It's not just the internal state but the prediction that makes it intelligent.
Your brain is taking in a lot of information at the edges of your awareness, light, sounds, touch, etc. are all getting absorbed and transmitted to your brain. As that information is transmitted along your neurons it's getting summarized, then merged with other summarized information and summarized again. The brain is getting summaries of summaries, and developing a unified categorizing of the global state across all it's inputs.
Then the brain takes that summary and makes a prediction about the future state. The summarization is energy-efficient. By categorizing all that data into a global state you make decision making possible. "When my boss seems stressed all week, then calls a bunch of people one-by-one into his office on Friday afternoon, I know lay-offs are coming. I better polish up my resume." From "stress/anxiety/unease" in the environment to "danger is coming I need to fight/flight".
Your brain is taking that summary/categorization and figuring out what it needs to do next. If "X" happens then I should do "Y" to "stay-safe/get-food/find-a-mate". The brain is very good at capturing and summarizing data, and making a prediction because that process is much more efficient than doing otherwise. Instead of foraging everywhere for food and hoping I just bump into something that will provide sustenance, I know if X, Y, and Z happen then food will be "here", and I can get lots of it.
You can apply this same model to all actions the brain directs. It also helps make sense of why maladaptive behaviors develop. Sometimes the summary is incorrect, or was formed based on past information that no longer applies, and it may need to be unlearned.
Reminder that the capital of Idaho, Boise, is (apochraphally) named for the trees (les bois) that surround the Boise river. French made it quite a ways west, and definitely made it as far as Idaho.
The story goes Owyhee County is named after Hawaii. It's a county southwest of the Boise Area and home to the most beautiful wilderness I have ever seen. There is nothing like hiking mile after mile out there under the hot summer sun never seeing another living soul... But I digress. The story goes some Hawaiian goat herders entered the area to try their luck and were never to be seen again and hence the name. Owyhee = Hawaii
How true it is I do it know but it's what I've always been told.
The ffmpeg page for AV1[1] seems to recommend the SVT-AV1 encoder. Using the SVT-AV1 encoder and -crf 17 I was able to get an 8x encoding speed (about 250 FPS) with a very basic set of options similar to this:
I concur, both options help a lot. I noticed that the ffmpeg packages are sometimes a bit outdated, yielding a gigantic gap between what the stock ffmpeg can do, and what a freshly compiled one does.
In the United States carts are free. You collect a cart at the entrance to the store, and return the cart to a cart corral in the parking lot next to your car. Then a worker from the store periodically goes out to the corral to collect the carts and return them to the store entrance.
In California you run the cart up a curb, leave it in an empty parking space, or maybe give it a gentle push and let it roam free. Corrals are depots for broken and rusted carts.
I really hate trying to turn into a spot that's flanked by two SUVs only to find a cart in the way. People are incredibly lazy. I love the ALDI's quarter scheme… it's just enough of a nudge to get people to do the decent thing.
I find that funny because we were taught growing up that leaving your cart out keeps the cart-collecting people employed, kind of like refusing to use the self-service checkout -- a different decent thing!
The carts still need collecting. And at least when I worked at K-Mart in the 1990s, there was no dedicated cart collecting person; it was the task of whoever had the free time, usually someone handling stocking, typically junior, and especially someone young (though these days they have the electric carts).
What you were told sounds like one of those slightly tongue-in-cheek excuses people sometimes use to justify behavior, though that doesn't necessarily make it insincere. For most of high school I worked dishwashing jobs. A typical task for a dishwasher includes picking up trash in the parking lot. People throwing trash in the parking lot weren't doing me or anyone else any favors.
I never heard that one but my mom refused to learn how to use ATMs because she wanted to have tellers. Same with any sort of self-scan groceries. And Oregon is one of two states where you can't pump your own gas.
Do you do that consistently now that you're an adult? Do you bus your own tables at local restaurants (small business owner) but not at franchise restaurants?
It's been a quarter for at least the last 18 years. You'd think with all the inflation that's happened over the years they'd have to increase the deposit at some point.
The coin thing is free too, it's just so people have to put the cart back to collect their coin (usually 1 or 2 euros). I wish we had it in the US, people are freaking idiots and leave carts all over the place in the parking lot.
In germany, paying with hard cash is still very common, having some change is basically the norm (you can also use plastic tokens instead of real coins, you can get those for free from a lot of places here, including the shop themselves, either as promotion or if you ask)
Today for the first time in two months I went to a retailer that was cash only. I haven't carried my wallet with me for two months - I just leave it at home and use Apple Pay for literally everything, including public transport.
But then, I also don't shop at Aldi or need a trolley.
Credit card fees are included in every purchase. I typically end up with 20 to 100 bucks every month. If I use that for travel I get even more. Twenty dollars in cash tends to last me an entire month.
Quite right; my family has a few plastic "coins" that work just as well.
Here in the UK, shopping carts used to take a £1 coin, which incidentally had very similar geometry to the Indian 5 rupee coin (worth about 5 pence) - that was a great little find for our family, who always had a few 5 rupee coins lying around from our time visiting family in India. Sadly they updated the design of the £1 coin, so this trick no longer works.
One thing that enables this to work for Aldi is their parking lots are much smaller than most grocery stores. You're walking maybe 100 ft round trip to return your cart, whereas it could be several hundred feet at larger stores with giant parking lots.
I don't think it's a coincidence at all. The closer a language and it's speakers are to English speakers the more likely those languages are to cross-pollinate, by sharing vocabulary, grammar, and culture. It makes sense that the closer someone is to you both culturally and geographically that the easier it is to speak their language, and understand their meaning.
Absent are Celtic languages, which have hardly any shared vocabulary with English, and completely different grammars (though lots of shared culture). Irish is listed as taking 1100 class hours to learn here:
The number of hours doesn't map directly to the FSI scale because the FSI scale is training Foreign Service Officers, who have undergone a rigorous selection process, and usually already speak multiple languages.
They are also learning full time at one of the best language schools in the world.
The average person taking average classes part time wouldn't learn nearly as quickly as they do.
the likelihood an american foreign service employee would ever need to use a celtic language is not very high. similar probably holds for basque which i hear is not the easiest to learn either.
Yes, poorly explained on my comment (not native english speaker, obviously). I just wanted to point out the region where basque is spoken. Thanks for the info.
No, because the postal service doesn't have access to read the contents of letters and parcels in transit. Not only do they not have access, but it is illegal for them to access the contents without a warrant.
The OpenType [1] font format does allow for stylistic alternates [2], which is basically what you're suggesting, in that different forms of characters are included and can be selected based on rules (like ligatures) or I believe selected at random. When used with a handwriting font it does more closely resemble natural handwriting to the casual observer.
> The original pitch for the RFIDs was that they'd just be able to scan your whole cart.
I'm sure the limiting factor at the moment is the incremental cost to the product. If an RFID tag costs 25¢ would you be willing to spend $1 instead of 50¢ for a can of corn, just for the privilege of not interacting with anyone? You might, but the average customer won't.
RFID is primarily used in application where the tag can be reused. I haven't seen many disposable RFID tags.
