partial_accumen

My solar PV system was one the reasons I went ahead and ripped out the gas furnace and put in a cold climate heat pump. No amount of solar generation lowered the gas bill, but with the heat pump that is yet another bill that is paid for largely by the panels on the roof. The continued rising costs of gas was another incentive to remove the low efficiency contractor grade gas furnace. In the USA we were also able to take advantage of the tax credit to pay for part of the heat pump installation before trump did away with the credit.

Can I ask what fuel you’re using to heat your house now? Also do you have AC for cooling in your house already?

Getty shares have lost about 99% of their value since returning to public markets in 2022 through a special purpose acquisition company that valued ⁠the ​company at about $4.8 billion, after 14 years ​as a private firm.

A SPAC strikes again!

It makes me curious how the financials could go so wrong for Getty. What are their operating expenses? Certainly fixed costs for the infrastructure for maintaining and distributing images and video, but with the royalties they charge I would imagine that is a tiny cost. I would also guess human staff needed for negotiating larger licensing/content deals would also exist. Even with these two expenses licensing images, I would think, would be very profitable.

The article mentioned bond holders, so they’re clearly carrying debt. I wonder if that was just for the attempted Shutterstock acquisition or if they’ve been borrowing to maintain operations for years and the worldwide credit crunch just caught up with them.

He says: “Do you believe in the First Amendment?! Do you believe in my First Amendment right to express myself?!”

Hey asshole Republican, read the First Amendment please. Here I’ll help you: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The people laughing at you aren’t the government. They didn’t even stop you physically from trying to utter your garbage. They just laughed at you. You stopped talking yourself. The First Amendment doesn’t mean people have to listen to you, and it certianly doesn’t shield you from being laughed at when you say stupid shit.

Mr. Republican, the fact that you don’t know how the First Amendment to the US Constitution works should disqualify you from holding the office where your oath includes: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic;”

How can you swear to support and defend the Constitution when you haven’t even read the thing?

We watched CBS Sunday Morning for decades. We were concerned when Weiss came in and could start seeing the mild content changes in the weeks following Weiss’s hiring and started to cut back. When Scott Pelley was fired we stopped watching any CBS news products all together and haven’t watched Sunday Morning since. We never watched Fox News. We see no reason to watch Fox-News-in-a-CBS-skin-suit now.

First, I’m not expert on economics or monetary policy, but I do find the topic interest and read up on it.

Pointing at other countries than US for “debt problems” is somewhat of a joke.

The US absolutely has a debt problem (driven from a deficit spending problem), but the US having a problem doesn’t mean other nations (including China) are perfectly healthy either. The article makes no comparison to the US and appears to be an examination of China in isolation.

France has lower interest rates than US

Barely. France’s 10 year bond right now at 4.8360% is only 34 basis points lower than the US 10 year T-note. UK Gilts and Austrilian sovereign debt yields also exceed the historically high US rates.

The world is going through a liquidity crisis right now and sovereign nations are competing with large corporate borrowers worldwide offering ever more attractive rates forcing governments to compete for the ever shrinking pools of unallocated capital.

China is extremely economically healthy. Not only are long term rates below 2%,

China has massive monetary export controls on its citizens. It has a captive market for domestic liquidity by force of law. It doesn’t need to have favorable rates to attract external foreign investment.

Their debt is 90% owned by banks that government has 70% ownership in.

That…many not be a good thing. When the US Federal Reserve buys dollars to drive down rates, markets start freaking out as it drives down the value of the currency, also know as “printing money” or “Quantitative Easing” in polite circles. Currently the US Federal Reserve only holds 12% of US Debt and the threat of them buying up more sends shockwaves around the world.

Also, China also doesn’t use domestic interest rates to control inflation like many western economies instead using its control of banks to direct spending to create disinflation or deflation.

they have 5% real growth.

Not according to the article you’re replying to:

“In the second quarter of 2026, the country’s economic growth slowed to 4.3%, below the target range of 4.5-5%.”

and their debt is on infrastructure and ROI driven investments to attract industry.

And a number of notable projects aren’t returning that investment. I’m not saying China is taking the wrong path here, as I believe in infrastructure spending, but only where it makes sense. To my amateur eye it looks like they’re taking big swings, hitting some, but also notably missing quite a few as well.

China still is very dependent on revenue derived from exports. While they’ve made significant progress in increasing domestic consumption, it lags far behind other economies of their size. Worse, a good chunk of that domestic consumption is in real estate which is the primary investment vehicle for retail investors. Speculative real estate has been collapsing leaving regular Chinese citizens with real financial losses when this occurs.

None of this is to say “US = GOOD, CHINA = BAD”. No nation on Earth yet has been able to sustain massive economies like these over the long term. I appreciate China is trying something different on many fronts, and am looking closing at them for things we can learn, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing everything right either.

He seems to have no problem throwing women in his orbit under the bus when it political suits him.

I’ve been using Asahi Linux on a Macbook M2 for about a year now and generally like the experience. There’s a few things I’m hoping for future improvements, but its definitively “good enough” for my needs now to use daily.

I used it for a few years and just stopped because of the partitioning and update issues.

What issues did you run into?

Sounds like Elgin go their cameras taken down so that college’s problem is solved. If the cameras were still up I can think if a few things the college could do. The college has a welding instruction department. I can think of no better coursework than constructing steel welded boxes the wrap around cameras. That would have prevented the flock workers from taking the bags off.

Alternatively, the school could have erected signage directly in front of the cameras obscuring the view, and if the flock workers moved the signs they could criminally charge them vandalism and sue the Flock for paying for it to happen.

I’d love to see the re-enlistment data results of these sailors when each comes up for it in the months and years ahead. I would guess there would be a dramatically lower number of those choosing to re-enlist from the Lincoln’s crew. So we likely haven’t seen all the damage this abuse of our sailors has caused our military readiness.

You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion

Why golly thanks

Sure thing, friend.

How? By asking their chatbot to verify each statement?

Wow, you’re really failing on the reading comprehension tonight. This is explained in the immediately proceeding sentence to the one you quoted of mine which you either skipped or did not comprehend. That sentence is “even those with only a little bit of knowledge”. The student wouldn’t have to ask a chatbot. The student would already know enough domain knowledge of the example topic to know the LLM output is wrong.

I’m not sure whats up with your abrasiveness tonight, but I’m not interested in it. Maybe tomorrow will be better. Have a nice night.

It doesn’t do anything better or in an innovative way,

It does it in a very applicable way in the sense that these students will be encountering AI “in the wild” in the years to come. The ways and methods AI is wrong isn’t really identical to the way humans deceive. As an example, most humans won’t straight up manufacture a fake citation to prove a point where this is a commonplace action of factually wrong LLMs.

In this way using AI to produce the content that students are assigned to criticise is much more useful and less costly than human generated content. I’m not saying that LLMs should be used exclusively to create the target content, but it would be equally wrong to use human generated target content exclusively because humans are wrong in different ways (and that content is much more costly to create).

especially when accounting for the costs associated with AI.

Are you talking about monetary costs or something more philosophical (ethical, environmental, sociological)? The monetary costs would be extremely cheap. Probably less than $10 in tokens for the entire curriculum for the AI generated content. The necessary human contributions would be significantly more expensive, likely tens of thousands of dollars. The human component is still absolutely necessary, but it would be the far more monetarily expensive part.

It is unnecessary to make a brand new round hole for this square peg.

AI content students (when graduated into adults) have the evaluate is a new peg with a new shape. We can pretend its the same shape as the previous one and attempt to use the prior solution, but it will fail the education system and the students going through it arriving unprepared in the adult world rife with AI content that they will need to evaluate in their daily lives.

Your reading comprehension is ass.

Cool, so is yours apparently. Someone else already pointed this out , and I already admitted my mistake.

It doesn’t make sense to use chatbots in any learning environment, where you have no way to verify output.

You’re certainly welcome to your own opinion, but we’ve already covered counter arguments to that point too..

High school also functions as a method to prepare students for how to interact with the world. Dumping them into a world where AI is commonplace with no knowledge or mental protection from it would be a disservice to them.

You’re just describing a critical thinking class

All classes are critical thinking classes. Which ones are you suggesting aren’t?

but with the extra step of ai generating the materials.

AI generates part of the material with human effort and checkpoints wrapped around it. That’s the appropriate use of AI anyway. Nowhere am I suggesting uncheck AI generated material be presented as learning material

Mlem

You used an em dash in your post response. Its extremely rare for a human to do that, but extremely common for LLMs to do so.

That is an indication of the LLM “temperature” being set too high. Unfortunatly it looks like Google has disabled user/operator settable temperature replacing it with a new “thinking levels” setting. If you could set the temperature to zero, you get rid of any sycophancy and nearly all hallucination and instead just get back “I don’t know” type answers, which is my preference anyway.

Sadly it looks like the lowest “thinking level” is “minimal” but even that level allows for the model to introduce reasoning (and hallucination). I don’t like this change tha Google made.

Can I ask what software/device are you using to post to Lemmy?

You’re right. I misread that. I think they’re making a mistake with that, but I get it. How to adapt the early education methods to a world with AI now has no proven path yet.

AI is anathema to teaching and learning.

Your statement on its face value, sure I agree, but I can see a path were AI is a fantastic tool for teaching and learning critical thinking. If the teacher is able to alter the “temperature” setting of the LLM, they could crank it all the way up to 1 (meaning full creativity) which will likely induce AI hallucination.

The AI LLM can create output which can speak to a topic but even those with only a little bit of knowledge can easily see the flaws in the AI response. It would give the student a chance to see how rational sounding output can be factually wrong. It would teach students to evaluate the statements individually and tease out logical fallacies or even outright manufactured falsehoods.

Further, if the teacher can again set the temperature lower (perhaps to .7) which reduces the creativity then the LLM output would be more factual with possible logical or factual errors. This would increase the difficulty on the students to be able to inspect what they are given as LLM output and explore the tools and resources available to provide a human check on not only AI, but anything that another human says too.

It can become an excellent tool for teaching critical thinking.

EDIT: The more I’m thinking about this, the better I see this as a teaching tool. Tests students take to cover the material can be teacher created questions accompanied with a completely AI generated answer and the question to the student is “Is this true or bullshit? If bullshit, which parts are wrong?”. Every question on the entire test could use that format. It would be a great test of the student because they’d have to know the material well enough to know where the LLM produced a “right sounding answer” but was in fact, wrong. Even better, if a student tried to cheat using their own AI to answer the “bullshit or not?” question there’s an even higher chance the students cheating LLM would give a wrong answer because of the repeated Error Cascade.

I think this is the right approach they’re taking:

• no AI for young kids so they can learn the underlying principals of things on their own
• AI for older kids that have learned those fundamentals and will have to grow up and interact in a world with AI as adults

This is the same logic used for decades where young kids weren’t allowed to use calculators for simple addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, but calculators were a requirement for higher Algebra and above.