About time!

The kind of funny thing is that if this happened for real, the next big plastic product would just be pesticide impregnated plastics. And then we’d have pesticide microplastics everywhere!

You’re one of the founding members of the greater Seattle area polycule, aren’t you?

What I’m seeing through your comments here is that your kid trusts you enough to get you into the weeds with them on this problem, has a good enough sense of judgement not to want to just fudge their name to follow the path of least resistance (don’t want to do election fraud in a technical, though not real, sense), and you all have thought through it all and realized it’s a battle not worth having, given your local and statewide political makeup as well as the stress it would cause your kid. It seems like your kid is comfortable with you, self-aware, and capable of making the sorts of pragmatic decisions that many adults cannot make.
Damn. Do you mind asking your kid what it feels like to have good parents that are preparing them to tackle life’s challenges?

Presented kind of as a joke, but good job. Seriously.

Toxic polyamory situation. A partner I lived with and was once very in love with fell away when she got interested in someone new. It was messy and shitty. I wound up dating someone new, who I had a great relationship with, and it was very physical. But I still lived in a 2 bedroom apartment with my ex.

My ex was a bit weird. She sort of viewed relationships as whatever things with no boundaries. Folks just do whatever they want in the moment and there’s no fidelity according to her. (Things I learned after I fell in love with her. Woof.) She also had intoned a few times that my new partner was a slut, which was sort of funny, given that my new partner had a pretty strong moral code.

My ex got a little less interested in her new guy, and tried to seduce me one night. And I rejected her. We had officially ended things, and I did not want to revisit that.
My ex sneered at me. “Fine. I hope you’re happy with [New Partner], and I hope [NP] is happy with you and your… magical penis!”

She practically spat that out at me, and… yeah. It was as funny then as it is now.

And for the record, it’s not magical. I just like to put top hats and little capes on it sometimes.

“I don’t really want to look at my body any more,” he said, noting it was too painful to see photos from the hospital. “Every time I see myself, I have flashbacks. And every time I see cops, I think, is he after me? And I know in my head it’s not true, but it just comes up.” He said he questions whether he could’ve done something differently. “I have to keep telling myself … I didn’t deserve this.”
He added: “I just want the Department of Justice to take care of them and fix what they say they’re going to fix … I’m not trying to get attention, I just want my story to be heard because I hurt.”

Oof.

They’re just holding him upside down and shaking him like a 1930s comic strip about bullies.

Genuinely chuckling at this and imagining his hair dye dripping off while it happens.

The goal is not really to kill civilians or even to harm Hezbollah. The goal is to destroy vital services to further destabilize the country.

Shirley you’ve heard of absurdist humor?

Ah, sorry. I edited that away, after rereading the context. I didn’t want to inject personal philosophy into what was clearly not about my beliefs.

But the second clause was given (or was intended to be given) in the context that I don’t believe hope is actionable. It’s just wasted emotional energy. If I can take an action that directly improves things, I do.

The scale is also poorly defined - sorry. The first: world at large. The second: the world that is around me - my family, my local environment (radiating out from my house, into my community, etc - but I know I can’t impact the national level).

Edit: Sorry, sleepy posting. That was not contextually relevant at all.

That’s where I know I don’t know enough to respond.

Well, crap. I just looked it up. Looks like phones will send out your MAC address when looking for WiFi networks to connect to, and they more or less always search for WiFi, unless currently connected to WiFi.

So - yeah. Same issues with Bluetooth.

And some newer consumer routers do all sorts of funky things under the hood in the name of security, which includes sending information about traffic back to their corporate home base. That could easily also include MAC addresses of passing devices. (Or telling the manufacturer every site you visit. Very fun now that the latest trend in routers is to require cloud connections and accounts, so your identity with them is ‘known’.)

Info dump incoming!

Basically, your phone is a big ol’ slut.

I’m not as well versed with WiFi, but phones are set up to be very friendly with Bluetooth. Every Bluetooth device your phone sees, it says hello to. Most phones these days don’t really disable Bluetooth (they just limit its active use), or they disable it for a limited time period.

This is ostensibly fine, since Bluetooth supposedly identifies itself with a MAC address that isn’t necessarily tied to your identity. Unless you connect to something with Bluetooth that knows your identity, like a smart speaker, or have given Bluetooth permissions to any apps you’re logged into.

BLE positioning with sensors utilizes BLE-enabled sensors that are deployed in fixed positions throughout an indoor space. These sensors passively detect and locate transmissions from BLE smartphones, asset tracking tags, beacons, personnel badges, wearables and other Bluetooth devices based on the received signal strength of the transmitting device. This location data is then sent to the central indoor positioning system (IPS) or real-time location system (RTLS). The location engine analyzes the data and uses multilateration algorithms to determine the location of the transmitting device. Those coordinates can be used to visualize the location of a device or asset on an indoor map of your space or leveraged for other uses depending on the specific location-aware application.
– Some random website - inpixon.com

That’s not to say that every place you go is deploying BLE beacons to know you spent 20 minutes looking at candy when you were supposed to be making a quick run to get milk, but it’s possible that is occurring. And if it is occurring, it’s likely they’re working with some sort of data broker to deanonymize your data. Or at the very least, making their own inferences - using that loyalty card and a BLE beacon to know that the loyalty info put into a register corresponds to your MAC address.
What’s not likely, however, is that this data is public. Your data has value, so they don’t want to let it go for free, plus if the general public knew they could be tracked almost anywhere, there might be enough outcry for lawmakers to adopt better consumer privacy laws.

Editing to add: Even if you aren’t being precisely tracked within a retail location, a single ping on a Bluetooth device is enough to establish that your phone was within 30-50 feet of the device, which is apparently all the police need to send you to jail for 20 years.

I hope you’ve enjoyed your tour of this info dump. Tin foil hats are on sale at the gift shop!

You say “Not even close.” in response to the suggestion that Apple’s research can be used to improve benchmarks for AI performance, but then later say the article talks about how we might need different approaches to achieve reasoning.

Now, mind you - achieving reasoning can only happen if the model is accurate and works well. And to have a good model, you must have good benchmarks.

Not to belabor the point, but here’s what the article and study says:

The article talks at length about the reliance on a standardized set of questions - GSM8K, and how the questions themselves may have made their way into the training data. It notes that modifying the questions dynamically leads to decreases in performance of the tested models, even if the complexity of the problem to be solved has not gone up.

The third sentence of the paper (Abstract section) says this “While the performance of LLMs on GSM8K has significantly improved in recent years, it remains unclear whether their mathematical reasoning capabilities have genuinely advanced, raising questions about the reliability of the reported metrics.” The rest of the abstract goes on to discuss (paraphrased in layman’s terms) that LLM’s are ‘studying for the test’ and not generally achieving real reasoning capabilities.

By presenting their methodology - dynamically changing the evaluation criteria to reduce data pollution and require models be capable of eliminating red herrings - the Apple researchers are offering a possible way benchmarking can be improved.
Which is what the person you replied to stated.

The commenter is fairly close, it seems.

I thought this disease sounded familiar. Trichinosis - Wikipedia

While the most common vector in the U.S. is now bear meat, that wasn’t always the case. The most common human infection vector used to be undercooked pork!
Many older folks won’t touch pork unless it’s well done, because apparently these parasites make your muscles feel like they’re on fire.
A history teacher (many years ago) even told my class that trichnosis was the reason Jewish people don’t eat pork. (A quick internet search throws water on that. Doesn’t rule it out, but it’s not guaranteed to be correct, either.)

While I agree that hunting apex predators (or, really, any sport hunting) is kind of dumb, I do want to note that pigs famously eat slop and bathe in their own shit and bacon is delicious. Which is to say, we probably can’t assume taste based on diet/lifestyle

That’s very fair, indeed.

Perhaps awareness of one will spark awareness of the other. I suppose my concern is that plasticisers are sort of a ‘hidden’ risk, for the most part. They’re used in nearly every food packaging (and prep, such as hoses) that isn’t contained in glass, or served up in its own peel.

Microplastics are terrifying and all that, but I’m sort of more worried about plasticisers like BPA, BPF, BPS and the rest of the alphabet of BP-whatever’s that was created and brought into use after the dangers of BPA were realized.

Just a heads up - if something plastic says it’s BPA-free, it probably uses a different bisphenol compound that is less studied than BPA. And is likely as toxic (or even more toxic)!

But nobody ever talks about those, because science words.

Don’t be ridiculous. It’s definitely not fentanyl.

We all know if he’d touched one even just one a tiny bit, it would have instantly absorbed through his skin and he would have fallen down dead on the spot, like he got unplugged in “The Matrix”

It’s just science, bro.

One of the things I’m wondering about is whether Helene chopped up the water and caused some overturning/cooling that may lower surface temps.

And if it did (or did so to a meaningful degree), is that helping to temper Milton before it makes landfall?

And I guess I’m commenting here because you seemed so confident. (Maybe you’re just making it up as you go along, too. Who knows?!)

It doesn’t really seem like a bailout.

The packaging says reliability, but the description within the article looks less like neighborhood reliability, and more like national grid reliability.

Specifically, those grid interconnections - the Cimarron Link, Southern Spirit, and Southline. Cimarron will connect Texas to massive wind farms in Oklahoma - power that isn’t going anywhere. It’ll connect Texas to Mississippi (Southern Spirit), and Texas to Tucson. I don’t know about the Mississippi connection, but Tucson is connected to Hoover Dam, which means that losses from transmission be damned, once this is all done, power from (at least) Oklahoma can be sent to LA the next time Lake Meade dries up, with the possibility of power from the east coast finding its way to the west, and vice versa.

As other commenters pointed out, Texas already has some of the least expensive energy in the country, so adding capacity doesn’t make a lot of sense. And transmission lines only adds reliability in the sense that there’s more supply, but most of their failures are not supply related. My understanding of the adding capacity part is just a dovetail into adding solar capacity to states with a lot of land that will become increasingly useless for farming as the climate changes. It just so happens that Biden is trying to create a U.S.-based solar panel and battery production industry. Not a bad strategy to throw cash into generating/subsidizing demand at the same time as we start adding tariffs to imports of those products. (It’s not like, a great strategy, either - because unless the U.S. is willing to subsidize their market longer than China is willing to subsidize theirs, then the U.S. will not really ever have a competitive industry, but I guess if they view it as a matter of national security, then it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense.)

You’re both sorta wrong (and sorta right).

Texas’s grid is crap. It’s far too unregulated and operators do not focus on the right sorts of improvements that will enhance grid stability. Sure, production is great, which means prices are low, but when you ignore warning calls, you invite disaster. They knew, and they chose not to enforce regulations that other states enforce. Other states deal with far colder weather. This was a failure of regulation. And they also fail to maintain basic system design, so a normal power fault can grow out of control to take out power to most of west Texas.

Anyway - sorry. That’s just a pet annoyance of mine. I hate it when pro-corporate governmental policies are seen as a positive thing based on limited metrics. Lower rates amidst poorer performance is not what I’d consider a marker of success. People die, have their homes and property damaged, and lose a lot of money during power outages.
While the chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure is still an issue, the recently announced infrastructure investment is geared toward transmission and generation, which wouldn’t (directly) address their reliability woes.

It seems to me that the goal of this allocation is to build generation capacity in states with space for solar (and possibly wind, although the Biden admin isn’t trying to bootstrap the wind industry in the U.S.). And also build transmission capacity to get that power out of those states and into other areas of the country. (And possibly back in, should they face local problems.)
My hunch is that they want to get some of that renewable power out west, to have a backup the next time the Colorado river/areas that currently get power from the Hoover Dam suffer from a drought, and to feed power up to the east coast so they can decarbonize more easily.