Looking back at the history of England. We have had wave after wave of immigrants/invaders. Each wave brought a period of tension. That period was followed by a period of innovation.
The new people, with new views means old ideas are re-evaluated. New skill, flavours and modes of thought became part of our culture.
Even our language improved. Part of English’s power is the level of nuance with word choice. A loft of that comes from melding multiple root languages in.
You’re on Lemmy, so I’m assuming you’re of a geeky mentality. If so, a local hackspace/hackerspace/makerspace would be a good bet.
On paper, my local one is a communal collection of tools we can all use. In practice however, it’s an excellent social group for fellow weirdos. We just also have some really fun toys to use, when we need them.
https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hacker_Spaces
It’s not fully inclusive of all of them, but a good starting point.
Be careful with the taking average mindset. It’s a default human one, and it’s being abused. A lot of media outlets (particularly American right wing) are mouthpieces for the same few groups or people.
Instead, try and look at their biases. Do they have a reason to mislead you. What akin do they have in a particular game. E.g. the BBC is still fairly unbiased on a lot of world news. They are far less unbiased on middle eastern politics now.
It’s an annoyingly complex problem to solve, on the fly.
Data rot is a serious problem.
I suspect that our time period will end up as an information dark age to future historians.
I saw a talk on the subject about a year back. It was discussing tokamak reactors, from an engineer working on them. The small ones can’t sustain a break even state, but they are affected by the inverse square law to a larger degree. I believe China is about to start/has started construction on a power station sized test reactor.
The pellet sort are a different type. They have different pros and cons.
Some companies are still trying.
I’ve got a ulefone 27T. It’s the phone equivalent of a tank. It also includes thermal and night vision, and underwater video modes. I would also give it good odds of surviving being used as a self defence weapon.
Downside is it’s a relatively unknown Chinese brand.
They are down to 2 main problems now. The main one is (the cost of) scaling up. Fusion reactors will be more effective then bigger they are. The tiny test ones are already past break even.
The other is wall material. Apparently the radiation has an annoying ability to transmute the elements making up the wall of the reactor. They are working out a material that can maintain its bulk mechanical properties, even with random elements appearing in its internal structure.
There are a bunch of characteristics that, while fairly arbitrary, can’t be changed once they are locked in. The mappings from RNA to proteins are a good example. Changing it is instantly lethal to the cell involved. Others include the chirality of amino acids, and the choice of bases for DNA.
If we look at the entire tree of life, we see no deviations in these deep characteristics. This implies that they were fixed before we all split. There might have been alternative variations in the past, but none have survived to the modern day (that we have identified).
This goes double of eucaryotes (basically everything other than bacteria). The design is so unique that convergent evolution is highly unlikely to stumble into the exact same layout from 2 sources.
Kids fill you to the brim with love, and drain you of everything else.
Thermal imaging requires specialised organs. The difference between optical and thermal wavelengths is too extreme for a single organ to cover. Long wavelength IR is also quite low resolution for visual purposes.
Snakes have evolved the capability, but it’s not common.
There’s definitely a difference between rural and urban requirements.
Analogue goes further, and can tolerate more interference.
Open channels allow others to jump on quickly. E.g. a hunter/hiker listening in, can jump in with critical information on a search and rescue.
Lower density means less people to mess with channels, and generally better radio etiquette.
Open radios are cheaper, and already have the required infrastructure.
Basically, it’s not worth the cost/effort to upgrade. It also provides some extra benefits.
While they are massively more common than in other fields, they are still a tiny minority.
It’s also worth noting that the toupee effect may be involved. A lot of trans people can pass, in a work environment, as their preferred gender. I know a few trans people that I would never have clocked as trans, except the info came out in discussions.
Dog particularly pick up on our emotions. If you’re always worried and stressed when you go to the vet, your dog will pick up on that.
My dog had a few checkups, not that long after we got him. None were stressful either to him, or us. Since then, he LOVES the vets. He has lots of new people paying attention to him and lots of new smells!
A fear of the vets is a learned response. If your vet is that frightening to them, I would consider looking at other vets.
A good excuse for a quick visit is to weigh them. Most vets I’ve seen have a dog scale in the reception. If you mention you also want to make sure they are not afraid of a vets visit, most will have zero issues with it. It also lets you check they are growing at an appropriate rate.
I’ve noticed 2 types on this, stick-in-the-muds and peak-hunters.
Stick in the muds latch on to the first version of a belief they encounter properly. They will stubbornly hang on to that for as long as possible.
Peak hunters are the opposite, they will rapidly change beliefs to maximise the results/find truth.
Interestingly, after some time, the 2 groups look almost identical. The peak hunters tend to find the ‘best’ version of their belief, based on their existing memeplex. To budge them, you need to show a different belief is better, on their rankings (not yours). This is hard when they have already maximised it. Without knowing how they are weighing things, they can look like stick in the muds.
The biggest tell is to question why they believe what they do. If they have a reasonably comprehensive answer, they are likely peak hunters. Stick in the muds generally can’t articulate why their belief is better, outside of common sound bites.
This is textbook toxic masculinity.
A lot of people misuse the term, but this is an excellent example. The men involved lose out on something amazing due to it being ‘unmanly’.
As the owner of a reactive dog, I disagree. It takes longer to overcome, but gives far better results.
I also put vibration collars and shock collars in 2 very different categories. A vibration collar is intended to alert the dog, in an unambiguous manner, that they need to do something. A shock collar is intended to provide an immediate, powerfully negative feedback signal.
Both are known as “shock collars” but they work in very different ways.
Shock collars are awful for a lot of training. It’s the equivalent to your boss stabbing you in the arm with a compass every time you make a mistake. Would it work, yes. It would also cause merry hell for staff retention. As well as the risk of someone going postal on them.
It would be possible to make an AGI type system without an analogue of curiosity, but it wouldn’t be useful. Curiosity is what drives us to fill in the holes in our knowledge. Without it, an AGI would accept and use what we told it, but no more. It wouldn’t bother to infer things, or try and expand on it, to better do its job. It could follow a task, when it is laid out in detail, but that’s what computers already do. The magic of AGI would be its ability to go beyond what we program it to do. That requires a drive to do that. Curiosity is the closest term to that, that we have.
As for positive and negative drives, you need both. Even if the negative is just a drop from a positive baseline to neutral. Pain is just an extreme end negative trigger. A good use might be to tie it to CPU temperature, or over torque on a robot. The pain exists to stop the behaviour immediately, unless something else is deemed even more important.
It’s a bad idea, however, to use pain as a training tool. It doesn’t encourage improved behaviour. It encourages avoidance of pain, by any means. Just ask any decent dog trainer about it. You want negative feedback to encourage better behaviour, not avoidance behaviour, in most situations. More subtle methods work a lot better. Think about how you feel when you lose a board game. It’s not painful, but it does make you want to work harder to improve next time. If you got tazed whenever you lost, you will likely just avoid board games completely.
Pre-assuming you are trying to create a useful and balanced AGI.
Not if you are trying to teach it the basic info it needs to function. E.g. it’s mastered chess, then tried Go. The human beats it. In a fit of grumpiness (or AI equivalent) it deleted it’s backups, then itself.
As did the vikings. The long term results were generally an improvement however.