At the end of pretraining, where the AI has been trainied to predict the next token over a humongous corpus of human text, that's basically all the wanting that exists in the AI. But then the AI undergoes posttraining and is rewarded for giving answers that humans find good, solving math and programming problems, etc. And that induces a whole different level of wanting that interacts with the initial patterns from humans in complex ways.
My understanding from reading news sources recently is that a vast amount of posttraining and even posttraining harnesses in many cases are LLM-overseen now in the frenzy of the AI race. Less and less human oversight in the part that does the rewards training. What could go wrong...
It's much more the case that we ship plastic to be recycled to other countries than trash. The problem is that then the unrecyclable plastic mixed in often ends up in rivers.
The article mentions the energy benefits from recycling aluminium but fails to mention the also large (but not as large) savings from recycling glass. Please recycle your aluminium and glass even if it's probably wiser to throw out plastic in most localities.
But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them. Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.
Since we can't get 100% compliance in rich countries and poor countries can't afford landfills that's a good reason to not use plastic. But it's not a good reason to have plastic recycling programs.
> But the pollution problem from plastic bags is solved equally well if we bury them or recycle them
We can't even reliably trust people to put the plastic bags in a bin and have that bin be cleanly collected and yet you're expecting people to bury them??
No, the solution is to massively reduce how often we use single-use plastic bags. It seems like every time I buy anything from any store its just assumed I want it in a plastic bag. Getting a single bottled drink at a convenience store? The clerk gets a plastic bag ready. Its insane.
It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever. Again, this article isn't about whether we should produce plastic but how we should dispose of it once its collected.
That's only true if everyone in the area is good about throwing away their trash in proper receptacles. That's the alternative stream that's difficult to control directly because it's at the individual level instead of the municipality and some people and areas don't give a damn about littering so the problem of plastic bags can be more pronounced depending on local culture about the environment.
The bag doesn't magically get from the store to the waste stream it has to be properly disposed of by the customer to make it there.
> It's the town or city that does the disposal whether that's burying, recycling, dumping at sea, or whatever.
> once its collected
Its not the employees of the town or city ensuring that bag ever makes it to the employees of the town or city though, that's my point. Its the user of the plastic bag is where a lot of the breakdown in the chain happens. Its the fact you buy anything and the shop gives you a plastic bag to deal with. Which, a ton of people don't do a good job dealing with them! Similarly, they don't do a good job with drink containers and other packaging either.
Its not like its the city employees putting all the plastic bags in the creeks and the rivers and the fields and the woods. At least, not usually, and not normally in their course of duty.
I can remember when there would be drifts of these bags caught in fence lines, trees, sewer grates etc.
Before bag bans there were SO MANY of these things everywhere.
There’s a whole scene about the beauty of plastic shopping bags in “American Beauty” in 1996. The whole point was finding beauty in something that was so common that you walk by it every day.
> Provided your municipality doesn't just dump trash in the nearest river which is an issue in some parts of the world.
Is this really true? I doubt it. In developing countries, there are lots of informal settlements are built along rivers. They have no municipal trash service, so a lot of garbage is burned locally (in a pit or oil drum) or is thrown in the river.
I'm unfortunately really unimpressed with the Trackpoints coming out of Lenovo today. I have a brand new ThinkPad that suffers from drift everyday, so it's easy for me to see why other companies aren't including Trackpoints on their products.
There is no good Lenovo hardware anymore. It’s been completely swallowed by the Chinese company that bought it, and even the formerly “noble”/enterprise lines are junk now. Same as HP.
I’d argue it’s a superior mouse even with the drift, even though I agree that the drift is annoying and am amazed they have not been able to fix it all these years.
More to the point x86 instruction streams aren't self-synchronizing. There are cases where you can read one valid stream of x86 instructions starting at byte X, but another completely different one starting at byte X+1. Apart from the security implications this makes wide decode on x86 notably harder than it has to be, though in practice you can make it work by just starting a decode your fetch window at every byte boundary the fist time you're executing something and throwing away the unused decodes, and then mark the invalid positions in the instruction cache so you don't waste that power again.
Essentially every cell phone out there has a VLIW DSP like Qualcomm's Hexagon cores (though AFAIK Qualcomm is the only one who lets you run your on programs on their DSP).
Between the Mason-Dixon line and the opposite latitude in Brazil it was more Malaria, Yellow Fever, and other mosquito born diseases rather than smallpox that did most of the killing. Malaria alone is responsible for about 5% of all human deaths through history, compared to something like 1% for smallpox.
It's unfortunate that we only have one vocabulary for radiation to cover both a 100 uS dose of fallout and a 10 S one. If a quantity of rock drops on someone we have different words like "pebble" and "boulder" that tell us how concerned we should be. I was shocked to learn that "fallout" in the context of a nuclear war could mean something that could cause you to die in hours, not raise your lifetime risk of cancer somewhat.
I guess we don't have the language because we don't have the experience.
Perhaps we should tune into what the Hiroshima/Nagasaki survivors use to describe things. I seem to recall they had various phrases for different kinds of fallout ..
There actually wasn't any appreciable fallout after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Fallout is mostly generated when a bomb explodes close to the ground so that its neutrons are able to reach and transmute that ground into radioactive isotopes. The bombs dropped on Japan exploded high up to affect as large an area as possible. Many people suffered terribly from the ionizing radiation produced by those bombs, but all that damage was inflicted in the first microseconds immediately after the bombs detonated.
Right, it was radioactive rain I am remembering someone describing to me when I was in Tokyo, discussing the subject. Not strictly fallout.
I remember there was some controversy over whether folks who were exposed to the black rain were eligible for health and medical support, and what constituted 'black rain' versus 'normal rain' and all the wide spectrum between ...
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