How many people have been killed in the US by right-wing protestors in the last four years? How many have been killed by left-wing protestors?
I can't say with any certainty what exactly happened. Neither, it seems, can anyone else, to judge by https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2022/02/23/canada-begins-to-release-frozen-bank-accounts-of-freedom-convoy-protestors/?sh=2745dbcc6364
Note that there is no reason to take statements by government officials at face value.
Even if you believe that the government intended only to freeze accounts of people actually at the protests, this is still a dangerous expansion of government power, considering that there were no court hearings, where people would have the ability to challenge the order. And it certainly had a chilling effect for anyone in future thinking of protesting government actions.
Crucially, there was no actual need for any of this, if the goal was simply to restore order. The Ottawa protest was cleared in the end by ordinary police actions, with no need for the Emergency Act, or freezing bank accounts. The Emergency Act was imposed the day after the most economically damaging protest (that blocked a heavily-used bridge between Canada and the US) was peacefully resolved. One has to suspect that the government was hoping that that protest would turn violent, justifying use of the Emergency Act, and when it didn't, they decided to go ahead and invoke it anyway. The precedent is now set for invoking it pretty much any time the government wants, though of course not against violent protestors whose cause the government is ideologically sympathetic to, such as this violent pipeline protest concurrent with the Freedom Convoy: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/surveillance-images-released-as-mounties-investigate-attack-at-b-c-pipeline-work-site-1.5788158
You write: "Stalinism is also very bad, but is not a major political force in 2023."
Why do you think this? In western countries, the "left" has control of most of the levers of power and influence - eg, look at who gets censored by social media corporations, what sort of stuff academic job applicants have to write to get hired, how much money is spent by governments on left-oriented projects. And there are clear signs of increasing authoritarianism on the left - for example, the Canadian government reaction to the "Freedom Convoy", invoking the Emergencies Act in response to an annoying, but peaceful, protest, and freezing bank accounts of people whose only crime was donating money to the protesters. Some left-wing policies seem almost designed to provoke the right, such as (in the US) giving away hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness, and proposing to give away trillions of dollars in "reparations". Such huge wealth transfers break the social compact, and are likely to trigger a conflict that might in the end result in right-wing authoritarians taking power, but presumably are seen by their advocates as more likely to result in a left-wing authoritarian regime.
In Alberta in the 1970s, there was a cloud seeding program whose aim was not to produce rain, but rather to reduce hail (which can be very damaging to crops, as well as property). It was viewed as experimental, with researchers doing surveys about how much hail fell. I don't know whether it worked or not, but I don't think one can come to any firm conclusion about it on the basis of simple observations such as "clouds are opaque".
But whether it works or not, it seems it's still actively done in Alberta: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-how-albertas-hail-suppression-project-helps-manage-severe-weather/
OK, you're right. Put another way, if the heating element doesn't get as hot, there is less energy wasted when it cools down after you pour the water out.
Yes, but losses like that are presumably independent of everything else, assuming you pour immediately after the kettle boils (though that maybe is less likely with long boil time, which might lead you to be less attentive to immediately acting when it finally boils).
My comment wasn't entirely correct.
Having now actually done the math, I realize that there is an optimum resistance for the heating element, with both larger and smaller resistances producing less heat. If V is the voltage, R0 the resistance in the cord, and R1 the resistance in the heating element, the heating power is (V/(R0+R1))^2 R1, which is maximized when R1=R0. However, half the energy is then wasted, so I assume engineers aim for a higher R1/R0 ratio. If so, reducing R1 by descaling to keep the temperature low will indeed result in more heating power.
But unlike what I said in my comment, this will make energy efficiency worse, not better - the ratio of power used to wasted is just R1/R0, so making R1 bigger and bigger will improve efficiency, at the cost of taking longer to head. Though actually, this is true only for a perfectly insulated kettle. If the kettle looses heat, at some high R1 value it will never boil at all (ie, it will waste an infinite amount of energy).
If you assume that the engineer designing the kettle made the optimal tradeoffs for all these factors when choosing R1, then descaling will be good because it will bring R1 back to what the engineer thought was the best value. But how much this actually matters is harder to say.
I've been assuming that the main effect of descaling is to reduce the temperature of the heating element, which decreases its electrical resistance, which should have two effects: (a) the kettle boils faster, (b) the energy used to boil the kettle is less, since with lower resistance in the heating element the proportion of energy used that is converted to heat within the kettle goes up (as compared to the energy converted to heat in the power cord going to the kettle).
I have no intuition as to how big these effects are, however, so I don't dispute your empirical results.
I've no idea what OpenAI actually does, but just as a matter of general probabilistic modeling, a model that has learned to predict the next word given previous words has also implicitly learned a model of the joint distribution of all words. (Since the joint probability of a, b, c is just P(a)P(b|a)P(c|a,b).) Given the joint distribution of all words, you can go backwards and deduce the conditional distribution of each word given the following words. Or you can get the conditional distribution of a word given all words both before and after. These conditional distributions are probably harder to get computationally than the forward conditionals that the model directly gives, but the computations are probably not completely infeasible.
So in theory there's no benefit from training on the backwards sequence as well as the forward sequence, though in practice it's conceivable that there could be (since the training procedure is no doubt only an approximation to an ideal statistical procedure, and this approximation might conceivably work better when training goes both ways, though off hand this seems unlikely).
I don't think you can separate these phenomena like this. Thugs who aren't official police can intimidate political opponents of the government, and then not be prosecuted by the government. Thugs can cause chaos that somehow goes away when an organization or community stops opposing the government, or pays money to associates of the thugs, with the government again not prosecuting the thugs for extortion. In fact, I find it hard to imagine a democratic government becoming authoritarian without it employing some extra-governmental coercion of this sort. Without it, it would be too easy for opponents of the government to organize, since governments (especially in the early stage of authoritarianism) have limited surveillance resources (though maybe that is changing with technology).
By the way, protests are not bad in general - only the violent or otherwise illegal (by democratic standards) ones.