etangent's comments

Okay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the author wrote on housing.

100% correct.

> a lot of the points felt more like learning how to charm, manipulate, and game social interactions.

A lot of stuff "normal" people do is charm, manipulate, and game social interactions. Except because they are not conscious about it, we give them a pass. One of the characteristics of autistic-spectrum individuals is that they must make a conscious effort to achieve goals that are achieved unconsciously by most of us. If we prevent such individuals from learning all that rarely-written-down stuff consciously because it seems "distasteful" to us, then we are disadvantaging such individuals socially.

there is no such thing as a scanner for undeveloped film nor will there ever be.

> A complex society or a natural disaster (a la dinosaurs) wiping out megafauna sounds much more plausible than the equivalent of the primitive societies we see today.

The problem with your argument is best illustrated with that famous picture of airplane with bullet holes; the only primitive societies you see today are those that are more or less sustainable; any unsustainable primitive society would have gone into a conflict with a major industrial power and ended up being wiped out. That of course does not prove that unsustainable primitive societies never existed; in fact I would say they were the norm as humans were expanding (when the frontier is constantly expanding, there is no need to sustain anything!).

> For example, can you tell me if EU is about saving the environment and stopping climate change? If so why they are blocking the Chinese electric cars?

This is a very strange criticism. Why is it wrong to try to make impact on the environment without fully destroying the domestic industry? Let's follow up on this a bit further. If the EU counties did in fact become hardliners on the environment to the point of fully destroying their own industries, then you would no longer attack the perceived "hypocrisy" but would instead attack their policy of deindustrialization. So you don't seem to have problems with hypocrisy, you instead seem to have a problem with environmental movement/policies as such or at least insofar as they are implemented by the EU block.

If the EU countries completely abandoned their environmental slogans, and went on an ultra-industrial path, would you still be a critic? Given your other comments (why can capital travel but people cannot?), something tells me that yes, you would. It is difficult for me to perceive your criticism as anything other than coming from a supporter of an _ipso facto_ enemy economic block. You are not interested at constructively helping EU countries anymore, you are looking for a hammer to destroy your chosen target with.

One thing about social media is that it allows anyone to have a voice. The problem of "anyone" is that it ignores the fact that we do not live in a post-human utopia, we live in a real world where the concept of an "enemy" is real. There are real people out there who seek our destruction. This is not a pleasant thing to speak about but it is something that seems to be unfortunately the case. Because English is such a popular language, chances are the enemy speaks English and is on social media. What content do you think he posts?

Read Mearsheimer's paper again. Nuclear deterrent is far cheaper than equivalent conventional deterrent. A country under existential threat will find means, one way or another, to fund it.

The episode starts with a strawman (that Ukraine never had nukes) and proceeds to beat it up. It's a strawman for reasons I will not go into for long, but ones that should be obvious to a fourth grader: physical possession of an object as well as of factories used to make it (which Ukraine also had) are far more important than electronic systems of control. This now classic 1993 paper by Mearsheimer is a much more clear-eyed take, his recent positions notwithstanding. https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Mears...

Aside from either, how many nuclear states have been invaded in the past 80 years? Apart from Ukraine's incursion into Russia's Kursk oblast last summer, the answer is a big fat zero. Finally (and this also applies to my post), social media is the worst place for any foreign policy discussion because it offers asymmetric returns to a foreign actor attempting to subvert a country's policy who happens to speak the country's language, and English is a very popular international language spoken by many people abroad at this point in history.

It seems to me that the selection task is tricky because it concerns interpretation of language. "Every card that has a D on one side has a 3 on the other" makes a claim: that there is a directional dependency "D => 3" but it makes no claim that "3 => D". However the absence of the latter claim is not stated explicitly, it is supposed to be inferred from the original statement. The English language seems to lack a way to encode unambiguously the "A => B" relationship. So it should not be surprising that students used to looking out for language pitfalls when checking proofs also happen to be the students who do better on this task.

It could also be that the numbers/assumptions input into the equations are incorrect but :)

Your calculation is interesting, but I beg you to go outside and look at how Godwits actually fly. Godwits fly in a straight line using rapid powerful nonstop flaps. They are relatively heavy birds with high "wing loading ratio" and their entire body plan is hyper-optimized for this type of flight and no other. This is especially true during migration when they accumulate lots of fat and their wing loading ratio is particularly unfavorable for soaring. Godwits are among the fastest-flying birds in a straight line, and they have never been observed to engage in any other mode of flight, nor can they. They cannot use regular soaring. They cannot use dynamic soaring. They do not fly like seagulls. Their wing area is simply too small to allow any other type of flight. They also typically do not wait for favorable wind to fly. They just take off and go.

Godwit does not glide at all. Its wings are physically too small to support any kind of gliding flight. It must flap constantly to stay aloft.

> My understanding is that these incredible distances are achievable less by "flapping" and more by leveraging small adjustments to harness the incredibly powerful forces

That is not correct. This particular bird (Bar-tailed Godwit) has never been observed to "dynamically soar" nor does it have the proper wing shape for that type of flight. If you ever seen Godwits in the wild, you will know why, it's a flapping only bird, they have no other mode of flight.

Albatrosses on the other hand do employ dynamic soaring and fly even greater distances than Godwit does (they can circumnavigate the Southern Ocean several times) although albatrosses have additional advantage of being able to use water for rest (Godwits cannot).

I would argue that it does not matter. The AI could even be "smarter" on pure IQ/reasoning, but in terms of practical reasoning that humans need that depends on exposure to real world, the AIs will still take decades to catch up.

The radiology AIs are technically more accurate than radiologists on any sufficiently large dataset, and yet they still have not replaced radiologists (or even are anywhere close to).

Unconvinced. Europe simultaneously exists and does not exist, depending on whether one uses the term pejoratively or not, which makes it impossible to subject anything in it to criticism. It's like a Schrodinger continent.

if you read the article, it also talks about outsourcing software production. In the broad sense, if one outsources both hardware and software production, what is one even left with? Does one produce anything besides putting one's name on fashion apparel?

This comment does not quite make sense: "The new trend here is very strongly Large Language Models (LLM)." Is every problem a language problem? No, of course. Is every problem going to be solved by an LLM? What about problems that require unique data sources that no LLM will ever be trained on?

And this: "If you are spending time with Jupiter notebooks I would say you are probably completely wasting your time" And how do you suggests one performs data analysis on any problem that's not an LLM -- data analysis of any kind, such as "is the model I am trying to build a front-end for even works for my problem?"

Of course they are artifacts -- everything in that picture is an artifact, by definition of how it is produced. But these artifacts are produced under specific conditions, which presents a certain window into the structure of what is being visualized. t-SNE is a different, older, method compared to UMAP, and it over-emphasizes local structure at the expense of global structure.

Example of what could cause a swirly chain in UMAP: if A related to B and B relates to C but A does not relate to C and so on. IMO that's a valid structure to visualize as a swirly chain. If re-run multiple times, of course you will get that chain in different locations and so on. But it is interesting that it is there.

rwerwrwerw

I discovered a "color-scheme paradox": Every color scheme I enjoy using avoids using color red for anything except error messages -- which seems to be objectively a good thing -- yet such color schemes are rarely the most popular ones, which I attribute to the fact that the preview screenshots that do not use the color red look unappealing.