Yes. Am not robot.

  • 5 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • In New Zealand, there is a provision in the copyright law that handily makes having a copy legal, while also making it impractical for most people.

    Prior to the addition of the format-shifting provision, making a copy was always illegal (eg that recording on your VCR was illegal). Adding the provision made it legal, but subtly also not generally useful.

    The format-shifting exception allows the owner of the physical media to make a copy themselves, for their own use. If they transfer ownership of the physical media they must destroy the copy (they can’t even pass on the convenience to the next owner).

    Since making copies is more technical than is practical for the masses, most cannot take advantage of the provision - and that’s the way copyright owners like it.




  • A conversation/collaboration… not really.

    You can create a ‘swarm’ of agents with differing roles, define different roles and phases, to have it iterate on a problem.

    1. Investigations to discover and provide a condensed context of discoveries
    2. Use this to propose a plan
    3. Some number of iterations of one or more reviewing agents (you can give each an area of focus) criticising the plan, one or more agents to propose improvements based on the reviews, and an agent to review and apply the proposals before the next iteration

    Groups of agents of the same role, operating in parallel, should ideally be using different models (or have context that gives them differing goals - eg focused on maintainable abstractions, security, scalability, test case identification, etc).

    The implementation can do a similar thing - a code generator followed by reviewers, proposals for action, and then apply improvements… and you can iterate on testing or benchmarking too, all before hand-over.

    This can improve results (at a non-trivial cost sometimes, so budgets are important) and it will still miss sometimes. You can help it of course with hints, directions or even implementations or stubs of implementations of abstractions you expect.




  • Presented to 1dp in million km2, I’m not sure how much Oceania could practically change.

    New Zealand only has 0.26M km2 and some of that can’t be forested. A lot of Australia can’t be forested without a few (quite a few?) generations of crazy effort and some handy scientific breakthroughs.

    I wonder if it would be more useful to have it shown as a percentage change as well as an absolute change (depending on the source data of course).

    eg

    • North America 🟢 1.3% / 0.1 km2
    • South America 🔴 -17.5% / -1.8M km2

    I’m uncertain of the weather dynamics and the effects on atmospheric-water movements, but maybe Northern and Southern Hemisphere totals would be useful too.

     

    Regardless. Sobering numbers in a long list of sobering numbers

    (arguably, after looking at such numbers for years, and seeing no sign of an en masse shift in policy and behaviour, maybe not so sober)