True. Yet, somehow more and more cities install them blindly because efficiency. I remember when I moved to Odense Denmark in 2013 - they had LED street lights all over the place. I thought - this is the future compared to my uderdeveloped post soviet Latvia. And yet, I remeber when I moved back, streets at night looked so yellow because the city still relied on sodium lights. And my eyes felt much more comfortable. At the time I wrote it off to nostalgia or something, and here we are.
But wouldn't the position of a strong government be to trust it's people, and allow them to see the whole spectrum of information available in the world, and give them essentially the right to decide what's "right or wrong"? I don't see how being free from any information filtering on behalf of some benevolent leader is USA-centric?
The USA centric view I was referring to is the one where lack of freedom is wrong, since it benefits the USA ideology of maximal freedom. Which is not in generally shared by all western countries (in Europe socialism and state ownership is much more present, for instance), and it's not necessary the most accurate view of real USA (there might be more "free" countries, like Switzerland), it's just that it benefits the perceived image of USA.
With this in mind, no, I don't share the view that a strong government should trust the people: people can easily be steered by foreign parties that want to gain soft power (example: Russia and recent anti-EU propaganda in Poland, Romania and Georgia). It's very hard to draw a line between what is "right" and what is "too much", but I don't think that excessive freedom is an obvious route to an healthy society (that is, a society that has peace and people are happy).
Nobody is arguing for maximal freedoms for Iranians. This is literally whether some Iranians are able to get their hands on Starlink terminals if they want to.
I don’t think it can be disputed that there is a lot of propaganda and misinformation in the internet.
One logical conclusion to this would be to protect people from that via censorship.
Many recent examples of the US doing this as well (Covid, Russia, etc.). Of course, the US delegates this to its cooperations, so it can publicly say its hands are clean.
People do remember the Twitter files though, and the US government has massive spying and monitoring capabilities, so its hands are not actually all that clean.
Well, allow me to make a suggestion, that the US came up with the original idea, in 1947 - the transistor, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Similar to how Germany had been capitalizing on the invention of combustion engine and various chemical processes for a century. Now, the curve of innovation on top of the fundamental invention (of the transistor) is in the flattening out region, where all the low hanging fruits had been taken down, and now it's about the remaining 5% of polishing - something that the labor force of well fed and comfortable nation is not really motivated to do.
It's a fascinating book indeed, just finished the second chapter, and it is surprisingly accurate in many regards of AI representation, given it's from 1994. Will read on, thank you
In the part of the world I'm form, my childhood of the 90's to early 00's was exactly the same, and I experienced explosive increase in "stuff" surrounding me. Going from landline phones and phonebooths as status quo - to mobile internet just in 10 years. But I digress.
Your point made me wonder - is it possible that the culture of material wealth - is the problem here? Could we have stepped on a poisonous flower - and now suffocating in the abundance of stuff we dreamed about as young people, now realizing, but not brave enough to admit that there is no meaning in it? And the optimism we had then, was a byproduct of a tighter communities, common struggles and just the architecture of life where we had to interact and care for one another more?
On that - naive proposition; shouldn't we establish say "humanTube" - service which would strictly prohibit AI content? With all this AI slop engulfing our web 2.0 - maybe this is the time and place to establish the new web for "nerds" i.e. people who care for the real thing? Just as our current web once was a place for scientists and engineers mostly, maybe we now need something as this? I feel the flaws in my own point, but maybe it's not all hopeless?
I think by this point that premium services dedicated to quality is going to be the way to avoid the flood of AI slop that's come to us. Premium services mean QA and accountability should anything try to slip through.
Closest thing in the YT space would be Nebula, but Nebula's scope is very narrow (by design).
We'll get content that is indistinguishable from human curated content before long, we might even already have that and it's just toupee fallacy making us only see the slop. I'm making no value statement here, just that any sort of curation attempts are probably futile.
I wonder, wouldn't this mean that in nordic countries, where in winter get less than 6 hours of sunlight in total, and where that sunlight is mostly obstructed by heavy clouds, would be the place with most myopia in the world? For example in Latvia where I grew up, winters last from november to march-april, the nights are long, and it can be months without any sunlight. And it gets darker once you go further north - Finland, Norway, Sweden. But back in my preschool, we had 1-4 kids per 30 in the class, with any eye problems. I myself was among those few who had hypermedia, some even got rid of it by age 10-13. And if I look at the my parents, and grandparents - even fewer had need for eye correction.
Valid point. I guess then in Canada they could have a lot of such cases, as it has been a major destination for migration. In any case, sounds like an good topic for a research paper
"Silicon metal" means "elemental silicon" in this context. Silicon was first industrially important for the manufacture of specialty steel, so some of the vocabulary is still influenced by its early proximity to steel production.
"Transactions of the American Electrochemical Society v. 29 (1916)"
A special steel of great importance to electrical industry is silicon steel, used in electrical transformer construction and all alternating-current apparatus. Silicon metal and 75 percent ferrosilicon essential in its manufacture are produced only at Niagara Falls. The ageing of transformer steel has long been the cause of a serious falling off in efficiency. This loss often doubled after a few years' use. Silicon steel does not age. Moreover, its original hysteresis loss is 25 percent less than that of the old type of steel.
The saving in a large generating and distributing system from the generator through step-up and step-down transformers to the motor may be as high as 6 percent. Thus silicon steel, a comparatively unknown product, is saving many millions of dollars annually wherever electric energy is transformed.
Silicon metal as a "preparedness" product is important in the generation of hydrogen for aeronautical purposes. In conjunction with caustic soda it forms the cheapest method of generating hydrogen in the field or on shipboard when portable outfits are required.
I had the same problem, but then discovered that chrome extension StayFree (used to be called StayFocused or something) released and app for android, that can block sites on android too. Now, I just added links to all the short video pages of all major social networks, and it does work!
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