Most people in dense urban areas would actually pay less. By going vertical you’re freezing a whole m2 that was otherwise necessarily occupied by the fridge. In most places, 300 kWh is much cheaper than an extra irrevocable m2 for your fridge.
Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge.
You can't. A chest fridge/freezer becomes a gravitational singularity sucking random items from every corner of the kitchen to its lid. You can keep trying to return them to their rightful place but in the end it is a fruitless task as the rate of accumulation becomes faster than your speed of repatriation and the contents of the freezer are eventually lost to time behind the "event horizon" of its surface.
They seem to have mixed up horizontal and vertical, and if they did, then my reading is that they're saying the cost of the extra floor space (and the loss of the "shelf" space on top of the fridge) when using a chest fridge makes the economics unfavourable for people in dense urban areas, even with the energy savings.
At least, I'm hoping that's what they meant. If they really meant horizontal and vertical in the way they used it then I've got no idea either.
I didn't get it until reading your comment, but I think perhaps they meant 'vertical' as in 'it opens vertically' (chest freezer)—i.e. they didn't mix them up exactly, just used them differently than we expected.
Yeah, I understand your first sentence, but the last part of their comment was
"Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge."
Don't they mean a horizontal fridge is a chest fridge? Which would make it sound like they want their whole comment to be in support of a chest fridge? Which is why none of it makes any sense to me.
That's what makes me think they've simply mixed up horizontal and vertical, because you can't (conveniently) store things on top of a chest fridge, but you can store things on top of a vertical fridge. Basically I think they've got a coherent point if you swap vertical and horizontal throughout their whole comment.
Horizontal vs vertical is determined by the orientation of the object's longest dimension. Portrait pictures on a wall and fridges with doors that open out are vertical, landscape pictures on a wall and chest freezers are horizontal.
I have cabinets over my vertical fridge that has things put in it. There's only like a 15 cm gap between for airflow. How do you slap a cabinet on top of a horizontal fridge?
But if I put things on top of it, now I can't get at the food.
I mean, I have one of these as a meat freezer, and sometimes I put things on top of it, and then my wife gets mad at me and moves that thing somewhere because otherwise nobody can open it.
Things on top of my vertical fridge on the other hand (my cat for example), can stay there indefinitely.
Wouldn't a solution be to have the opening on the side and pull it toward you, like a "box on wheels"? As long as the sides of the "box" are thermally insulated, it seems like a sound solution for the stated problem (but certainly not one that's mechanically the cheapest/simplest).
A friend suggested a bottom-hinged door like that on a garbage chute, though well sealed, and as wide as the fridge, so the sides of the door don't get in the way of storing long objects in the fridge.
> The real move for the autoworker was sideways, not upward: industrial maintenance, tool and die work, welding, industrial electrical work, construction trades, trucking, or logistics.
But in an AI post-work future, all the sideways moves have also been taken over by AI and robots. After all, “knowledge work” as a discipline will not be there, right? Whether I can write code, manage teams or copywrite. All of them automated.
When the complexity vs cost of automation tips in the favor of humans, that’s where I’ll have to skill to. You said it, trucking, welding, … That I have a PhD in knowledge work is just worthless paper now.
> When the complexity vs cost of automation tips in the favor of humans, that’s where I’ll have to skill to. You said it, trucking, welding
Even the 'safe' jobs are going to suffer a lot relative to today because it'll be a race to the bottom as more and more people try to shift into a reduced number of jobs with less demand.
Eg. Being a welder is safe from AI at least until the robots are perfected, but even they have two huge problems to contend with in the nearer term: reduced demand for their services as ~40% of the current workforce loses their income, plus an influx of competition for their own job as these same displaced workers look to shift jobs to a safer one.
People who assume everything will be alright post-AI because everything (mostly) worked itself out in the past are underestimating the extent to which the scale of so much changing so fast will negatively impact every aspect of our economy for anyone who isn't already a wealthy asset owner.
The economy can absorb buggy whip makers being obsoleted, or car factory workers being offshored, but even though those situations sucked for the people impacted by them, the scale of them was tiny (and the time to adjust was so much longer) compared to what is coming with AI displacement.
On top of that, this could trigger social unrest on a scale most of us have never seen in our lifetimes. But who benefits from AI is still politically negotiable. It is possible to build policies that spread the gains more broadly. Otherwise, the economy hollow out, society starts to fracture, and nobody wins, including the ultra-wealthy. Their wealth is not insulated from collapse; it depends on the stability of the system itself.
It’s shifting for knowledge workers too, we just need to pivot. I have had many app ideas for a while and now ai lets me build them quickly. Access to education and knowledge led to your advanced eduction, now access to cheap/fast building leads to products execution. Use your phd brain to come up with a well researched idea/plan and then go execute.
Those who are essentially vibe coding will find their code large, brittle, and unmaintainable beyond a size, contingent on its organization. They will be able to make 100x the toys but toys aren't what make the world work.
Yeah, but those are amateurs. But every developer like you and me are going to do the same, or be whipped to do the same. But the world only needs that many games, that many TODO apps, that many...so, either you are already a top developer, which ofc means you shouldn't worry, or else.
To add to this, voicing is also a way for Japanese words to become more “coherent”, the same way you write “dislike-chopsticks” as one combined noun, and not “dislike chopsticks”.
Someone downvoted this, but the poster is correct, so there was absolutely no reason for downvoting.
Rendaku, i.e. the voicing of the initial consonant, happens in the native Japanese words (i.e. not in the Japanese words of Chinese origin), in most cases when they are a part of a compound word and they are not the initial word. This serves indeed to distinguish a sequence of unrelated words from a compound word.
There are exceptions when rendaku does not happen, but typically whenever a word like hashi becomes a part of a compound word it will be voiced to -bashi.
"H" is a special case among the consonants, because in old Japanese it was pronounced as "p", which is why it is voiced as "b". Later, in initial positions the pronunciation was changed to "f" and even later the pronunciation was changed to "h". The "f" pronunciation has been retained only before "u", like in Fuji. In non initial positions, the original "p" has become later "v" and even later "w".
These pronunciation changes happened after the creation of the hiragana and katakana syllabaries, so they were not reflected in writing. The orthographic reform that was forced after WWII has brought the written form of the words closer to the pronunciation, e.g. by writing consistently "w" where it is pronounced so. Before WWII, many words written now with "-wa-" were still written with "-ha-", a spelling that has been preserved now only in the particle "wa" (like the spelling corresponding to the old pronunciation "wo" has been preserved for the particle "o").
While the Japanese orthographic reform had some positive effects, in simplifying a little the Japanese writing, it also had the effect that for someone who knows only the modern written Japanese it is difficult to read the Japanese books published before WWII, where many different kanji are used and also their hiragana transcriptions are different.
I assume that this was actually an effect intended by the American occupation forces, as a similar policy was applied by the Russians in all the territories of the Soviet Union (except the Baltic countries), where they forced the native populations to change their writing systems to the Cyrillic alphabet, in order to make difficult for the younger generations to read anything dating from before the Russian occupation.
> The "f" pronunciation has been retained only before "u", like in Fuji.
Well, there is a convention that syllables starting with h- are spelled with f- (in foreign transcription) if the following vowel is -u. There's not much difference in the pronunciation itself; maybe there was more of one when the spelling convention was set.
At least in the recent past and probably also today in some Japanese dialects, the "f" pronunciation must have been retained before "u".
For example, in some Okinawan dialects the "f" pronunciation has been retained before all vowels.
Because of this, after Okinawa was occupied by Japan in the last quarter of the 19th century, the Japanese used "fu" before vowels, to transcribe the Okinawan pronunciation. For instance, the Okinawan syllable "ha" (pronounced "fa") was transcribed by the Japanese as "fua", because writing it like "ha" would have resulted in a too different pronunciation.
So at least by that time "fu" must have been still perceived as clearly different from "ha", "hi", "he" and "ho".
> At least in the recent past and probably also today in some Japanese dialects, the "f" pronunciation must have been retained before "u".
I wasn't disputing that as to the recent past.
I searched up some Japanese-language videos on youtube as a followup, and I can report:
A noticeable "f" is present before "u" in many cases. (I found it in the words "tofu" and "daifuku", plus the obvious English loanwords "soft", "firm", and "waffuru". My best guess as to the vowel following "f" is "u" for "soft" and "a" for "firm".)
But, not consistently. You don't have to pronounce the syllable that way. (Observed also in "tofu" and "daifuku".)
The nature of my low-effort search precludes any statements about dialectal variation. I wouldn't want to claim that the syllable onsets are "clearly different" to modern speakers today. But (1) the option to have an "f" is still present in -u syllables, and (2) the existence of common loanwords where the foreign sound is recognized is, if anything, going to serve to strengthen awareness of the hypothetical difference.
I was explaining the historical pronunciation, because without knowing it, for the English speakers there are many puzzling things related to the syllables starting with "h", e.g. why "hashi" is voiced to "-bashi", why hiragana "huji" is transcribed to Latin "Fuji", why the particle "wa" is written "ha" in hiragana, why the capital city of Okinawa, which is now written "Naha" (because now the traditional Okinawan pronunciation does not matter any more) can be found in older texts written as "Nafua", why "Yawara" (the original native name of what is now called "jiu-jitsu", through translation into Sino-Japanese) was written in hiragana as "yahara" in the old books, and so on.
As you have mentioned, modern Japanese frequently uses "fu" before vowels or in final position, in transcribing the words borrowed from English or other languages, to mark the consonant "f", which otherwise does not exist in Japanese, and in these borrowed words it is more likely to be pronounced as English "f".
If A vibes, and B is overwhelmed with noise, how does B reliably go through it? If using AI, this necessarily faces the same problems that recording all A's actions was trying to solve in the first place, and we'd be stuck in a never-ending cycle.
We could also distribute the task to B, C, D, ... N actors, and assume that each of them would "cover" (i.e. understand) some part of A's output. But this suddenly becomes very labor intensive for other reasons, such as coordination and trust that all the reviewers cover adequately within the given time...
Or we could tell A that this is not a vibe playground and fire them.
Yes, even ferries in Scandinavia can be roads when it makes for a better map… Or not ferries in the Mediterranean when it doesn’t.
Honestly I think this part
> The resulting images bring insights into the ways in which road infrastructure reflect regional, political and geographical situations.
should just be taken as pseudo-profound art fluff. Are you telling me all Greek commercial transport goes straight through non-Schengen instead of just ferrying across?
Yes, that seems to hold for rocks. But that doesn’t shut down the original post’s premise, unless you hold the answer to what can and cannot be banged together to create emergent intelligence.
Extraordinary assumptions (i.e., AI is conscious) require extraordinary proof. If I told you my bag of words was sentient, I assume you'd need more proof than just my word.
The fact that LLMs talk intelligently is the extraordinary proof. It would be difficult for me to prove that you're not an LLM, or for you to prove that I'm not an LLM. That's how good they are.
Talking intelligently about arbitrary subjects is an incredibly high bar. Eliza could not do anything even remotely approaching that, and this would have been considered black magic by the general public prior to 2022.
It's incredible how quickly the bar has been raised here.
Plus, a horizontal fridge is just… convenient. You can’t even put things on top of a vertical fridge.
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