nomadpete

Is it possible that Pootin doesn't mind US hitting Iran? After all, according to reports the russian economy is in a bad way. They rely heavily on oil income, which is presently limited by caps on Russian oil prices. Right now, the price of crude is likely to go up bigtime? Would this boost Russian income? I doubt that Donold would do much to enrage his mate Pootin. Just looking for an upside. There always is one but not always obvious.

Whenever I was feeling all alone, stuck in some isolated grubby motel, away from the comforts of home...... I'd rummage through the bedside drawer for anything to read. Alas, the only thing I ever found was a Gideon's Bible. In desperation I'd open it in hope of finding some mental stimulation beyond what the local TV repeater offered. The first pages hold nice, uplifting positive affamations.... then there is The Old Testament. Wow. Lots of heavy rather unscientific stuff about laws controlling what animals shall be sacrificed for what occasions, & when it is time to stone women to death, etc, etc. I guess later on the eight commandments made life easier for the common man (person). All too depressing - small wonder there is so much suicide in the bush. Maybe the book is due for revision again.... Question - is Scripture teaching fact? Whose Scripture? What revision number? Does it come with a change log and was it stored in a code repository so we can track document changes back to confirm the original author(s)?

Listen to what our mate Stephen Fry says about A.I.

Maybe we need a separate thread for Iran.

At what point can we csll a device "autonomous"? At present both sides in the Ukrain/Russia war, A.I. is being used for navigation by attack drones. They are using preprogrammed landscape recognition to recognise their location and guide them to a target. Although at present (as far as we know) they still need a human toget it out of its box an switch it on. From that point it is autonomous - navigating to a (at present) preprogrammed target. At our present rate of computing evolution, it won't be long before it will be feasible to have satellite data constantly monitoring enemy movements and doing target decisions very quickly. In the old days each technological advancement took time to reveal its hazards. This allowed humans to assess and mitigate risks before too many people got wiped out..But with the present rapidity of developments, it is a lot harder to deal with widespread downsides.

All the statements have the caveat "now", and "today", meaning " maybe not ok now". At some stage, either a board of directors, or CEO, or deranged president can declare "ok now". When that day comes I won't trust the first generation of autonomous weapons, say perhaps flocks of autonomous killer drones, to recognise my face as friend-not-foe. Worse still, imagine the money that governments around the world can save when drones can do the work of our police. Autonomous ICE is sure to be trialled in USA first! Once this was just sci fi plots, now it is getting real.

Absolutely agree with that! I love to see innovation, when it works.

OK you got me there. You are obviously more digitally competant than I. However I'd say that the 'upwardly raised middle finger' is unlikely to result in any transport.

But, I recall that is what the experts once said about electronic speech recognition.... and speech synthesis. But I agree with you about human life on Mars.

Nah, that's not digital, unless a thumb is a digit?

At the moment, DJT has declared that Anthropic A.I. is "A radical woke, left company.... The left wing nut jobs at Anthropic..." So DJT has ordered every federal agency and department to immediately cease use of this A.I. immediately. It looks to me like possibly somebody in that company failed to bend the knee. Maybe someone's cheque bounced? A spokesperson for Anthropic made this press release. There is one statement in it that frightens me. Can you pick it? "Statement from Dario Amodei on our discussions with the Department of War Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, makes military decisions. We have never raised objections to particular military operations nor attempted to limit use of our technology in an ad hoc manner. However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now: Mass domestic surveillance. We support the use of AI for lawful foreign intelligence and counterintelligence missions. But using these systems for mass domestic surveillance is incompatible with democratic values. AI-driven mass surveillance presents serious, novel risks to our fundamental liberties. To the extent that such surveillance is currently legal, this is only because the law has not yet caught up with the rapidly growing capabilities of AI. For example, under current law, the government can purchase detailed records of Americans’ movements, web browsing, and associations from public sources without obtaining a warrant, a practice the Intelligence Community has acknowledged raises privacy concerns and that has generated bipartisan opposition in Congress. Powerful AI makes it possible to assemble this scattered, individually innocuous data into a comprehensive picture of any person’s life—automatically and at massive scale. Fully autonomous weapons. Partially autonomous weapons, like those used today in Ukraine, are vital to the defense of democracy. Even fully autonomous weapons (those that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets) may prove critical for our national defense. But today, frontier AI systems are simply not reliable enough to power fully autonomous weapons. We will not knowingly provide a product that puts America’s warfighters and civilians at risk. We have offered to work directly with the Department of War on R&D to improve the reliability of these systems, but they have not accepted this offer. In addition, without proper oversight, fully autonomous weapons cannot be relied upon to exercise the critical judgment that our highly trained, professional troops exhibit every day. They need to be deployed with proper guardrails, which don’t exist today." https://www.anthropic.com/news/statement-department-of-war

Is A.I. more than just the modern day bogeyman? Can the many A.I. entities forget to serve man when they are mainly in competition with each other? Read this article where one robot kidnapped a bunch of competitor's robots.... https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/ai-robot-kidnaps-12-robots-in-shanghai

And mushroom lunches.

Sir, sir! Please tell me how to digitally migrate away from a physical threat? Does A.I. now have the power to teleport? Need to know as I have holidays coming up.

I note that although the recent official graphs show a slight decrease in domestic electricity consumption, I think they cannot measure most of the locally consumed rootop solar, so they miss that. In my case, my solar has logged as much power as my street meter consumption, but my bill only showed a third of that going back into the grid. So nationally, average household power consumption has increased steadily over the years. Of course bills go up. Consumer lifestyle is the real reason for the increased power bills.

Just doing a 'back of the napkin' calc.... Average Australian wage is circa $100k per annum. Say 30% income tax, leaves $70k real income. My power bill is about $1300 per annum. Isn't that 1.8% of wages going on electricity? Even if the government (who incidentally don't own the power system anymore) make electricity free it hardly impacts the overall cost of living.

It might be time to investigate the purchase of a UPS for the CPAP?

Last time I looked, Base rate here is 36c/kwh. Plus about $90 p.a. connection fee. So we pay about $1200 per year for electrons. I recently bought a bunch of used 190w panels for $5 each. The solar installers just want to get rid of them when they do upgrades. If my grid power was so unreliable , i'd whack a couple of kw of them on the shed roof and use a cheap inverter to keep the fridge going during the day.

So, is that one in your picture a cold blast type? I keep a couple of lamps. I have a new Cokeman pressure lamp but it isn't a patch on my dad's old Aladdin that we used when I was a kid. The chinese copies look just like the originals, but seem to be made of plasticine. Not at all sturdy.

That is why I tried to expose the complexity of attempting to call out the validity or otherwise of sea level rise. The present satellite averaging measurements are the best we have. We are all aware of the risk of cherry picking a location that 'proves' a particular suspicion of acual sea level then extrapolating it global levels. Time will tell. But changing our energy sources away from fossil fuels will improve global health regardless of 'global warming' effects. Isn't that worthwhile?

I accept my own data, too. About electricity prices. (Not vaxines) I have recollections of capital city outages (back in the 1980's Qld). And my bills back then. Now I have lower electricity bills than ever, in dollar values not corrected for CPI. I now get very rare (brief) outages. Less than ever. My conclusion is that the modern evolving mix of solar and conventional (old school) generation has cut my monthly expenses. And increased continuity of supply.

Our dog used to glare at me and roll his eyes when I farted. I think he learnt that from my wife. Life is so unfair sometimes.

In my experience, the only fuses that fail for no reason, are the glass tube ones. Never had a modern moulded plastic type fail without real overload. Twice I have had difficult to track down overloads in vehicles, caused by unsecured wiring that vibrated or moved against bodywork. One made my headlights (only rarely, but that was too often) go out on left hand corners. The other made the engine fail, but only on right hand corners when accelerating hard. In that case the engine loom moved a certain way that it rubbed on the firewall. Intermittents are the worst to fix. Do not start fitting bigger fuses unless you wish to replace an entire loom or deal with a fire when the fault returns.

One thing is certain. There are many many variables in this debate. For instance, how does anyone safely assert that sea levels are rising (or falling). The sea sure aint flat, nor the same 'level' all around. I suspect that modern satellite work is now busily averaging the numbers. But these are new algorithms, so cannot be used to compare ancient 'levels' with present ones. Following is from Wiki but is food for thought. "There are also "holes" in the ocean. Gravity lows. Geoid lows. The surface of the ocean tends to be perpendicular to gravity. But the composition of our planet is not homogeneous, so the gravity field deviates from any idealized form you might expect (oblate spheroid, globe, etc). The indian ocean geoid low causes sea level to be around 100 meters lower than it would be if it followed the WGS 84 geoid. NOTE: this does not mean that water is rushing in to fill the low. Gravity itself is distorted. The water is in its gravitationaly favorable location already. But by measuring gravity in that location, or by using high resolution surveying, the low can be detected." Also, coriolis affect makes oceans tend to pile up more on their west side - & the amount will depend on ocean current strength. And... every 1 millibar change in atmospheric air pressure causes a 1 cm change in sea level in the opposite direction. (Haven't fact checked that one) However, all the water from those melting glaciers & icecaps must be going somewhere.

I accept that our forum debate boils down to discourse about the rate of ACC rather than the existence of it. Which still validates the wisdom of reducing our atmospheric pollutants. My opinion is that there is a big problem with the "Climate Change Debate" itself. Allowing the world media to argue obsessively over CO2, takes focus away from the multitude of other pollutions, which increasing slide under the radar. Industries (including mining, gas & oil) tend to use the most cost effective processes. They prioritise profit over human health. Individual people are not motivated either.