Technically your refrigerator heats up your kitchen in the same fashion adding extra work for your AC to compensate.
Unless you live in the artic where it's freezing year round, these things make sense. During the summer they reduce your cooling load and during the winter they are effectively heated by whatever your home heater is. Meaning if it's gas, then they are gas powered. If you have a heat pump outside then it's still pretty efficient. Even in the worst case of a resistive heater you are basically just running a slow resistive heater.
> significantly slower than a resistive or gas-powered water heater
This was TC being a weirdo. He bought a 120V hot water heater. Had he done a regular 240V water heater the recovery time would be comparable to pure resistive water heaters.
But the takeaway about cooling is important. These things barely chill the room they are in.
I generally actually agree with you. The real issue with these cameras is the network effect that allows them to stalk anyone anywhere.
Were I to draft legislation, the first thing I'd do is ban any sort of surveillance network from giving data to non-governmental 3rd parties. Google and mcdonalds don't need to know exactly who I am and what sort of places I like to visit or products I buy.
The next thing I'd do is require a search warrant for each access. If a crime is committed then the cops need to go to a judge and say "A crime was likely committed here and we need a warrant to figure out who was there and where they went". None of this "well, here's the same case number I use for all my searches".
I would probably classify the likes of traffic cameras as something different than a surveillance network as there's not much of a real network. They are all watching one location for violations and reporting them when they happen. That to me is fine (though, again, they shouldn't share that data with private 3rd parties).
And this goes beyond surveillance networks, but I'd setup a national registry of police misconduct and bar cops who abuse their authority from ever getting a job as law enforcement again. All these cases of cops stalking exes would result in those cops needing a new career where they can't abuse the public's trust.
There are much better examples where the 2 parties are frustratingly aligned to a large extent. For example, datacenters, ICE, and foreign policy. You can find a good number of democrats who are mad about Iran not because it's a dumb war, but because it wasn't done correctly by going through congress.
Both sides are aligned pretty closely in making their donors happy above their voters. That keeps democrats from regulating like they should and it keeps republicans focused on "the enemies within".
Maher himself is a perfect example of this. He's a hardcore Zionist warhawk who has an ideology nearly identical to Ted Cruz, yet he's a "liberal" (neoliberal). He also had Democrat Van Jones on his show making fun of dead Gaza babies. While I don't think the media and politician class represent the public (at all!), they are as aligned as lasers on promoting Israel.
Unfortunately, no. Common law requires famously very little consideration for a contract to be valid [1]. I can sign a contract where I give $100 and am given a penny back and that'd be valid consideration.
IMO, whether or not an LLM was used in the writing process doesn't really matter and I think it's a bit annoying that articles are being dismissed out of hand because of that.
The line is "Is this an interesting and accurate article that concisely makes it's case".
LLMs love to burn paragraphs writing about nothing which is why it's generally poor writing. Humans can do the same thing if they are trying to make very little information feel more substantial.
I say, stop trying to determine if an LLM was used and start judging based on your subjective measure that you'd have used before LLMs became widespread.
(If it helps, I ask my own question of myself too -- I mostly don't write code by hand any more as I find that an LLM writes it faster and with less bugs -- Is that therefore proof that my time was never worth my paycheck? I hope not but at the same time I would actually be proud if I had got away with being an accidental charlatan/fraudster at my employer's expense during my entire career)
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Similarly, if what I said really is true, I would be implying that LLMs are charlatan/fraudster detectors (to some statistical level). And I refuse on principle to believe that that is actually the case.
My main problem — which I am sure being middle-aged compounds — is that I struggle to retain information that an LLM has written or produced. I cannot explain why but it is a consistent problem.
In a week’s time I might remember the substance of your comment and some of its shape as a matter of course. Nothing LLM-written that I see today will stick, no matter how curated it was.
This is a complaint I hear others voice and one I have myself. I think it comes down to the text being poorly written. Sure, LLMs are good at a lot of the surface indicators of good writing: they have a wide vocabulary, they use grammatical sentences, they break up the text into paragraphs, sections, and lists. But they're terrible at organizing the text and marshalling a concept to get it across to a specific audience. The section and paragraph breaks are meaningless, the metaphors are unenlightening, the rhythm is exhaustingly uniform. Pre-LLM, you'd find this kind of text in marketing materials, corporate PR, and heavily padded sophomore essays.
Possibly an inevitability, since LLM text is specifically generated to be low entropy. It’s smooth, optimized for minimal perplexity.
And if you don’t find any of the word choices a little bit perplexing, your brain can just gloss over it. There is no meaning here. It’s like smalltalk.
Interesting — do you happen to have any suggestions for something I could read about this?
It really bugs me, this aspect of LLMs, and yet I find myself sounding like a lunatic when I describe it, until others chime in and say they have the same experience.
Perhaps it's just a bias? You are already negatively biased against LLM writing so you disregard stuff you read when you suspect it's an LLM. This could also be a selection bias. It may be that you generally struggled to retain information but you are more aware of it when LLMs are involved.
I don't think so, no, because it extends to LLM-generated text I want to recall.
I use LLMs to generate starter/tutorial material. I may hate the way Claude writes but I absolutely don't hate the way Gemma 4 writes. But I have to continuously consult it in a way that I do not with human-written text, which gets its message across in a more persistent way I find less troubling.
(This non-memorability extends to AI images and video.)
You are right that there are some confounding factors in my life but while I was worried about middle age affecting recall, I find actually I am still remembering stuff humans wrote pretty much fine.
ETA: there is one thing that I have noticed that does affect recall that is specific to LLMs: watching text roll out word-by-word in LLM chat, I think, damages recall. It's engaging the wrong kind of memory and focus.
So I now let it generate and I'm trying to find decent ways to format it e.g. as PDF, to give it the best chance.
This could be generational; there were many studies twenty years ago that suggest that people a decade or so younger than me who grew up with full colour books and magazines and multimedia can read less-linear text layouts more comfortably, for example, so it's not out of the question that there's something generational going on here too.
Yes, LLMs make it a lot easier to produce a lot more garbage. That's not an exception to my point. If something is well written then it doesn't waste the reader's time.
Sure, but if you're going to publish it, at least run it through an edit prompt and tell it to remove clickbait "Its not X, its Y" rubbish. Like literally calling examples clickbait in the prompt has given me better results. Interestingly, I have a lot less trouble with the first draft with Qwen than with Opus.
Probably worried about things like spectrum wifi. I don't know if others do it, but spectrum will sell access to a private WiFi network using their customers Internet as a backend.
> You are not separating the vast majority of policing every day which is good and attempts to stop evil people.
That's really not what policing is about even in the most charitable view. It's certainly what policing has been propagandized to be.
Besides playing candy crush in a cruiser, the vast majority of policing everyday is responding to complaints that happen after a crime happens (or someone getting nervous).
The role of police, in the most charitable framing, is to catch people suspected of committing crimes.
Evil is also something I'd quibble over. For example, the cops that are doing things like hiding in closets to catch people jumping a turnstile certainly aren't "stopping evil people". People are complex, there are few that are truly "evil".
Now, my less charitable read on cops is they have overbloated budgets, too little oversight and consequences, and they certainly don't prioritize impactful crimes to low class people. Cops, for example, very rarely try and catch/stop bike theft. Cops primarily exist to punish people that pester the rich and well connected. See, for example, BAM and reckless ben.
Ever been mugged? I said this topic was a wedge, you are clearly someone who already doesn't have to deal with crime (as I said, privileged), and are projecting your own insecurities about it. In real life, good people want criminals stopped at all costs, especially when it inevitably happens to them. I'd love for police to catch the bike thief, we all hate bad policing, but being unconditionally anti-police is a great way to get normal people to disagree with your politics, and we get people like trump.
Mugged, no. But I've certainly had someone try and pickpocket me.
> you are clearly someone who already doesn't have to deal with crime
Not in my day to day. In fact, most people don't. I've certainly known people who have been mugged and the thing they've said is universal "The police didn't do jack shit".
> and are projecting your own insecurities about it.
That's an uncharitable reading of my comment.
> In real life, good people want criminals stopped at all costs, especially when it inevitably happens to them.
In real life, police don't stop crimes. They don't stop muggings. That's not the job of cops. As I stated and you don't really want to contend with, the role of cops is catching the people that mug after the muggings happen. Unless you want to literally blanket the streets with cops, they will never have enough presence to stop a mugging because, spoiler, muggers don't tend to be blind and they don't tend to mug when cops are around.
Also here's that "good and evil" stuff again. No, good people don't have universal beliefs, you are using your own standards as "good" and classifying anyone who disagrees with you as evil. Life isn't black and white. I gave some pretty clear examples of that already (which you didn't respond to).
> but being unconditionally anti-police is a great way to get normal people to disagree with your politics, and we get people like trump.
Where, anywhere, have I stated that I'm anti-police? You are strawmanning me.
Police are a necessity that should exist. But, unlike you, I realize they aren't superheroes flying in to stop crime. The state has to have enforcement of it's laws and something like cops will always exist. The question is, how much should we fund them and how much accountability should we expect.
My standard is that cops who flagrantly abuse their authority (such as the cops in this article) should lose all ability to be cops. They are done, no more career. Do you disagree with that?
Unless you are making the argument that it's impossible for cops to not power trip, then you should be able to clearly see that I'm not advocating that we abolish the police.
Stop trying to play armchair psychologist and actually address my comment in your next response. It's annoying that you decided to put forward so many bad faith and misrepresentations of my argument in just a few sentences.
You probably won't read this, but I agree my response was uncharitable and presumptuous of your perspective. I've just met enough people who want to "abolish the police" who have zero clue what they're talking about, who absolutely fit the narrative I erroneously painted of you.
While I don't think police are omniscient superheros stopping crime before it happens, they are often true heros in every sense of the word. They put their lives on the line in very dangerous situations to try and prevent danger to others, and cops are killed in duty very regularly to no fanfare outside the local community.
Police are a public good. Without a public police force the wealthy would happily fund their own security, and most already do. There are neighborhoods in San francisco with private security teams who simply bypass the shortcomings of SFPD. I'm not sure I follow why police inherently exist to serve only the interests of the wealthy. I agree with most everything else you said.
> Police are a public good. Without a public police force the wealthy would happily fund their own security, and most already do. There are neighborhoods in San francisco with private security teams who simply bypass the shortcomings of SFPD. I'm not sure I follow why police inherently exist to serve only the interests of the wealthy. I agree with most everything else you said.
I agree police are a public good that society should maintain. The alternative is just a pile of bad ideas.
That being said, we, as in America, do a terrible job of maintaining our police force as a public good.
You talk about being "heroic" and "risking their lives", and that's technically true, but only for a very tiny subset, a larger subset is abusing their power and authority, and more crucially, never being held accountable.
Preventing all crimes is functionally impossible, although the incidence can be reduced in certain ways, but what we need is the criminals to be prosecuted. And a lot of police who commit crimes are not.
My counter example is Sam Francisco, where window smashings almost reached 3 figures PER DAY because they wouldn't be enforced. It was more police resources that finally curbed the problem, police started taking window smashing seriously and actually going after criminals, and to no surprise the numbers plummeted.
That tiny subset of heroics is not trivial just because it's a small number. Police are in danger every day and even if they draw a weapon .1% of the time that 1/1000 is everything, if they're not respected for putting their lives on the line then why would anyone take on the job. SF already can't hire enough police in part because of the anti police culture and overtime rates are a huge drain on the budget.
Preventing all crimes is impossible, but the culture that forms around taking them seriously or not absolutely contributes to local crime rates. In SF gangs and like minded criminals all talk to each other, they know whether they will get away with crimes, and it's why young children feel brazen enough to commit violent crime knowing the system will protect them.
Ivory tower academics can analyze police all they want from their already safe neighborhoods, the rest of us have no patience for it. I said this topic was a wedge, and even if I'm wrong it absolutely represents the sentiment of a huge portion of regular people who vote, and will vote red on this issue alone.
Look, I just don't think your view of cops matches the reality of cops.
There's a lot of stats on this, cops are just as likely to die in a car accident as they are to die from being shot (not very). It is a dangerous job, but not one that requires heroic fortitude.
I believe the way you view police directly contributes to their lack of accountability. They are just people. Getting training and a badge doesn't transform someone into the hero you expect them to be. There is an endemic of bad cops because they very often get a "these are heroes" treatment by a large percentage of the public.
I actually want cops to be the heroes TV portrays them to be. But to do that, you have to weed out the losers and bullies who figured out it's a cushy job that pays pretty well for very little education and oversight. That will involve doing things the police union will certainly protest. For example, a national registry of police misconduct and mandatory background check. To stop the problem of a cop who egregiously violates someone's rights from just moving to the next town over.
Unless you live in the artic where it's freezing year round, these things make sense. During the summer they reduce your cooling load and during the winter they are effectively heated by whatever your home heater is. Meaning if it's gas, then they are gas powered. If you have a heat pump outside then it's still pretty efficient. Even in the worst case of a resistive heater you are basically just running a slow resistive heater.
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