Public restrooms are a sign of advanced civilizations. It's a pity that they have to be built to withstand damage from hooligans.

The existence of well maintained and clean public restrooms and hooligans is a shibboleth for culture. Some cultures are simply superior.

I’m currently travelling in China and the total absence of graffiti and the wide availability of public toilets as well as the general cleanliness of the place is a stark contrast to London. I am somewhat dreading that part when I return.

The restroom building provides more utility than most buildings do to a hooligan. Unclear why it is an enemy.

Vandalism scales linearly with [accessible, visible, unsupervised].

Uncorrelated with the usefulness of the building after controlling for other factors

Any "private" space in a public place becomes valuable with more density. It's basic scarcity incentives. It unfortunately incentivizes hooligans to make the restroom appear even more disheveled and unsafe to increase the privacy (less people want to go in it)

You're reading way too far into it. Private spaces are simply easier targets.

So the solution is obviously https://juxthpose.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/m...

Having a "indexed global data collection" of the markdown would be a kumbaya moment for AI. There's so much data out there but finite disk space. Maybe torrents or IPFS could work for this?

I'm actually sort of working on this! https://github.com/ctoth/propstore -- it's like Cyc, but there is no one answer. Plus knowledge bases are literally git repos that you can fork/merge. Research-papers-plugin is the frontend, we extract the knowledge, then we need somewhere to put it :)

Awesome! TIL about Cyc, and it's quite intriguing. I'd been thinking about how being able to integrate Prolog or similar tools might be a valuable endeavor (although I've yet to write anything in Prolog myself).

It's because the people who get rich off of fossil fuels are in control, and they are willing to continue this damage as long as it adds to their personal fortunes.

We could "manhattan project" ourselves out of this mess if we wanted to. China, in a sense, is doing just that.

Made worse that there's a significant number of people who refuse to believe it, and for all the wrong reasons at that.

Global warming doesn't exist.

If it does, it's not that bad.

If it gets bad, it's not a big deal in reality.

If it becomes a big deal, it was not humanity's fault.

And if it was humanity's fault, at least the planet was saved from a global dictatorship run by scientists.

You're missing: it's real and we did it but it's good, and, it's real and we did it and it's bad but it would cost too much to fix it now.

I appreciate that they build this stuff for their own benefit, but I don't want to feed even more of my private info. Hopefully the models will become public or lead to equivalent models from other sources.

> Of course this only works as a justification

If killing those kids was instrumental in a greater good, only then is it worth being philosophical about. From what I've seen, they were too eager with the bang bang boom boom to actually double check that it was a valid target.

Double checked?

They fed ancient intelligence into an AI which spit out a target list that nobody seems to have checked, period.

Too many are either disinterested in politics because it's ugly, or mad that their assigned candidate betrayed one of their values (e.g., genocide in Gaza). I think a lot of younger people just don't want to be bothered.

Being against genocide isn't a "value". It's not idealistic, or naive either.

It's a duty. Moral, and legal; domestic and international.

Drawing a hard red line at genocide is damn near the very least any human must demand from their leader; perhaps only exceeded by "don't threaten entire civilizations with nuclear weapons".

Same with prosecuting rapist insurrectionists, and going after billionaire's child-trafficking/murdering blackmail rings. These are not "nice to haves" - ya simply gotta do it.

If you're not "mad" when people fail to do these things, then are you really "interested in politics", or are you simply caught in some kind of us-vs-them death spiral?

Yeah, reminds me of Changing World Technologies -- so much hope, so little reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changing_World_Technologies

In a more civilized civilization we'd be investing in making these processes work. Likely there was more money to be made by stakeholders to scuttle these endeavors.

Well, a plasma torch -> energy system is basically a chemical factory attached to a plasma torch and the thing about a chemical factory is that quality inputs lead to quality outputs. Poor quality inputs lead to poor quality outputs or maybe something blowing up. Any kind of "circular economy" chemical factory has the problem that it has to run on whatever inputs are available that day and that kind of thing will have Chem-E's pulling their hair out.

If you are throwing in nothing but rubber tires a thing like that will yield a lot of energy, if it is nothing but concrete rubble from buildings it will consume a lot of energy. To keep it happy it really wants every bite you feed it to have the perfect mix of ingredients and it's not easy to get that out of municipal waste.

I assumed that it was to ensure that the announced products were revealed in a controlled manner rather than because they aren't able to do updates to their product listings as a regular thing.

My reading of the tea leaves is it started out as the latter and continues as the former as part of the “mystique”.

I missed that, that could come in handy. Thanks!