Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:

According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:

• Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
• No managers: There is no managerial oversight
• Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
• Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
• Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills

“If it wasn’t hard, it wouldn’t be worth doing”

AFAIK, there’s nothing stopping any company from scraping Lemmy either. The whole point pf reddit limiting API usage was so they could make money like this.

Outside of morals, there is nothing to stop anybody from training on data from Lemmy just like there’s nothing stopping me from using Wikipedia. Most conferences nowadays require a paragraph on ethics in the submission, but I and many of my colleagues would have no qualms saying we scraped our data from open source internet forums and blogs.

I’m convinced that we should use the same requirements to fly an airplane as driving a car.

As a pilot, there are several items I need to log on regular intervals to remain proficient so that I can continue to fly with passengersor fly under certain conditions. The biggest one being the need for a Flight Review every two years.

If we did the bare minimum and implemented a Driving Review every two years, our roads would be a lot safer, and a lot less people would die. If people cared as much about driving deaths as they did flying deaths, the world would be a much better place.

The victims have beed identified as the owner of the flight school, a flight instructor, and a student.

https://www.wtnh.com/new-england-news/no-survivors-after-plane-crash-in-greenfield/

I hate that I am defending Israel when I say this because what is occurring in Gaza is tragic, but a lot of people are confusing “Genocide” for perceived “War Crimes” as defined by international law and also confusing “Hamas” for “Palestine” or the “Palestinian Authority”.

Hamas is terrorist government (similar in nature to the Taliban) that receives a lot of external funding from countries that actively wish to see the death of Israel and all Jews, making Hamas the chief perpetrators of Genocide in this conflict despite how ineffective they have been in their goals.

Israel was attacked by this terrorist government, and is now defending itself with the expressed war goal of destroying Hamas. While Israel has had a tenuous relationship with the Palestinian people (namely the government’s active efforts to limit the Palestinian Authority and drag their feet on grant the PA more autonomy and their own state which is deplorable and inexcusable), they do not and have not wished to kill an entire culture of people.

Complicating matters, Hamas commonly employs warfare techniques that go against the Geneva Convention like placing government and military headquarters in basements of protected buildings like Hospitals and places of worship. The moment they do that, and abuse those international recognized sanctuaries, they become legitimate military targets leading to the tragic deaths of unwitting civilians.

People can object to the war on the grounds that war is tragic and results in many civilian casualties, but to make meritless claims is detrimental to both international institutions and to the definition of a Genocide. South Africa calls what Israel is doing a genocide, but also explicitly looks the other way with Ukraine and continues to forge close ties with Putin? (For the record, Russia’s actions in Ukraine are also not considered genocide under it’s strict international definition, but they have been found guilty of war crimes).

Israel has an internationally recognized right to defend itself, and it is doing that by dismantling Hamas through force. The Palestinian people are unfortunately caught in the crossfire. With that said, Israel’s methods to this end are not above criticism, and they have faced pressure from the US and Biden to limit civilian casualties wherever possible, and use ground forces to directly attack Hamas rather than relying on airstrikes that have resulted in many innocent deaths.

For those reading who think all war is bad, I’ll leave you with this quote from John Stuart Mills:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

The actual study claims that top 10% is $41k and accounts for 50% of carbon emissions. No where does it normalize incomes for those from Kenya as the article claims. So these incomes are viewed globally. If you are in the US and make more than $20/hr hours a week, you are top 10%.

$67/hr makes you top 1%.

Others are calling to eat the rich without realizing that the global rich includes low wage earners flipping burgers at McDonald’s (I’m in Boston and minimum wage is $15/hr and an assistant manager can be hired for $22/hr).

https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/10546/621551/2/cr-climate-equality-201123-en.pdf

I’m an AI researcher at one of the world’s top universities on the topic. While you are correct that no AI has demonstrated self-agency, it doesn’t mean that it won’t imitate such actions.

These days, when people think AI, they mostly are referring to Language Models as these are what most people will interact with. A language model is trained on a corpus of documents. In the event of Large Language Models like ChatGPT, they are trained on just about any written document in existence. This includes Hollywood scripts and short stories concerning sentient AI.

If put in the right starting conditions by a user, any language model will start to behave as if it were sentient, imitating the training data from its corpus. This could have serious consequences if not protected against.

You would think so, but there is one river that happens to flow and split over the continental divide called North Two Ocean Creek. It’s the tiniest technicality that makes this map technically true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Ocean_Pass

Yes, but you fail to understand the difference between a peninsula and a psuedo-island (a piece of land entirely surrounded by any body of water, artificial or manmade).

The Colorado River starts in Colorado is does not flow over the continental divide.

Not quite, this was made with a ControlNet. A hybrid image wouldn’t work as well as this does. But the underlying visual phenomena is the same.

This is done by combining a Diffusion model with ControlNet interface. As long as you have a decently modern Nvidia GPU and familiarity with Python and Pytorch it’s relatively simple to create your own model.

The ControlNet paper is here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05543.pdf

I implemented this paper back in March. It’s as simple as it is brilliant. By using methods originally intended to adapt large pre-trained language models to a specific application, the author’s created a new model architecture that can better control the output of a diffusion model.

I am a satellite software engineer turned program manager. This is not unexpected in this current environment, however the conditions that created the environment are abnormal.

This solar cycle is much stronger than past cycles. I’m on mobile, so I can’t get a good screenshot, but you can go here to see this cycle and the last cycle, as well as an overlay of a normal cycle https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/solar-cycle-progression

As solar flux increases, the atmosphere expands considerably, causing more drag than predicted. During periods of solar minimum, satellites can remain in a very low orbit with minimal station keeping. However, at normal levels of solar maximum, 5 year orbits can easily degrade to 1 year orbits. Forecasters says we are still a year away from solar maximum, and flux is already higher than last cycle’s all time high (which was also an anomalously strong cycle). So it will get worse before it gets better.

TLDR: Satellites are falling out of the sky because the sun is angy

The aircraft hold their value, and actually appreciate. The actual cost is about $10k a year. Lots of people spend far more than that on other hobbies.

Over half of all pilots in the US (200k) hold a commercial pilot certificate and use flying as their sole source of income or as a way to supplement their income. Commercial pilots makes $50k a year until they can become airline pilots which have salaries starting at $100k.

My 1961 plane burns 25mpg, carries 4 people, and goes 160mph. I own a car that gets worse fuel economy.

Small aircraft have a carbon equivalent to large cars. My plane is from 1961 and has a fuel economy of 15mpg as the crow flies (arguably closer to 25mpg because of straight line measurements versus winding roads that can almost double the distance), seats 4 people comfortably, and flies at 160 mph.

I fell like the only way is to become a dictatorship like El Salvador, and then hope the person in power is actually trying to make the country a better place.

Be right back, I’m going to read up on the latest of El Salvador.

Edit: Bukele has good intentions, but it’s clear that he justifies the means with the ends, including jailing non-criminal dissenters, removing elected officials, and ignoring the supreme court to do it. Only 30% of the 70,000 jailed (nearly 1% of the country’s population) have gang ties according to human rights groups.

At the same time, Bukele has a 90% popularity rating. The people clearly want this. I just wonder how and when the falsely imprisoned might be freed.

The honeymoon phase for Lemmy is over. No one cares anymore about someone expressing themselves (I still do–this is based on my observations).

Frankly, it was much lower than I expected. As a PhD Physicist who leads a very successful career in science education, I expected him to score at least 140, and would not have been surprised to see 150.

Tenet is criminally under rated at 69%. Easily one of my favorite movies of all time.