Any percentage of people being de-personed is bad. If the state is permitted to withhold travel documents of people indefinitely (and the supporting documents they sent in to get their passport renewed[1]), do you really live in a free state?
Also, and I know people knee-jerk at the comparison, but historically speaking Jews comprised less than 1% of the population of Weimar Germany.[2] The smallness of the percentage shouldn't be cause to dismiss the harm of their discrimination as "no big deal." It's been shown where that leads.
No US citizen is unable to get a passport. The only issue is that their passport needs to reflect their biological sex rather than their gender identity. I personally think this policy is excessive but nobody is being "de-personed".
I use GnuCash for the accounting of my hackerspace. It was either this or a site called "wave" which the treasurer of a nearby makerspace recommended. After signing up for wave and playing around, I still wasn't sure. A few weeks later I decided I would use wave, but then I found they had locked my account for no reason. GnuCash it is!
It's good software! I eventually wrote code that dynamically links with the libgnucash library so I can auto-generate monthly invoices for the member's dues.
It's kinda a mess tbh, and it actually also requires some non-exposed symbols to work properly, so it needs access to the GnuCash source code. I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you're ok with maintaining your own unsupported GnuCash feature.
I fully agree, however if you're the kind of person who orders groceries, then what ends up happening is that you start collecting reusable bags that you have no way of reusing. I hope that someone starts some kind of "reusable bag recycling" system so I can give the scores of bags I have to a good home
If the bags are actually reusable, it doesn't seem very hard to coordinate to have the delivery person pick up the last delivery's bags next time they're at your house.
For home grocery delivery, I could imagine that using stackable or collapsible crates or similar containers might even make more sense, assuming the delivery is via car/truck. Why stick to a container optimized for walk-out customers at all?
I had that problem, but then the supermarkets in Australia all switched to paper bags. Now I just chuck them in recycling. Even if they do end up in landfill or a creek, they are paper, in a month they will have disintegrated.
It does not matter much how they do in a landfill. What matters is what happens when left out in the environment, aiui they weather and breakdown pretty fast.
Anything that ends up either in a landfill or in the environment (fwiw landfills are usually part of the environment, but that's a different discussion) is something that doesn't get to amortize production costs over several uses, so arguably both are best to be avoided, if at all possible.
Yes I can attest to how quickly they start breaking down even just sitting in the container for about a week. Almost need a scheduled reminder to replace it no matter how full it is.
It's really a farce. The old bags were really, really thin. Now, they're reuseable, and so they have to be much thicker, but they're still only used once. This just means that we're making more plastic waste.
I don't know what the average number of uses for a reusable bag is, but it's certainly not one. We've got about a half dozen, including a few freezer bags that do most of the work, plus a few that have been repurposed as the "beach activities bag" and "kid's soccer stuff bag" and so on. The ones used for groceries have been used at least once a week for going on four years.
The old bags also averaged slightly over one use, but the mandatory "bag of bags" in the pantry got depleted much more slowly than it filled.
If someone is throwing their reusable bags in the landfill and getting new ones every time, they're using it wrong...which I admit isn't entirely their fault at this societal scale, but let's at least agree it's the expected way to use the tool.
the trash created after use of shopping bags is not a big deal either; a typical non-reusable shopping bag weighs 200 milligrams, so if you use three per day for 72 years, you produce a grand total of 16 kilograms of shopping bags. that's less than even your own bones, which will also last thousands of years
the issue with paper mills is not their energy consumption, which generally is fueled by the same biomass they process (and is thus carbon-neutral), but the toxic waste they produce
do the math instead of just posting stuff without thinking
When I go fishing at the creek it is not a ton of paper bags littering it. Single-use plastic bags are terrible and people overly use them. Go get a pack of gum from a bodega and you'll be offered a plastic bag by default.
Maybe we shouldn't necessarily ban them, but we should definitely tax them to make people question "do I really need that bag?"
it sounds like your assessment of environmental harms is mostly guided by surface appearances, but things like paper mill pollution are not easily visible or understandable
When did I advocate for paper bags? I don't seem to see that anywhere. It seems like your argument is mostly guided by straw men and reading comprehension failure. How is paper mill pollution relevant then? There weren't paper bags available where I went either. So it's not like banning plastic bags increased paper usage.
Either way, we can also have regulations protecting against paper mill pollution. It's not like we have to have one or the other. We can do both!
But in the end my argument is we should do much to eliminate the wastefulness of single-use bags in general. Not that we should substitute one for another. Quit throwing so much shit away every day of your life is my argument.
I fully acknowledge there's absolutely useful places for disposable things. Medical equipment, certain kinds of packaging, etc makes a lot of sense; there's often not really any good alternatives. But being given a throw away bag after buying a pack of gum is a simple example of the egregiousness of our throw away culture.
Go kayaking on most rivers in the US and get absolutely inundated with single use plastic trash of the worst kinds and continue telling me how bad doing anything is. Fuck single use plastic shopping bags, I can't wait to see them disappear.
I've noticed that adding a colour can make it go from having a solution to not having a solution. Maybe it should try to come up with a solution using fewer colours in that case, since it's not obvious that manually removing a colour will lead to a solution.
Increasing temperature just makes more uncommon tokens more likely to appear. This can include both uncommon ideas and uncommon spelling and grammatical mistakes. It also won't make ideas that the LLM isn't capable of thinking appear, unless you crank the temperature way up and get lucky (like monkeys on typewriters lucky)
Not just “uncommon tokens”. In the case when generation does weighted random sampling, it autoregressively takes its own past tokens into account. It generates whole different sequences. So if it’s diversity of output you want, you will get it.
Right, so in rough outline an LLM-based brainstorming framework might generate multiple responses to a question with multiple different combinations of temperature, top_p, top_k, etc., to get a mix of dull-but-baseline (you don’t want to miss those options) and more off-the-beaten path responses, then take each one and send it back to the LLM with a prompt to evaluate “does this provide a coherent answer – however unconventional or bad of an idea – to the question asked?” to filter out the cases where it was asked for summer vacation ideas and responded with something like “Banana banana banana banana” (this request probably with default tuning.)
There is a way to do this same compression by utilizing the raw probability distributions that the LLM produces as output. Fabrice Bellard has some experiments with doing this with transformers: https://bellard.org/nncp/
The idea is that if you can produce an accurate probably distribution over the next bit/byte/token, then you can compress things with an entropy compressor (huffman encoding, range encoding, asymmetric numeral systems, etc). This comment is too small of a space to explain fully how they work, but it suffices to say that pretty much every good compression algorithm models probability distributions in some way.
Exactly this. The way to do this is to use the LLM as the statistical model inside an arithmetic coder. You use its next-token probabilities to encode the next token. The KL divergence between the LLM's probabilities, and the empirical probabilities in the corpus that you actually compress, is the compression inefficiency.
> The idea is that if you can produce an accurate probably distribution over the next bit/byte/token...
But how can you get credible probability distributions from the LLMs? My understanding is that the outputs specifically can't be interpreted as a probability distribution, even though superficially they resemble a PMF, due to the way the softmax function tends to predict close to 100% for the predicted token. You can still get an ordered list of most probable tokens (which I think beam search exploits), but they specifically aren't good representations of the output probability distribution since they don't model the variance well.
My understanding is that minimizing perplexity (what LLMs are generally optimized for) is equivalent to finding a good probably distribution over the next token.
I love grunions. Such funny little creatures. I'd recommend finding a video of them in action where they bury themselves in the sand, only to wiggle around and "pop" out of the sand again.
