arithmomachist

At no point were the American public consulted by the intelligence agencies when they did these operations.

That's exactly the problem! Once the federal government started conducting secret projects during the world wars, it stopped being accountable to the public. And it used that latitude to commit war crimes, assassinate foreign leaders, and experiment on American citizens. All in the name of lower commodity prices and fat profit margins for well connected companies.

The CIA should have been disbanded after what came out in federal hearings in the 70s. We have known since the 90s that the joint chiefs of staff endorsed killing Americans in a terrorist attack to justify invading Cuba.

Americans as a whole are good people, or at least no worse than anyone else. But our government is a bloodthirsty imperial machine whose claims of any sort of moral high ground are laughable.

How stable is the entrainment effect they plan to use in their engines under high winds, rain, changes in atmospheric pressure, etc? Accelerating air by creating a low pressure region seems like a pretty delicate setup.

I wonder if this is connected to the Russian military buildup on the Ukrainian border.

Haven't the Ukrainians diverted important rivers upstream on Crimea? Undoing that could be the concession Putin is hoping for.

From the Akoin white paper:

Akoin has chosen to only issue 10% of tokens in this public sale. To accomplish this, the remaining token supply will be used to drive adoption amongst merchants/vendors and to bring value to the platform. The total supply of Akoin will be released over the course of 4 years, with 39.41% released after 12 months, 70.12% released after 24 months, 87.25% after 36 months, and 100% at 48 months. This is subject to change with Escrow tokens being placed back into Escrow if they are not needed in the month they are released.Each token allocation is subject to vesting and lock-up periods except for Public Sale tokens which are available immediately.

This sounds sketchy as hell.

Quite the opposite: such complicated games are an outlet for creativity and cleverness that's stifled by our repetitive, heavily automated society. Most people don't get to make a movie or conduct a particle accelerator experiment. Even art forms like writing or music that can be done on a shoestring budget are generally a fool's errand. Everyone has a backlog of music to listen to and books to read that would occupy the remainder of their life without anything being added, so it takes marketing savvy and nigh-psychotic dedication to get anyone to pay attention to new work.

The popularity of games like Factorio says more about how much intellect and creativity has nowhere to go.

Nuclear definitely should be paired with energy sources like wind and photovoltaics. These sources are aren't consistent, so you need something to balance the load at night or when the wind isn't blowing. I find it hard to imagine another non-carbon energy source that could fill that role aside from nuclear energy.

Disposing of nuclear waste is certainly a difficult problem, since it requires designing structures to last longer than recorded history up to this point. There is at least one good answer to this problem that's under construction now in Finland, called Onkalo. The issue of nuclear waste disposal seems to be as much a political as an engineering problem. People don't want to have a nuclear waste dump anywhere near them, because they justifiably don't trust the government or industry to build it so that it works.

Three Mile Island and Chernobyl loom very large in the imaginations of the boomers and gen x, respectively. Nuclear plant meltdowns are world news on the few occasions they've happened, whereas horrifying explosions and accidents at fossil fuel plants aren't considered remarkable. It's the same reason people overestimate the risk of flying relative to driving.

The invention of credit scores and their use to screen people for renting apartments and getting jobs brought in a coercive system of similar magnitude to debtors' prisons. Credit scores should be only used for evaluating potential loans, not for anything else.

Hmm, so it might be out of reach for me. I have a PhD in pure math, and no experience as a software engineer. I've coded for research, but never for production.

Thanks, that clarified it.

Do you know how people typically get into that role?

What is the difference between data engineering and data science? The terms frequently seem to be used interchangeably, but apparently they're not synonymous.

How extensive a code portfolio would someone need for you to consider them? How much experience would they need?

I got my PhD about a year ago and have been retraining myself to become a data scientist when postdocs didn't happen, and I'm really not sure how to break into the market.

If the image classifier it's training has learned that mailboxes and parking meters are the same thing, I wonder if there's any way to fix that without starting over!

Now I'm wondering about adversarial responses to captchas that would make unrelated objects indistinguishable to the AI...

The relatively low energy density means it won't be replacing li-ion batteries in vehicles any time soon. Where I could see this technology shining is in low-power consumer electronics. For example, since it's flexible, it could be used to make an e-ink reader that's paper thin and flexes (somewhat) like paper.

Being able to steer the car effectively is only one part of an enormously complex engineering problem. A fully autonomous vehicle would need to:

1. Be robust to bad visibility, not an easy task in computer vision.

2. Have access to extremely detailed maps that include things like driveways and parking lots. These maps would need to be continuously updated. The labor required to make and maintain such maps will limit how many places cars can be fully autonomous.

3. Understand the etiquette of the road. For example, a person seeing a car stop in the street near a parking spot would assume the car is about to parallel park and give it room to pull off the maneuver. An autonomous vehicle wouldn't give it so much room, because it can't reason about context in that way.

4. Negotiate ambiguous situations requiring interaction with other drivers. There are frequently situations where it's not clear who has the right of way from the rules of the road. People resolve these by gesturing with their hands and with their cars. A fully autonomous vehicle would need to understand these signals.

Companies should be paying for this directly: if pyca/cryptography actually broke on HPPA or IA-64, then HP or Intel or whoever should be forking over money to get it fixed or using their own horde of engineers to fix it themselves.

This about sums it up.

The internet of lead.

Nvidia immediately swept in and picked their carcass clean, mostly for their patents in this space, so they would have more ammo/leverage against competitors going forward.

That's surely not a healthy situation either. Courts should never be a central part of competition among businesses.

Aren't there lots of NP problems that have this property?

At the very least the proof of work ought to compute something useful.

I'm a little surprised no one has fought a duel there.

Given that carriers are increasingly boxed out from shore by anti-ship missiles and drones are a lot smaller than crewed aircraft, I wonder if this design concept is due for a revival.

I could imagine drones launched vertically with single-use rocket boosters that would then land on the water for retrieval. You could get much closer to shore than a carrier while still carrying out a pretty effective air strike, especially with several subs.

Fascinating to see the highest state of the art of pre-digital cryptography, right before it was rendered obsolete. Very evocative that volumes 4-6 were planned but never completed, presumably because the first crop of modern encryption schemes were already outdating theses volumes as they were being written.

I wish the NSA would declassify more records of what it managed to break in the pre-digital era, now that the methods are out of date and the people involved are mostly dead. It would be great for historians to see both what the agency was capable of in that period, and how its methods, together with its successes and failures, shaped history in the early Cold War.

I'm tempted to install Turbo Pascal for a deep nostalgia trip. I grew up in a small-ish town in Appalachia, and when I ran out of math classes to take in high school I started learning to program. They had put together a little "computer lab" circa 1990 when cash was a little easier to come by for a public school, and hadn't updated them since.

It was 2004, and their intro programming course was still taught in Pascal. We hacked on a version of Turbo Pascal that might have dated to when the Soviet Union still existed, and I remember that cheery blue terminal interface fondly. It left me with an irrational life-long love of text-based interfaces.

What a crazy story! I suspected this was, under the surface, the tale of a douchey foreign archaeologist pissing off the locals, but no. Ruth Shady Solis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Shady) is Peruvian, and teaches at the National University of San Marcos in Lima.

The "family of squatters" who bring in a backhoe kind of sounds like Ammon Bundy's clan.