Chat

[Randi]

Neat!

[studentforever]

What will they think of next!!? Just in case you are driving round the South West of England

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-englan ... t-68318992

[Morgan]

I was fortunate early in my career

Thanks, Gordon. All of you in OW have such wonderful valued lives. It's interesting to hear from you. THANKS.

[pommystuart]

What will they think of next!!? Just in case you are driving round the South West of England

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-englan ... t-68318992

I wonder if the Edog drops dead batteries instead of poo?

[Randi]

Beware Scammers
What Amazon, the F.T.C. and C.I.A. Won’t Say When You’ve Been Scammed
New York magazine’s money columnist wrote about being conned out of $50,000 by crooks pretending to be from Amazon and government agencies. We asked the company and agencies for comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/16/your ... =url-share

[Morgan]

Following Randi on the IT subject, I am trying to get my mind around AI. For all I know, Artificial Intelligence will be easier than real intelligence. I see at the bottom of the posts others who are signed in; often Randi, sometimes BOT. Is this an AI system "Learning" from Old Weather?? These are such eclectic, Mad Cap as it says, conversations,; perhaps I will have greater faith in AI. Right now, all I have to go on is the voice tree and automated answers from my bank, which won't give me a live person and no hope whatsoever and autocorrect on my text messages which makes me be VERY careful.

[arboggs]

So-called "A.I." right now is not really artificial intelligence. It is just a glorified LLM a.k.a. "machine learning" a.k.a. a thing that works like spellcheck. Except it's worse than spellcheck because it absorbs all of the wrong things, too, and becomes biased in favor of them. All of the current tech people hawking the "AI" nonsense are just promoting a scam the same way they did with other tech nonsense like cryptocurrency and NFTs. Unfortunately, the computing power required to make these AI work, much like crypto, uses such a large percentage of natural resources - especially water - that they are incredibly harmful to the environment.

(By the way, the prevalence of "AI" is why the quality and reliability of things like Google Search have gone downhill very quickly in a very short amount of time.)

[Matteo]

Regarding bots you see online, no worries... usually they're just search engine spiders (automated, yet far from intelligent) indexing forum pages.

Completely agree with arboggs on AI, at least at their current state, i tried with a few tricky historical questions and both chatgpt and bard came out with the wrong answer, since online sources were too few and unclear... the real issue is that it gave me answers with a worrisome human tendency not to contradict itself, so it was somehow defending its wrong answer.

Fake facts are alarmingly easy to get from it when online sources are few, unclear or biased. Currently they're not reliable unless you question on something that has a very broad consensus. Given that their impact on environment is not small, they're actually pretty far from intelligent.

[Maikel]

The hyped generative AI are at best fun toys.
But, like April mentioned, their power and water consumption are enormous.

I've read somewhere that asking generative AI to create a single image for you is the equivalent of completely discharging a fully charged smart phone.
That adds up, because millions of images are generated daily just for the fun of it, or worse, to make someone look bad.
All at the cost of the environment.

In case you're wondering, the water is used to cool the data centres to prevent the computers in it from overheating.
All that consumed power comes with a lot of heat.
To make it slightly less bad for the environment, they are looking into ways of using that heat.
E.g. in The Netherlands there is a pilot project where the heat generated by a data centre is used to warm nearby offices and houses.
However, you won't need it when it's warm enough outside.

[Morgan]

I knew this was a REAL intelligent group! Thanks. Especially interested in the heat capture concept. Using so much energy to heat something up and follow it up with using so much water to cool it off it twice the folly in my book.

On another more personal note, Maikel, in May we will spend a few days in Amsterdam and then cruise up the Rhine including Kinderdijk. (Yes, we will be a couple of those pesky American tourists.) Anything we should be sure to see (or eat) beside the usual tourist places?
Thanks.

[studentforever]

I did hear a programme on the radio which highlighted a startup company which was placing modest sized data centres in swimming pools or tower block heating systems as a 'pre-heater' which raised the temperature of water fed into the main heating system. The claim was that it would reduce the fuel used for heating and the power for the data centre would be used anyway. I haven't noticed any reports since so I assume the idea didn't take off.

[Maikel]

On another more personal note, Maikel, in May we will spend a few days in Amsterdam and then cruise up the Rhine including Kinderdijk. (Yes, we will be a couple of those pesky American tourists.) Anything we should be sure to see (or eat) beside the usual tourist places?
Thanks.

I'm probably not the right person to ask.
For me Amsterdam is where I studied and went out, not to be a tourist.

I would suggest avoiding the tourist traps of Amsterdam.
The red light district really isn't all that interesting, and stroopwafels are much cheaper if you buy them anywhere but the Kalverstraat and surrounding streets.

Of course you have the Museumplein with the arts museums, for example the Rijksmuseum and the van Gogh museum, but that's probably already on your list.

If you're into science, the Nemo Science Museum is always very interesting.
Learn about science hands-on.

And maybe the Scheepvaartmuseum (Maritime Museum), almost next door to Nemo?
Confession, my school was opposite the museum, yet I never visited it.
Nor have I ever visited Kinderdijk, for that matter.

If you have the time and can travel a little, and like going off the beaten track, and want to know more about the old ways in the area where I grew up, visit the Broeker Veiling museum, the oldest sail-through vegetable auction in the world.

Then there are the marvels of our fight against the sea, but again, you'd have to travel to see them.
The Delta Works, with its visitors centre at Neeltje Jans.

Or the 32 km long Afsluitdijk, with its new Afsluitdijk Wadden Center.
Learn about the dike and the Waddenzee (Wadden Sea), the largest intertidal zone in the world, stretching all the way to Denmark, and a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Before starting your cruise on the Rhine, perhaps work on your sea legs by taking a ferry to one of the beautiful islands?

Closer to Amsterdam you have the Hollandse Waterlinie (Dutch Water Defence Lines), a 200 km long defence line of fortifications and waterworks to defend the heart of the country against invaders by flooding large areas.
Also a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Unfortunately the English part of the site isn't very informative, you'd have to look at the Dutch version to see what's to do where.

Spoiler: the Hollands Waterlinie was never used in earnest.
During WW1 The Netherlands were neutral and by the time of WW2 warfare had changed so much they had become obsolete, water no longer stopped armies.

I hadn't planned it, but I can detect a nautical theme here.

[Morgan]

Thanks, Maikel for all the tips! Since water is such a big focus of the Netherlands, I would expect nothing less. Very different from our focus on water. Besides, the reason for travel is to see things and people other than what I am used to. I am getting excited! Look out, we're coming!

[Maikel]

You're welcome.
Have fun.
And be as pesky as you like, I don't live in that part of the country any more.

[studentforever]

Completely irrelevant to OW but this short clip made me smile - they were so obviously having fun.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-68446327

[jil]

Brilliant. Love pine martens

[Randi]

[Michael]

[Randi]

Happy Birthday
Espross

[Michael]

Happy Birthday, Eric!!!