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Messages - ergophobe

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1
Hardware & Technology / Re: VASA-1 - Microsoft Research
« on: Today at 02:18:45 AM »
Attention: You are now leaving the Uncanny Valley (but you are not quite out)

I’d love to be part of a double blind test to see if that feeling is because I know it’s generated. I feel that if I watched an hour of that I would feel anxious or tired and not know why because I wouldn’t know it was generated, but somewhere I would feel it.

I am guessing that a year from now at most, the best models will be fully out of the Uncanny Valley

2
Web Development / Re: The Turing test of online reviews:
« on: May 01, 2024, 01:03:16 AM »
Quote

Younger participants were somewhat better at distinguishing between human and AI reviews.


Have I said before, I am bullish on the youth? Have I said it too often ;-)

I just hope they take over in time

3
Water Cooler / Re: AI Audio used to retaliate against school's principal
« on: April 28, 2024, 12:18:59 PM »
“There is a time to think and a time to act and THIS IS NO TIME TO THINK.”

John Candy, Canadian Bacon

4
Water Cooler / Re: And we're back
« on: April 28, 2024, 12:17:17 PM »
Thanks!

They changed server config without tellling you?

5
Water Cooler / Re: Golden Age of Renewables Is Beginning, and California Is Leading the Way
« on: April 27, 2024, 02:38:02 AM »
I’d like to know what the auction price was at that moment.

If consumers had to pay the auction price they would flip. Sometimes it goes negative, which is great if you have a big empty battery. But one podcast on the issues I was listening to said it can briefly go up to over $1000/MWh, which delivered to the house could be $2/kWH.

6
Water Cooler / Re: AI Audio used to retaliate against school's principal
« on: April 27, 2024, 02:31:10 AM »
That all makes me sad, but above all the typical knee jerk response to forward the email to a student who would spread the recording on social media.

That teacher should be disciplined too. We have to find a way to stop adjudicating everything by social media mob. That is the saddest part of the story for me.

7
Water Cooler / Re: Golden Age of Renewables Is Beginning, and California Is Leading the Way
« on: April 25, 2024, 07:50:56 PM »
Do you mean commercial or residential?

The bigger problem is that they ARE paying retail to grid-tied systems even when there is a surplus.

This has resulted in me pulling back from a lifelong association with and some pretty big (for me) donations to the Sierra Club.

Anyway, it is obviously unsustainable and the utilities want to quit doing it.

Someone asked why the utilities wanted to do this and an older, leadership person said, “Because they are greedy and stupid.”  I walked away from the Zoom meeting and haven’t been to another.

8
Traffic / How much would students pay to have Tik Tok banned?
« on: April 24, 2024, 10:49:47 PM »
Interestingly, you have to pay college students more to quit Tik Tok than to quit Instagram. But if you tell them that they if they get enough people join, they will ban them campus-wide, they will PAY more to ban TT than IG.

So it seems they see IG as both less important and less destructive

https://timharford.com/2024/04/a-tiktok-ban-wont-solve-social-medias-collective-trap/

9
Traffic / Re: The man who killed Google Search?
« on: April 24, 2024, 10:21:12 PM »
I wonder if becoming a symbol of the Rot Economy / Enshitocene has set off a yellow alert at Google like it did in 2010

Matt Cutts defense of Farmer (which I thought was a huge improvement) at Pubcon started with a series of screen shots of headlines saying Google has become a games cesspool. We’re there again.

I think they have two problems though.

1. It will cost short-term revenue

2. They may no longer have the ability to roll out something like Farmer/Penguin that has a noticeable impact on search quality.

BoL - what do you think of #2? Has search quality just become too hard or does Google simply not care?

[fix autocorrect]

10
Water Cooler / Re: Under the Influence - Podcast Recommendation
« on: April 21, 2024, 02:38:16 PM »
Subscribed. I’ve been looking for some new perspectives

11
Marketplaces / Re: 75% of all US shoppers are Amazon Prime members
« on: April 19, 2024, 01:38:31 PM »
:-)

Very true.

Many of my online purchases are things I know I can get at Target or Home Depot. But a large number of my wife’s are probably not all in any metro area. She finds some new brush that an artist she follows loves and it is only available by direct mail order. It used be that if tou wanted to be up on things like this, you needed to subscribe to a magazine.

I know when I was looking for new computer equipment, camera gear or construction materials, I would buy magazines often mostly for the ads. My dad had two subscriptions to computer magazines for the university athletic department because it was the only way he could keep abreast of which stuff to buy for the office. That was a cost too.

On the other hand, the enshittification of Amazon means that, as people have said, you can’t find any useful guidance since it’s basically an ad auction. Which I guess was the same with the magazines, but improving on that was one of Amazon’s big advantages

12
Marketplaces / Re: 75% of all US shoppers are Amazon Prime members
« on: April 18, 2024, 05:17:34 PM »
>> Tik Tok

A friend who was an early adopter (and is in his 80s by the way), says it has basically become the Home Shopping Network.

>> credit cards

This is a major consideration for me. Especially after I started working on e-comm sites and realized what percentage had no clue about PCI compliance and basic security. 

>> 3am

Different world. The delivery people who use their personal cars are OnTrac, which I call OffTrac. They only come once per week. So second day delivery takes 2-8 days. But since they deliver to the wrong address 10% of the time and cancel the weekly delivery of weather is bad, it can be 3 weeks to never for a package to arrive.

They are cheap so a lot of “free” shipping goes via OffTrac. So even second day delivery is not really a thing unless you pay for the up charge for UPS/FedEx overnight…. Which is actually second day, not overnight. Nobody offers that except courrier services… maybe. Some oil-rich prince had his favorite wine courriered to the hotel for dinner once. Several hundred dollars :-)

So this infrastructure that has been built up in the cities just surprises me every time.

That said, I think online shopping and rapid delivery, even if not AS rapid, is a much bigger change for rural areas than it is for urban and suburban areas.

13
Marketplaces / Re: 75% of all US shoppers are Amazon Prime members
« on: April 18, 2024, 01:01:36 AM »
Bezos early on said that Amazon should not compete in price, but service and convenience. But what happens when the site is so awful that it isn’t actually convenient to use? 

I think the decision to have their own delivery fleet is key. I am shocked when I get off the mountain and go to a town to see how many Amazon vans there are. I didn’t even know about them until going for a run through suburbia while traveling my niece’s wedding 2 years ago. Now I notice them in every city.

Just today my BIL said he was going to order some items for tomorrow. It hasn’t occurred to me that you could order something in the afternoon and have it the next day. Again, it made me realize that Amazon’s warehouse network and delivery operation gives them a huge edge in urban and suburban areas that until recently was not obvious to me.

Anyway, it made me realize that no matter how shitty the website is, they have major market lock for other reasons.

14
Water Cooler / Re: Cali Grid: Wind-Water-Solar
« on: April 17, 2024, 02:29:33 AM »
I would not have expected that 10 years ago

I recently read that the 2015 IEA projections for 2115 solar capacity have already been hit. 91 years early

The thing about exponential growth is that if you get the base wrong, the error compounds pretty damn fast.

15
Water Cooler / Re: Bird flu: First human case reported in Texas - transmitted by cows
« on: April 17, 2024, 02:16:41 AM »
Should you worry about bird flu found in cows?


https://www.futurity.org/birds-influenza-dairy-cows-viruses-3207552/


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