The “embodied energy” of a new tablet like a Steam Deck is estimated at roughly 1 GJ, which is ~275 kWh. Original Xbox draws around 100W, so you’d need to play for more than 2000 hours to get anywhere close to the energy cost of creating a new device.
That's 500 4-hour days of gaming. I imagine a large number of gamers would easily do more than that over a few years of console ownership, so I imagine a large percentage of devices did use more power than the embodied energy.
Sure, lower Manhattan lost power & cell service during Hurricane Sandy back in 2012. People were split between lining up around the block for one of the few remaining payphones, and trying to find a spot with line of sight to Brooklyn
From experience, it may be minor or it may be quite major depending on the shape of your data. If you have a whole bunch of small items that, combined, only account for say 1% of the total, then adding borders and labels to all of them may significantly skew that proportion, and the proportions of its parent/ancestors
Yes, that's true. It depends on your use case. I'm almost always focused on the largest items, e.g. for space recovery. But also, being able to zoom in and out negates that issue in every case for me personally.
Spin period: how long does it take the pulsar to fully rotate once, ie. how often does it “flash”?
Dispersion measure: from our perspective, how much is the flash “smeared” across time and frequency vs. just being a narrow-band sharp pulse? This is a function of how much stuff (electrons) exists between us and the pulsar.
Spin-down luminosity: how much of the pulsar’s kinetic energy is being lost as electromagnetic radiation? Pulsars spin more slowly over time due to this, so how hard are the brakes being pressed?
Surface magnetic field strength: what it says on the tin, how strong is the magnetic field on the surface of the pulsar? Refrigerator magnets are 10-100 gauss, a powerful MRI might be 30,000 gauss.
Characteristic age: estimated age of the pulsar calculated by assuming a very fast initial spin & applying the known spin-down rate to see how long it would take to slow down to its current rate. Makes some “spherical cow” assumptions but should be a good rough estimate of its age.
Fighting linguistic trends, insisting on tradition. Drake pushing aside, pain in his face. Embracing and extending, finding the new path forward. Drake with a knowing smile, pointing a finger in admiration.
So, what, if you make a bunch of money selling stolen goods you should be able to keep the proceeds? Surely there are plenty of cases where assets directly involved in the commission of a convicted crime may be justifiably confiscated? Seems like you’re assuming the same flimsy conditions defined in the US’s backwards civil forfeiture laws apply elsewhere in the world.
I think you misunderstand my point and unfortunately come off as not civil in your reaponse, I'm not for civil forfeiture at all. Don't steal. I was surprised you support civil forfeiture and even have an air of mightier then thou since you believe the things stolen to go to a good cause.
You're also conflating criminal forfeiture with civil in your example.
I think question really is in what part of process the forfeiture happens.
In Europe it is after the judgement as part of it. So the tools used in crime might be taken away. A gun in armed robbery. Maybe getaway vehicle if it is used multiple times. Special tools used for breaking in.
FWIW, I learned this approach while working in the trades as a welder. You have consumables in stock and ready to go, and that includes extra grinders. Some tools you do take the time and effort to really take care of, of course, but a lot more than you might think are in the cattle not pet category of things.
Similar for professional kitchens. They use cheap pots, pans, knives, etc. then replace them when needed. No special Damascus steel knives and copper ply pans, just functional cost effective easy to replace stuff.
...all the professional kitchens I've seen use very nice professional kitchen equipment. They don't use damascus steel knives because that doesn't offer any advantage in function, but they aren't using cheap anything. Pots, pans, and knives work for a very long time and it doesn't make sense spending little to not get good ones. You can't get heavy guage stainless pots and pans for cheap, ply or no ply. The knives are the most used tool in food prep - they spend money on quality steel and good ergonomics so they dont have to work harder than they need to. In some places people bring their own knives.
When you sharpen a knife several times a day it’s going to wear out fast, even if it’s expensive. Pots and pans get bashed about and dropped, which damages even expensive pans.
Maybe it’s different in the UK but we never used fancy knives or cookware in the kitchens I’ve worked.
thats why you use quality knives that need sharpening less often. You still sharpen them because that makes the work take less time and effort. They're not fancy they're just high end. They're not damascus steel because that doesn't offer any actual advantages. Thats why you can get a shitty henkels knife for $50 anywhere you look, but the actual zwilling pro chef's knife is 3x the price - because you don't need to sharpen it as often - it keeps the edge for longer.
It's not a question of fancy. Regular looking pans and pots made from ultra thick gauge stainless steel dont look fancy, but they survive being dropped on the ground without issue.
You have a big miscomprehension if you think expensive = fancy. Not fancy, rather ultra utilitarian but high quality.
I'm trying to learn welding/metal working so I can combine it with woodworking for furniture making. Meaning I know shit about tools compared to a professional.
But I've bought two grinders and have an ancient cheap one from father in-law. My cheap Metabo is relatively quiet and smooth. Cheap Lidl one is loud and jerky. Ancient one I've just thrown away at how bad it was to use. Recently I had to grind some tubing for > hour and my wrists felt it even with the Metabo entry level. Supposedly the pro versions have antivibration, better balanced, speed control, etc.
My point being if I was using this 5 days a week for >1h I'd invest in ease of use/comfort/safety - no ? I'd probably have a few throwaway ones for backup.
First, buy a separate handle that you like the feel of. They're dirt simple to swap around between tools. If you're in a large shop, make sure it stays in your lockbox overnight so that it doesn't grow feet.
Second, although honestly more important, make sure you are using the right wheel for the job, with the right pressure (lighter than almost everything thinks), and stay focused on using either the edge or the face, depending on type. This will keep things smoother, slow disc changes, and improve safety by reducing the risk of disc shatter. Detailed explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n0TSF1i5os&t=162s
Hope that helps.
[edit]- When it comes to welding, I strongly recommend learning stick first, even before MIG. It gives you much better practice learning how to control the puddle without spewing metal everywhere. Bonus points in that it is also very inexpensive, and the welds themselves are usually stronger than MIG. Only disadvantage is speed, but for the types of projects you mentioned, that's not much of an issue. This guy's channel is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMtqDWUpJds
I am dreading the inevitable future day when I have to argue about a denied health insurance claim on the phone with a fucking robot prompted to make it as difficult as possible for me to win.
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Optimistically, it might be an improvement. Imagine a world where you can call in or chat. Hold time is zero in both cases. You never need to "transfer" to a new department, or supply the same information over and over. LLMs have access to all the case files and needed info on the backend instantaneously.
Health insurance companies may still seek to deny claims, but the fog of bureaucracy is no longer so easy to hide behind. LLMs should be able to give you a plain-english explanation of why your claim was denied instantly. If they refuse, there will inevitably be consumer-advocate LLMs that can cite the specifics of your health insurance plan in response, or argue on your behalf. I think companies will find that this is a big waste of time, and cut to the chase. Either there is a legitimate reason for claim denial or not. If there is legitimate disagreement on the interpretation of your plan, escalation to lawyers and human review can be fast-tracked.
Often, holding times are not only due to a shortage of call center employees available, but also to encourage the caller to give up. I doubt the hold time would be zero, unless the government legislates a maximum hold time. Even then, the AI could stall with endless patience and requesting clarifications and further information, and repeating details back to you to confirm, with minor errors requiring correction, which might be even worse than waiting on hold.
Do you have direct experience with a call center where this was happening? This sounds like a ridiculous conspiracy theory. In every call center I've ever had experience in, median/mean hold time was a KPI that was relentlessly optimized for. Hourly demand was modeled and staffing levels were set such that hold times were kept to the minimum possible with the resources available. Calls-not-answered was an inverse metric. That's not to say the optimal hold time is always zero. It's also bad to have too many staff sitting idle "just in case" demand suddenly peaks. It's a tricky problem. But LLMs obviously obey the laws of compute scaling, not human scaling, so I would expect it to scale to demand very quickly.
Hold times are optimized for customer retention and profits. This implies that you’re both correct. It’s just the perspective: if people give up on their query but stay a customer that’s fine. Most call centers don’t exactly have the degree of customer service of a hospitality institution like a luxury hotel.
I’ve always appreciated the perspective that they just figure out how much staff they need to stop the customers from getting too pissed off.
The startup opportunity is to have an adversarial chatbot argue on your behalf. Feed it the terms and conditions of your policy, claim info, and then have it duke it out with the insurance company.
"better" for whom? The key issue raised by the parent post is that from whatever sources the robot learns, we should expect it to be trained to use that data to make things better at achieving the goals of the robot owner which are different from - and often opposite to - the goals of the customer.
So yes, in comparison to a static robot flow or a human following a script, a robot that learns from past calls would be better... at maximizing the chances that the caller gives up in frustration while still having their insurance claim denied.
Jeez, one usually has to do some bad things IRL to be called shitty spammy and pathetic, apparently all it takes online is saying “hey”. Doesn’t that seem a bit excessive for someone whose crime is not figuring out some rather subtle unwritten, untaught social rules?
If the result is that women end up swamped in these messages, then it is literally spammy. Sending everybody a "Hey" is no different from sending everybody any other sort of message, ad or otherwise, and calling that out is not excessive.
We used to all fight against spammers like the Spam King, because everybody suffered equally from that flood of unwanted messages. But because these minor spam lords only target women, it seems lots of men think it's not really a problem. If the people suffering from it think it's a problem, then it's a problem. And as far as I can tell, a lot of women on such dating sites do consider this a problem.
I think the key difference is that bisect refers to slicing something into equally sized parts. This is sometimes the case (see eg. git bisect) but bifurcating the problem space would be the more general term.
While bisect is indeed slicing into two (mostly) equal parts, bifurcation is creating two branches, and in my mind, with the intent of following up on both (at least initially). So what's done here is bifurcation with pruning, and I think bisect would be a more appropriate term -- certainly the attempt should be made to divide the problem space into equal parts.
https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy#:~:t....