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> Also don’t confuse Genetic Algorithms (GA) with GP.

I just lump it all under "Evolutionary Computing"...


It sounds like a standard threat-risk assessment applies.

How big of a threat is it/what impact will it have on business/reputation/etc.?

How likely is it to be exploited and how widely would it be considered useful to the market of threat actors?


Caveat: IANAL so there are sure to be things wrong/missed here.

So recognizances or peace bonds are issued frequently - even before this act.

"The purpose of a recognizance or peace bond is to prevent serious harm by imposing conditions upon a person, which may restrict their movement or behaviour to reduce the risk of them committing a future offence"

I know of instances where someone has verbally threatened harm on another person - and been subject to this. Generally, the impact is "stay away from the person or face consequences" but can have many additional conditions. Often a recognizance/peace bond is offered as an alterative to actual court proceedings - like a plea deal, but without the burden of a criminal record.

https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/law-crime-and-justice/crim...


Appreciate the info. That it's not new doesn't change my opinion about it all that much. I'm sure that in practice it probably resembles a restraining order, and requires a certain level of likelihood that said harm will come to pass.

But in the end it's the state that has the latitude to broadly restrict the movement and behavior of an individual who hasn't committed an offense.

That is too much power to entrust in the state, and poorly justified.


In so far as the state is a provincial/federal judge making the decision based on the presented evidence and setting the conditions as appropriate.

It looks like it will probably be used in the "you made these threats and if you follow through, you'll be tried for that _and_ suffer some penalty for breaking the conditions of this order" kind of way...

That said, you won't get much traction in Canada with an argument that free speech includes things like "we should rid ourselves of all [members of some group]".

From: https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...

"Even though these freedoms are very important, governments can sometimes limit them. For example, freedom of expression may be limited by laws against hate propaganda or child pornography because they prevent harm to individuals and groups."


I don't think I addressed the case of calling for mass murder at any point.

My point is that "it will probably be used" is the problem. The power exists to be abused, so it's a matter of trust that it isn't.


Oddly enough, I was just thinking about that sort of thing...


That said, I don't know that I would buy a car that used to be a rental... regardless of what type of car it was.


My old car was a rental and I didn't know it. Bought it from a car dealer, with about 20000 km on the meter. It had broken suspension that I found slightly after but could be fixed while under the 3 months warranty.

The funny thing is how I found out. One day it was a very special type of frost outside. The frost crystals formed in a pattern on the back window, spelling out the name of a local gas station. Some residual of a removed sticker. It must have been a rental from that gas station.

Still, apart from the suspension problem that was fixed for free it has been very reliable.


In my view, with a rental car you can at least know they got regular maintenance. I know they're driven harder, but the fact that they're getting oil changes puts them above the average mystery car for me, even if they're not ideal.


I don't even know if that's true, i've had a couple times where i was given vehicles with check engine lights on. Fortunately they swapped them for another vehicle that was .. possibly better?


My brother and a cousin both worked at different rental car companies, and I can assure you - they are not well maintained. My cousin worked at Enterprise, and he said they'd buy fleets of cars, run them until they had any failure, then sell them at auction. He was a mechanic, and I remember being gobsmacked when he said "the only fluid I ever put in a vehicle was windshield wiper fluid."

My brother has told me similar stories, though I can't recall specifics at the moment. Most were similar to my cousin's stories, the theme being "as mechanics, we didn't do anything except make sure there was air in tires and wiper fluid."

I think the companies they worked for probably knew what they were doing too. Most cars made within the last 20 years can go a hell of a long way without an oil change and still function (which isn't me saying that "function" means the same thing as "work well long term"). Rental car companies know when to sell them before they stop functioning.


That's not true.

My wife and I had to exchange a rental because it was producing excessive exhaust, the alignment was so bad it pulled, and an engine service indicator was on.

Rentals are frequently driven hard and may not get basic routine service (that should happen more frequently due to being driven hard).


I donno about the US. But rentals in Europe aren’t always treated well from my experience.


Are you sure they get oil changes. I've ran into a few rental cars that didn't even get basic things like windshield wipers. I can't imagine a lot of those companies would take them out of service to change the oil on time.


I haven't worked in the rental car world but I used to work for a place that rented moving trucks and RVs (and was also the area maintenance provider for them) and... No. They did not get regular maintenance, at least not on time.


Here is one more anecdata point: we bought a used Hertz rental eightish years ago and it's been great. Nissan Versa Note 2014. There was a scratch on the dash and faint cigarette smoke smell that made it a particularly good deal.


This definitely feels like a case of buyer beware.

From the article: "quarter-sized hole."

If you're buying a former rental car and aren't giving it an intense enough inspection to spot a quarter-sized hole, you're rolling dice.

If you take the time to methodically go over one... and reject a few... I'm sure you can find a pretty great deal.


Yeah, they’re very intensively used, so almost certainly they need more work than your average used car.


Not necessarily, folks are incentivied to keep the cars clean and undamaged.


Cosmetically maybe, but Hertz has very good incentives to do minimal maintenance and only fix things when very broken. The renter has little incentive to report issues like weird noises or anything mechanically broken, especially if it may have been caused by them.


Sure but there's no incentive not to be hard on the powertrain. Probably less of a problem now with so much drive-by-wire preventing you from drag racing a Camry.


I see that a speaker is in the hardware list - does this speak back?


Yes! I'm currently using https://espeak.sourceforge.net/, so it isn't especially fun to listen to though.

Additionally, since I'm streaming the LLM response, it won't take long to get your reply. Since it does it a chunk at a time, there's occasionally only parts of words that are said momentarily. Also of course depends on what model you use or what the context size is for how long you need to wait.


When I did a similar thing (but with less LLM) I liked https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS but back then I needed to cut out the conversion step from tensor to a list of numbers to make it work really nicely.


My favourite example of this type of thing isn't mentioned in the article - using evolutionary computing to do some of the things mentioned in said article:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2737441_An_Evolved_...


I read that paper about 20 years ago - at the time I was very interested in ML, and was torn between neural networks and evolutionary algorithms. This paper caused me to go all in on evolutionary algorithms, and eventually burn out because I could never get any kind of promising result out of it. Wrong choice I guess!


Yeah, I tried my hand at some evolutionary algorithms and found it's all about the fitness function. I'd spend hours and hours refining it and eventually realized that you're really just optimizing the function to fit what you want to see. Kinda took the magic out of it for me.


> 20 years ago... This paper caused me to go all in on evolutionary algorithms, and eventually burn out because I could never get any kind of promising result out of it. Wrong choice I guess!

Wow. 36 years ago, I was super excited about neural networks, but lacked the skill to get good results fast enough; meanwhile, a very talented colleague was getting really interesting results from evolutionary algorithms.

It can be hard to move forward all alone.


Further on this - there's a more modern project that is trying to get the original experiments working on iCE40 FPGAs now:

https://evolvablehardware.org/


more: On the Origin of Circuits (2007): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9885558



Another giveaway that it's ROCm is that it doesn't support the 5700 series...

I'm really salty because I "upgraded" to a 5700XT from a Nvidia GTX 1070 and can't do AI on the GPU anymore, purely because the software is unsupported.

But, as a dev, I suppose I should feel some empathy that there's probably some really difficult problem causing 5700XT to be unsupported by ROCm.


I wrote a bunch of openmp code on a 5700XT a couple of years ago, if you're building from source it'll probably run fine


Pretty graphs of possible impact sites:

https://twitter.com/JoelSercel/status/1691549821629526219


That tweet which had an image showing bands of latitude that it may hit and times (london/newyork ish tomorrow and day after) has been deleted by the author and now says "I would like to make an apology to the small body community. Some information was shared with me on an internal company message board that I did not have full perspective on and I posted a tweet, which I now understand was not appropriate. It was preliminary data and I did not have full perspective on it."

I don't feel very reassured.


I really wish there was a true and modern successor to the Nokia n900 I had ages ago... it was an awesome device.


That thing could have saved Nokia if they went all in.

The community around it was amazing.

They chased trends instead and couldn't keep up.


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