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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • 5g is a lot more capable and flexible compared to older generations. The main one is a massive increase in capacity, for the same frequency allocations. Compounding with this is that it can be directional. This allows several phones to use the exact same channel simultaneously, so long as they are positioned at different angles to the tower.

    5g also uses more frequency bands, allowing even more data to be moved around. Unfortunately, 2g has most of the lower frequencies, higher frequencies carry more data, but have less penetration into buildings.

    Finally, 5g allows for priority and context awareness. E.g. the police can have their phones prioritised, or VoIP calls given priority over video streaming. It can also trade bandwidth for range. This allows a tower to either reach further to cover a larger area, or focus down, to provide more bandwidth locally.

    In theory 5g could have a similar range to 2g. However, that rarely happens. It requires it using the lower frequencies, that 2g currently uses, and well as dropping its data rate to improve range. Most of the time it’s optimised for shorter range, and more towers using higher frequencies. This gives impression of a far smaller range. But give a huge increase is available bandwidth.






  • It would be possible to make an AGI type system without an analogue of curiosity, but it wouldn’t be useful. Curiosity is what drives us to fill in the holes in our knowledge. Without it, an AGI would accept and use what we told it, but no more. It wouldn’t bother to infer things, or try and expand on it, to better do its job. It could follow a task, when it is laid out in detail, but that’s what computers already do. The magic of AGI would be its ability to go beyond what we program it to do. That requires a drive to do that. Curiosity is the closest term to that, that we have.

    As for positive and negative drives, you need both. Even if the negative is just a drop from a positive baseline to neutral. Pain is just an extreme end negative trigger. A good use might be to tie it to CPU temperature, or over torque on a robot. The pain exists to stop the behaviour immediately, unless something else is deemed even more important.

    It’s a bad idea, however, to use pain as a training tool. It doesn’t encourage improved behaviour. It encourages avoidance of pain, by any means. Just ask any decent dog trainer about it. You want negative feedback to encourage better behaviour, not avoidance behaviour, in most situations. More subtle methods work a lot better. Think about how you feel when you lose a board game. It’s not painful, but it does make you want to work harder to improve next time. If you got tazed whenever you lost, you will likely just avoid board games completely.





  • Imagine widgets are $10 in country A, but a company in country B can make and sell them for $8. Buyers are likely to buy the cheapest (all else being equal). A 100% tariff would turn $8 into $16. Company B still only gets $8, but they now look far more expensive to customers in country A.

    They are designed to price out external competitors to local companies. This can be used to protect industries. Steel is a good example. China can make steel far cheaper than the rest of the world. However, steel plants take a long time to build and get producing. You generally don’t want a potential rival to have control of the materials you need for war production.

    Another legit use is to account for local regulations. If you require local companies to pay in a carbon credit system, an external company could undercut them from abroad. A tariff would help level the playing field.

    None of these apply to what trump is doing. He’s swinging a claymore mine around like a toy hammer. It causes huge damage to all involved.







  • cynar@lemmy.worldtoComic Strips@lemmy.worldEntropy
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    10 days ago

    Entropy is the tendency of systems to move from order to disorder. It’s intrinsically tied to energy and its flow.

    Basically, if I gave you a box with 1000 dice, all showing 6, bar 1 showing 5, it has an extremely low entropy. If you shake it, the entropy will tend to increase. You’ll likely get an event spread of values. This is a high entropy state. The chances of all 6s is tiny, and gets everything smaller as the number of options gets bigger.

    Gas expanding into a space is another example. The entropy of the gas increases as it expands.

    The rule of thumb is that entropy always increases in a closed system. If it seems to decrease, you’ve likely missed something.

    Increasing entropy can also be harnessed for energy. An expanding gas can drive a piston upwards. We can even work out the amount of energy that can be extracted from a system, based on the entropy change involved.

    That about covers the basics of entropy, without diving into the maths.