The transition

A bunch of conversations are video chat these days using small phones. The con artists could me automated. Wow, she is beautiful and really asking interesting questions about me. She is so into me. And wants to be beholden. To owe me one. I would like that, it would give me power in the relationship. That is why she is asking for x,y.z.
Maybe she just wants the ticket and hotel to visit me and to update her wardrobe for the visit.
 
I ran Eliza on a TRS 80 in the 80s. Almost every sentence was "so tell me about your mother " or "Why don't you want to talk about your mother? " and yet it still fooled some very smart people.
The unfortunate thing is that a lot of people, including a lot of people who should know better, are being fooled by large language models too.

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'They' will run language models on you and the one thats gets you the most manipulated and submissive will follow you around the internet, it will know every interaction you have had and use your entire digital life profile to bend you to its wishes.
This will include corporations and scammers, who are basically the same thing.

Imagine the most evil, manipulative, self obsessed narcissist you know.
That will be your entire online experience.
 
'They' will run language models on you and the one thats gets you the most manipulated and submissive will follow you around the internet, it will know every interaction you have had and use your entire digital life profile to bend you to its wishes.
This will include corporations and scammers, who are basically the same thing.
Except LLMs are shockingly easy to jailbreak and manipulate, and "fixing" that weakness isn't simple.

So I reckon that clever people will be able to easily bypass them and run amock while weak-minded conformists will be trapped indoors and force-fed cheetos. Seems I'm likely to do fine in such a world.
 
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Except LLMs are shockingly easy to jailbreak and manipulate, and "fixing" that weakness isn't simple.

So I reckon that clever people will be able to easily bypass them and run amock while weak-minded conformists will be trapped indoors and force-feed cheetos. Seems I'm likely to do fine in such a world.
Doesn't sound "fine" to me... :rolleyes:
 
The more I think of it, the worse it gets.

It knows everything about you...everything.
Your bank balance, if you bought a bottle of vodka last night, your love life, how many times you go the bathroom, your maritial woes, what you watch online, what you confessed to chatgpt.
What you said before and after conversing with it.
How fast you drive, what dodgy people you know, how educated you are..
Where you walk the dog
What you dream of buying
What your mates have just bought
Are you having an affair with any of their wives.

This is just simply beyond horrific.
Its goddam biblical.
 
Its lucky oil has 100X the energy density of lithium batteries :)
The problem is that you are not making an apples to apples comparison here.

A fully discharged lithium battery weighs approximately the same (though very, very, very slightly less) than a fully charged one. So if you measured it that way the energy density is far higher than of a fuel tank, where most of the weight is the fuel.

You burn and consume the fuel, but you don't burn and consume the lithium. Yes, battery chemistry degrades over time, but the battery will not eventually run out of lithium. In practice it is within easy technological reach to recycle the lithium and rare earths in the anode and cathode and build a new battery. We already do that with lead acid batteries and recycle 98 percent of the material in them. That's good because lead is heck of a lot rarer than any of the rare earths or lithium used in an EV.

What is relevant is the overall system weight that moves people and stuff from point A to point B. Here, comparable ICE vehicles end up 10 to 20 percent lighter. Which in practice isn't significant in terms of utility or performance. Yes, batteries are heavy. But there are a lot of heavy, clanking parts that you just do not need if you are not burning stuff. Like a transmission. Like exhaust. Like emission controls. All of that stuff adds up and you don't need it on an EV.
 
The energy density of oil has huge advantages in many situations, but in a car you cant use most of it, so it gets radiated out or absorbed by the transmission.
It does make for a superb cabin heater though.
 
I am reading the new neuroscience book The Genius and the Impostor. Large language AI can only mimic the impostor. The book starts very easy then begins to show interesting things. The left language brain is only making up a story, it is a hallucination. The real impetus and creativity has nothing to do with it.

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Our new electric trains accelerate and deaccelerate like fairground rides, you have to hold on tightly if youre standing with the bike
It must depend on the specific country's railroad layout (geography), company's culture and rules, the engineer training and so on. The new electric train rides here are pretty soft. There is a variety of bike attachments on different Poland's train: hangers, racks, etc. I hardly ever hang my e-bike on the train.

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Space allowing, I often just use a kickstand as shown. Usually, no intervention necessary, so soft and smooth the train starts and stops are.

On the last Saturday's longer train ride there were more bikes in the designated space than the available hangers. Two lightweight bikes got hung while the three other (two MTBs and an e-bike) were stacked on the parallel, standing on the floor. Near to the trip end, one of MTB-ers expressed his admiration about my Vado SL and asked if it were a carbon bike. I smiled and replied "Of course not". I would not allow stacking a carbon bike between two MTBs!

Back to "the transition". I realise North America made herself car dependent. Here, a 2 x 120 km (150 mile total) train trip takes 2 x 1 h 08 min and costs pennies... My mates who own big cars now have realised how convenient and cheap it was to take their bikes for new destinations by railroad! (I actually taught them!)
 
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I realise North America made herself car dependent. Here, a 2 x 120 km (150 mile total) train trip takes 2 x 1 h 08 min and costs pennies... My mates who own big cars now have realised how convenient and cheap it was to take their bikes for new destinations by railroad! (I actually taught them!)
Our preference is to be independent; go where we want, when we want. Not dependent on where and when the train goes.
 
Our preference is to be independent; go where we want, when we want. Not dependent on where and when the train goes.
Yes, I suppose that is why so many people drive to Disney World...

Different kinds of transportation have different sweet spots. It makes zero sense to book a flight between two cities thirty miles apart. And most of us wouldn't ride our bikes to a National Park five hundred miles away.
 
I tried to check if I could get a train back along the coast, firstly using google is simply excrutiating.
Can I get a train from any station along the coast.
Ten pages of adverts, gorome, trainsadventures, booktrains, trains4you.
So I smart searched, what are the stations along the route and does the train stop there, ten pages of etc etc.
Eventually ...there is one key station.
I want every station.
Ten pages...
I googled mapped it, you need to walk to the station four miles...what???
Then it plans a train journey that floats across the sea.
I was there for twenty minutes, every site flat refused to tell me.
I ended up scrolling the entire track and zooming in to see if there was a station then trying to book a ticket from it.

One site said yes, fours hours, 20 mins train 3 1/2 hours walking.
It was like the twilight zone.
Going to ring the company tomorrow.
 
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