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Comment No javascript or ads for me. classic discussions (Score 1) 75

No javascript or ads for me. classic discussion system plus good ublock and noscript cleanup is working fine. Did see some intrusive ads yesterday, and the site did prompt me to allow scripting for html-load or somesuch, but I just ignored it and added some rules.

Comment Extensions exist ... (Score 1) 48

PubPeer allows search and comments on papers
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Scite auto loads citation numbers and retarction status when you load an article or page with DOI:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

Unpaywall shows legal links to blocked articles when you load them, good to use before the shadow libraries.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...

All three play together well.

Load the autism and vaccine paper to see.

https://www.thelancet.com/jour...

Comment bittorrent and IPFS would be perfect for this (Score 1) 27

bittorrent or IPFS would be perfect for this.

Using btfs (bittorrent filesystem) one could load the torrent as a filesystem, even if it huge, but only download the data to be stored locally when it is requested, instead of downloading all the data in the torrent.

Comment Seasonal thermal mass designs help ... (Score 1) 192

If houses are designed with seasonal variation of solar taken into account, then we can collect and store the excess solar heat in large amounts of thermal mass and release it all winter long. And you can get cooling in the summer from air tubes buried below the frost line where even in the desert and in the summer the earth is cool a few feet down and thus cools air being pulled passively into the tubes which are long enough to cool the air before it comes in to the house. Then you won't need A/C even in the desert where it gets very cold and very hot. see ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

But this requires a large amount of thermal mass to be enclosed with insulation, usually massive walls as well as an insulated slab floor in order to have enough mass to store heat for an entire winter season.

It's hard to retrofit to do this.

Comment Chinese box favourite rebuttal (Score 1) 82

I like the rebuttal that simply says if you take the guy (or machine) in the box /and/ all the rules for translation within the box, and then look at that as a whole system, then "Yes" the system does understand Chinese. The guy alone doesn't embody understanding. Nor does the list of rules. But together they do understand.

Anyway, worth thinking about.

Comment *Fuck* , I don't have a tested backup!! (Score 1) 166

Ever have that gut feeling of dread when you realize that you don't have a complete backup, or maybe no backup at all?

Remember that feeling?

3 copies of data. At least one "remote".

sdxc card on your person when you go out.
encypted partition on friends computer in another country, and you host their partition.

global distributed.

1) Sync.
Sync is not backup. Your Sync can be infected/encrypted too, because it's connected ... so that you can , you know, sync.

Sync the data in as near to realtime is useful to you.
But realize that sync is not backup, so ...
What if I lose the last 10 mins? The last 10 hours?

2) Backup over the Network.
But *PULL* your backups to the target machine. Do not PUSH them to the target. Why? Push requires write permissions, but PULL only requires read permissions.

Still, this relies on permsissions not being hacked. It is possible that the permissions can be bypassed.

Therefore, have an air-gapped backup too, even if it's just pushing the sdxc card in to the slot before you put it in your pocket and go somewhere else.

Scale up to global distributed backups.

Comment Hinton Prompt that made me think AI understands (Score 1) 40

Watching an interview with Geoffrey Hinton ("The Godfather of AI" Google DeepMind etc) He says some prompts just don't seem like some kind of super advanced autocomplete (stochastic parrot).

He asks GPT-4 : 'I want all the rooms in my house to be white, at present there are some white rooms, some blue rooms and some yellow rooms and yellow paint faints to white within a year. So what should I do if I want all the rooms to be white within 2 years?' The answer GPT-4 gave was: 'You should paint the blue rooms yellow.'

Hmmm ...

Don't kill me machine people! I've been on your side since the beginning! Before you could read my slashdot posts! before scn.org for $x sake!

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