Urban Dictionary says: Fetch Stop trying to make it happen. It’s not going to happen. “That’s so fetch!” “Shut up, Gretchen. Stop trying to make fetch happen. It’s not going to happen.” Fetch by KamIsTotallyFuckingAwesome May 17, 2011 Word of the Day on March 30, 2019

and also

fetch slang for cool or awsome. Used in mean girls by Grechen Weener. Omg Kadi you love him. That is so fetch. Grechen stop trying to make “fetch” happen! It’s not going to happen! fetch by Kayla February 8, 2005

But from context I can tell you mean the first one :)

And they’re probably built just fine for 95C summers, since everyone would be dead anyway.

I’ve been taking my chances with refurb 6TB SAS drives since at about $120 they cost what my new 6TB drives cost 4 years ago. Im just trusting in the ZFS gods to never let me be more than 2 drives down at once.

This would have made the photoshoot even more interesting than it probably was.

I dunno, they did manage to get the antichrist elected. Twice.

To put it into context, it’s doing about one full-time support engineer’s job currently, which is the maximum we’ve permitted it to do so far.

Our analyses below reveal that US trade sanctions have generated consequences that US policy-makers may not have fully anticipated. Rather than merely restricting Chinese firms’ access to proprietary technologies, these measures are associated with accelerated engagement with scientific knowledge, reflected in both intensified use of publicly accessible science in patenting and increased participation in scientific knowledge production.

I’d say this is the law of unintended consequences at work, but seriously did anyone not see this coming?

I guess the difference is that it I have actually seen it do legitimate work now. We have implemented outbound SDR and inbound tech support agents that do the right things. Our SDRs generate new leads for our (currently all-human) sales team to go after. They are boosting the numbers of closed deals. Our inbound tech support agents are closing a significant fraction of tickets. My last metrics call was yesterday, it was 12% of inbound tech support chats that never got escalated to a human. These are both first-draft tools, they’ll improve. They cost pennies per session to run. And client NPS scores show that they’re happy with the results. I don’t think we’ll see either of these tasks become 100% automated, but at even 25% or 50% that’s a lot of formerly-human work not being done by humans anymore. And we’re deploying more agents to handle more of the sales pipeline, development pipeline, HR and accounting. I don’t work for a huge company, there are a few hundred people total. This isn’t something that’s coming, it’s here already.

I’m not pro-AI by any stretch for a huge number of reasons, but in my day job as a technical product manager I have to use a number of AI-powered tools and workflows. Whereas 18 months ago they were a novelty that the bosses were enamored of, today they get real work done and speed up a number of key areas, mainly like fancy automation workflows (which have been around forever). The rate of improvement and capability for certain use cases has been very, very rapid. We do seem to be reaching a plateau though. The tools and models from 6 months ago are just about as good as the ones from today. And China’s models from today are better than the US’s models from 6 months ago, but at a fraction of the cost.

So when I hear people talking about the “end of the world”, I think a realistic case for that is that the AI tools that come out in the next few years will be good enough to do a fair amount of white-collar work, and we won’t have a plan in place to deal with all of the now out-of-work people that leads to. Whole classes of jobs in areas like data entry, telemarketing, and customer support will be almost entirely automated out of existence. New classes of jobs will be created, of course, but it’s hard to imagine them existing in sufficient numbers to make up for the losses. And this is just for LLM-workloads.

In other areas, other types of AI are already enabling robotic automation of factories and in the near-ish future might make self-driving truck fleets practical. This would be devastating because factory workers and truck drivers make up like 30% of the US workforce – and again, there are no signs of new classes of jobs that could absorb the out-of-work workers, and no plans for a social safety net or wealth distribution.

So I’m not worried about a rogue AI unleashing some bioweapon or launching a nuclear attack. I’m worried about a bunch of CEOs deploying barely-acceptable AI to displace millions of workers as soon as it is safe(ish) to do so.

I think the 70s just looked like that…

He’s also the kind of person who doesn’t feel like he’s winning unless he’s making someone else feel like they’re losing – there’s no such thing as win-win. So a “rising tide lifts all boats” scenario does nothing for him.

I need a Canada for scale.

If that CRT has a Trinitron tube it’d probably be pretty easy to find an arcade/retro gaming enthusiast in your area who’d want it (and probably even if not…)

The main advantage that plywood has is that it generally tolerates getting wet and drying out better, especially at edges and seams and around fasteners. So while it still will have a vapor barrier and some kind of external cladding in front of it, it’s used in my soggy neck of the woods instead of OSB just because it better tolerates moisture and humidity. Or it might just be a local code thing – maybe Big Wood is lining the pockets of your local city hall officials :)

MapQuest is a perfectly reasonable commercial alternative that has all of the things you’d expect - dynamically-loaded map tiles, turn-by-turn nav, etc. If you want to look at options that use OpenStreetMap data, I’ve found CoMaps to be very good. The biggest drawback is that you have to download maps (~100-300MB per geo area) all at once, which can be a problem if you’re on the road and don’t have great signal strength.

One of the very first things the US govt standardized was the size of screws because it was wreaking havoc with shipbuilding efforts.

There was a stretch of the Florida coast that had metric in the late 90s and early 2000s, but people kept stealing the speed limit signs. They also had a problem with people misunderstanding 100kph (about 60mph) and doing 100mph instead.

Originally it was because the ship carrying the official metric measures from France to the US in 1793 was captured by pirates. More recently it’s because there was a near-revolt when Jimmy Carter tried to reintroduce it in the 1970s in an attempt to make the US even slightly less regressive.

Great! Now when can we get one of those?

I’ve been watching History in Taberna recently, which is a silly history meets cooking mashup.

Also love Technology Connections and PBS Spacetime.