Yeah well, my teeth were so tight you couldn’t squeeze any floss through. My dentists generally refused to believe it and one insisted on demonstrating. After squeezing very hard, he finally succeeded getting the floss through, at which time the floss immediately broke. Zero flossing actually occurred, the dentist was embarrassed and confused, and pretended it didn’t happen, and made no comment about what else I should do, since I CLEARLY couldn’t floss. Only result was I had a piece of floss stuck, and It took me weeks to finally get rid of that frigging floss thread from between my teeth.
Quite frankly, I’m more than a little tired of reading mundane advise for people with normal teeth, who probably know this already.
Yes people who have ordinary teeth, can use this common and obvious advise.
Same - I could never understand interdental brushes. How the hell was I supposed to get that between my teeth when even I waxed floss won’t fit? So I gave up and now use an electric toothbrush +waterpick when I can be arsed. My dentist is more than happy so I guess I’m doing ok.
I later found out to flush thoroughly. It would have been great to have been advised on that 25 years ago, instead of the constant talk about flossing.
Flushing really is extremely efficient, I never tried a waterpick, but I’m guessing that’s even better.
What is flushing exactly? Is it just violently swishing water through your teeth? I do that and find it works better at getting stuff out than flossing most of the time.
Yes that’s basically it, you can get special mouthwash to use instead of water. that should prevent bacteria for longer. I generally just use water, but I do it each time I’ve brushed my teeth. And it really makes a difference.
Agreed on the water pick. It’s really just a high powered stream of water, but not so powerful as to cut you. Although against delicate gums it may still cause bleeding like floss.
In case you (nor the dentist) haven’t tried, there’s also flat floss that’s like a strip of paper. Oral B Satin Floss is one that is available where I live. Hope it might be of help!
It was the flat one he used, and yes I’ve tries with the Oral B Satin too. Apart from not working for me, it doesn’t seem to be able to do much cleaning even if it did.
I flush or rinse whatever it’s called instead. That works fine for me.
I only know him from the TeamTrees and TeamSeas projects. Using his huge viewer base to promote projects like this is one of the best possible things an influencer can do IMO.
Team aluminum all the way. A higher up where I work is obsessed with stainless steel, he gets these monstrous heavy duty tables made out of SS that hold objects 1/3 of their weight. Makes lab rearranging a nightmare lol.
If you really want to stop the stainless steel obsession, you could start cleaning the benches with bleach and not rinsing again afterwards. The corrosion will set in quickly.
Aluminum is where it’s at, and where it is, is everywhere.
Your cans? Aluminum. Your car? Mostly aluminum. Old wiring, you better believe that’s aluminum. Your fucking phone screen is aluminum, sand paper is aluminum, half the birth stones are all aluminum let’s fucking goooo baybee
Most cars are still steel. Source I work on cars in New England. So much rust, even on the ones with aluminum bodies, at least wherever it can touch a dissimilar metal and becomes a battery.
And crucially the important parts that keep it from exploding (cylinder liners) and save you in a crash (crumple and bumper cores) are almost all steel. Because it deforms better with simpler engineering.
See also iron brakes in most cars hardened steel bearings everywhere.
Yeah I’m mostly just shitting on it for fun too. But the pistons don’t work very long without steel rings, wrist pins and big end bolts.
The problem is we have to bring copper, brass and other fancy metals in them though, because the all spin on oil cushion bearings. Unless we’re talking Babbitt bushings from the early 1900s.
I used to be a fan of it, but in the past couple of years I’ve seen MBFC rate sources as “highly credible” that are anything but, particularly on issues involving geopolitics. That, plus the inherent unreliability of attempting to fix an entire news outlet to a single point on a simple Left <-> Right spectrum, has rendered it pretty useless, in my opinion.
There days I’m much more of the opinion that it’s best to read a variety of sources, both mainstream and independent, and consider factors like
is this information well-sourced?
is there any obvious missing context?
is this information up to date?
what are the likely ideological biases of this writer or publication?
What is the quality of the evidence provided to support the claims made in the article?
And so on. It’s much better this way than outsourcing your critical thinking to a third party who may be using a flawed methodology.
When I was on in Reddit I used to do it all the time, but writing everything out, organizing it and including citations etc. can be rather time-intensive.
These days, I’ll leave a quick comment on a post if I have enough time, but nothing major.
I find it useful at a glance, specifically when I don’t recognize a niche source. There’s a lot of “alt” media under random names. This helps flag them.
For mainstream, you can easily make your own call. You should be exposed to enough of it.
The most beneficial application of AI like this is to reverse-engineer the neural network to figure out how the AI works. In this way we may discover a new technique or procedure, or we might find out the AI’s methods are bullshit. Under no circumstance should we accept a “black box” explanation.
This ones from 2019 Link
I was a bit off the mark, its not that the models they use aren’t black boxes its just that they could have made them interpretable from the beginning and chose not to, likely due to liability.
Well in theory you can explain how the model comes to it’s conclusion. However I guess that 0.1% of the “AI Engineers” are actually capable of that. And those costs probably 100k per month.
It depends on the algorithms used. Now the lazy approach is to just throw neural networks at everything and waste immense computation ressources. Of course you then get results that are difficult to interpret. There is much more efficient algorithms that are working well to solve many problems and give you interpretable decisions.
IMO, the “black box” thing is basically ML developers hand waiving and saying “it’s magic” because they know it will take way too long to explain all the underlying concepts in order to even start to explain how it works.
I have a very crude understanding of the technology. I’m not a developer, I work in IT support. I have several friends that I’ve spoken to about it, some of whom have made fairly rudimentary machine learning algorithms and neural nets. They understand it, and they’ve explained a few of the concepts to me, and I’d be lying if I said that none of it went over my head. I’ve done programming and development, I’m senior in my role, and I have a lifetime of technology experience and education… And it goes over my head. What hope does anyone else have? If you’re not a developer or someone ML-focused, yeah, it’s basically magic.
I won’t try to explain. I couldn’t possibly recall enough about what has been said to me, to correctly explain anything at this point.
The AI developers understand how AI works, but that does not mean that they understand the thing that the AI is trained to detect.
For instance, the cutting edge in protein folding (at least as of a few years ago) is Google’s AlphaFold. I’m sure the AI researchers behind AlphaFold understand AI and how it works. And I am sure that they have an above average understanding of molecular biology. However, they do not understand protein folding better than the physisits and chemists who have spent their lives studying the field. The core of their understanding is “the answer is somewhere in this dataset. All we need to do is figure out how to through ungoddly amounts of compute at it, and we can make predictions”. Working out how to productivly throw that much compute power at a problem is not easy either, and that is what ML researchers understand and are experts in.
In the same way, the researchers here understand how to go from a large dataset of breast images to cancer predictions, but that does not mean they have any understanding of cancer. And certainly not a better understanding than the researchers who have spent their lives studying it.
An open problem in ML research is how to take the billions of parameters that define an ML model and extract useful information that can provide insights to help human experts understand the system (both in general, and in understanding the reasoning for a specific classification). Progress has been made here as well, but it is still a long way from being solved.
Thank you for giving some insights into ML, that is now often just branded “AI”. Just one note though. There is many ML algorithms that do not employ neural networks. They don’t have billions of parameters. Especially in binary choice image recognition (looks like cancer or no) stuff like support vector machines achieve great results and they have very few parameters.
Machine learning is a subset of Artificial intelligence, which is a field of research as old as computer science itself
The traditional goals of AI research include reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, learning, natural language processing, perception, and support for robotics.[a] General intelligence—the ability to complete any task performable by a human on an at least equal level—is among the field’s long-term goals.[16]
good luck reverse-engineering millions if not billions of seemingly random floating point numbers. It’s like visualizing a graph in your mind by reading an array of numbers, except in this case the graph has as many dimensions as the neural network has inputs, which is the number of pixels the input image has.
Under no circumstance should we accept a “black box” explanation.
Go learn at least basic principles of neural networks, because this your sentence alone makes me want to slap you.
Don’t worry, researchers will just get an AI to interpret all those floating point numbers and come up with a human-readable explanation! What could go wrong? /s
As a practical example, new regulations by the European Union proposed that individuals affected by algorithmic decisions have a right to an explanation. To allow this, algorithmic decisions must be explainable, contestable, and modifiable in the case that they are incorrect.
Oh yeah. I forgot about that. I hope your model is understandable enough that it doesn’t get you in trouble with the EU.
Look, maybe you were having a bad day, or maybe slapping people is literally your favorite thing to do, who am I to take away mankind’s finer pleasures, but this attitude of yours is profoundly stupid. It’s weak. You don’t want to know? It doesn’t make you curious? Why are you comfortable not knowing things? That’s not how science is propelled forward.
“Enough” is doing a fucking ton of heavy lifting there. You cannot explain a terabyte of floating point numbers. Same way you cannot guarantee a specific doctor or MRI technician isn’t racist.
A single drop of water contains billions of molecules, and yet, we can explain a river. Maybe you should try applying yourself. The field of hydrology awaits you.
No, we cannot explain a river, or the atmosphere. Hence weather forecast is good for a few days and even after massive computer simulations, aircraft/cars/ships still need to do tunnel testing and real life testing. Because we only can approximate the real thing in our model.
I understand that complicated things frieghten you, Tja, but I don’t understand what any of this has to do with being unsatisfied when an insurance company denies your claim and all they have to say is “the big robot said no… uh… leave now?”
It won’t though, as there become fewer humans it’s likely it will become easier to have more children again (fewer people for the same amount of finite resources) and the rate will increase.
You’re thinking about the resources wrong. I mostly mean land availability.
Even in first world countries the birth rates are higher outside cities than inside. In undeveloped counties the birthdates are lower in crowded cities.
Huh, I guess that will mean that humans will perpetually be moving to “the big city” from the countryside. I guess romcoms won’t ever have to change their story line.
Blaming this on “laziness” is a really naive and unfair take on why rich nations have less kids. The more likely reasons, and more commonly accepted reasons are:
I like how we phrase this as “better education” and “better career opportunities for women”. While technically true relative to poor countries, these explain nothing about why fertility rates are so low. They are related, but framing them differently will help us understand.
Why do people have fewer kids? Because economic life in most developed countries is relatively unstable, and to ensure economic stability, we require people to develop years of education and work experience to receive a comfortable salary. In many places we now require two such incomes. This mean women really don’t have a choice but to pursue advanced education and work, whether they want to or not. And we are not willing to accommodate children during education or work. This means women (and increasingly men too) are severely penalized economically for having children, and so of course people will have far fewer on average.
Another likely factor is the atomized nature of the modern family. Many people need to move to distant places for work, severing their direct ties to family and community. Human mothers aren’t well equipped to raise children solo, and even two parents is a stretch if you have 2+ kids. In past times we always relied on neighbors and extended family to help keep an eye on the youngsters and to teach parents the skills they need to do it right.
If you look at the very wealthy, there is some evidence that they have higher fertility, though I couldn’t find good data on this so take it with a grain of salt. But they have access to enough money to buy personalized childcare, which solves almost all of the above issues.
In developing countries, children often mean free labor and form the basis of your retirement through elder care, so while the economic conditions are of course worse overall, the opposite incentives exist. Another factor is that poor, agricultural societies are almost always extremely patriarchal, which tends to lead to high (involuntary) fertility.
In my view, egalitarian economic reforms will help bring fertility rates in all countries towards a healthy moderate level.
Yea I completely agree with everything you said. Life in rich countries doesn’t mean that everyone is rich and lazy and fat. I mean just look at the US. So many people live in poverty and literally cannot afford kids.
The retirement plan goes for rich countries too. But different. With elder care going the way it’s going, you’d be happy to get someone to help you shower once per month. Children can help you with a lot once you’re old and fragile.
True! This might be part of why we see poorer families having more kids, in addition to the fact that lower educational attainment expectations make it easier to get pregnant younger.
For more middle and upper-class families you typically send them to a retirement home so it’s not something people are as worried about.
In poorer countries, the investment into each child is minimal. By the time they were 8 or 9 years old they were expected to contribute to the family. Higher child mortality rates also plays into this, as most families lose a few kids to disease etc. Children are seen as a commodity that they control to make the parents/grandparents lives better.
In industrialized societies the amount of resources dedicated to each child is more than the the resources dedicated to 5 or 6 families in poorer countries. Children are dependent on their parents well into adulthood. As the cost to raise the kids increase the average family size decreases because of limited resources.
You are contradicting yourself. By moving into a wealthy country you neither gain education nor wealth. Its about culture and environment.
My guess is: in wealthy countries people are living more isolated. Without help from friends and family you have to invest a huge amount oft time into rising a child, which many can’t afford.
By moving to a wealthy country, you do gain education and wealth, wtf are you talking about.
People don’t move to a country to stay poor and uneducated. They immediately send their kids to school and they immediately benefit from better employment.
There’s been enough studies about it. Birthrate is absolutely linked to wealth. It’s universal.
Transport layer security should mean this shouldn’t matter. A good POS shouldn’t rely on a secure network, the security should already be built in cyptographically at the network session layer. Anything else would still have the same risk vector, just a lower chance of happening.
In fact many POS systems happily just take a 4g/5g sim card because it doesn’t matter what network they’re on.
Not all attackers might want access to the POS system. Some might just want to mess around
Couldn’t someone mess with the WiFi or network itself? I’m just figuring someone who doesn’t secure the WiFi is someone who’s going to leave admin passwords on the default and they’d be able to mess with the network settings just enough to bring the system to a halt.
A software shouldn’t use passwords for tls, just like before you use submit your bank password your network connection to the site has been validated and encrypted by the public key your client is using to talk to the bank server, and the bank private key to decrypt it.
The rest of the hygiene is still up for grabs for sure, IT security is built on layers. Even if one is broken it shouldn’t lead to a failure overall. If it does, go add more layers.
To answer about something like a WiFi pineapple: those man in the middle attacks are thwarted by TLS. The moment an invalid certificate is offered, since the man in the middle should and can not know the private key (something that isn’t used as whimsically as a password, and is validated by a trusted root authority).
If an attacker has a private key, your systems already have failed. You should immediately revoke it. You publish your revokation. Invalidating it. But even that would be egregious. You’ve already let someone into the vault, they already have the crown jewels. The POS system doesn’t even need to be accessed.
So no matter what, the WiFi is irrelevant in a setup.
Being suspicious because of it though, I could understand. It’s not a smoking gun, but you’d maybe look deeper out if suspicion.
Note I’m not security operations, I’m solutions and systems administrations. A Sec Ops would probably agree more with you than I do.
I consider things from a Swiss cheese model, and rely on 4+ layers of protection against most understood threat vendors. A failure of any one is minor non-compliance in my mind, a deep priority 3. Into the queue, but there’s no rush. And given a public WiFi is basically the same as a compromised WiFi, or a 5g carrier network, a POS solution should be built with strengths to handle that by default. And then security layered on top (mfa, conditional access policies, PKI/TLS, Mdm, endpoint health policies, TPM and validation++++)
I mean this is the world he wants, you can’t dog whistle people to take up arms against tyranny without a comfortable acceptance of the irony pool you are filling. Everyone will try to spin this to their political advantage but the truth is this is the level of political discourse the right has been driving towards.
Trump’s rhetoric almost lead to Pelosi getting killed. Trump’s rhetoric got people killed on Jan 6th. Republicans have been posting images with crosshairs of their opponents for years, and now they are surprised that shit is turning violent…
I know you are being cheeky.. But you are using their lingo. It is strategic as it skips the the perp ie the rent seeker looking to underpay for labour.
You know how fake teevee always got NYC migrant bussing story?
But we never hear about migrants being bussed into the heartland to work in meat packing or some other hard work.
This shit has got to be outlawed. Companies are doing this across the board. Literally skirting labor laws, outsourcing jobs that should be going to us citizens, all to just continue pouring more money into the tops pockets. When will we have all had enough?
It’s a simple enough solution in this case. They are performing the work of employees, so for all intents and purposes, they are employees. They are directly interacting with US customers at a physical location within the US. Their place of work is that physical location, even if they are not physically present. They need authorization to work in the US, and the minimum wage laws applicable to that location applies to these workers.
All that is missing is the lawsuit under existing labor laws, which they will probably lose.
Sounds like something the Department of Labour could legislate… Or could have.
But the supreme court just ruled that this falls under the courts jurisdiction and there’s a snowflakes chance in hell that a case pushed high and far enough will result in those ghouls will rule in favour of labour interests.
Yeah, I don’t think SCOTUS would side with an IRS or Labour Department rule requiring businesses pay minimum wage. But you’re forgetting the “racist” angle: the courts would love nothing more than to support a State Department determination that they are “immigrant workers” and require a work visa.
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