The next graffiti in that exact spot better be of those two guarding the cover up.

On a “respond to an individual query” level, yeah it’s not that much. But prior to response the data center had to be constructed, the entire web had to be scraped, the models trained, the servers continually ran regardless of load. There’s also way too many “hidden” queries across the web in general from companies trying to summarize every email or product.

All of that adds to the energy costs. This equivocation is meant to make people feel less bad about the energy impact of using AI, when so much of the cost is in building AI.

Furthermore, that’s the median value–the one that falls right in the middle of the quantity of queries. There’s a limit to how much less energy a query to the left of the median can use; there’s a significantly higher runway to the right of the median for excess energy use. This also only accounted for text queries; images and video generation efforts are gonna use a lot more.

There are zero downsides when mentally associating an energy hog with “1 second of use time of the device that is routinely used for minutes at a time.”

https://xkcd.com/1035/

• I ask a website for content.
• The website gives me content and a side of shit.
• I instruct my intelligent butler to discard the shit and only give me the content I requested.
• I get only the content I requested.

If a website wants to run ads that’s fine, I’ll just remove them. If they want to gate their content behind a paywall that’s fine, I’ll just make a determination about whether or not what they offer is worth it.

Removing ads is not “breaking a website” if anything it’s the exact opposite–restoring a cleaner layout, faster loading, less privacy invasion, and a reduced chance of malware.

Grover’s mad quest to kill God

One of my coworkers said the same thing. After the third time they were forced to move they caved and bought a condo.

One of my big concerns is that access to psychological benefits of keeping a pet gets to be gatekept by the whims of someone else.

My parents own multiple rental properties and completely straight face told me it’s a charity cause they rent to people who can’t afford homes.

Meanwhile I’m engaging with my mutual aid group every week handing out about 400 meals, and survival gear for people who can’t afford anything.

Glad their fucking charity has turned enough profit to pay off the rentals, their main home, and their vacation spot though. /s

WiFi uses a subset of the significantly wider microwave band. Ground Penetrating Radar also uses a subset of the microwave band. While there can be some overlap, the frequencies desired for GPR will very broadly based on what you are looking for, what you are looking in, and how deep you are looking for that thing. The wattage supplied can also differ.

WiFi and Microwaves in general are most definitely not the same thing and I will absolutely encourage you to not set up a 1kW 3GHz jamming antenna for your WiFi needs.

Could you use WiFi for search and rescue? Maybe for a narrow set of circumstances, but in almost all situations a dedicated GPR option will be better.

This also won’t identify a victim, only revealing that one exists.

Microwave based ground penetrating radar is actually different from WiFi. Also the technology referenced in the link is a motion based body locator, not an identity recognition device.

This is different technology doing different things than what the original article was talking about.

VPNs will help. The article is only talking about VPN servers based in a location with a geo ban, which, duh. But if you actually use your VPN to be in a different country and not just a different city it’ll work fine.

Why do you need to identify specific cats over merely the presence of movement or cats in general?

If all you need is presence detection then a motion sensor would be vastly more efficient.

If you actually need identity detection, then maybe, but you’ll still have to have a camera or detailed access logs to associate the interference signature with a known entity and at that point you may as well just put an RFID reader under the bowl you throw your keys into or use facial or gait detection.

Probably not.

This kind of thing relies on the fact that the emitter and environments are static, impacting the propagation of the signals in a predictable way and that each person, having a unique physique, consistently interferes with that propagation in the same way. It’s a tool that reports “the interference in this room looks like the same interference observed in these past cases.”

Search and rescue is a very dynamic environment, with no opportunity to establish a local baseline, and with a high likelihood that the physiological signal you are looking for has been altered (such as by broken or severed limbs).

There are some other WiFi sniffing technologies that might be more useful for S&R such as movement detection, but I’m not sure if that will work as well when the broadcaster is outside the environment (as the more rubble between the emitter and the target the weaker your signal from reflections against the rubble).

Don’t think of this as being able to see through walls like with a futuristic camera, think of this as AI assisted anomaly detection in signal processing (which is exactly what the researchers are doing).

I’m generally pro research, but occasionally I come across a body of research and wish I could just shut down what they’re doing and rewind the clock to before that started.

There is no benefit of this for the common person. There is no end user need or product for being able to identify individuals based on their interactions with WiFi signals. The only people that benefit from this are large corporations and governments and that’s from them turning it on you.

Continued research will ease widespread surveillance and mass tracking. That’s not a good thing.

It would cause traffic change, sure. But that change could be modeled, tested, and adapted around beforehand. Hell you can even go a step further and implement more routes for the free mall ride, move parking and traffic even further from the city center and use it as an opportunity to promote public transit. Sure nimbys would complain, cause that’s what they always do, but when they see how much easier it is travel to and within downtown, how much quieter it is there, and how great the now enlarged park is surrounded by stuff to actually see and do they’ll pretend like it’s always been that way or that they were always for it.

That was my proposed alternative I encouraged my friends to call about. I don’t know how it wasn’t obvious that if your goal was to increase pedestrian safety and encourage visiting your park in the middle of downtown (which was the public justification in the survey) that the best way to do that would be to get rid of the 2 highways trisecting your park. Grass them over to both remove traffic and increase park space, install meandering leisure paths through a history walk, and have local Coloradoan artists produce for a dedicated Coloradoan history sculpture park.

Oh, and if you really, really want members of the public to use your public park get rid of the helicopter parent rangers that yell at you for touching the oldest tree in Denver or for falling asleep, get rid of the signs that forbid standing still or loitering (at a fucking park of all places), and don’t close off the grass areas periodically.

You could even go so far as to install more trash cans or make the bathrooms available 24/7.

It’s not that the public didn’t care about your fake liberty bell, it’s that your park is kinda a hostile environment with shitty infrastructure.

Speaking of not teaching things kids have to unlearn later, I’ve often wondered why we don’t just start teaching math with the expectation that you solve for “x”.

i.e. Instead of

2 + 3 = 

Write

2 + 3 = x

This would prime the child to expect that math is about finding an unknown and you’ve already introduced the unknown that will be most prominent in their academic career. This will also reduce the steps necessary when teaching how to balance an equation as you no longer have the “well actually you were always solving for ‘x’ we just didn’t write it, so you didn’t know, also we’re never going to use ‘x’ for multiplication again.” stage.

But I’m not a teacher, parent, or child psychologist and this is just my blathering hypothesis based on watching my peers struggle with math for years.

The hazards also override your turn signals so I now have no idea when you are going to attempt lane change.

Trump’s birthday military parade is gonna be filled with paid actors.

• History shows everything I’ve ever been to including the “nope that top result in my search engine actually didn’t contain the search string anywhere in its contents and is thus useless to me.” pages
• Bookmarks are for things I routinely go to for years
• Tabs are useful results for the projects I’m working on now.
• Pinned tabs are the pages I visit multiple times a day.

None of those is a substitute for any other.