“Artificial General Intelligence arose from the streets of San Francisco ca. 2027 possibly due to the high use of opiates among the population. Scientists have found that many locals at the time (of the dominant natural species - Homo sapiens) would consume vast amounts of fentanyl on the city streets - an incredibly dangerous drug originally used at the time as painkiller - which might be the source of artificial intelligence.”
Apple is a good choice if someone doesn’t know which company to start with. A lot of Apple customers have iCloud+ but don’t realize email hosting on your own domain is included in the plan. If you’re already paying for it you might as well use it.
I was totally unaware of this. I haven't quite been ready to pull the trigger on something like FastMail or ProtonMail, but I have a few domains kicking around and figure it's worth a shot to try it out. Thanks!
Even worse some data centers have been caught running on diesel generators even in places where that is illegal. People are sick of tech companies bribing their way out of any accountability.
> A US regulator ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company had acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power huge datacenters in Tennessee.
> xAI has been fighting for a year and a half over truck-sized gas turbines the company had parked near its Colossus 1 and 2 facilities, arguing to local authorities that the electricity-generating turbines were exempt from requirements for air quality permits.
It is very big assumption to me. It is now used very widely. But I am not sure if it was at all common back in the history. Most systems were kinda different from it.
I once had a statistics professor (teaching a programming class using, IIRC, SAS) in college who worked as a data analyst in the federal government, possibly the Labor Department. Part of his job was working with polling and form data. After class he once tried to explain a paper he wrote arguing for an additional null-like type in the formal analytics system in his domain. I was young and stupid (took it as an easy programming course; was not skilled at abstract math) and impatient (wanted to meet up with friends at a pub) so didn't follow along well enough to even properly remember his argument, let alone understand it. But I've always distinctly recalled that he was arguing for a 4th, or possibly 5th type, yet whenever I survey the literature I've only found at most such 2 types. But I've probably been looking in the wrong places.
For context, NULL/missing was a type. N/A was a type (i.e. a question irrelevant to someone). I can't remember the 3rd, and of course not the additional (4th or 5th) type he was proposing. If anyone knows a good resource that describes this problem domain, that would be much appreciated. I've been haunted for over 20 years by the regret of not fully appreciating what he was trying to explain to me, both because I could've learned something that day, but also because I almost immediately felt like an a*hole for not showing enough interest in and respect for a piece of scholarly work he was clearly proud of and wanted to share with me.
EDIT: I think the third pre-existing type was for a situation where someone abstains from answering a question like, "Sex: male/female", because they consider themselves neither. So something like an Other type. In retrospect this was presumably related to set theory, and he felt there was a gap in the pre-existing formal models.
> For context, NULL/missing was a type. N/A was a type (i.e. a question irrelevant to someone). I can't remember the 3rd, and of course not the additional (4th or 5th) type he was proposing
“Don’t know”: this has a value, but we do not know it could be one. Also, within N/A, one _could_ discriminate between “not available yet”, “will never be available”, “was available once, but was lost”, etc.
Depending on the domain, others could be
- “Can’t tell”: this has a value, but you are not allowed not know it (unlikely, as you likely also shouldn’t be allowed that the value exists)
- incomputable: this has a value, but it isn’t possible to know it
I think generic systems shouldn’t try to capture such domain specific things, but allow for implementing them. SQL shouldn’t even have null, but have enums and product types on top of which you could create it and functions supporting it.
"Don't care" - it has a value, but it doesn't matter. This is classically used in Karnaugh maps.
But you can imagine two kinds of "don't care" values, too: the complacent one, and the assertive one. The complacent one is the one we have in Karnaugh maps, which says, "it doesn't matter what I am, so if it matters to you what I am, I'll be what you want".
But the assertive variant says, "I don't matter, and if I matter for your calculation, your calculation clearly doesn't matter either."
"Not available yet", at least to me, carries the implication that it will, not just might, become available at some point. Probably soon enough that it's worth asking the question again later. Whereas "don't know" suggests that it's not worth asking the question again, because you're probably just going to get "don't know" as the answer. (At least, if "don't know" and "not available yet" are both presented as options).
A more accurate description is “May become available”, it might be possible that it could become available and we believe it could within a short order, however it is also not assured or guaranteed that it will become available when we think, and it may also never become available at all for any number of reasons as simple as someone not following up and adding newly ascertained information or that the only possible source of the information has become permanently unavailable for many other reasons of their own.
> But I've always distinctly recalled that he was arguing for a 4th, or possibly 5th type, yet whenever I survey the literature I've only found at most such 2 types. But I've probably been looking in the wrong places.
It’s common for surveys to encode various null values. ‘Refused to answer’, ‘Did not know’, ‘Not applicable’, ‘Illegible response’ etc, although there is no standard way to do this.
The SAS language allows you to use multiple custom missing values, but this is not widely known and I’ve never seen anyone do it.
Oh that's easy. The 4th is "misplaced/lost", and the 5th is your kids pointing fingers at each other and saying "he/she did it, it wasn't me". Finally, the 6th is FILE_NOT_FOUND, coincidentally also the third boolean value after TRUE and FALSE.
No, that implication is not automatic. The Babylonian numeral system evolved over milenaries, and the simple space noting the absence of a digit between two digits was later noted by a "0" digit. But this symbol was never used by itself, so it did not mean "nothingness". In the same way, a civilization having the concepts of addition and subtraction does not automatically induce the concept of negative numbers.
On the other side, ancient Egyptian numerals did have a zero, but it was only for nothingness. But they did not have a placeholder zero, because their systems was similar to Greek and Roman numerals.
In the 2000s I knew a guy who was transitioning to software development after working in HR at a large American police department. He told me you couldn't become a cop unless you had a mental illness. They psychologically screen candidates to filter out people who have too much empathy. They would reject you if you said you had a close relationship with your mother, for example. They wanted people with aggressive tendencies. They loved it when someone had a superhero tattoo or had a parent die when they were a child.
People always comment that we need to do more screening before people become cops, do more training. The screening and the training are the problem.
It sounds like that guy may have been exaggerating a bit. Aggressive people are a liability. Especially in law enforcement. Not just to the department but to fellow officers. They stir shit up and it is dangerous and annoying.
Cops do need more training, like dramatically more training. I think the screening process is trying to solve a really difficult problem. You don't know if/how someone will be corrupted when they have a little bit of power. Or how they will change over time.
I’m pretty sure the commenter you responded to agrees aggressive people are a liability and that’s the problem with current hiring(or at least the hiring contemporaneous to when they heard this).
From my own personal conversation with a hostage scenario trainer for the police, he said de-escalation forms only a tiny percentage of his training because that’s not what the cops want, even though he would make that the majority of the training given a free hand, since de-escalation doesn’t just increase the chances of the hostages being safe, but also the cops and the first responders.
Yes, I'm sure they would agree but I'm pointing out that the department/agency would agree as well. I don't think that departments were actively seeking out aggressive people, but rather seeking out people who could handle getting aggressive when a situation calls for it. Someone who can't get aggressive is likewise a liability.
I do see what you are saying regarding de-escalation. It seems like one of those things that is easy to mistakenly dismiss as "easy" and focus on something like firearms or tactics training.
It's very different in other countries. My partner is a psychologist and was at a scene where police were called in, she commented afterwards that they were using established de-escalation techniques that she was very familiar with to defuse the situation (I didn't recognise any of it, she's the expert here). So they'd apparently had fairly extensive training in de-escalation as well as experience in applying it.
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