MondayToFriday

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Marketing promises effectively constitute a binding unilateral offer, for the purposes of contract law. When a customer signs up, you also have acceptance, consideration, and intention, thus forming a valid contract. Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company is the classic case in English contract law; the principles are basically the same in the US.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

Standardized by JEDEC earlier this year as JESD323, CUDIMMs tweak the traditional unbuffered DIMM by adding a clock driver (CKD) to the DIMM itself, with the tiny IC responsible for regenerating the clock signal driving the actual memory chips. By generating a clean clock locally on the DIMM (rather than directly using the clock from the CPU, as is the case today), CUDIMMs are designed to offer improved stability and reliability at high memory speeds, combating the electrical issues that would otherwise cause reliability issues at faster memory speeds. In other words, adding a clock driver is the key to keeping DDR5 operating reliably at high clockspeeds.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

How would a kernel that has already crashed handle keypresses?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

More likely, it's about not wanting to share oil wealth with the rest of the continent.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 6 months ago (12 children)

I see at least four big problems with having drivers that sit around to supervise the AI.

  • It's a mind-numbing boring task. How does one stay alert when most of the stimulus is gone? It's like a real-life version of Desert Bus, the worst video game ever.
  • Human skills will deteriorate with lack of practice. Drivers won't have an intuitive sense for how the truck behaves, and when called upon to intervene, they will probably respond late or overreact. Even worse, the AI will call on the human to intervene only for the most complex and dangerous situations. That was a major contributing factor to the crash of Air France 447: the junior pilots were so used to pushing buttons, they had no stick-handling skills for when the automation shut off, and no intuition to help them diagnose why they were losing altitude. We would like to have Captain Sullys everywhere, but AI will lead to the opposite.
  • The AI will shut off before an impending accident just to transfer the blame onto the human. The human is there to serve as the "moral crumple zone" to absolve the AI of liability. That sounds like a terrible thing for society.
  • With a fleet of inexperienced drivers, if an event such as a snowstorm deactivates AI on a lot of trucks, the chaos would be worse than it is today.
[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The debunked myth of using 10% of our brains has been rebunked!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Wealth that's just sitting there is hard to assess and therefore easy to game. What's the value of a piece of art? It's far more practical to tax transactions and realized gains, when money changes hands.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

On modern computers, linked lists are rarely a good option for performance. The overhead of the memory allocator and the non-sequential layout (which results in CPU memory cache misses) means that dynamic arrays are surprisingly faster even for random inserts on very long lists.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Electric cars generally have heated seats. Since heat doesn't come as a free byproduct, it's more efficient to keep occupants warm by heating the seats than the air.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

Yes, but you can't inspect quality into a product; you have to build it into the product.

Years ago, some American auto executives toured a Toyota factory to learn from them. After the tour, one of them said, "Those sneaky Japanese, they didn't show us their rework area." What he didn't know was that unlike American factories, there was no rework area. Everything was assembled correctly the first time, and any worker had the right to stop the assembly line at any time to fix a problem. It's far easier than finding and fixing a defect that is buried deep in a finished product.

 

My attempt to translate and paraphrase…

A doctor in Montreal has been suspended for three months for having adopted “an inappropriate and disrespectful attitude” towards a trans patient who consulted him to obtain hormonal treatment. Dr. Raymond Brière repeatedly told the patient that he was biologically a woman “despite the patient’s explicit requests address him using male pronouns”.

On 17 May 2022, the patient consulted Dr. Brière to get a prescription for HRT. He secretly recorded the session on his mobile phone.

During the appointment, the doctor mentioned that male hormones could cause aggressive behaviour. The patient responded that those were stereotypes. Dr. Brière said that some women use testosterone gel as a way to say “Hey, boys, I’m the boss!”

At one point, Dr. Brière said that he had never prescribed hormones to anyone who wanted to “transform into a man”. … The doctor said that the patient was “genetically a woman”. The patient reiterated that he considered himself a trans man. Dr. Brière responded that “if a chromosomal analysis were performed, it would be demonstrated that he had XX and not XY genes”. The patient repeated that he was a trans man. The doctor said, “Yes, in your head.”

Before leaving, the patient asked to be referred to a colleague of Dr. Brière, which was refused. The doctor also said that he no longer wished to keep him as a patient due to a loss of confidence.

The patient lodged a complaint to the Integrated Centre for Health and Social Services of Eastern Montreal alleging discrimination and aggressive behaviour. The examiner concluded that there was “a problem with the professionalism and lack of respect towards the patient”, but found no discriminatory behaviour. Dissatisfied with this response, the patient escalated to the College of Physicians. Dr. Brière finally pleaded guilty to two charges. He maintained however that “the attitude of the patient, who recorded the HRT appointment on May 17 2022, conveys, at best, a lack of trust necessary for a professional relationship”.

The council added that if a patient “determines that their gender identity does not correspond to the sex indicated on their birth certificate, they can ask to be addressed according to their expressed identity. The clinical interaction must then respect this gender identity.”

According to the council, the recording showed that the patient was respectful to the doctor. “Nothing indicated that the patient was ‘difficult’… Rather, he was calm most of the time.”

For the council, the recording highlighted deficiencies in personal qualities of Dr. Brière, “such as the capacity to humbly recognize his limits, listening, empathy, introspection, and recognition of his cognitive biases as well as control of his emotions”. Two periods of suspension of three months and two months, to be served concurrently, were imposed.

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