A lot of these problems are already managed by nurses or clinic assistants. It's pretty rare to get a lot of face to face time with an actual M.D. Certainly this is true the more you look at poorer communities.
Resources on wild pig management usually recommend trapping or baiting rather than trying to shoot them. Shooting at them with a semi-auto while they are fleeing is a particularly cruel way to address the problem, as you're not making clean kills in this sort of situation.
We aren't talking about one or two pigs wandering into a backyard here. The sheer numbers are such that people who hunt them routinely end up shooting literally dozens of feral pigs in minutes, and it still isn't enough to keep the populations in check. Which is why USDA straight up says that "lethal techniques may be a more effective means for limiting population growth and achieving long-term suppression of damage".
There's clearly a sweet spot in the amount of entropy/unpredictability that is "interesting". Otherwise observing white noise would be the most interesting thing imaginable.
I don't know the details, but probably you would want to seek unpredictability in a higher level representation of the observed state. White noise is highly unpredictable per pixel, but will get a very predictable representation after a layer or two of featurization if the features are trained/designed for real world observations.
I think there's a gap between the human version of curiosity and the AI version. A machine can be told that something is interesting, where humans need to innately find something interesting or spend a long time sort of learning to find something interesting.
> White noise is highly unpredictable per pixel, but will get a very predictable representation after a layer or two of featurization if the features are trained/designed for real world observations.
Virtually anything that cannot be predicted is interesting by nature of being unpredictable. Is it truly random? How, or why? True randomness is rare, and its existence is interesting.
TV static is uninteresting because it isn't actually random, it's just too onerous to get the measurements to predict it for the value we would get. It's part of the large class of things that is random for practical purposes, but not truly random. I have no doubt that if humanity dumped all its resources into predicting static, NASA could measure inbound radio waves and/or model space to figure out what static would look like at a particular spot.
Notably, humans find the cause of static (partially various waves from space) fascinating because we can't predict them. We've just placed our interest down a layer of abstraction from static. Static is boring, the source of static is interesting.
I suspect it is truly random to the AI, though, because it has no means to "see" those radio waves. I would wager humans would be far more interested in static if we were also unable to see the causality between radio waves and static.
I would be interested to see if the AI was as interested in static if it was also provided a real-time feed of radio waves at the antenna. Would it figure out that those things are correlated and lose interest in static like humans have, or would it continue to find static fascinating despite knowing it's a basic causality?
> A machine can be told that something is interesting, where humans need to innately find something interesting or spend a long time sort of learning to find something interesting.
Humans seem to be the same way. Lots of people learn something because it pays well.
It's possible that white noise is interesting to look at but it simply overloads our feeble human brains. If you could zoom in, slow down, and blur the white noise to make it a slowly changing gradient I bet it would be somewhat engaging.
Career focused culture has destroyed a large amount of social cohesion. If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building. Type A personalities that demand social mobility can play politics to see who leads their respective tribe. The rest of us can spend the time learning about the world, developing engaging hobbies, reading philosophy and experiencing great works of art. Maybe just focus on a personal spirituality and/or self-actualization.
There is so much humans should be doing to make our brief existence a little more happy and fulfilling. Little of this has to do about contributing labor.
I do think this sounds like a plausible outcome. I can even see the "AI wealthy" getting a bit lonely at the top and wanting to be part of the human race again.
Notice how rich people wear hoodies and train at the gym like everyone else now?
>Career focused culture has destroyed a large amount of social cohesion.
Eaxtly, spot on!
> If machines do more work, humans can go back to community building.
In an ideal utopic society, yes, but that's not what's happening. More automation replacing workers just means more people out of work from older jobs, means more competition and lower wages for the remaining few un-automatable jobs flooded with now jobless workers.
It's impossible to pull off if all the profits from automation go to those doing the automation instead of the disposed workers, but if those in charge of investing and reasearching automation would not get huge profits they wouldn't be motivated to invest in automation in the first place and we'd be back to the middle ages.
So what do we do? What's the realistic sollution? Do we go back to communism and have the state in charge of all economic planning and development? Maybe not since that doesn't works too well in the long run.
Ideally there should be a middle ground that's missing right now where replacing workers with autoamtion is done through union negociations at a steady pace to enure disposed labor can be retrained in newer careers.
It's worth considering how old the US version of democracy is, and how many systems came after.
Americans have a deep reverence for their personal brand, but it's worth considering they don't install their government model on countries they conquer. Japan, Iraq, Germany, etc are all Parliamentary.
This often had more to do with adopting a system that has some familiarity to the conquered country. In the example of Japan, allowing an emperor as a more permanent figurehead.
That’s not the reason that we spent the 20th century installing governments that look conspicuously unlike our own: it’s that the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws for more than a hundred years, among the kinds of people who study governments, and those same sorts of people had some say in how we set up new governments, and evidently not a lot of pressure on them to make those look like ours.
We can’t fix ours in-place—technically, yes, but practically, no, largely for game-theoretical reasons—so we’re stuck with, effectively, an obsolete constitution. Fortunately, those who’ve set up new states in our name haven’t been forced to install that same known-bad model, so they’ve done better.
> the US model has been known to have several severe, practically irreparable flaws
It's also a different context. The problem with presidential systems is they become despots. That historically hasn't been a problem in America, because it's a big country with multiple power centers.
Except in most parliamentary systems (any that I'm aware of), this kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.
> his kind of impasse would trigger an election. In the US you just get unending gridlock.
True. Would not help us before November 17th, though.
Also, parliamentary democracies do fall into the trap of back-to-back snap elections. Given the current situation is likely to change within thirteen months, I'm not seeing a fundamental advantage to a parliamentary system with respect to this dynamic.
That's fair. Israel's parliamentary system is famously dysfunctional (perhaps because they don't have a solid constitution) and systems like the UK and Japan are also moribund in many important respects, partly by design.
The UK is a bad example of a parliamentary system, because it's even older than the US and even more systemically broken. Can you believe it, the US actually learned from the UK's system and didn't make all of its mistakes (though it did make some bold new mistakes).
Agreed, a parliamentary system alone wouldn't fix the overall zero-sum dynamic of two parties. IMO that's why the most stable parliamentary democracies also tend to have proportional representation.
A typical characteristic of a parliamentary system is that there's a system to trigger a snap election if nobody can command the confidence of the parliament. Unless the parliament you're copying is Norway's, which apparently serves fixed four year terms no matter what, this kind of nonsense wouldn't go on for long.
Fungi make up one of three primary kingdoms of multicellular life. Mushrooms and other fungus have a variety of flavors already, and some of them are quite meat-like. Given fungus cells are more similar to animal than they are plant, it is possible that they can be selectively bred or engineered to taste more meat-like.
I wouldn't be too dismissive of the potential here.
I'm not being dismissive, but was instead responding to a completely useless argument based on the ideal. Ideally, people will choose to eat mushroom instead of meat.
An ideal situation only exists in a textbook, and dealing with reality is what we should do, was sort of my point.
I'm not being dismissive of the use of mushrooms as a meat argument. But I was being dismissive of the moral superiority based, "you should do this because it's right" argument being made framed by mushrooms.
Anything is probably possible eventually, you could engineer a fungus to grow and taste like meat. Is it economical and possible with current technology, maybe not.
Anyone visiting wine country north of SF can visit a vineyard and tasting room that is/was tied to their family. It is almost a little museum with various artifacts from the family.
The wine is also decent, and many bottles are quite affordable. They make a lot of Italian grape varietals that are a little hard to find elsewhere.
I don't really understand why iron is being considered over aluminum. Is aluminum production from ore too complex compared to iron? I would have to imagine burning metallic aluminum produces much more energy per gram.
Aluminium production is complex and might be less efficient per kilogram than iron production. Also, compared to iron there are no known processes to employ hydrogen, which can be had from green-ish sources, in aluminium production.
Aluminum definitely oxidizes extremely well. Most of the aluminum you come in constant with is oxidized intentionally (anodizing).
It’s just a ridiculously expensive metal to make.
Look up how much alumina is minded all over the world, how it’s shipped to Iceland for processing because of their cheap geothermal electricity, then shipped to China to processing, then shipped back around the world to final destination. It’s crazy.
> I think this is pretty cool. Maybe I’ll buy some McDonalds today too.
Plenty of people will have plenty of issues with a major corporation. But it's worth pointing out that McDonald's is one of the most prominent fast food chains which has no problem with animal abuse in terms of products from horribly treated livestock animals. They have trouble even making their french fries livestock-torture free .
Maybe this issue doesn't personally matter to you, but it does create a huge problem for a company that does something so shamelessly unethical.
It's very hard to take this essay seriously. Mostly because it so completely dances around the obvious purpose of a "superstore" that it is hard to connect this described experience much at all to what people actually do in such a store.
This essay kind of describes this sort of store as one would describe a walk through the woods. But the purpose of a walk in the woods is so distinct from the purpose of shopping that no comparison can be made.
The essay is not about the purpose, it's about the effect.
I see where you're coming from, living in a big busy city and shopping regularly in such stores you get desensitized, but your comparison to a walk in the woods is perfect.
A walk in the forest can teach you a different way to see, and so can reading a book. A more systems-minded person might see an entirely different world of hidden machinations than Annie Ernaux if they walk their local megamart like they would in the woods, but it would be equally fascinating to read.
It has the same essence as the hacker's posture of curiosity and play.
I think they're giving us the benefit of the doubt that we know what a store is for and have already sufficiently considered what can be accomplished in one.
Two different posts have called out that specific part, and I don't get why. It fits just fine, in context. The overall tone of the article, I get criticizing, but that part seems entirely fine to me.
(the context is that the author's parents seem to have disliked the store, and ran a press that published a book that was sharply critical of Wal Mart, with the result that the author went many years without visiting one—this context is presented right before that entirely reasonable and appropriate use of "transgressive")
It's a continental philosophy thing. The moment I saw Paris Review in the title I knew there would be "transgressive", a few shots at capitalism, and inevitable dog-whistles to race and gender.
And sure enough, coulda won bingo with those assumptions.
Usually some sort of tie back to "the Real", in either the Lacan / Zizek sense, or the Baudrillard sense. Didn't get any of those, though; kinda disappointed.
> The moment I saw Paris Review in the title I knew there would be "transgressive", a few shots at capitalism, and inevitable dog-whistles to race and gender.
Lol. Boy Howdy, you nailed it and I love your Bingo card. In my weak defense, I hoped that, since it had been vetted by the good denizens of Hacker News, it would’ve been a bit better than average.
To be fair, even the most remote Carrefour in rural France would be considered an opulent food palace for the top 5% in the United States. Some forms of capitalism seem to produce more aesthetically pleasing results than others.
