This list somehow doesn't have "converter" (to refer to a television remote), which was the first word to unexpectedly baffle my American coworkers the first time I said it, to my own surprise.
I'm from Northern Ontario and never heard that one, but I was also surprised by a missing term: "transport". In my neck of the woods, that's how we refer to a semi-truck / 18-wheeler.
I think that's actually going to be more of an age thing as well. The converter wasn't just the remote, but the little box, separate from the TV, needed to convert signals for an older TV.
Basically, the 'cable box' or the 'satalite box.'
But ya, 45 years old, grew up in Toronto and Southern Alberta and it was a converter, until it wasn't.
I grew up in BC as well and never heard it. My parents were from Ontario and always called it the flipper. Because it flips channels I guess. Felt like every household had a different name for it though.
You're way more likely to die riding in your car than riding public transit. It's not even close. Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do and yet people just act like it's a totally safe thing to do.
Nobody(TM) is worried about the tiny risk of dying. They're worried about the risk of being victim of a crime or other unpleasantry at the hand of someone else, a risk which is small and fairly up to change on transit but damn near zero for most people in their own car and if not nearly zero almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves.
People get shot and battered from road rage incidents, I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage. People die from drunk driving and people running red lights. Driving a car isn't a guarantee you won't be a victim of a crime. It actually means you're more likely to die from one.
And it's not a tiny risk of being injured by a car. About 2.5 million injuries a year in the US are caused by automobiles.
Just look at this chart and tell me how massively unsafe riding the train is.
You're ignoring that the average ride on Muni, Bart, or AC Transit involves someone who's visibly or audibly tweaking out, loudly muttering curse words or threats to themselves / others, blasting music in the back from a tinny phone speaker, carrying a bag of cans and/or trash, or smelling offensively bad. It's no wonder that people won't want to take transit.
Source: someone who takes transit almost daily and has seen a LOT, and has received death threats on the bus twice in one year.
Meanwhile, here in India, where there absolutely are valid questions over the behavior of general public as a whole, particularly over freeloading, crowding, decorum and cleanliness issues: I don't think there are many tweaking, curse words or death threat complaints going around in public transit.
>people get shot and battered from road rage incidents,
Yes, they do. I was specifically thinking of replies like this when I said the risk is "almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves."
>I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage.
And what role did they play in developing that situation? I'm serious. The frequency of road range in which the victim did not take action or willful inaction through ignorance or malice is vanishingly, vanishingly, tiny. While I am sympathetic to people who do truly mean well but are simply ignorant the degree to which road rage is a meeting between those disposed to violence and those disposed to entitlement and "bad but within the rules" behavior I consider it a generally self solving problem.
It's kind of like my elderly and senile mother who's been in a couple accidents that aren't technically "her fault" but she most certainly precipitated by failing to drive responsibly even though she doesn't see why it might not be ideal of her to panic stop rather than miss her exist on a major highway in a major city.
> And what role did they play in developing that situation?
Driving the speed limit and stopping at a stop sign was one of these instances. I watched the dash cam of that.
Another instance I saw was someone flying up a shoulder trying to get around a big traffic jam. After three or four cars denied him merging in, he took out a gun and started shooting at cars.
And you're still just going to ignore all the victims of people not paying attention, of people tailgating, of drunk drivers, of people driving recklessly.
Drunk driving is a crime. It hurts other people more than it hurts the drunks. It has absolutely no bearing on how the victim carried themself. You can just be driving normally and completely following the law and a drunk t-bones you at 70mph through a red light.
You can be driving normally and just happen to draw the ire of a road rager and have them shoot you or commit other forms of violence against you. Happens more often than you think.
A person on the train is unlikely to have a weapon on them. Every other person on the road is piloting a giant death machine capable of hurting a lot of people in a moment's notice even if by accident.
People act like they're all safe in a car but once again it's the thing most likely to cause you serious injury in your life outside of your diet.
You're more likely to be the victim of a crime that will seriously hurt, maim, or kill you driving a car than riding the train.
Hey, maybe I reduce the odds of getting pickpocketed today by massively increasing the odds of getting killed by a drunk driver. Seems like a excellent trade!
> Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do
Not even remotely close. Anytime you elevate your feet more than 6' of the ground you can fall and kill yourself. This is 2x more common than vehicle fatalities and is in the category of "accidental self inflicted injury." The third most common cause of death. Vehicles are like #11. You're more likely to commit suicide than die in a car accident.
I'm in my car multiple times a day. I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so. And I do agree in any given situation I'm more likely to be seriously injured using a power tool than I am driving, but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.
> I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so
Do you never take the stairs?
> but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.
Which is why your car has a built in safety system and your power drill doesn't. The majority of fatal accidents involve drugs or alcohol. 15% are motorcycles and 15% are pedestrians. We see all miles as "passenger miles" in a vehicle but there are "inebriated passenger miles" and "sober passenger miles" with wildly different expectations between them.
Not daily (often not even weekly), and a lot of the stairs I do take have regular landings. I work from home, live in a one-story home, stores around me are often on the ground floor, etc. I figured your 6' off the ground was mostly focused on things like working on a roof, climbing ladders, being in a bucket lift, being on scaffolds, being near ledges, etc. But yes, stairs do cause a lot of injuries. Nowhere near as many deaths as automobiles though, and usually fewer injuries. So even climbing stairs is less risky than being around automobiles.
> The majority of fatal accidents involve drugs or alcohol
You don't have to be the drunk one to be the fatality in a collision involving alcohol. Once again, acting like if you do everything right, you'll be fine. Even if you're a perfect driver, you're surrounded by imperfect ones.
15% being pedestrians doesn't mean driving the car is safe, it's still an injury related to a dangerous task of driving a car. But I guess you're of the mindset as long as you aren't the one getting hurt its somehow OK?
But in the end, we're still just splitting hairs here. Operating and being around automobiles is a risky thing practically all Americans do without even thinking about the safety of it, and for a lot of people it is the least safe thing they'll do that day. 40,000 people a year die from automobiles and well over a million get injured.
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America.
Is there any data backing this up? Is it from the same people who think nobody rides the NYC subway for safety reasons, despite there being over 3 million riders per day?
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit
Several people on this thread have said that; and I've heard it for years. Why do you say nobody wants to talk about it?
IME, it's the people least familiar with cities (and public transit) that talk most about how dangerous it is. I understand they are afraid - imaginations about the unknown run wild, including about unknown people (different ethnicities and socio-economic groups); it can be a bit disconcerting at first because most people outside of cities only mix with their own socio-economic group. And there's Fox and the GOP pushing the narrative that cities are dangerous (laughable these days).
The reality is, all those people are people like you, and it's a great, positive experience everyday to mix with them. Jane Jacobs said something about it - the sidewalk ballet, I think - where you find and reinforce, every day, that people are generally good and helpful and caring, and that they are people like you, no matter how they dress or what they do.
I have had no personal safety problems on public transit. I've heard some loud radios; a couple times someone was smoking on a train, which was annoying. Driving in traffic is definitely annoying, and there's much more personal safety risk too when someone cuts me off or sends a text. Sometimes the people at home are annoying. :)
> personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America
Perceived safety and comfort. Buses are safer than cars [1]. The problem is you might have someone who hasn’t managed their BO in a week sitting next to you, and that’s frankly happened enough time to me that I don’t take it in New York or the Bay Area anymore.
IIRC in the USA there are features allowed to be installed aftermarket that aren't legal to be installed as a dealer option (like front side-window tinting)
I guess the term would be "conspicuous consumption".
As to why Koenigsegg doesn't get the rep, I'll take the outside opinion that it's because their name is too inaccessible whereas "Bugatti" slips easily into rap lyrics.
Starting salaries around $70-$80K, senior salaries around $140K-$160K and “architects” around $175K.
This is in the Atlanta market where I use to live before I started working remotely and moved. I got this email from a recruiter there. It’s about the same in most major non west coast markets
Exactly. I feel constant ascendancy and the opportunity to do so would be a fortunate thing.
For OP, I feel there might be qualifiers that preclude such opportunities, like total comp or location. If you're looking for comp above the mid 100s or very low 200s at max, you're gonna struggle to find jobs that meet your criteria. On the converse side, these opportunities can be found in mid/low COL locations, so that number goes a lot farther.
Since we don't yet have anything remotely like AGI and at the same time, don't even really know how the brain works or what consciousness is aside from being aware that we feel it, you and nobody else really know if our path to consciousness is just one of many. For all we know it might be the only one. There could be some very big unknown unknowns in those waters.
I would say I think those are all pretty good observations, all perfectly true and I think AGI is more plausible than it's ever been in light of what we've demonstrated via LLMs. Our understanding really is that limited but I don't take it to be a counterpoint to the prospect of AGI.
Probably an unavoidable property that emerges from the sheer and perverse complexity of the human brain, its 100 billion connections and the unimaginable amount of interactions between them, modulated by neurotransmitters + their reuptake, length, amount, location, quality and condition of pre/post-synaptic receptors, axons and other nano structures in the brain...
Comparing this disgusting moist, fleshy and electric masterpiece of nature with something primitive like a """neuronal""" network or LLM was always ridiculous.
> Probably an unavoidable property that emerges from the sheer and perverse complexity of the human brain
I don't think complexity alone leads to consciousness. Rather, consciousness is the mechanism by which information is integrated in a relatively resource-cheap fashion: dump all this info into a shared mental workspace, add some reflective awareness of that info/workspace, and bam, you can both process the information in an integrated way, and you're also now aware of it all. The higher-level information processing and the awareness go hand-in-hand.
There're good reasons why most of the leading theories of consciousness focus on information integration. (Baars' Global Workspace Theory, Graziano's Attention Schema Theory, Tononi's Integrated Information Theory, etc.)
I don't see how the sensations of color, sound, etc come out of information integration. Sensory experience along with internal sensations form the hard problem of consciousness.
> Probably an unavoidable property that emerges from the sheer and perverse complexity of the human brain
Complexity alone causing consciousness, much like an infinite amount of monkeys coming up with Shakespeare's complete works, is a far flung pipe dream.
The hardware doesn't guarantee the software, but the software can't exist without the appropriate hardware is probably a better way to look at it.
There's so much life out there that survives just fine without consciousness that it seems like a very narrow stroke of luck that it occurred at all.
Not trying to be sassy but what definition of AGI are you using? I've never seen a concrete goal, just vague stuff like "better than humans at a wide range of tasks." Depending on which tasks you include and what percentage of humans you need to beat, we could be already there or maybe never will be. Several of these tests [1] have been passed, some appear reasonably tractable. Like if Boston Dynamics cared about the Coffee Test I bet they could do it this year.
> I've never seen a concrete goal, just vague stuff like "better than humans at a wide range of tasks."
I think you're pointing out a bit of a chicken vs. the egg situation here.
We have no idea how intelligence works and I expect this will be the case until we create it artificially. Because we have no idea how it works, we put out a variety of metrics that don't measure intelligence but approximate something that only an intelligent thing could do (we think). Then engineers optimize their ML systems for that task, we blow by the metric, and everyone is left feeling a bit disappointed by the fact that it still doesn't feel intelligent.
Neuroscience has plenty of theories for how the brain works but lacks the ability to validate them. It's incredibly difficult to look into a working brain (not to mention deeply unethical) with the necessary spatial and temporal resolution.
I suspect we'll solve the chicken vs. egg situation when someone builds an architecture around a neuroscience theory and it feels right or neuroscientists are able to find evidence for some specific ML architecture within the brain.
I get what you're saying, but I think "boiling frog" is more applicable than "chicken v egg."
You mention that people feel disappointed by ML systems because they don't feel intelligent. But I think that's just because they emerged one step at a time, and each marginal improvement doesn't blow your socks off. Personally, I'm amazed by a system that can answer PhD level questions across all disciplines, pass the Turing Test, walk me through DIY plumbing, etc etc, all at superhuman speed. Do we need neuroscience to progress before we call these things intelligent? People are polite to ChatGPT because it triggers social cues like a human. Some, for better or worse, get in full-blown relationships with an AI. Doesn't this mean that it "feels" right, at least for some?
We already know that among humans there are different kinds of intelligence. I'm reminded of the problem with standardized testing - kids can be monkeys or fish or iguanas and we evaluate tree climbing ability. We're making the same mistake by evaluating computer intelligence using human benchmarks. Put another way: it's extremely vain to say a system needs to be human-like in order to be called intelligent. Like if aliens visited us with incomprehensibly advanced technology we'd be forced to conclude they were intelligent, despite knowing absolutely nothing about how their intelligence works. To me that's proof by (hypothetical) example that we can call something intelligent based on capability, not at all conditional on internal mechanism.
Of course that's just my two cents. Without a strict definition of AGI there's no way to achieve it, and right now everyone is free to define it how they want. I can see the argument that to define AGI you have to first understand I (heh), but I think that's putting an unfair boundary around the conversation.
