed about. The Sun undergoes activity cycles every 11 or so years, from relatively quiet and peaceful, to absolutely rambunctious.
These cycles coincide with fluctuations in the solar magnetic field. When the magnetic field is at its weakest at the poles, the Sun’s magnetic poles switch places, and the polarity of the magnetic field reverses. This is when the Sun is at its most active, known as solar maximum.
We’re right on the cusp of solar maximum. Because the Sun is so enigmatic and difficult to predict, we don’t know precisely when the polarity reversal will occur (scientists can usually only make a ruling after the event), but we do know a rough ballpark: Our current predictions place it in July 2025. //
georgfelis | February 12, 2023 at 3:41 pm
The last words of humanity will be some solar scientist saying “That looks interesting.”
The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology eBook : Shippey, Tom
Dan Lawler
4.0 out of 5 starsVerified Purchase
Was the Way to Middle Earth Shut?
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 8, 2022
Author Tom Shippey demonstrates how the Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion legendarium grew from Tolkien’s deep dive into the search for original meaning associated with Old English words, fragments and stories touching on the subject of Faerie. As a fellow philologist, Shippey is uniquely qualified for the task; he has held the same chair in language at Oxford that Tolkien once had, and the two are certainly rare birds of a feather. Shippey examines Tolkien’s personal motivations in storytelling and the value he placed on fairy tales, including LOTR.
What is fascinating, and worthy of a book itself, is Shippey’s theory in chapters 8 and 9 that, as Tolkien aged, he became increasingly despondent over whether his stories bore the “inner consistency of reality” which, by Tolkien’s reckoning, was the singular quality that justified the immense time and effort he had devoted to writing fantasies at the expense of his professional career.
Tolkien’s metaphysics of storytelling are set out in the essay On Fairy Stories (1939) and the follow-up tale Leaf by Niggle (1943) which illustrated the principles in story form. The two papers presented as optimistic a view of storytelling in particular, and art in general, as any author or artist could ever hope for. Literature and art had the capacity to convey other-worldly truth because man, though fallen in nature, still possessed a capacity to discern and communicate at least some splintered fragments of that truth. Because God is Creator, humans made in His image are sub-creators whose works, if properly done, can possess eternal value. Indeed, the author/artist may hope to find a representation of their earthly work that was only seen in part and partially enjoyed here but in the world to come seen in full and fully enjoyed throughout eternity.
Shippey says of Tolkien that “by the 1960s he was not so sure” of his theory of sub-creation. (Location 5247.) That is no loss to Shippey as he believes Tolkien's works “keep their own purely literary justification; the theory of ‘sub-creation’ is not needed.” Id. But it was otherwise for Tolkien himself as the ideas underlying sub-creation were the only basis by which fantasy was worthwhile and meaningful, and distinguished from mere escapism. Two of those ideas were the inner consistency of reality and eucatastrophe.
In On Fairy Stories, Tolkien created the term eucatastrophe to describe the universally desired joy of the happy ending “or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous ‘turn’ … which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well…. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and insofar as evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.” It is this peculiar quality of joy that infuses good fantasy with the inner consistency of reality, providing “a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.”
For Tolkien, without this hope, joy and truth, there was no escape from the nihilism of universal final defeat. Yet Shippey finds it absent in Tolkien’s later writings: “For Tolkien there was no eucatastrophe” and “the sense of age and exclusion seems to have grown on him more and more strongly.” Loc. 5553. Tolkien came to doubt his theory of sub-creation and “the legitimacy of his own mental wanderings.” Loc. 5239. According to Shippey, Tolkien “asked more than he had a right to” and all hopes for a supernatural guarantee “are bound to be disappointed.” Loc. 5247.
Shippey’s conclusions are certainly shaped in part by his own skepticism. Tolkien scholar Joseph Pearce, who is acquainted with Shippey, said he is not a Christian and “conceded readily that he did not fully understand the religious and theological aspects of [Tolkien’s] work but most certainly did not dismiss it or deride it.” Still, it is true, as Shippey elaborates, that Tolkien’s later poems and short stories lack the joyful turn of the eucatastrophe, and end with the protagonists being denied access to the Perilous Realm of Faerie, returning with melancholy to the ordinariness of their everyday lives. Shippey concludes from this that Tolkien “no longer imagined himself rejoining his own creations after death, like Niggle” and “he felt they were lost….” Loc. 5247.
Shippey does not address the cause of Tolkien’s apparent disillusionment. Perhaps, given his own predispositions, Shippey simply attributed it to the man growing older and wiser. But without the theory of sub-creation, or an equivalent, there really is nothing beyond the circles of this world except a universal final defeat that awaits all. Tolkien could not have fallen that far, but there must have been something underlying the ominous change in tone of his later works. Its worth pursuing.
The book presents much to think about. Also, the word-craft on the philological side is superb and provides many surprises and delights. In addition, Shippey’s droll and deadly rebuttals to Tolkien’s snobbish literary critics are especially satisfying. Definitely a good read.
In appearances on two Sunday talk shows, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) said that China sending a high-altitude spy balloon across the continental United States “was an act of espionage in plain sight” and revealed that the balloon had a greater capability than satellites to gather and collect imagery, and left open the possibility that these signals and images were still transmitted to Beijing even though US intelligence officials claim that they “mitigated” the damage.
In case anyone is interested, I have developed a web app to create .edl files and modified / filtered (family friendly) subtitle files.
Regarding the creation of .edl files:
2 .edl files are created.
- One is the regular "ready to use" .edl file. This is a bit different from the ones we may be used to seeing from the "Open Beta - Mute Profanity" Kodi plugin.
- There is no preamble of **** which was causing certain versions of kodi to skip the .edl file. (and thus not work)
The "Open Beta - Mute Profanity" .edl file only listed the word that was skipped which sometimes made it hard to determine if it was an "appropriate" skip or not. This one will list the phrase so that the word can be seen in context and thus the decision of whether to include the skip or not is easier to make - The other edl file created here is a "testing" edl. BIG THANKS to @MovieCleanup for this idea!!! (See his post here). He brilliantly created a windows script that would create a testing edl from the regular edl file on your computer. I decided to include the creation of a similar testing edl file (through a different process) automatically at the same time as the regular .edl file creation.
- When you want to use the "Testing" .edl file, the file name needs to be renamed by removing the "TESTING" text and thus match the movie file (and thus the regular .edl will need to be temporarily renamed or moved out of the folder)
- When watching the movie in kodi, The Testing .edl file will have kodi skip the movie to 5 seconds before and a few seconds after every "mute" / filtered word. This way, you can "test" the timing of the filters as sometimes the subtitles don't exactly match up with the dialogue. Adjustments can thus be made to the timing of the filter. (Obviously the timing adjustments will need to be made in the regular .EDL file as well!!)
- There is an option to filter ALL profanities (STRICT) or to not filter a list of a few words. (I could build this out further, not sure yet.)
Time is VLC Extension that displays running time on the screen in a playing video.
(Extension script "time_ext.lua" + Interface script "time_intf.lua")
Features:
- supported tags: [E], [Efps], [D], [R], [T], [O], [P], [n], [_];
- 9 possible positions on the screen;
- elapsed time with milliseconds;
- playback speed rate taken into account for duration time;
A script to turn Kodi with TVHeadend into a fully automated DVR
Turn your system into a fully automated TV recorder. It's supposed to just work without further interaction with the end users (wife and kids). In fact they should not even notice anything is happening in the background. The system should just silently do it's task, record all the favorite series and movies, remove all the advertising junk, convert everything to a decently compressed format and cleanly add every recording to the movie or series library.
For each of these tasks there's good open source software available. But it is not just a simple download and run. Most needs to be compiled from source and the documentation is incomplete and scattered around the web. Nothing for a beginner at least. Also you have to manually run it on each recorded video. That's very inconvenient and absolutely not acceptable for a family box.
Follow the steps below to set up the necessary software and install a little script to do all the processing. When it's done, you just choose what to record and let the system do all the work for you.
In 2022, SpaceX launched 61 missions into orbit, breaking the company’s previous record of 31 missions set in 2021. So far in 2023, the company is on pace to break its own record again. Based on the launch cadence achieved in January and early February, SpaceX could easily pass the 80-launch mark this year. //
With the launch of Starlink Group 5-4, liftoff occurred five days, three hours, and 38 minutes after the Amazonas Nexus mission. This breaks SpaceX’s previous pad turnaround record which was also set at SLC-40, with just five days, nine hours, and 28 minutes between Hotbird-13F and Starlink Group 4-36 in October 2022.
The 29-year-old defected from North Korea as a young teen, only to be human-trafficked in China. In 2014, she became one of just 200 North Koreans to live in the United States — and, as of last year, is an American citizen.
Now, three years after she graduated from Columbia with a degree in human rights, Park is raising alarm bells about America’s cancel culture and woke ideology.
In her book “While Time Remains,” out February 14, Park writes how she made it all the way to the United States only to find some of the same encroachments on freedom that she thought she left behind in North Korea — from identity politics and victim mentality to elite hypocrisy.
“I escaped hell on earth and walked across the desert in search of freedom, and found it,” she writes. “I don’t want anything bad ever to happen to my new home … I want us — need us — to keep the darkness at bay.”
She implores readers: “I need your help to save our country, while time remains.” //
In the first five years of her life, an estimated 3.5 million North Koreans died of starvation. Park recalls hunting for cockroaches on the way to school to quell her hunger — even as the Kim’s regime banned the words “famine” and “hunger.”
IIRC, Webb’s images first appeared on or about the same day as Gus Fring’s Double was revealed on Better Call Saul. Some clever person combined the two events to create a picture of the Double titled Hubble Telecope: and a picture of Gus titled Webb Telescope:. A case of 1 + 1 > 2, IMHO
I had a Psychology prof at Oberlin whose area of expertise was surveys, and he made the statement that any reasonably competent person in that field could create a survey which captured accurate data, but the really good people could use it to manipulate a person’s views as a product of taking the survey. This was perfectly portrayed by Sir Humphrey on Yes, Prime Minister who showed that people who either supported or were against National Service could be persuaded to have the opposite opinion after answering a few questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks&t=10s
Just one example of why this show is timeless.
It is evidence that the move to use artificial intelligence chatbots like this to provide results for web searches is happening too fast, says Carissa Véliz at the University of Oxford. “The possibilities for creating misinformation on a mass scale are huge,” she says.
…Véliz says the error, and the way it slipped through the system, is a prescient example of the danger of relying on AI models when accuracy is important.
“It perfectly shows the most important weakness of statistical systems. These systems are designed to give plausible answers, depending on statistical analysis – they’re not designed to give out truthful answers,” she says.
Twice a day, every day of the year, weather balloons are released simultaneously from almost 900 locations worldwide! This includes 92 released by the National Weather Service in the US and its territories. The balloon flights last for around 2 hours, can drift as far as 125 miles away, and rise up to over 100,000 ft. (about 20 miles) in the atmosphere! //
A parachute, attached to the end of the balloon, allows the radiosonde to fall slowly to the ground at speeds less than 22 mph after the balloon bursts. Each radiosonde contains a mailing bag and instructions on what to do if you find one. About 20% of the 75,000 radiosondes sent up each year in the US are found and returned. //
Weather balloons are the primary source of data above the ground. They provide valuable input for computer forecast models, local data for meteorologists to make forecasts and predict storms, and data for research. Computer forecast models which use weather balloon data are used by all forecasters worldwide, from National Weather Service meteorologists to your local TV weatherman! Without this information, accurate forecasts beyond a few hours would be almost impossible!
A frosty Comet ZTF (C/2022 E3) joins snow-covered Mount Etna in Sicily on January 24, 2023. This scene is exactly how photographer Dario Giannobile saw it through a 300-mm focal-length lens, but to make the comet pop he composited the foreground image with 27 tracked time exposures. The mountain is an active volcano as evidenced by smoke billowing from fumaroles. Comet ZTF exhibits both a dust tail (pointing upward) and a fainter antitail extending in the opposite direction.
Dario Giannobile
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/understanding-the-tails-of-comet-ztf-c-2022-e3/
We explore Comet ZTF’s remarkable trio of tails and share the latest news and photos.
In 2004, ASHRAE (the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers) recommended an operating temperature range from 20°C to 25°C. In 2008, the society went further, suggesting that temperatures could be raised to 27°C.
Following that, the society issued Revision A1, which raised the limit to 32°C (89.6°F) depending on conditions.
This was not an idle whim. ASHRAE engineers said that higher temperatures would have little effect on the lifetime of components, but would offer significant energy savings.
Figures from the US General Services Administration suggested that data centers could save four percent of their total energy, for every degree they allowed the temperature to climb. //
Facebook quickly found it could go beyond the ASHRAE guidelines. At its Prineville and Forest City data centers, they raised the server temperatures to 29.4°C, and found no ill effects. //
Google went up to 26.6°C, and Joe Kava, then vice president of data centers, said the move was working: “Google runs data centers warmer than most because it helps efficiency.”
Intel went furthest. For ten months in 2008, the chip giant took 900 servers, and ran half of them in a traditionally cooled data center, while the other 450 were given no external cooling. The server temperatures went up to 33.3°C (92°F) at times.
At the end of the ten months, the chip giant compared those servers with another 450 which had been run in a traditional air-conditioned environment. The 450 hot servers had saved some 67 percent of the power budget.
In this higher-temperature test, Intel actually found a measurable increase in failure. Amongst the hot servers, two percent more failed. But that failure rate may have had nothing to do with the temperature - the 450 servers under test also had no air filtration or humidity control, so the small increase in failure rate may have been due to dust and condensation.
The federal government’s onerous regulations on HSAs have limited their availability to all but the luckiest American workers.