I clicked back through the years available for my city on weatherspark.com
Back in the 90s, never above 90-91 in Sept.
In the last 10 years we started seeing 94-95 in Sept.
Coincidentally air travel has doubled in that time period; from 2.25 billion people flying in 2010 to 4.56 billion in 2019. Of course that cratered since 2020.
Thanks AirBnB and other apps that make burning fossil fuels a thoughtless, trivial thing?
> Thanks AirBnB and other apps that make burning fossil fuels a thoughtless, trivial thing?
Your outrage is misdirected to something you probably personally relate to. Leisure travel is a minuscule component of the carbon in the atmosphere. Leisure travel is a fly hitching a ride on the beast that is global logistics, and AirBnb making leisure travel slightly cheaper and easier is a drop in the bucket for all leisure travel in general.
2.4% when talking tonnes may be a small percent relative to the “big picture” but it’s not 0 tonnes, it has an impact, and production of machines to produce planes, production of more planes to keep up with rising demand are not included in that 2.4%. Leisure travel across the planet is not exactly a requirement for the survival of the species.
It’s still pushing our choices onto future humans.
Since statistics are what matters to you; you’re one of seven billion; your perspective is not that important.
Probably best to avoid overly reductive rhetoric, the basis of which (statistical relevance) can be easily used against you. More co2 is released in service of the airline industry than just planes flying. The world is not made of singular statistical objects in a vacuum.
I doubt people going on a vacation a couple times per year is even a line item in the list of causes of burning fossil fuels. However, at the beginning of the pandemic, with fewer cargo vessels and even fewer personal vehicles burning fuel, we saw a measureable improvement to the environment within days.
The planes in the air are not the only release of co2 required to provide air travel.
There’s an industrial pipeline of machines to mine materials and machines to produce planes, all the travel to and from airports. The drink service carts don’t just fall from the sky or grow on trees, they too have an entire industrial pipeline required for their production. Making travel easier puts more strain on planes necessitating more parts and net new planes sooner.
The world is a miasma of statistics making up “the big picture”.
I think it’s the opposite; he’s such a square which explains why his imagination is stuck on literally creating Snow Crash.
Anyone who has tripped balls and come out OK is not so addicted to literalness as Zuck. They realize a multiverse of perspectives lives within them. It doesn’t need to be made “real”.
That's a neat way to think about it. I think a lot of the hype about AI or whatever is just because so many techies have tried these substances and realized that the brain is such a weird thing, and now they think they can emulate it, commodify it, and sell it for a monthly subscription fee. The truth is, we have no idea how the brain _actually_ works.
In "The Doors of Perception", Aldous Huxley describes it very well: it's like these drugs remove a sensory filter we normally have in place which makes the world feel like...well...reality. When you remove that filter, you're suddenly flooded with the sense that there's so much more to the universe, but in actual fact it's all just in your head. It's just your brain cells doing a lot of communication with each other in a way that is most likely nonsensical.
Some people come out the other side thinking they've found some magic, but more likely they've just experienced what was always there without the filter, and once it wears off you're the same person you were but perhaps with a sense of feeling like you're part of a big system (which we all are, called biology).
From a strictly biological perspective it makes sense, given that most life is based on DNA and we share a lot of DNA with things that we are very different from. We share about 60% of our DNA with bananas.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately; human languages are only 5,000 years old. Humanoid spatial reasoning, intuiting “enough heat, food, water” is a set of fundamental problems we evolved to survive.
I’d say it’s more than just “all brains” and say “all bodies”. Maybe our brains gave us the ability to generate syntax to capture meaning but our bodies play a role in letting us know when we are “cold” as a response to external measure. A body is a gradient of spatial points, matter interacting with fields; not just the brain.
Rigid physical models of the past must give way to updated awareness, an idea many have understood throughout time. People missing 80% of their brain have gone on to live full lives, graduate from higher education, succeed in a career. The brain is not the center of our awareness, merely a component.
Is free expression under attack or are affluent people who demand an audience under attack?
Express yourself all you want. No one is owed an agreeable audience. That’s the exact opposite of allowing freedom of expression.
Personally I think it’s the contrary; expression has become so unique and personal and not coupled to an abstract social tentpole; it’s really confusing people whose success is coupled to attention and adherence to past political correctness.
A whole lot of people used to a lot of deference are no longer being deferred to and are complaining. That’s all this feels like to me. Memory of when the sky was the limit for them because there was less freedom of expression under past “big top” social frameworks.
To back this up; in the US we recently crossed a threshold of <50% of adults believing in “higher powers”, down from ~80% around 2000. It’s hard to see such release of a modal not impacting belief in the “higher power” of a nation state, prior success of celebrities and thinkers; biological state has changed. Everyone is just “one of seven billion” with no special claim to a figurative identity that uniquely empowers them over any one else. That’s freedom of expression and people who rely on deferential attention will hate it.
Between this and efforts to add 3D dimension to 2D images, I don’t see much of a future for digital multimedia creator jobs.
Even TikTok could be an endless stream of ML models.
Fears of a tech dystopia may be overblown; the masses will just shut off their gadgets and live simpler if labor markets implode within the traditional political correct economic system we have.
Open source AI is on the verge of upending the software industry and copyright. I dig it.
Good intentions behind making life “more comfortable” achieving a result of inequality, inane busy work, and climate inversion is everyone’s fault.
Laws and borders are ephemera; California did not create this contemporary reality; the species did.
It’s easier to deflect than accept one’s role. I expect better of so-called adults; why buy the arguments of people contributing to the problem deriding others as the source?
Do less. Stop chasing incentives and buying into the nation state propaganda yourself then. Otherwise shut up with externalizing the blame; you’re part of the problem.
Excel has a history of forced format updates, breaking incompatibility. I know people who banned it because they got tired of marching to MSs upgrade beat.
Python 2 to 3 upgrade aside, can’t really say the same about the language.
There are a number of good arguments out there that might violate an engineers perception, which one might call a cognitive data model built through training and experience.
There is no theory that makes any given engineering path “wiser” than others. Just engineers chasing incentives to be engineers.
Libraries introduce breaking changes, too. I’ve been bit by silent default changes in Pandas, for example. To me that’s kind of striking because I also wouldn’t consider myself a major user of the library.
And we still are; computers are designed, software is designed.
“AI” as we know it does not exist without humans pushing it forward; romantic notions our inventions are independently sentient depends on ignoring a whole lot.
For the same reason I can choose to not import a religion I can not import the idea these stupid things are “thinking” independently of humans, without justifying it as I don’t have to with religion as well.
All the constraints are defined by us. It’s not magic.
I agree it's not magic. I don't think art requires magic.
As a pretty handy example, photographers are considered artists. I took photography pretty seriously at one time, and it's very dear to me, but I will say that I don't think there's very much magic in it.
I don't think the algo is thinking or sentient or anything like that. It's hard to argue that it's not producing art, though.
Tangent: I would also argue humans are designed. I don't mean any mysticism: I think all life is being designed by unthinking processes. As evidence, just look at all the specialist life-forms that are filling a niche that they were...well, designed for.
I am not saying it’s not producing art, I’m saying a human instigated the machine to produce it; it’s a robot with a bunch of brushes in its hand. The difference between that and life evolving to fill a gap in a vacuum is the computer did not do that on its own. Semantics, maybe, but a computer did not evolve until humans did. Fish and moss evolved independently of humans; that’s the difference that distinguishes whether AI is intelligent to me. I would define it as a memory store for contemporary human sensibilities, not a independently bodied entity.
That said, if people want to wax poetic privately in their own jargon, whatever, of course. That’s democracy.
But the refined over thousands of years corpus of knowledge “contained” within STEM fields has been shown over and over to be our most reliable guide humans have come up with for building a society. Nothing in there attempts to define what is and isn’t intelligence; it’s a model of what matter exists and how it coalesces at various “speeds” relative to light. Needing to define if AI is this or that is a romantic human thing; very subjective.
Where a physical thing “is” is hard to argue. Where a thing fits into ones subjective mental taxonomy is easy to argue.
The main problem is people wanted to make money so they went into the business of building things that financiers threw money at.
So long as people are going to treat nation state totems (coin) and scripture (bank statements) as sacrosanct they’re going to be building a nanny state that trades in such things to support trade in such things
Automators we’re rewarded for unemployment career workers and employing gig workers. They deflated others value for their own. Nice work.
Talk about freedom all you want; Muricans chase that dollar carrot on a stick that relies on the existence of the police state “they hate”.
Back in the 90s, never above 90-91 in Sept.
In the last 10 years we started seeing 94-95 in Sept.
Coincidentally air travel has doubled in that time period; from 2.25 billion people flying in 2010 to 4.56 billion in 2019. Of course that cratered since 2020.
Thanks AirBnB and other apps that make burning fossil fuels a thoughtless, trivial thing?