mountainriver

joined 2 years ago
[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 1 month ago (5 children)

UK Asks People to Delete Emails In Order to Save Water During Drought

The part of data centers using to much water is apparently old emails.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 3 points 1 month ago

What I'm on about? I think the english term is "damning with faint praise". If this is the best that can be done, which I am arguing, there isn't much use to it.

The latest one is an outlier, in that it doesn't have a voice over, so it isn't a radio play. Most of the other ones I have seen has a voice track that tells the story. They are also more dreamlike which matches the prediction of what kind of story can be told from one of the comment threads here (from one of the pivot videos about VEO).

The latest one (and the only one to gone viral) is actually interesting in that he is trying to tell a visual story, but with the medium he has chosen he can't have a novel character as protagonist really, or dialogue, which is why it is limited to a very simple story.

I'm interested in why it is so limited, because I think that tells a lot of the limitations of the technology as such.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Joining the war on teen pregnancies on the side of teen pregnancies to bring back the ideal past of - check notes - the 1990ies in the US.

(At least a cursory look points toward teen pregnancies in the US peeking some time in the 1990ies.)

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago

Most medical careers work well internationally, in principle. Something to keep in mind is that language proficiency may be a stated or unstated prerequisite for employment, in particular if you have contact with patients. If you work with the machines (lab technician, etc) the language may be of less importance. Or at least, so I have heard. Relevance depends on your country of choice and your pre-existing language skills, of course.

To bad attempt number one didn't work well. Better luck with attempt number two.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago

Historians like to use "state capacity" as a term for what a state is capable of doing. The government leader might want to build a great bridge, and might order it done, but depending on which state in which era it might not be a thing that is possible to execute.

I didn't think we would see a powerful state like the US so willfully destroy its state capacity (except for violence), but here we are and “everybody who knows how to access the money got fired”

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 12 points 2 months ago

For those that (like me) is out of the loop and don't get it, Wikipedia comes to the rescue:

In one of the advertisements that was particularly controversial, Sweeney says that "genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color. My jeans [or genes] are blue". Another voice then declares "Sydney Sweeney has great jeans".

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

FWIW, I think he's wrong in the causation here. During the heyday of the British Empire history was one of the high status subjects to study, and they wrote it in very plain language. Physics on the other hand was seen as mostly pointless philosophy, and in the early 19th century astronomy was a field so low in status that it was dominated by women.

I would say the causation is money giving the field status, and lack of money hollowing out status. Low status makes the untrained think they can do it as well as the trained. You had to study history and master it's language to make a career as a colonial administrator, therefore the field was high status. As soon as money starts really flowing into physics, the status goes up, even surpassing chemistry which had been the highest status (and thus also manliest) science.

If one wants to look at the decline of status of academia, I recommend as a starting point Galbraith's The Affluent Society, that goes a fair bit into the post war status of academia versus business men.

I think the humanities were merely the weak point in lowering the status of academia in favour of the business men.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 7 points 2 months ago

One of the products was removal of unwanted hair. You radiated and the hair just fell off! How practical!

To be fair to the radium people, I don't think the correlation between radiation and cancer was established until the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still one could see hair falling of as a warning sign of sorts.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Depending on how AI-pilled your boss is, maybe you could just "ask the AI" if it is being used. If the magic eight ball says "yes", then it's being used, and everybody should be happy.

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 6 points 2 months ago

Can it really be that stupid? Was he just prompting it wrong?

[–] mountainriver@awful.systems 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Going through work email I saw a link o an article about Quantum-AI. It was behind paywall, and I am not paying for reading about how woo+woo=woo^2. What do you do when your bubble isn't inflating anymore? Couple it with another stale bubble!

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