CanadaPlus

@CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org

Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

more realistic smiles and expressions

No. No it is not. It’s just grosser.

Edit: Whoever downvoted this, I’m fascinated to know what you like about this image. Genuinely no hate intended at all.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

For everyone planning on fleeing to Canada: we have a massive housing shortage already. You’re probably going to end up in tents. Igloos, maybe, which would be ironic since a lot of you think we live in them.

Edit: For the record, I welcome all non-MAGA Americans. This is just facts, though; if housing prices were allowed to spike up even further there might be legit rioting. It’s already the top political issue.

CanadaPlus,

Fun fact, housing prices are actually higher in Canada.

I’m guessing you “win” on other expenses, though. And generally are a smaller country with a smaller capacity for loud-talking refugees.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Hmm. I did notice the funny, overly-symmetrising perspective, but I couldn’t place who it sounded like. I guess that’s because I don’t know any billionaires.

In addition to the contemporary takes, “fascism is right-wing dictatorship and communism is left-wing dictatorship” isn’t an entirely useless way of putting it, but it’s close. Left and right are very situational, and there’s been left wing dictatorships that weren’t very much like the USSR, and plenty of right-wing monarchies that had none of the populist vibes fascism runs on.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Is…is this guy arguing that we’re equally likely to fall into a communist dictatorship as a fascist one?

He didn’t say that explicitly, but now that you point it out, that would be a simple corollary of this dude’s take on the shape of polarisation in America. And it’s obviously a dumb conclusion.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Biden’s foreign policy is an aggressively boring continuation of what US policy has always been. Lol no.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

The former. We measurably just have less housing stock per capita than other developed Western nations. Maybe the latter happens too, but I’m skeptical, because rent money is as (non-)green as the rest, and it’s not required to explain the situation.

Why we haven’t built more houses is less clear. In the absence of hard data or guesses from more educated people, I’ll speculate a bit:

One tradesman I know is billing high enough to feel personally guilty about it, and is still swamped with work. From what I hear this is typical. The US and Canada officially have the same rate of construction work employment. We don’t have undocumented immigrants working construction really, while it sounds very common in the US. Put together, my guess is there’s a sizable labour shortage, but it’s masked by data collection issues in the main other jurisdiction that builds largely with wood framing.

CanadaPlus,

This research has nothing to do with consciousness, though.

A new open-source humanoid robot project suggests dystopian sci-fi tropes may have got it wrong; AI and robots will be decentralized/widely available, not hoarded and controlled by corporate elites.

Many people have been surprised how quickly open-source AI has kept pace with the AI efforts getting billions in investor funding. It’s worth wondering if the same may happen with robotics. After all, robotics are primarily AI too, though embodied in a 3D environment. Recently two major Chinese manufacturers, UBTech Robotics...

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Yeah, I don’t think design was the problem here, once the software exists. That machine just has a lot of parts, each with a cost attached.

Even if most people owned one robot (humanoid or not), obedient GAI would enable rich people to own armies of them without worrying about pesky things like revolt.

Relatively dumb robots could accelerate inequality just by increasing capital earnings vs. labour, but we’ve been dealing with that for a couple of centuries already.

CanadaPlus,

Yup.

I’m glad we’re seriously discussing AI safety as a society, but for this exact reason I wish more people questioned whether “obedience” is a good metric of success for it. A paperclip optimisier is bad, but whoever has the password getting unlimited power could actually be more fucked up. A ball of paperclips is at least benign, once it’s finished.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah, how long did it take for an imposter to emerge, become dominant in some contexts, and then have to be defended from imitation by the original standard. Like, three years?

CanadaPlus,

How much power does it provide? This doesn’t sound like a high-energy reaction.

Second question, if it’s actually enough to be useful, which I doubt: How long does it last?

This reads like a nothingburger right now. Science journalists have a way of taking academically-interesting projects and omitting all the catches so they seem commercially relevant.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Hypothecated taxes are tricky like that. I think they’re underrated when it’s essentially a user fee, but otherwise, no, it’s an old-timey idea for a reason.

Fun fact, in Canada we have a carbon tax that goes right back out as cheques to people, kinda like this but at a lower rate. Currently getting rid of them is the leading candidate’s whole platform

CanadaPlus,

Farmland comes in varying qualities, too, so that’s probably not a huge loss.

CanadaPlus,

Well, there’s things like “jumping genes” that don’t necessarily provide anything for the organism, but that’s a bit of a nitpick, since they’re not just random codons, and some do or at least could.

CanadaPlus,

How many times is this thing going to be posted? And it’s still useless for any possible space mission, for a number of reasons.

CanadaPlus,

They should move to a model not several years old, if so. I’m leaning more towards a human not so good at writing, though.

CanadaPlus,

I mean, it seems to be a real story in this case. And not that surprising, either, tiny wires could shift. This is why we do testing.

CanadaPlus,

Huh, I wonder what the safety features are. From a skim of the article, it’s detects power demand somehow, so maybe that helps.

Also, I’m concerned for linesmen, because somebody is going to buy this and not tell their company that they are energising the local grid, rather than just consuming. Europe apparently has some kind of solution, but nothing stops you from using it elsewhere.

CanadaPlus,

I’m really curious how it can tell what’s being drawn in a fool-proof way, without actually putting energy out.

CanadaPlus,

No offense, but with nothing else provided I believe the IMF more about matters of global economy.

CanadaPlus,

In China where there’s a ton of manufacturing, I’d agree, but in the West there’s a lot of jobs that are surface-level natural language tasks.

CanadaPlus,

I have some idea, yeah. Call centers employ a lot of people, as do book-keeping, HR and retail checkouts. It’s not going to code or engineer any time soon, taking a statistically decent guess at what you do, but the percentage of the non-Lemmy population that does that sort of work is tiny.

Manufacturing depends heavily on the specific job. Obviously machining is easily automated (if not the loading and maintenance of the CNC machines themselves), and basic assembly can be too, but once non-rigid or variable materials come into the picture it all gets harder, and any kind of uncontrolled environment seems to make it impossible.

CanadaPlus,

Compartmentalising sensitive data isn’t too hard with AI. LLMs don’t have a memory of their own once out of training, remember. It’s just a matter of setting it up the right way.

The issue with checkouts has been theft, since they basically just trust the user to charge themselves right now. Amazon’s Just Walk Out is the technology to watch for that kind of checkout, and for anything where shoppers don’t collect items themselves LLMs can do a decent job without finetuning.

It’s not going to replace every job, not with current capabilities anyway, but enough to drive a big economic shift? Yeah, I do agree with the IMF on that.

CanadaPlus,

Also, it’s China, so higher than normal chance they made it the fuck up. Research ethics is a bit of a problem in the region.

That being said, it’s not a surprising result. Usually small pieces of tissue can be frozen without problem.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

A lot of people don’t realise, we can and did. In the 50’s. It completely works on small creatures.

Unfortunately, like you said, cooling is really hard to do quickly in bulk, and no cute tricks have been forthcoming quite yet.

CanadaPlus,

The most obvious way around that would be some kind of cryoprotectant, but those have all proven very toxic so far. The next frontier would be trihalose, which we’ve figured out how to produce in quantity recently, so watch out for news on that. To get something hot evenly and quickly, RF heating works great, but it’s not obvious there’s any equivalent for cooling, unless you’re dealing with a few already-cryogenic atoms. One thing I’ve wondered about is using high pressures that depress the freezing point of water, but those kinds of pressures are sometimes biochemically toxic on their own. No research on short exposure in animals seems to exists, unfortunately.

It’s so close to working, I feel like we’ll solve it eventually, but I don’t know when or how.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Well, no. Reductionism still holds. If you could magically make the water everywhere inside super cold, it would behave locally just like water in a smaller creature. Unfortunately, it seems impossible to do that. Even pumping coolant through the circulatory system, which is a thing I know at least happens in some related procedures.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah, it’s a doozy of an engineering problem. It’s like trying to build a lever out of sand. There’s just no way to tackle it straight.

CanadaPlus,

More than that. Gravity is weak; gravity-based technologies inevitably need insane amounts of material to work. This particular metric also involves shedding mass, y’know, like a rocket would have anyway.

Wasn’t this story posted already here? I don’t want to rehash if I don’t have to.

CanadaPlus,

This is also pretty lightly compressed, though. If you’re trying to do mind uploads you can probably shave off orders of magnitude pretty easily, since in silico neurons don’t need any of the functional structures as long as they act the same way.

CanadaPlus,

Assuming it actually works good. Right now they’re probably going to get a limb caught irrecoverably on a doorknob.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Food is just unpredictable. What shape is lettuce?

Word on the street is that robots that can chop and sautee carefully provided ingredients themselves are probably coming, but that’s more evolution than revolution. The big space to watch is AIs taking your order in a more human way.

CanadaPlus,

The paper. It doesn’t actually help for any practical space exploration future or present, but it’s interesting and seems accessibly written so far.

Figure 13 is nice if you just want to visualise it.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • random
  • Hentai
  • doujinshi
  • announcements
  • general
  • All magazines
    •