> Some Japanese utilities have introduced tariffs designed to encourage daytime water heating as growing volumes of solar generation enter the grid. [Emphasis added.]
I was quite confused at the use of "tariff" here, as it meant to me a "tax on a good crossing a political boundary." Turns out, 'tariff' has an older meaning: a published schedule of fees or taxes issued by some authority.
I've read that the word is borrowed from Arabic, meaning notification, and I think at first it was price notifications and then people started using it to mean that the prices were bound to some schedule or condition.
For example in Turkish, "tarife" means only that: Conditional / Schedule-based pricing, and according to Sevan Nişanyan (a language researcher), Turkish borrowed it from Italian, where it was being used similarly. Import tariffs are a completely different word.
It apparently came to English through Italian -> Spanish -> French.
So I'm not a native English speaker but as far as I understand, import tariffs are just one kind of tariff.
From French, tarif, a table showing the amounts of payable fees, or a list of prices set for certain goods or services (1572), via Spanish tarifa, from Arabic ta'arifa, meaning notification, coming from 'arrifa, to let know.
Big fan of Etymology as well, mostly because my brain seemingly needs to understand the origin/history of terms to feel like I've fully grasped concepts.
US utilities also have Tariffs. It’s the statement of how the utility operates and charges users for service.
Anytime a utility needs to adjust costs/rates, they need to file a Rate Case with the public utility commissions, and resulting in changes to the Tariff.
It's an arab loan word for ~"price list" (originally strongly suggesting an import-duty-like meaning).
The same word exists in e.g. German or Italian, but mostly just means "pricing scheme" there, like in the article ("import duty" using a different expression in those languages).
Might be a mostly/somewhat "false friend" for a German (pv magazine is german).
Tarif/Tarife means price list of anything. Your barber, restaurant, taxi service, hospital can have one. tariff as in the meaning of custom tax is a very narrow meaning considering the usage of the word in general (but that's OK).
Import duty is "gümrük vergisi", and the general list of this is "gümrük vergisi tarifesi" in broad sense. It also has a more technical name here but both I don't remember it, and it doesn't matter in this context.
In the Japan's context we would call it "elektrik fiyat tarifesi", or "elektrik tarifesi" for short, for example.
My electricity contract in the Netherlands here is on a "Dynamisch tarief", with the most direct translation being "Dynamic tariff". It means I pay/get a different price for my power every 15 minutes.
"Tarief" just means price of mainly a service.
I think 'dynamic rate' is the proper translation for the US?
In the UK you can get agile tarrifs now where the price changes through the day according to demand and supply predictions. There's an API you can use to control chargers, heaters, bitcoin miners etc.
Likewise, many years ago, I got confused by less common meanings of the word "schedule". The most common meaning is a written or explicit arrangement of how a person or machine spends their time, particular for future planning.
The less common uses show up in examples like "Schedule I drugs" (highly banned) or various schedules in tax laws, appendices of long documents, etc.
Schedule is a note, it goes back to the Latin word for the strips of plant used to make papyrus sheets; so it's one of the strips and by analogy a written note small enough to fit on such a sheet.
Schedules are common in UK legislation as addenda to the main clauses/provisions. Most wouldn't fit in a papyrus strip though!
It’s confusingly super common in the US for that usage when talking about trucking and shipping. Where of course the other kind of tariffs are also common.
On initial install, sure. But user accounts can also be created at arbitrary times. The user may have changed the set of photos in the intervening time and might even be editing the directory during profile creation.
I thought the same thing, and then wondered if this must be an enterprise problem, because what home user adds loads of icons - so many that IO becomes a concern - and also wants them to be randomly assigned to other family members?
But then it occurred to me that XP was of an era when you would absolutely spend an afternoon downloading some megapack of 10000 cool user icons.
> “I certainly don't expect the industry to continue to spend millions of dollars to solve problems in mathematics, because there is no profit in it,” Columbia University mathematician Michael Harris wrote in an email to Science. But he worries the highly publicized achievement will be “extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.”
LLMs seem particularly suited toward these existence-proof problems. Working mathematicians seem absolutely essential for universally quantified results, still. I strongly doubt, for example, that if Fermat's Last Theorem hadn't been proven three decades ago, that an LLM would be able to do work equivalent to inventing the mathematics as Andrew Wiles did to solve the problem. I have similar doubts about P vs NP, the twin prime conjecture, even the Riemann Hypothesis (unless the latter has at least one counterexample).
And I want to be clear: I'm not downplaying the achievements of these models. This is remarkable! I simply think that the pattern of success is in existence proofs or finding counterexamples, which makes sense based on how LLMs function and are trained.
I only have an undergrad in math, so very little understanding, but I'd be pretty surprised if it couldn't do forall just as well. Like, say it found this counterexample which relies on axial stretching or whatever approach. Then it already knows how that made the proof work, and can use it to try to prove NS has smooth solutions modulo this particular kind of defect (so it could make some statement about cohomology, or some additional constraining equation). Or if that doesn't work, then it can find a counterexample, which we've established it's good at. Then repeat until you've characterized what does work. The various defects, along with being defect free, become definitions. Now you have a theory.
It would be good if someone made a list of allresults obtained with AI so far just to see what kinds of problems AI excels at. Are there any that aren't of the existence-proof type?
Reductively, math can be said to be either problem solving or theory building - it seems the latter is a much harder thing to do right now.
Holmes seems to have the Harvard Business (MBA) mindset: science, R&D, engineering are just results to squeeze out of recalcitrant practitioners. Any failure in those domains is evidence only of the scientists' or engineers' refusal to align themselves with the Vision.
Despite not even finishing undergrad, she adopted this persona so naturally, including the black turtleneck and a Zuck-esque vocal inflection, that due diligence apparently defenestrated itself. Phyllis Gardner is the unsung hero who tried to warn the world, but the MBA mass-delusion was too strong.
I live in this neighborhood. I was just kvetching to my wife this morning about how our HOA wastes so much money on excess. That had me in the wrong (or right?) mood to read this.
I will say, we have a LOT of elderly retired people who live here. It's not uncommon to hear sirens because someone is having a medical episode, and the security office is helpful with responding to those and helping with EMS. They are also helpful for doing well checks on the elderly when they haven't been responsive to others.
That being said, a lot of what they do is run radar and evidently do absolutely atrocious behavior like this. One of the flip sides of the retired population is that many of them devote their lives to reporting their neighbors to The Authorities – generally the HOA or security office. In this case, I guess the informant went straight to the cops.
I live in the neighborhood in question. While my immediate neighbors are all really awesome people, the neighborhood as a whole has a LOT of retired people whose sole activity in life is to report their neighbors to The Authorities. Usually that's the HOA management or the security office, but sometimes they'll call the actual police.
Many of us find it frustrating, though exposure is almost random. Someone who used to live on our street used to get very upset about trash cans being visible from the street, for instance. I think this person moved in the last two or three years because the passive aggressive HOA letters about this apparently heinous nuisance have stopped. But among groups of affluent people, I find that a small percentage never outgrew the tattle-tale phase and still behave in such a way into their sixties, seventies and eighties.
This happened in my neighborhood, and I've met the "perpetrator." She's a sweet person, and I'm convinced she was absolutely acting in the best interests of her child as she saw it. Kids as young as elementary school age in our neighborhood frequently go to the various ponds for fishing, watching the wildlife or even sailing remote control boats. Five years old without a buddy might be on the younger end, but it's hardly criminally negligent. And given the several close calls I've had with elementary & middle school-aged kids on e-bikes and scooters this summer, I hardly think this is even close to the most serious youth safety problem here.
From my reading on the topic, the tokens are subsidized when considering average cost, but are profitable at marginal cost. Basically, they're super expensive when considering the training cost, but aren't super expensive when doing inference. Since AGI is quite unlikely now, my guess is that we'll see consolidation and will see frontier models released at a slower clip, such that they can pay for training for from the profits from prediction tokens themselves. There may be slight increases in token prices, but there's sufficient competition between Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and X alongside the open weights providers that I don't see huge price increases happening. Even if OpenAI is absorbed into one of the others (which I think is most likely), that would still make token price collusion difficult.
> Everyone who stays for at least 7 innings is staggering out, drunk as a skunk. Whether I ride the train home or I get on the roads, I'm positively surrounded by drunk zombie people. Woe betide us if the home team didn't win.
Good Lord, what games have you been going to? I see a couple MLB games live every year and a few minor league games. I haven't seen anything like what you're describing. That doesn't mean there are no drunks or obnoxious fans, but that's the risk of doing something in public. The last game I saw live was San Francisco at Milwaukee in June. Giants won 1-0, and the home team crowd was fine. And I mean the Brewers fans like their beer, but in no way was it a zombie apocalypse. Last game I saw in Oracle Park last year was also fine. Even Boston a few years ago, which definitely has more of a college town vibe than SF or Milwaukee, was hardly zombie land.
I'll also say that AAA ball is typically awesome. The games are much cheaper than the big leagues, you get to see some big league talent rehabbing from time to time and see the occasional prospect who gets called up. They also tend to be very family friendly.
> Baseball has been a game of moral fiber, respectable players, and good clean fun. But it seems that activists and jerks set out to ruin the experience for people like me. I'm not having it. I'd have way more fun at a punk rock women's roller derby bout.
I don't know about that. Baseball has a certain level of honor, sometimes an excessive amount e.g. some of the "code" that has started to fade away the last decade or so. It also invented the concept of a nearly all-powerful commissioner, which was created specifically because players threw a World Series for a payout. It's a wonderful game, a thinking person's game, but it's always been quintessentially American for both good and ill ever since it scaled nationwide during the Civil War.
I was quite confused at the use of "tariff" here, as it meant to me a "tax on a good crossing a political boundary." Turns out, 'tariff' has an older meaning: a published schedule of fees or taxes issued by some authority.
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