Notices by Tom Ritchford (tomswirly@toot.community), page 2

@randulo I wonder if the reporters got any say in this matter?

Will they get royalties? Just kidding, I'm sure they won't.

@randulo Ooh, what are the equivalents? (We're here in .fr now, likely for keeps.)

So many people have gotten offended by my using the word vegan that I use "plant-based" now.

My feeling is that vegan offends two sorts of people: Fascists, who can [copulate] themselves, but also decent people who are subconsciously guilty about their meat consumption.

That second group shouldn't be alienated! It'd be much better if 90% of the world gave up 90% of their meat, than 1% gave up 100%

@thomasfuchs

Some sort of argument would go a long way to helping me understand why.

Again, take customer support.

This is an area where 90% of the queries are one of perhaps a dozen questions. If generative AI can answer those with 90% accuracy, and then defer to a human, you've saved 80% of your personnel.

Human customer support representatives have << 100% accuracy, too.

It is impossible to be completely sure of non-trivial events in the future. Your very certainty makes me doubt.

@thomasfuchs You seem very very sure.

I'm also a skeptic, but I am not so sure.

I think an awful lot of BS jobs, like call centers, are at risk from BS AI. Yes, the error rate would go up, but the costs would plummet. Making call centers less useful might be part of the plan...

AI's main threat is to jobs. Automated driving isn't generative AI, but will, eventually, kill nearly all the 10 million or so professional driving jobs in the US and some huge number of jobs elsewhere.

@hildabast @PLOS I'm proudly descended from two generations of vaccinationists: my grandfather helped bring TB vaccination to Australia, getting on for a century ago...

These vaccines are marvels, but the game changer would be a sterilizing vaccine against COVID, may it come soon! The durable vaccines are a step in that direction...

Of course, the real threat is wilful ignorance, and there will never be a vaccine against that.

@freakazoid @jramskov @InternetEh

Hear, hear.

Unbounded exponential growth of consumption and waste are impossible on a finite planet.

#degrowth is the only solution but humans will resist voluntary degrowth, even incremental, until the laws of physics impose involuntary and dramatic degrowth upon us.

@hakan_geijer @stevewfolds @HeavenlyPossum Oh, you bet. "Militarize the border" makes it abundantly clear.

I was simply curious as to whether "negro" was even acceptable when he wrote it, and it wasn't.

What a let-down.

@hakan_geijer @stevewfolds @HeavenlyPossum Oof.

"Negro" was mostly unacceptable already by the time he wrote this (clearly in 1983).

@HeavenlyPossum 9/11 is another story just like that. All the announcements told people to stay in the buildings...

@koteisaev @jeffowski

> Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky

Can you explain what, say, Marx and Stalin have in common?

(I had a lot of trouble not being mocking or incredulous in my comment...)

@polotek @sbszine @tillshadeisgone

There's one of him, but he wants to take the content of millions of us.

@0xabad1dea
First he ripped out my 64-bit fixed point arithmetic, and replaced it with `int128_t` - which works by using two hardware 64-bit ints!

My quick benchmarks showed me that this slowed all arithmetic down by a factor of about five.

But then, even worse, since he had no understanding of how computer arithmetic worked, all his intermediate calculations were in 64-bit floating point, which then got converted back into `int128_t`.

Of course, the product never came out.

/thread

@0xabad1dea A quibble: floating point numbers give exact values for addition, multiplication and subtraction involving integers if the results aren't too large.

In 32-bit floating point, you can exactly represent all integers up to 16,777,217.

> You should never, ever use floats for things like money

You can't do things like compound interest and mortgage payments with integer arithmetic! 😁

---

I have a relevant story here that you might find amusing.

1/

@0xabad1dea I worked for Ripple, not nice people at all. I got put on a project with a young man with very strong beliefs about his ability to write computer programs who had "written" a trading backend in "C++" - really C.

(One of his beliefs, for example, was that making all variables static and global made the program run faster. Indeed, he had a lot of weird beliefs about what made programs faster, but since he refused to do any form of benchmark, I was skeptical.)

2/

@0xabad1dea The project was specc'ed to use integer arithmetic, so I spent a week writing a nice 64-bit fixed point arithmetic system.

But this nice young man refused to cooperate. One of the things I'd been brought in to do was write unit tests, something he was completely against, so he'd made all these changes and never run the tests.

I got fired. But they were too stupid to remove my privileges for the repo, so I watched his "work".

3/

@passenger @jackofalltrades @largess @subjacentish When kids playing in the street started to get killed, the parents were portrayed as being at fault.

Amsterdam even started to pave over its canals in anticipation of a new motorized era!

But a movement called "Stop de Kindermoord" (Stop the child murder) managed to get the attention of both the citizens and the very progressive government at the time, by strong slogans and iconography.

2/

@passenger @jackofalltrades @largess @subjacentish Let me preface this by saying that I'm not really an environmentalist but someone with some science background who's interested in the environment and moved to the Netherlands in 2016.

Bikes were always fairly popular in the Netherlands before cars because it's so flat.

When cars arrived, it seems the same sort of story played out in the US and the Netherlands - everyone loved them.

1/

@passenger @jackofalltrades @largess @subjacentish And the paving of the canals met a not-entirely-peaceful opposition of immigrants and leftists, and again the very progressive government of the time recanted.

A municipality (Gemeente) here is run by a lot of competent, practical, educated people who realistically want to improve life, and so they are always putting their fingers on the scale for bikes - you can bike everywhere, park everywhere.

3/

@passenger @jackofalltrades @largess @subjacentish

Unfortunately, the Dutch love their capitalism. Car ownership is high. People do almost always take their kids to school on bikes, it's amazing to watch, but for trips over 1km, there is a lot of car usage. Public transportation is still good, but pandemic-era cuts have not entirely been lifted. Affluent people will drive, even if it's less convenient.

As a cyclist, you feel very well taken care of but cars have not been replaced.

/thread

@Daojoan Amplification: it isn't just giving them a platform, it's monetizing them, and even offering Nazis money to move onto Substack!