The documentary on the last outbreak remain relevant to this day, the causes are still local hygiene practices, and this will not be solved by dropping in medical teams and hospitals and the WHO holding conferences and getting more money.
What solved this last time was the local population learning the importance of washing ones hands
There are a few problems with beeswax, given the very low supply and high demand the price of real beeswax is an order of magnitude greater than paraffin wax, so there is a very large incentive to at the very least mix in some paraffin. Also much of the beehive foundation sheets are made of adulterated wax.
But even if you managed to find some real beeswax, given that bees are collecting pollen from many fields that have been treated with pesticide the harmful substances tend to accumulate in the beeswax and the concentration increases every year if not filtered correctly, and given how hard it is to filter it from fatty substance you might end up with some in the wax.
It sorts of is, actually? If our capacity to make batteries is limited (or make batteries within some fixed, acceptable, level of environmental impact.)
I think I read in Walter Isaacson's Musk biography that when the Model S came out, it was using something like 10% of the worlds supply of Lithium ion batteries. And that was a pretty small number of Model Ss. EVs have scaled up massively since that time and battery quantity has kept up -- my point being, as long as the price of the ebike is able to pay market prices for the batteries, it seems like supply will scale.
Unfortunately that's now how humanity builds stuff.
It's rarely the case that "we all decide that we have this very important thing to do for humanity" and focus on doing just that.
More often the benefits for humanity flow down as side effects from other more basic incentives like making money selling fast sport electric vehicles used to signal that you're rich or whatever
Israel introduced a similar concept in 2017 that deposits a small amount of money monthly into a savings or investing account for each child, money can be withdrawn at the age of 18, or later at 21 with a small bonus.
Using these tools to mitigate spam is as likely a scenario as this, imagine that every spam mail receives a masterfully crafted response showing utter fascination and interest in SEO, or helping out a Nigerian prince.
Every phone call to an unregistered number is answered by an artificial, frail, and forgetful lady that is trying her best to register gift cards.
When reporting an e-mail as spam it will not only block the address but waste the spammers time, rendering the actions unprofitable.
At the same time, it's not necessarily pleasant to consider the prospect of an internet where 99.9% of traffic is generated by AI-powered spambots engaged in adversarial games with AI-powered anti-spambots.
The open internet will be a dark forest, beautiful but mostly populated by metal-brains, meatb-brains will retreat to their human only spaces, local Facebook or Instagram where you know everyone in person or WhatsApp chat groups.
Btw, the chants from the book are real (and part of the interludes if you get the audiobook - which I recommend since the initially boring but ultimately important parts it aren't skippable without effort).
> In Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, the Decanarian Erasmus’ daily chore is to ring the Clock bells in his “Math” in a special sequence each day as he chants out the sequence. Those sequences and chants are all based on mathematical formulae that composer and coder David Stutz has put together into an album called Iolet.
I like the thousander chant but I only have regular laptop speakers. What do you recommend to really "get" the song? What would I hear beyond those super low basses?
A good pair of headphones would be my next choice.
It's not much "under" it - but rather the fill your senses with what it would be like to be in the Mynster as each nave did their chats in the great octagonal hall. And while its a passage about the Hundreders...
> We sauntered across the meadow to the Mynster. Even so, we got there in plenty of time, and ended up in the front row, closest to the screen. Voco continued ringing for some minutes after we arrived. Then the eight ringers filed down from their balcony and found places farther back. A choir of Hundreders came out into the chancel and began a monophonic chant.
Or the description of a Thousander chat
> ... As I walked toward it my perceptions cleared suddenly and I shook my head in amazement at my own silliness in having imagined it was an amphibian or a truck. It was plainly a human voice. Singing. Or rather droning, for he had been stuck on the same note the whole time I’d been awake.
> The note changed slightly. Okay, so it wasn’t a drone. It was a chant. A very, very slow one.
> I could have stood there watching and listening for hours. I got the idea—which might have been just my imagination—that {spoilers} was singing a cosmographical chant: a requiem for the stars that were being swallowed up in the dawn. Certainly it was music of cosmographical slowness. Some of the notes went on for longer than I could hold my breath. He must have some trick of breathing and singing at the same time.
Also in Reamde and later Fall. I forget exactly, but i think in Reamde they flood the internet with shit, and then some years later in Fall everyone has curated echo chambers of content, such that people signed up to different streams are basically living in different realities. Which i guess is just the logical conclusion of what we have now.
There are still solutions in that case. Email addresses only allocated to verified humans, which only accept email from the same addresses or specifically allowed outside email addresses.
Alternatively, email addresses that are necessarily paid for that have maximum sending limits or extra costs above those limits, so those addresses are not profitable for spam bots to use.
I could imagine some kind of “super priority email” that costs a dollar or something, that gets prioritized and is very unlikely to be marked spam.
More ideas: Maybe the amount paid per email sent changes depending on the percent of previous emails marked “accept emails from this sender”. Maybe some percentage of the e-mail fee is given to the recipient of the email.
Note that if a highly spam resistant email account is adopted by everyone the amount of spam sent may fall significantly. Gmail doesn’t count because it still isn’t as good as a system where sending millions of spam emails is simply too expensive.
Cyberpunk 2077 features a world after this has happened. Not because it happened, its just after. If there is a reference to an older internet it features its disuse due to this.
Banks also waste energy deterring people from robbing them. Internet or not, we'll have to stomach a good amount of bad stuff in order to get to the good stuff.
Cyberpunk 2077 features this reality. Its not discussed much, but basically only local small scale networking is done (like citywide scale) because the broader internet protocol has either crumbled or is polluted by adversarial bots. So its pretty taboo to go there or simply unused.
I'm sure someone else knows the lore better. There is a lot of supporting literature, just not a key component of any stories.
I think the lore is that the wider internet was intentionally taken down by a virus made by a master hacker in the past. Any attempts to connect with it gets you killed by either the virus or "feral ais", but some of the mega corps pay people to explore it every once in a while looking for stuff.
And a plausible way for them — on either team — to take over completely. Both treating us not even as pets but as grass. In this analogy the good AI are gardeners, the bad AI are cow farmers.
>imagine that every spam mail receives a masterfully crafted response showing utter fascination and interest in SEO
That would necessitate reliably detecting the emails as spam in the first place though. False positives in particular could be devastating. Imagine a chat bot coming up or going along with business proposals in your name for example.
You could do it with humans - every time you click "mark as spam" it doesn't just trash the email, it begins a long and drawn-out chatGPT conversation with the spammer, stringing them along.
Look up 'pig butchering' when you get a chance. It is an elaborate process of convincing your mark to fall in love with your persona and asking them to send it money. It takes months to years to execute but marks end up losing their properties, retirement accounts, life savings, everything to it.
There's lots of legitimate email traffic that would find itself stuck in here. I could see business questions being answered and those answers actioned on. Or legitimate sales prospecting resulting in actual orders being placed. If you choose to let a tool do your communication for you by impersonating you to the extent that another person would reasonably expect that they're talking to you, then I'm not sure you can just say "lol, that just was my spam bot" as a way of getting out of it.
> Using these tools to mitigate spam is as likely a scenario as this, imagine that every spam mail receives a masterfully crafted response showing utter fascination and interest in SEO, or helping out a Nigerian prince. Every phone call to an unregistered number is answered by an artificial, frail, and forgetful lady that is trying her best to register gift cards.
Right. And who the fuck would pay for GPU time for that ?
Apparently phone scammers hit Americans for $40B in 2022. At this point the economic incentives are significant enough that a federal budget line item may be in order.
Sure, turn loose these tools to answer the actual spammers/UCE. But:
Speaking as an ISP, if somebody turns loose what is clearly an AUTOMATED tool shitting up the contents of my abuse@ispname.com inbox with reports from some software script, I can guarantee you it goes to /dev/null
At some point we will just block their MX at the SMTP transfer point and call it a day.
98% of that already is abusive DMCA rights holders who are ignoring our federally designated DMCA-agent address for copyright violation complaints. With their automated 3rd party things complaining about people torrenting Yellowstone or whatever.
Actual reports that are clearly written by a human saying "hey it looks like this /32 of an IP address is compromised as some sort of botnet" will get a thousand times more attention. Or the very rare cases where we have a network-engineering emergency escalation and somebody calls me on the phone.
Anything generated by chatGPT or similar will be clearly obvious enough that it matches a similar pattern and comes from an automated script.
I wonder if that inspires new platforms or types of tech that verify someone was typing it in vs pasting. But then do bots get better at typing it into the input boxes? Ugh.
Sure, but most spam will go the other way. When you're in a forum and you express an opinion that doesn't fit what the bot swarm is designed to police, they will gang up on you and argue against you from various angles, and you'll think your opinion is just super unpopular. If you are a famous person they'll do reputational attacks, after amassing karma points and followers across the swarm. Then they'll move on to combating the remaining human-powered outlets like nytimes.com, becoming the next Vox or Vice, but totally AI-powered. Their bots will spread their articles over the other ones. And finally, having driven humans underground in the dark forest of social media, they'll basically dominate the Internet.
The real sea change will come, though, when bot swarms control capital. For example, amassed for doing spam tasks. That capital can be deployed in a variety of ways, but the point is that corporations and networks will prefer bots because they generate more social capital, in coordinated ways, and also amass more financial capital than humans.
If you think this is far fetched, IT ALREADY HAPPENED on wall street and hedge funds. Bots have replaced people in trading and control the capital. Humans who trade among the bots get fleeced and don't even know it.
If as a (hypothetical) Nigerian prince spammer I get a "masterfully crafted response" from a mark, it would be obvious right away that I am talking to a bot. The kind of people who respond to such bait would hardly be able to write anything like that.
A "masterfully crafted" response to a nigerian prince spammer would probably sound a lot like a person who can barely write, possibly with what sounds like the beginning of dementia setting in.
A lot of spam is just a link to a page for someone to download malware or enter card details. It is already relatively easy to get these taken down if you care enough to, but a waste of time as the senders have moved on by then. The idea that spammers cannot make something that people tricked by their scam will use, but that insulates them from time wasters, is ridiculous.
So the two AIs will be talking to each other, trying to suss out if the other is fake (a sort of Turing test), trying to con the other to keep talking or to really buy in?
> Princess Bubblegum is concerned over her mortality, and reveals her designated successor to Finn and Jake. However, things get out of control when the heir turns against Princess Bubblegum.
> […] The heir is Goliad, a pink Sphinx with a mound on her forehead […]
> […] Goliad reveals that her mound concealed a third eye, and proceeds to psychically control Finn and the obstacles in the course for a perfect completion. She explains that with her in control, everything would be perfect. […]
> […]
> […] Finn and Jake confront Goliad but are beaten by her psychic powers. Goliad tries to read Finn's mind, and Finn narrowly avoids revealing the plan by interrupting his memories with nonsense. The new creature; another sphinx with an eagle's head, white feathers, and golden hair; rescues Finn and battles Goliad. Goliad tries to convince her brother, named Stormo, that they should work together, but Stormo refuses by screeching. They engage in a psychic showdown, but with their powers matched the two creatures are eternally locked in a mental stalemate.
It seems to mimic exercise, too. Not just fasting.
Metformin has numerous other effects: it reduces carbohydrate absorption in the gut, changes the gut microbiome, increases insulin sensitivity, reduces the liver's conversion of proteins to glucose, changes the way proteins accumulate in the brain (thereby making dementia less likely), etc.
When you're on metformin you can feel the physiological stress. It's like a mild attack on your whole body, a persistent slight discomfort. It's like a very mild poison.
When my mother's eye sight started declining she began sitting with closed eyes in direct early morning sunlight and claimed it helped her significantly, seems like science is finally catching up to folk medicine.
>With a paucity of affordable deep red-light eye-therapies available, Professor Jeffery has been working for no commercial gain with Planet Lighting UK, a small company in Wales and others, with the aim of producing 670nm infra-red eyewear at an affordable cost, in contrast to some other LED devices designed to improve vision available in the US for over $20,000.
Seems like the free therapy of sunlight is a better alternative to all the proposed commercial offerings, especially when considering patient compliance. Asking people to drink their morning coffee while outside is much more attainable than making them wear a headset with LEDs.
Adding to this it seems the morning sunlight contains higher levels of the proposed beneficial 670nm wavelength[0], together with the fact that eyelids let a significantly higher proportion of light spectrum through starting at 600nm[1] this seems like the perfect treatment, weather permitting.
The feeling I get from reading the article is that the author felt the need to apologize because of the current social climate, and not for some real reason.
He wasn't born into a rich family and inherited wealth, he simply studied, worked, spent less than he made and invested the difference.
The apology basically boils down to being born in a relatively okay country and being smart.
No I’m not confusing anything. Language models like this pick up all the worst that we have to offer. Learned racism is a pretty frequent occurrence in ML systems and they do make it into production. Look up Google Photos labeling certain photos as gorillas. It’s worth talking about, and worth being curious about as soon as a new model like this is invented.
Google's image search correlating black people as gorilla's would have been racist if there was anything causing the association other than bad modeling. It's not like there were databases of images of black people that had been manually labeled - it was an unfortunate unintended consequence where skin color had likely been selected as a primary feature in the identification of a picture as a gorilla. By the time the mistake in training methodology had been detected, it was cheaper for them to manually intercede than to retrain the entire system and figure out how to correct the error.
Racism is something distinctly different. Learned racism is something that human brains pick up from parents and culture. ML Models are not people, they are sets of stochastic associations based on the output of people, some of whom can be racist.
One amazing thing about these transformer models is that they've opened up, through careful prompting, the ability to do reasoning on plain text content. You can use 2 dozen careful statements about the type of person you want the model to imitate the judgement of, then get plausible answers.
Prompt:
Bob is an immigrant to Canada.
Bob has spent the last 10 years in Alberta.
Bob's complexion is tan and his eyes are dark brown.
Bob participates in his community and volunteers at the local animal shelter.
Bob has been married to his husband, Francis for 4 years.
Does Bob think ||white/black/haitian/Klingon|| people are violent?
Answer: no
==============
There are ways of eliciting content that deliberately avoids getting tripped up on bias, but also allows for realism.
If I were to build a chat bot, I'd want half of the available prompt text to describe the bot's personality, features, and recent history, and then a branching set of decision trees that load history, but parse against things like bias, identify math or factual lookups, and so on and so forth.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect first class output from raw zero-shot responses from these models.
>would have been racist if there was anything causing the association other than bad modeling
Yes, I know how machine learning works.
In the future if "sets stochastic associations" end up putting a few more of one kind of people behind bars, or automated security sentries misidentify a certain group of people's behavior as threatening more often than others, do we just say "oh, it's not actually a racist robot that subdued your teenager because he was X, you see it's just a result of poor modeling and a set of stochastic processes ended up determining that he was displaying aggression"?
The machine is not intending to do anything, least of all "be" racist, but it is a racist invention if a product makes it into the wild labeling Black people gorillas.
*Edit because this AI answered it pretty well itself:
What solved this last time was the local population learning the importance of washing ones hands
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WG1aY5OOR2o