The guillotine remark resonates in today reality because people feel this scam. Tone-policing the symptom while ignoring the cause is naive.
The C15 thread shows exactly why: It beats modern trucks in pure utility. Today we are paying more for less value.
It is exactly the wealth extraction Ray Dalio describes in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order (Stage 5 of the debt cycle), resulting in internal conflict.
To be fair, they killed a lot of people before killing the royalty as well. And then, when you dig a bit deeper, you realise that the royalty did quite a bit of the killing itself, just shortly before. It's amazing, it's almost like History does not happen in a. vacuum, and events depend on the cultural context and other events that happened previously.
I'm not sure you have to be terribly right wing to say that a "societal movement" which includes something called "The Reign of Terror", in which tens of thousands of people were executed, was a bad thing. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution#Reign_of_Ter...)
There are some situations with tricky lifetime issues that are almost impossible to write without this pattern. Trying to break code out into functions would force you to name all the types (not even possible for closures) or use generics (which can lead to difficulties specifying all required trait bounds), and `drop()` on its own is of no use since it doesn't effect the lexical lifetimes.
Conversely, I use this "block pattern" a lot, and sometimes it causes lifetime issues:
let foo: &[SomeType] = {
let mut foo = vec![];
// ... initialize foo ...
&foo
};
This doesn't work: the memory is owned by the Vec, whose lifetime is tied to the block, so the slice is invalid outside of that block. To be fair, it's probably best to just make foo a Vec, and turn it into a slice where needed.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, you'd have the same lifetime issue if you tried to move the block into a function, though. I think the parent comment's point is that it causes fewer issues than abstracting to a separate function, not necessarily compared to inlining everything.
There actually is one idea for cleaning up debris in high orbit: You launch tons of very fine powder into the orbits you wish to clear. These orbiting particles create drag on anything up there, so that their orbits degrade much faster. But the because the particles themselves are so tiny, they have a very low ballistic coefficient, and will deorbit quickly.
Hmm, seems like it would work for 800 km, but maybe not for 1000+ km? Just based on what he says there, which is that each 100 km increase is a factor of 10 in deorbit time, and it's 1 year at 800 km.
I'm not sure I believe that operational satellites would be unaffected by sustained bombardment with tungsten particles at orbital velocity (x2 for head on collisions), even if they are 10 microns.
If we assume there's some altitude that's so polluted by debris that we need to intervene, it might not have that many functional satellites left. Cleanup the orbit in 1 year might be something the world could agree to if the alternative is waiting 5 years for it to clear up by itself.
I think the burden to show that AI is not thinking lies on the skeptics. There are two broad categories of arguments that skeptics use to show this, and they are both pretty bad.
The first category is what I'd call "the simplifying metaphor", in which it is claimed that AIs are actually "just" something very simple, and therefore do not think.
- "AIs just pick the most likely next token"
- "AI is just a blurry jpeg of the web" (Ted Chiang)
- "AIs are just stochastic parrots"
The problem with all of these is that "just" is doing an awful lot of work. For instance, if AIs "just" pick the most likely next token, it is going to matter a lot _how_ they do that. And one way they could do that is... by thinking.
There are many different stochastic processes that you could use to try to build a chat bot. LLMs are the only one so far that actually works well, and any serious critique has to explain why LLMs work better than (say) Markov chains despite "just" doing the same fundamental thing.
The second category of argument is "AIs are dumb". Here, skeptics claim that because AI fail at task X, they aren't thinking, because any agent capable of thought would be able to do task X. For instance, AIs hallucinate, or AIs fail to follow explicit instructions, and so on.
But this line of argument is also very poor, because we clearly don't want to define "thinking" as "a process by which an agent avoids all mistakes". That would exclude humans as well. It seems we need a theory that splits the universe of intellectual tasks into "those that require thinking" and "those that don't", and then we need to show that AI is good only at the latter, while humans are good at both. But unless I missed it no such theory is forthcoming.
"Splitting the universe of intellectual tasks" would be a gigantic job. Various AI implementations already fail at so many tasks it seems reasonable for skeptics to claim the AI is not yet thinking, and the burden is on the implementers to fix that.
> "Splitting the universe of intellectual tasks" would be a gigantic job
What I mean is a theory that allows you to categorize any given task according to whether it requires "thinking" or not, not literally cataloging all conceivable tasks.
> The main causes of death were cancer (769 and 853 cases per million in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals, respectively), external causes of mortality (493 and 597 cases per million, including, among others, unintentional injuries, such as transportation crashes, falls, and drownings, as well as suicides or self-inflicted injuries) and diseases of the circulatory system (282 and 367 cases per million) (Table 2). Vaccinated individuals had a lower risk of death compared with unvaccinated individuals regardless of the cause of death.
I don't think mRNA vaccination is likely to cause an increase in all-cause mortality. But this study is clearly comparing two radically different populations, and could not show a mortality increase from mRNA vaccination even if one existed.
I do not see any 'radical difference' in the numbers. Individuals who choose not to get vaccinated are likely to be less informed and more reckless in other aspects of managing their health and their lives in general, so the relatively small difference between the populations is perfectly understandable.
It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!
Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with!
You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't.
Pods work great for me, and I love not having crumbs of powder under the sink, or a bottle of liquid detergent with encrusted drips down the side. It's just gross.
They are more expensive, but I buy them on sale at Costco for about $16/100, so at $0.16 per load I really don't care if powdered detergent is only $0.03 per load or whatever.
There is clearly a revealed preference for pods among consumers for these things, and "proving" that everyone is wrong for liking them is just not a very interesting exercise imo.
> it was really hard to track one down that still had flouride in it
Oh, so you are one of those tin foil hat types that does not want fluoride in their toothpaste or drinking water? What the hell is it with fluoride and Internet randos? There is always one who pops into a discussion who has a hysterical story about why they avoid it. Repeating from my previous post, but this time about fluoride: <<Billions of people use X every day and have no issues.>>
The reason you check the canary is because the gasses are building up and will eventually become dangerous to the non-sensitive life in the mine. Toothpaste surfactants don't build up.
His specific thesis is that pods fundamentally clean worse than powder because they're inherently single-stage releases of detergent in machines designed for two-stage releases. Despite this, he still explicitly says that pods have their uses. So I'm unclear on how his goal is "proving that everyone is wrong." Did we watch different videos?
Out of 5 machines I've used at different apartments, none had a separate pre-wash dispenser. And I've saved manual for my current one, it says nothing about adding detergent additionally to the dishes. And all of them washed just fine with powder, without any additional mumbo-jumbo.
i have dishwasher that is loaded with cartridge that has 400g of powder. ideal scenario for dispensing detergent at will. yet, never mind what cycle I am using, it dispensed only during main wash cycle.
i also had in past machines from 5 different manufacturers. none of them had mechanisms that facilitate 2 releases or pre-wash compartments
> i also had in past machines from 5 different manufacturers. none of them had mechanisms that facilitate 2 releases or pre-wash compartments
did you check the manual?
I think in a previous video he mentioned that for machines like that it was stated in manual to add powder for prewash directly in the machine.
they all washed dishes just fine without any prewash powder added. somebody "here" even quoted bosch manual that there is no need in prewash powder. i most of the time use cycle that doesn't even has prewash
I'm 1.5 minutes in and I already learned to purge cold water from the pipes before running the dishwasher. Assuming this is evidence based and true, I mean come on! Is it really so alarming to see someone deep dive hard and do the work to mass educate the public?
It seems like it would be trivial for the machine to pump water in, turn on the heating element, and wait until it reaches optimum temperature before beginning the cycle.
My understanding is that energy efficiency requirements prevent this. Dishwashers have a fixed energy budget they are allowed to expend, which may not be enough to heat cold tap water up to the optimal cleaning temp.
So instead it pulls in hot water, but not for long enough to purge the line, so all the 140F water it pulls from the water heater sits in pipes till it cools off.
That’s pretty wild, since the energy needed to get it up to temp would still need to be expended on the water heater side. There are no real energy efficiency gains unless they can somehow engineer an effective cold water cleaning.
Many hot water heaters use gas which may be cheaper than resistive heating depending on where you live. Additionally, there are now water heaters that use a heat pump which will be more efficient than either.
And of course they'll be setups that use solar heating or are programmed to heat by time of day.
This is all down in the weeds though because a dishwasher does not use very much water.
there is typically only 1 program that is used for labeling (of overall efficiency to achieve appropriate cleanness level). my manual specifies which one it is. it takes 3 hours. there is also fast&furious program that is less efficient but takes 1 hour
It's not a matter of power, but energy. It may take it twice as long as a 220v circuit, but when it's an unattended appliance that doesn't really matter. Per cycle they use about a gallon of water (3-4 per load total). Going from 70F to 140F requires 170Wh for a gallon of water. So if you run it at 1000W it takes 10 minutes.
Read the manual of your washer. I’m willing to bet it instructs you to run the tap until it’s hot before you start the dishwasher. This is common for American dishwashers, because they can’t get the water hot enough, fast enough, for the prewash cycle
i also went to american lg website and checked manual of cheapest dishwasher that they have. it doesn't instruct to run water either. it says that if water is not hot enough cycle will run longer.
anticipating comments that LG is not american enough, i went to GE and checked manual of cheapest (349) dishwasher. it doesn't instruct to run tap either. it does say just like LG that if water not hot enough, cycles that use hot water will take more time (because water needs to be heated)
In the video he mentions that the machines heat for a set time and not for a target temperature. So as majority of machines (in US market) are meant for hot water input. Then if you feed cold water they don't heat it enough
depends very much on where you are, unfortunately. in USA, this is definitely not the case, they're almost all incredibly dumb. especially the cheapest-possible models that most renters are forced to use (and renters account for about a third of all households).
as a concrete example, the video has a section in it where he shows that his doesn't so any sensing - hot or cold water have exactly the same timing on the heater's use (and resulting water temperature graphs).
so like. I agree with you that it should be true, it's simple and cheap to implement and it obviously works better. unfortunately it's not a sane reality for tens (hundreds?) of millions of people.
i am in usa. rented few times here. both in apartment complexes and houses.
cheapest GE dishwasher that i found now - $349 heats water. of course, for video he could go and find some ancient dishwasher that doesn't heat water just to make a point (or maybe he has a broken one ? ), but i think it will be outlier today.
many (vast majority I've seen) have a heater, but won't heat the water sufficiently for the pre-wash cycle from cold. or, frequently, the second / wash cycle, unless you set it to a high temp mode, and even then it's questionable / often just a timer and not thermometer-based.
check your user manual. huge numbers of them tell you to run your nearby tap until it's hot before starting a cycle because of this exact reason. this is also part of the video, and it has been true for literally every washer I've lived with (I read essentially all manuals), including the "good" ones.
pre-wash cycle meant to remove chunks of food/scraps. not to wash. my dishwasher doesn't bother to heat water for it. but for main wash cycle it heats water. i don't think i ever used dishwasher (american, eu, asian or turkish brands. some of them in country where they are hooked up to cold water) that bothered to heat water for pre-wash cycle. i think it's a feature and not a bug.
my dishwasher manual doesn't say to run tap. in fact it says "The dishwasher can be connected to a hot water supply for further economies. If the water is heated by for example, solar panels, this would be energy efficient. However, if your water is heated by electricity we would recommend connection to cold water.
"
i also went to american lg website and checked manual of cheapest dishwasher that they have. it doesn't instruct to run water either. it says that if water is not hot enough cycle will run longer.
anticipating comments that LG is not american enough, i went to GE and checked manual of cheapest (349) dishwasher. it doesn't instruct to run tap either. it does say just like LG that if water not hot enough, cycles that use hot water will take more time (because water needs to be heated)
if they're finally changing, I'm thrilled - maybe I'll have one in a decade :) thermocouples are so dirt cheap that it's ridiculous it was ever a thing.
if you have powder crumbs under your sink you might need to improve your technique.
This reminds me of how some of my house guests will accidentally splash water all over the bathroom counter and even the mirror when they wash up in the morning. I don’t say anything, to be polite, but they clearly lack technique lol.
This works for me:
0. store the dishwasher powder (box) under sink.
1. Open dishwasher door
2. grab box, place OVER the opened door.
3. dispense powder into cartridge in door (with spoon, tilting box, etc)
4. put spoon back in box OR fully tilt box back upright. “Crumbs” will drop onto the door, that’s OK.
5. move box back under sink.
Even if I was messy, I personally couldn’t make myself spend 5x on pods to avoid cleaning crumbs under the sink once a month. When i think of convenience i think of a dishwasher saving me hours every month. Not saving 10 seconds a month to wipe crumbs under the sink. :-)
We clearly all have different preferences and ideas of “convenience”. I respect that.
I have a bad habit of not fully drying my hands when retrieving pods. The pods all clump together if they get wet. This is one of the many reasons I prefer powder.
"if they get wet". Ok, so don't get them wet. If not wet, did you ever consider using chopsticks to pick one out of the bag/container? That might work well.
With pods you can’t add some detergent to the prewash while adding the rest to the main wash cycle. That’s the thing that makes one of the biggest differences.
I used an old container with a 3" lid and a handle, and fill it regularly with the cheap dishwasher powder that I buy in bulk. I put a whole in the screw on lid so I can just pour out the powder. 98% clean and much much cheaper than any pods and much better for the environment because the packaging is all paper.
I live in CA, but am lucky enough not to be a PG&E customer. My winter off-peak rates are $0.12, compared to $0.43 for PG&E. On the other end, my summer peak is $0.36, vs $0.56. Absolutely absurd.
The arbitrage opportunities here are insane.
You should install an electric charger or two in your front yard and charge people 50-100% premiums to use your power :)
I live 20 minutes north of you. My power is in fact 4 times expensive in the winter.
BRB, Shopping on amazon for a 20-mile long extension cord
I moved across the road from this government owned power company so i was just out of Palo Alto municipality and suddenly had to pay 4x the price. Sigh.
It's a weird thing moving to the USA. Everyone's been brainwashed "anything government run is more expensive" yet every example I've ever looked into proved the opposite to a dramatic extent. Government run institutions lead to lower overall costs.
I never understand how people can't see that private companies have a "must make a profit" motive while a non-captured government has a "must help citizenry" motive. Essential services being privately owned means they are incentivized to squeeze more profit in any way they can, to the detriment of their captive customers.
I'm guessing the upper-class managed to convince people of that as well as they managed to convince them of "the dangers of unions". There seems to be (at this point) almost an innate reaction to just hearing "union" or "general strike" that makes people recoil, even though they're necessary part of a society where capitalism exists, otherwise there is no way of stopping it when it outgrows any other concerns.
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