At least using Irish as an example, the state of machine translation is still far far behind proper translation unfortunately and wouldn't be up to scratch
For public websites most probably don't even need to touch cron as Apache/Caddy/NGINX/Traefik have built-in options these days. The only time I run something like a cron task is for certain internal IoT type certs.
From a _consultancy_ it feels a bit on the nose. Do you have a system that's mostly working at the moment? We'll migrate that at huge cost to something else (for little upside, but it'll get sold in really well to senior management)
This marketing effort is aimed at shareholders, not customers or employees. The stock has been tanking hard and she's just replicating the strategy of staying in AI related news hoping for a bump. Hopefully it works, for the employees anyway, so they can dump their own shares.
I think your point is a little black-and-white — there's tons of behaviour that sits in the "technical possible but frowned upon" bucket.
It's like people listening to music without any headphones on the train — technically has been possible for ages but previously would've gotten you told to turn it off. Now it barely gets a raised eyebrow.
Can you prevent people secretly filming you? No, but most people still don't want it be become accepted behaviour, even if to you that's all just "whining and blathering".
You say that, but "mechanically" in the dictionary gives "In a mechanical manner."
"Mechnical" gives "Of or relating to machines or tools."
"Machine" gives "A device consisting of fixed and moving parts that modifies mechanical energy and transmits it in a more useful form." and "A system or device for doing work, as an automobile or jackhammer, together with its power source and auxiliary equipment."
An ox & cart fits the bill for "machine" with that lens. Not sure it's a smart-alec workaround, any more than the likes of McVities arguing the biscuits vs cakes in court for Jaffa Cakes. Anything not defined is fair game.
It is perfectly obvious to me and to the vast majority of people. That is why they didn't bother defining it further.
> An ox & cart fits the bill for "machine" with that lens
No it doesn't. I don't think you thought this through. The cart itself cannot do anything without something else acting on it. An ox is obviously not mechanical (it being an animal) which is what is propelling the cart. Therefore it is not mechanically propelled.
If it was a person a bicycle then would be more ambiguity. But it is commonly understood that a bicycle (excluding e-bikes which are mopeds) is not a "motor vehicle", because it is propelled by the rider.
"Propelled" is the other term in that definition. A conveyance might be mechanical in the sense you describe without being propelled by a machine.
At the same time, an individual person being blown forward by a sufficiently large fan might meet the qualification of "mechanically propelled" without being in a mechanical conveyance per se.
But more generally, a vehicle plus a motor of some description would seem to meet the definition. ICE, steam, electric, spring-wound, whatevs.
I can't remember what the package was, but when I was working for "large bank", one of the npm dependencies we wanted to use had a licence file that just said 'Do whatever the fuck you want'.
Legal came back saying that it was "highly unorthodox, but approved for use"
I mean, all the more reason it shouldn't be privatised. If it only makes sense to have one of something (road network, water system) it's a natural monopoly, _and_ it's going to require large public investment to be maintained, why wouldn't you in-house the expertise needed to do that and avoid the shareholder dividends overhead?
The overhead of having shareholders in this case is minimal. The profits they make are small, but having a goal of making profits does create discipline in resource usage.
The water system is like the electricity system. It's perfectly possible to have inflows and outflows be fully private, as long as the government keeps its hands off the pricing. The network itself can also be run privately, as both supplier and buyers want supplies to flow. The trick is to ensure there are numerous different companies with the expertise to maintain pipework and then allow local communities to quickly change to different contractors.
This is why the state owned company structure exists. The board and management are correctly incentivized and the profit can be reinvested if necessary. No parasites.
You need a counterbalance to efficient resource use, usually competition ensures they don't skimp, that doesn't work with natural monopolies.
Kind of shows how toxic things have become in our culture when people need to be bribed with profits to provide the basics necessary for a society to function, instead of just being incentivized by wanting a functioning society.
Cynically, if you’re someone trying to make a lot of money, why wouldn’t you take a well run system, convince people they can save a bunch of money by ‘cutting waste’, then pocket as much money as you can by cutting long term maintenance and pocketing the difference - and when it blows up, sell them the solution at inflated prices too?
It seems like the voters actively encouraged this kind of behavior.
Eventually people figure it out (maybe) and go all fire and pitchforks - but that sounds like a problem for ‘future me’ eh?
And if you’re good at structuring everything, maybe they’ll never even have anyone concrete to blame but themselves! (Classic referendum/politician behavior there)
I can't understand the perspective of those who defend privatizing natural monopolies. I'm not against privatization in any way, but good governance is impossible without consequences for failure.
Focusing on Thames Water's particular example, if we assume malice as the cause, what would be the potential consequences? While the government could impose fines, the possibility of non-payment exists and what would happen in that case? Instead of debt collectors taking action, like ripping pipes from the ground or causing pension fund collapse, the government would act as a last resort investor, potentially providing further funding for a few additional years before the situation likely repeats.
Notably, public utilities are often seen as ‘above consequences’ too when part of the gov’t, since usually governments make it impossible to sue them or give them real consequences either.
In theory, with privatization the gov’t can arrest people or the like. The gov’t very rarely does that to itself.
Politicians can be swapped out of course, but most smart ones setup scape goats and a lot of levels of abstraction so they can claim successes and point the finger elsewhere if it goes wrong.
> Taken together, the fall in shareholders' investment and retained earnings - or profit - and rising dividend payments mean that, according to the University of Greenwich, owners have withdrawn £85.2bn.
>
> — BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw4478wnjdpo)
It might be a rounding error vs the scale of investment needed for water, but that investment is needed regardless of public or private ownership.
It's not a rounding error in terms of gov investment elsewhere — imagine an extra £85bn invested in, say, social housing? Even as a single one-off
Speaking of which, could we apply vector embeddings to search engines (where crawled pages get indexed by their vector embeddings rather than raw text) and use that for better fuzzy search results even without an LLM in the mix?
(Might be a naïve question, I'm at the edge of my understanding)
> Speaking of which, could we apply vector embeddings to search engines (where crawled pages get indexed by their vector embeddings rather than raw text) and use that for better fuzzy search results even without an LLM in the mix?
Yes, this is how all the new dev documentation sites work now days, with their much improved searches. :-D
I'm talking about the scenario the GP referenced — where if you search for say "holiday" but get no results because the pages only use the word "vacation" which AFAIK is still a problem in regular search.
LLMs inherently would introduce the possibility of hallucinations, but just using the vectors to match documents wouldn't, right?
Why would they be embarrassed?
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