The risk analysis is no better or worse than it is for other loosely/weakly understood technology such as flying.
It amounts to noticing that few if any of the people you know or are acquainted with through two or three removals from personal contact, have suffered or died as a result of using said technology, and basing your own confidence solely on this privileged form of hearsay.
It sounds like something that should not work, but actually does a pretty good job as a high-pass filter for safety.
You could certainly get help that was 'mechanical' but which did not involve machines or robots as we think of them today. More of an older, original definition of robot.
Without wheels, people can't spin thread as fine as they can with. Full stop.
Directly to this thread, nobody is claiming they didn't use tools. The question is specifically why they never invented a specific tool. My specific question is why the cart wheel needs to be a prerequisite to a spinning wheel.
The common answer is that you don't need carting wheels without drafting animals. My question is why does that preclude pulleys and spinning wheels? They seem they should be unrelated.
Pulleys, in particular, seem an extension of levers more than of carting wheels.
I'm not convinced that the unprecedented advantages of setting up base camp on the other end of a major global ocean on both sides of the landmass, the almost completely unfettered access to a continent of largely untapped natural resources with virtually no competition from established powers, of being in the right place at the right time to find enormous reserves of oil (and ultra-high grade anthracite coal) so close to the surface that it is possible to discover them by sight alone, and well over a century of widespread exploitation of pre-industrial society's version of market-disrupting robotic labor, AKA slavery, to undercut our competitors on top of all of our other advantages, have been sufficiently controlled for in this "we won because free market economy" analysis. Though I concede that the last one, slavery, is a feature you'd expect to emerge from of a pathologically under-regulated free market economy.
I wanted to hate this aspect of it, but since I like Debian and and use it as my daily driver on a lot of systems anyway, I just couldn't work up enough ire to complain.
Which is part and parcel of distro-maintainer duties - someone has to deal with the complexity, between the upstream project, linux distro or the end user.
Complaining that the upstream project won't support specific configurations or installations reads as incredibly entitled to me, especially for projects like HA or Pihole that aim to be useful to folk who may not know how to fix package dependency issues, fix a broken install, or many other such foot-guns. This would be a magnet for unpaid support.
If one is knowledgeable enough to complain about installing onto an existing install, then one is likely skilled enough to know how to side-load the app and debug and resulting challenges. It's worth noting the upstream provides the installation artifacts!
They are emulating the behavior of every power-seeking mediocrity ever, who crave affirmation above all else.
Lots of them practiced - indeed an entire industry is dedicated toward promoting and validating - making daily affirmations on their own, long before LLMs showed up to give them the appearance of having won over the enthusiastic support of a "smart" friend.
I am increasingly dismayed by the way arguments are conducted even among people in non-social media social spaces, where A will prompt their favorite LLM to support their View and show it to B who responds by prompting their own LLM to clap back at them - optionally in the style of e.g. Shakespeare (there's even an ad out that directly encourages this - it helps deflect alattention from the underlying cringe and pettyness being sold) or DJT or Gandhi etc.
Our future is going to be a depressing memescape in which AI sock puppetry is completely normalized and openly starting one's own personal cult is mandatory for anyone seeking cultural or political influence. It will start with celebrities who will do this instead of the traditional pivot toward religion, once it is clear that one's youth and sex appeal are no longer monetizable.
Not just ChatGPT, Claude sounds exactly the same if not worse, even when you set your preferences to not do this. rather interesting, if grimly dispiriting, to watch these models develop, in the direction of nutrient flow, toward sycophancy in order to gain -or at least not to lose- public mindshare.
Google's model has the same annoying attitude of some Google employees "we know" - e.g. it often finishes math questions with "is there anything else you'd like to know about Hilbert spaces" even as it refused to prove a true result; Claude is much more like a British don: "I don't want to overstep, but would you care for me to explore this approach farther?"? ChatGPT (for me of course) has been a bit superior in attitude but politer.
I used to be a Google employee, and while that tendency you describe definitely exists there; I don't really think it exists at Google any more (or less) than in the general population of programmers.
However perhaps the people who display this attitude are also the kind of people who like to remind everyone at every opportunity that they work for Google? Not sure.
My main data on this is actually not Google employees per se so much as specific 2018 GCP support engineers, and compared to 2020 AWS support engineers. They were very smart people, but also caused more outages than AWS did, no doubt based on their confidence in their own software, while the AWS teams had a vastly more mature product and also were pretty humble about the possibility of bad software.
My British don experience is based on 1 year of study abroad at Oxford in the 20th c. Also very smart people, but a much more timid sounding language (at least at first blush; under the self-deprecating general tone, there could be knives).
I spent a few years in Cambridge and actually studied in Oxford for a bit.
In any case, Google Cloud is a very different beast from the rest of Google. For better or worse. And support engineers are yet another special breed. Us run-of-the-mill Googlers weren't allowed near any customers nor members of the general public.
Intermodal freight drayage industry, which is largely comprised of a thousands of very small and ineffocoently run mom and pop nepo-companies run dependent upon an open tolerance of very scammy business tactics extending temporary surcharges indefinitely, milking covid business relief loans to the fullest extent possible) in order to survive, is going to experience a mass die-off if this tariff war lasts another 6 to 9 months.
The fact that Bitcoin (and kin) turbocharges corruption, and its success is a direct result of doing so on a wide scale (the whole point is to undermine state power by dwpriving it of control over currency) is proof to the armchair economist Bitcoin supporters that it is "sound money" and things like facilitating a market for circulation of child porn at one end and open political grift at the other, are welcomed as signs that the *experiment" is working as intended in their winner-corrupts-all bitcoin maximalist worldview.
Its called kleptocurrency for good reason.
Those who support it on philosophical grounds will destruction on everyone else for the sake of their own gain, and should be viewed with all possible hostility as they constitute an intentional community of public enemies in the plainest possible sense.
Neither will bans and prohibitions, unless you are willing to go full north korea with cameras everywhere and computers locked down. And you'll probably fail with that.
Of course you can. 20 years in prision for using Bitcoin. Not a lot of people would wanna risk that. And when 99,99% chooses to not touch it with a pole the value will collapse. Then a few people can sit there with Bitcoins that no one wants to buy from them.
Is it a good idea? Mayne not. But obviously one can crush Bitcoin if one wants.
I don't see what's wrong about OP's use of the term in the context they are using it. In the context given the number of days in the denominated unit is 1. Which means as dividend or factor it is going to give you the same result. Again in this context watts per day is much more intuitive for most people too reason about.
I don't mean to be rude, but anyone who thinks watts/day and watt days are ever interchangeable will have severe problems reasoning about anything electricity-related or energy-related.
It is akin to thinking that "2 apples" and "an apple divided by 2" are interchangeable because both expressions involve the concept of an apple and the number 2.
> over 170,000 terawatts of solar energy every day
i'd definitely rewrite it myself, but it's also a correct way to specify that there are no days of the week, year, or whatever (solar cycle) in which the terawattage is below 170k. Not very intermittent, is it!
I think we may be talking at cross purposes. I specifically used the number one because it behaves like a unit here. unlike 2 or any other number, 1 is also the standard 1D unit vector, so 1apples is indeed the same quantity as apples/1, but because it is a unit we usually imply its presence rather than express it explicitly as above.
watts/unit thus seems fine to me, whatever the unit may be, even if it itself is derived from time. watts per day would just work out to joules/second/1/24*60*60, making 1 watts per day a derived unit that expresses joules/84600 seconds, or an instantaneous rate of one 84600th of a joule.
We don't know how long it takes to evolve our level and kind of intelligence, nor if intelligence like ours implies successful expansion such that it could eventually be noticed from the kinds of distances we can sense with our tech, nor how fast it would actually expand.
If the first in any light cone dominates that light cone, expanding at a high fraction of c, then almost everyone starts off thinking they're the first.
We may be the first in our own light cone, and that light cone may be just about to start intersecting with that of a galaxy where every star has been completely Dyson'd by a Kardeshev 3 civilisation.
If the civilisation is two million years older than us, that galaxy could even be the Andromeda galaxy.
No, it actually seems to be the most likely explanation. The universe is so young yet. It's just a cosmic blip of time since the current generation of stars has began forming.
It amounts to noticing that few if any of the people you know or are acquainted with through two or three removals from personal contact, have suffered or died as a result of using said technology, and basing your own confidence solely on this privileged form of hearsay.
It sounds like something that should not work, but actually does a pretty good job as a high-pass filter for safety.