tal

Outside of specialized uses like wanting a very long shelf life for rarely-used devices, I kind of thought that everyone had switched to rechargeable AA and AAA batteries years back.

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

The Ouija (/ˈwiːdʒə/ ⓘ WEE-jə, /-dʒi/ -⁠jee), also known as a Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, or witch board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words "yes", "no", and occasionally "hello" and "goodbye", along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance.

Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living, and reportedly used a talking board very similar to the modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio during 1886 with the intent of enabling faster communication with spirits.[2] Following its commercial patent by businessman Elijah Bond being passed on 10 February 1891,[3] the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unrelated to the occult until American spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.[4]

We've done it before with similar results.

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/?icao=a97316

https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n708jh

https://globe.airplanes.live/?icao=a97316

The only teacher who taught financial education was a substitute we might have seen for one lesson twice a year or something. I still remember him too, Mr. Roland. He called it his Roland-omics course.

I mean, we definitely didn't even have that. And like you, home economics for me was basic sewing, cooking, some crafts.

Oh, there was one point in driver's ed

an elective course

where we covered getting quotes from multiple car insurance providers rather than just taking the first one. I guess I should count that.

People need to work on their susceptibility to this.

I'm not saying you're wrong, and that's gotta be part of it, but humans are humans. They don't get better at that across generations unless doing it wrong is killing them, and even then, evolution isn't a fast process. So basically, every new young human is starting from scratch.

The art of fine-tuning how you convince people to buy your thing is a developing field, and knowledge gets passed down among experts in written form, trained into them. We have marketing, advertising, communication science, psychology, economics. The rate of improvement blows past any kind of change that humans can biologically do.

Maybe we could teach humans how to deal with some of that, but my point is that we aren't doing so, not in an institutionalized form. As a new human, I'm not just given some body of knowledge to counter all that work in trying to influence me. Each generation that goes by, you'd kind of expect humans to get worse at dealing with it, on the net, because the crowd influencing us is getting better more-quickly.

Sometimes we have regulations to deal with certain types of problematic things: pyramid schemes, misleading advertising, etc. But I'd say that that's relatively limited.

EDIT: For the US, if you look at most of what the increase of spending over the past century is on, it's on housing. Like, as society has gotten wealthier, our relative share of spending on, say, food has declined. But housing is up as a percentage of spending. And the housing we have is substantially larger in terms of per-capita square footage than it has been for past generations.

EDIT2:

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/decline-u-s-housing-affordability-1967-2023/

This one doesn't go back a full century, but it does do the last 60.

In that time, median household real income has risen by a bit over 50%.

And median household real house price has risen by about 107%.

EDIT3: And over the past century, average household size has declined, also worth pointing out, so there are also fewer people in those larger, more-expensive houses.

EDIT4: One more fun chart:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at-the-state-of-affordable-housing-in-the-us/

EDIT5: This has some data that goes back the full century that I wanted:

https://thehustle.co/originals/why-america-has-so-many-big-houses

What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”

Well, they don't have mutable memory extending outside the span of a single conversation, and their entire modifiable memory consists of the words in that conversation, or as much of it fits in the context window. Maybe 500k tokens, for high end models. Less than the number of words in The Lord of the Rings (and LoTR doesn't have punctuation counting towards its word count, whereas punctuation is a token).

You can see all that internal state. And your own prompt inputs consume some of that token count.

Fixed, unchangeable knowledge, sure, plenty of that.

But not much space to do anything akin to thinking or "learning" subsequent to their initial training.

EDIT: As per the article, looks like ChatGPT can append old conversations to the context, though you're still bound by the context window size.

One person

Yeah, but:

Inquirer: Piss Christ artist Andres Serrano

I'm not sure how seriously I'd take that.

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

the COL also varies wildly. I could move 1.5 hours away from where I live now and pay like 1/3 of what I do now for rent/mortgage.

Part of that high city housing cost is zoning and other planning constraints on building upwards. Have to increase supply if you want to bring the cost down.

I post this occasionally:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/03/how-skyscrapers-can-save-the-city/308387/

https://archive.ph/jRQIm

If it were possible to reduce the cost-of-living bar to letting more people move to cities, it'd be possible to increase productivity for a lot of people.

I remember the "The Rent is Too Damn High" guy running for mayor of New York City a few years back. The guy had a point.

Like, policymakers have not done a great job on that.

life is easy if you live on a budget.

vast majority of americans, of any income level, low or high, absolutely refuse to do that.

While I share some frustration on the matter, I'd also point out:

• It's not as if we're taught to do that in school. Maybe if your parents do that, great. The financial extent of my entire K-12 education taught me how to write a check and balance my checkbook. Unless I was an exceptionally bad case, that's it by way of financial literacy that you can expect as a baseline.

• We live in an environment where the risks aren't, say, being gored by an elephant or the sort of things we evolved to deal with. The threats to your financial health are companies set up to compete as hard as possible as they can to get you to spend as much on their products as they can. We built an environment to encourage those, and they are really, really good at it.

  Like, a lot of people in the thread talk about how people overspend on vehicles. Okay, I don't disagree: America could generally do just fine with less-extravagant vehicles. But...think about how many decades and how many marketing resources have been devoted to achieving that state. There are a lot of experts with a lot of data working very hard on that.

0.78 inches in one go causes widespread flooding there? Crazy.

More than that. From the article, that's just what they normally get in November.

the area — which receives an average of 0.78 inches in November

There will be two rounds of wet weather, with the first round expected to bring 1 to 3 inches of rain on Friday night.

The second round of rain is expected Saturday and will be more significant, potentially bringing heavy rainfall, gusty winds, small hail and isolated tornadoes.

A widespread 2 to 6 inches of rain, with higher amounts possible in some areas, is expected through Saturday across much of Southern California.

For perspective, average annual precipitation:

https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-annual-precipitation-by-city.php

Baltimore, Maryland: 45.0 inches

Los Angeles, California: 14.3 inches

So imagine a little more than tripling the numbers there to get a feel for what might be comparable in terms of percentage of rain they'd normally get. For Baltimore, it'd be like maybe 6 inches to 18 inches in under two days.

Sorry, kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubba_(fish)

Bubba (c. 1982 – August 22, 2006) was a giant grouper (Queensland grouper) that resided at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Illinois.

Bubba was left in a bucket at the aquarium's doorstep in 1987 by an anonymous donor with a note asking for him to get a good home;[3] at the time, he was a female and about 25 cm (10 in) long. Bubba changed sex to male (being a protogynous hermaphrodite) in the mid-1990s[2] and eventually grew to 154 lb while living in the aquarium's "Wild Reef" shark exhibit. Aquarium staff started referring to him as Bubba because of his hulking appearance and manner.[3]

I can but imagine that this will be a concept explored in generative AI images in short order.