I agree completely. I am baffled by the support that this and other "rails to trails" initiatives get around the world. At a time when we are trying to decarbonize, we should be investing in modernizing and upgrading the existing railway infrastructure, not scrapping it for recreation. This is a vanity project. California has enough hiking trails. It has too many cars and not enough public transport.
A similar project is underway in Ireland [0], where they decommissioned a large number of former passenger lines in the 1970s, and are now spending millions of euros converting them to "greenways". To give one example, the Youghal to Midleton "greenway" replaced a former commuter rail line connecting commuter towns to Cork City. Every day, thousands of people drive between those towns, resulting in traffic jams and unnecessary CO2 emissions. Re-opening the train line would be a no brainer, they have more commuters today than ever before. Instead, residents now have the option of cycling or walking along a desolate trail through a bog.
Article states: "a railroad was constructed to shuttle passengers and redwood logs between San Francisco and Humboldt Bay."
So a key question is: are there a lot of people trying to move between SF and Humboldt Bay? Does the carbon from transportation along this line warrant the renovation of the rail line (which itself produces emissions)? And if you build a train and no one rides that train, then that's probably even worse for emissions.
> California has enough hiking trails
This is pretty subjective. You can probably get rid of several of America's national parks and say "yeah we have enough national parks".
The article says they are hoping to promote tourism in the area. Why not use the 300 mile corridor for passenger rail, and construct hiking trails from the stops?
Also, realistically, how many people are going to actually travel the 300 mile trail on foot/bike?
> I’d hate to see another South Africa scenario, xenophobia wise
For the uniformed, South Africa has a growing nativist political vigilante movement which violently targets foreign people and businesses called Operation Dudula [1] (Zulu for "push out/forcefully expel"). They attribute South Africa's social and economic problems to other migrant Africans, rather than the mismanagement and corruption of the ANC.
The problem is that there aren’t any real leaders that are loved in their country. Ironically, the closest to be liked (atleast externally among Africans) are the Rwandan and Ghanaian presidents. But the citizens living in said countries have varying levels of dislike for said leaders.
It will be an easy task for said leaders/citizens to put blame on migrants for the movements. South Africa has been mentioned, but a lot of people in Ghana’s opinion on recent tourism friendly attitudes range from dislike to blaming it on inflation/devaluation there.
Immigration is always an easy scapegoat, it’s almost cheating.
ChatGPT's web interface has two, one is triggered by a moderation endpoint API call which scolds you and another one is hardcoded as a regex type filter for copyright which forcibly closes the pipe from the LLM instantly and doesn't acknowledge that something happened. It's hardcoded because a translation to another language or a typo inserted into the output avoids it.
You can get this (or at least could) by asking for the opening of tale of two cities (a public domain work!)
The API (at least via playground) now also has scolding built in, which triggers sometimes when you're just playing around with settings like high temp, because the model can devolve into a mess of all sorts of nonsense text, as is teh nature of transformers, but it doesn't censor it.
The funny thing is that the "plz delete" messages have to be executed by the browser javascript. So in theory, you should be able to capture the "deleted" messages by keeping the network tab open or recording the traffic, right?
Edit: Last time I checked, ChatGPTs web interface was using server-sent events to stream the response words. The events were clearly visible in the network tab if you opened it early enough. So if it sends "delete" messages, they should show up in there.
In the UK at least Apple has a subscription-based iPhone upgrade program [1] to get a new iPhone every year. Makes sense as they want recurring revenue, but it does seem wasteful to promote that type of consumer behavior.
Yes, and in fact getting a trade-in price is dependent on having a relatively current working phone. They don't give you a trade-in for any random piece of broken metal, silicon, and glass.
As someone born after the Cold War, that film opened my eyes to the fear of nuclear winter in a way I didn't grasp learning history. Fantastic piece of cinema, highly recommended.
Canonical sent me a 30 question "written interview" which asked all sorts of personal and irrelevant questions as the first step in their interview process. I ghosted them.
Disclaimer: I voted to remain, but this is a great example of misleading/fear mongering by the remain campaign. They very vocally claimed that all the "good bits" of the EU cooperation would be permanently ended by leaving the Union. As evidenced by this news and others, that is untrue. There is clearly room for close cooperation in many areas without surrendering sovereign control over your nation.
I don't see how it was misleading. The scientific co-operation was stopped, just as they said it will be, and it took three years to re-negotiate, without it ever being certain that the negotiation will be a success.
And the UK remains an "associated country", allowed to participate but probably excluded from decision-making (a guess, it doesn't explicitly say in the article, but the UK now has the same status as countries like New Zealand, Ukraine, Kosovo or Israel).
I didn't hear that. I heard vocal claims that _getting rid of all of the things_ would cause problems, and that we'd either have to expensively replicate or just sign up for it separately anyway.
> Before you move goods between Northern Ireland and non-EU countries (including Great Britain)
We started with borderless free trade from Iceland to Greece and we ended up with customs guidance that pretends that GB and NI are in different countries.
Having to pretend GB and NI are different countries seems like the inevitable outcome of the Good Friday Agreement (or at least one interpretation of it) that requires you to pretend that parts of two different countries (NI and IE) are the same country. That was obviously not going to last indefinitely as long as the two places are ruled by different sovereign states (in this case, the UK and EU).
Nonsense. There is no pretense that GB and NI are in different countries. They are in different trade zones.
As for "our" country, here's your reminder that all of Ireland was coerced into the UK by colonisation and oppression and that NI is a contingent part of the UK not an integral part of it.
A majority of its people voted against Brexit; a majority favour the NI protocol and the Windsor agreement; and a majority will vote in due course to end the imperial gerrymander imposed at gunpoint on the Irish people (likely within 15 years, now that unionists are a minority in decline).
It was the UK govt and parliament's decision to separate NI so that GB could go "buccaneering". As for "surrendering" the English will get over it, just like they got over losing most of Ireland and the rest of the empire.
No, they correctly predicted that the research funding was one of the things the government would kibosh with its "not paying the EU a penny" dick-waving, which is what happened.
The fact we can later renegotiate access to a particular programme on the same basis as NZ doesn't mean we're getting access to other EU perks like free healthcare on holiday or the right to live in Spain, or that London hasn't fallen behind Paris for size of equities market. The "sovereignty" argument put forward by Leave was much more misleading. Ask the fishermen how many of the hated EU rules they're still required to follow as part of our "independent" fishing deal...
> No, they correctly predicted that the research funding was one of the things the government would kibosh with its "not paying the EU a penny" dick-waving, which is what happened.
this couldn't be more inaccurate
Boris Johnson negotiated as part of the brexit treaty to pay in, in the normal proportion
After four years of talking about how we didn't need to do a deal because they'd miss our money more than we'd miss them, we got the possibility of associate membership of Horizon included provisionally with the deal we did at the last minute. This didn't exactly help orgs who'd already lost collaboration opportunities because of the uncertainty involved in Mr No Deal being in charge. Their participation for the next year was already kiboshed.
Then we had more dick-waving about not adhering to what we'd signed over NI, so membership wasn't ratified whilst the Science Minister talked about the lost funding being "the freedom to go global", and consortia felt their decision not to invite UK participants over the risks associated with the UK govt was vindicated
> They very vocally claimed that all the "good bits" of the EU cooperation would be permanently ended by leaving the Union.
I was living in the UK during the referendum and voted remain [0], and that sentence that I quote does not align with my experience and I dare say it sounds like revisionist history.
It was never a part of the Remain campaign to claim that the UK would 'permanently' end the 'good bits' of EU cooperation. It would be bad enough to abandon the EU, so what would be the point of Remain claiming that the loss of the 'good bits' of EU membership (surely all of them in their view!) would be permanent?
What's more, what I do remember is many of the Leave campaign's talking points insisting that the UK would NOT leave the 'good bits', many of which are open to non-EU members (Horizon, Erasmus, customs union, freedom of movement, etc.)... and then guess what happened?
[0] Before anyone is confused if they see other comments of mine, I'm a dual Spainish–British citizen.
Your attitude is strange. If you break a friendship in a painful way, you don't at the same time think "oh but I can surely resume borrowing his record collection in the future".
> There is clearly room for close cooperation in many areas without surrendering sovereign control over your nation.
Are you sure you voted remain? This is basically the prototypical pro-leave argument.
Given the argument for undoing Brexit is that the EU is "just a trade agreement" and not worthy of any discussions on democracy and sovereignty, I'm always surprised that so many Europeans, even high-level politicians, seem to have taken the decision to leave in such an incredibly personal way. Even the leave campaign itself was squarely against the EU as an institution, not a judgment on the EU member states and the people who make them up.
'Given the argument for undoing Brexit is that the EU is "just a trade agreement"'
The mistake I see here is that you are saying "The argument" and "is" implying that there is a singular argument/factor/opinion in play. This kind of simplification is not the way forward.
If everyone on the internet who claimed to have voted remain actually did so, we wouldn't be having any of these conversations and I wouldn't have so many bloody stamps in my passport.
I've never done standup but am a big fan and want to try at some point. I'm glad you mentioned your experience, this thread made me think of the show "Kill Tony" (a podcast where randomly selected comedians do 60 seconds). The quality of comedians ranges from terrible to excellent, but I feel watching those terrible performances has taught me more about the art form than I could have learned only watching headliners who've perfected the craft. The line between weirding everyone out and making them laugh is a fine one, and it helps to see many examples of people failing to fall on the right side.
I think gp's referring to this meme [1] embedded in the article. I believe a charitable interpretation would be that it's satirising the various entities who have voiced opinions against large scale deep learning (from skeptics and theorists, to social activist types that want to slow or stop DL's march). No need to take it too seriously.
Neither, they found that 6.2% of the programs that SILO generated performed better on their benchmarks (based on a sum of the expected and actual execution latency of the assembly on some test data) than the gcc -O3 baseline (i.e. 93.8% of the programs SILO generated did not perform better, or were not correct). AFAIK they don't state how much better the super optimized programs were.
A similar project is underway in Ireland [0], where they decommissioned a large number of former passenger lines in the 1970s, and are now spending millions of euros converting them to "greenways". To give one example, the Youghal to Midleton "greenway" replaced a former commuter rail line connecting commuter towns to Cork City. Every day, thousands of people drive between those towns, resulting in traffic jams and unnecessary CO2 emissions. Re-opening the train line would be a no brainer, they have more commuters today than ever before. Instead, residents now have the option of cycling or walking along a desolate trail through a bog.
[0] https://www.corkcoco.ie/en/resident/greenways/midleton-to-yo...