If you know about this ahead of time, and can be a contractor, then forming a corporation that is its own tax entity gives you this in the US. I did exactly this in the mid-90s when 9 months of work was suddenly going to yield 4-5x what I had made the previous year, then I would lose the position immediately after, and I knew I would need a break at that point. I paid myself the regular salary whether the corporation was making a lot or making nothing. The corporation had to pay taxes on the profit the first year, but it could deduct the loses against those profits in later years. The same thing happened 5 years later. All my work for a decade was through the corporation I had formed. You can also do things like have a company car (with the company deducting insurance, gas, maintenance, etc.), rent your home office to the company, and much more. US tax laws are much better for corporations and their owners than for individuals.
>> Amanda was 10 years old. she went into the bathroom and had sex with a 30 year old man.
If the story was real, should Amanda be banned from publishing her own account of her experience later in life? Should she be able to write about the impact it had on her? I think she should have that freedom.
What if she was 17 years 364 days old and the adult was 18 years 1 day old, assuming the age of consent is 18, and she writes about it being a good experience for her? 16 years old and 20? 4 and 40? Those are increasingly grotesque to me, but I don't know where to draw the line.
Wait, have I crossed the line in what I've written in this reply? Have we all?
I have no idea about Australia, but in USA it's pretty well established it is a crime to publish CSAM of yourself. Children are prosecuted for sending their own provocative images to others. I can only imagine the punishment would be worse if they distributed them after they were an adult.
So I would think hypothetically if the words were CSAM, the fact they are the victim publishing their own account would be immaterial to their defense.
IANAL, but written materials about sexual abuse don't seem to be illegal in the US. For recent-ish publications, see My Dark Vanessa by Russell and Tampa by Nutting.
(I liked the former which took a thoughtful approach whereas I didn't finish the latter because it just felt like erotica for pedophiles which isn't what I was looking for.)
I think one additional objection to AI generated depictions is that photo-realistic AI generated content gives plausible deniability to those who create/possess real life CSAM.
And it would make authorities waste time finding the real csam to investigate or mistakenly investigating AI csam (under the hypothetical that AI csam is decriminalized).
Oh wow, what a bad memory. This exact thing happened in a building I lived in several years ago, a couple of floors above me. It looked like waterfalls outside our windows and water was rushing in under the baseboards. All while every fire alarm in the building was going off and fire truck sirens were blaring outside. Understandably, the fire department would not turn off the water until they had been to every floor to check for fire. On the upside, it's impressive how much water can be delivered by fire sprinklers.
Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.
Oh man, multi-tenant housing sounds like the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. I’m glad you were able to avoid any liability, trying to pin liability for rebuilding a unit on a tenant is insane.
And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
A fascinating takeaway from that video for me... If you take the US land that is dedicated to growing corn for ethanol that is put in gasoline, and replace all the corn on that land with solar panels, how much energy would it produce? Twice today's total electrical generation in the US, from all sources. And that's in the corn belt, which is far from ideal for solar. It would be billions of panels, but it's a pretty interesting perspective on the questions about the land use requirements of solar.
Another genuine question: I wonder how that would change the climate in those areas. I live in Iowa and "corn sweat" is a thing that never fails to make several weeks of summer completely unbearable.
There was a book about renewable energy in Britain about 17 years ago, "Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air" that tried to make the argument that renewables could not power Britain, there wasn't enough land. But if you drilled down, this conclusion was due to use of biofuels.
The significant problem with that book is that it commits the primary energy fallacy. It sees that we need X GWh of chemical energy from fuels and says we have to replace it with X GWh of electricity. Which is of course completely wrong since it ignores the efficiencies of the processes and conflates two different things simply because they are measured in the same units.
Genuine question: How much energy, minerals, transportation, manufacturing, etc, etc. goes into making the panels. How much are the panels going to make back percentage wise in it's lifetime vs. the cost to make and transport, install?
Corn kind of reproduces itself every year (If you don't get the GMO kind), so you only need natural resources to continue to grow it right? Water, sunlight and labor?
> Corn kind of reproduces itself every year (If you don't get the GMO kind), so you only need natural resources to continue to grow it right? Water, sunlight and labor?
At industrial scale, it has a huge petro-chemical fertiliser input.
Total energy input to agriculture in the US is less than 2% of total energy consumption. So "huge" there has to be taken in context.
All the energy inputs to agriculture could be replaced with non-fossil inputs. Fertilizer in particular needs hydrogen to make ammonia, but that can be produced from non-fossil sources.
Germany uses less land for energy crops and is further north, but still could satisfy most of its electricity needs if it replaced the plants with solar panels.
20 years ago, I was working on a consumer device, doing indexing and searching of books. The indexer had about 1 MB of RAM available, and had to work in the background on a very slow, single core CPU, without the user noticing any slowdown. A lot of the optimization work involved trying to get algorithmic complexity and memory use closer to a function of the distinct words in books than to a function of the total words in books. Typical novels have on the order of 10 K distinct words and 100 K total words.
If you're indexing numbers, which we did, this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working. But, because it constantly triggered that approach to capping memory usage, it took far longer to index than more typical books, including many that were much larger.
Over 30 years ago, was working on a presentation software that shipped with a bunch of (vector) clip art and remember using the (raster) graphics from the CIA World Factbook as a base to create vector (WMF) versions of the flags of various ‘new’ countries at the time (following the breakup of Yugoslavia) that were missing from the set that our art vendor provided to us.
The Croatia flag in particular took quite a while to trace/draw (by hand).
> this book has little difference between total words and distinct words because it has so many distinct numbers in it. It ended up being a regular stress test to make sure our approach to capping memory use was working
> Even the Google "AI" knows better than that. CSAM "is [...]"
Please don't use the "knowledge" of LLMs as evidence or support for anything. Generative models generate things that have some likelihood of being consistent with their input material, they don't "know" things.
Just last night, I did a Google search related to the cell tower recently constructed next to our local fire house. Above the search results, Gemini stated that the new tower is physically located on the Facebook page of the fire department.
Does this support the idea that "some physical cell towers are located on Facebook pages"? It does not. At best, it supports that the likelihood that the generated text is completely consistent with the model's input is less than 100% and/or that input to the model was factually incorrect.
California offers both. I renewed my license last year. I opted for a non Real ID version because I could renew online rather than spend hours at the DMV.
I can't think of another electronic device that has survived and remained useful for half the 43 years my 15C has - through two years of high school, a math degree, and an entire software engineering career. When I calculate something any other way, it involves thinking about what my thumbs automatically do on my 15C and translating that.
When I'm away from it, there's a wonderful emulation of the 15C (and 16C) at https://jrpn.jovial.com. The numeric algorithms behave identically as far as I can tell, and it even includes the back panel (3-dot menu near the logo, then "Help"). The visuals make me feel right at home. If only they could reproduce the tactile experience.
My neighbor, who spent 40 years in the USFS doing fire fighting and prevention, pointed Zeke out to me saying, "This guy really understands fire." Zeke does great live streams during large wildfires, explaining what is happening with webcams and mapping of near-realtime data. It's crazy to watch him triangulate smoke plumes from multiple webcams and then correlate that with cartographic data put out by the agencies fighting the fire. His experience is obvious when you see how calmly, quickly, and rationally he evaluates devastating situations.
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