ramblenode

There may always be a moral panic but that doesn't mean every moral panic is equally misplaced.

Most high school age children of the 1800s weren't inclined to read novels 12+ hours a day and neglect their sleep and hygiene to finish a few more chapters...

is it damaging if your caregiver uses phone a lot but remains responsive.

but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.

This is probably more relevant to people who are using their phones for passive entertainment than work. The difference is that your kids are more engaging than your work, so your attention will naturally be pulled toward your kids, whereas parents who are scrolling social media or playing games are going to be more drawn to their phones and are going to have punctuated and shallow interactions with their kids.

Personally, I don't think I've ever observed someone who was actively engaged with their phone who was also fully engaged with the people around them.

You can get nearly as good source reconstruction with 16 channels as with 32 channels after MEMD, and even 8 channels under MEMD performs nearly as well as raw MSP 32-channel array.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/1...

Like the panic over fracking

Fracking is absolutely not harmless. I posted elsewhere in this thread about how I have had family property damaged by fracking-induced earthquakes. This is in a region with no active faults, with no record of earthquakes before the fracking started, and the wells are tens of miles away, not next door. I certainly hope data centers are better than fracking wells because those things are a plague.

Honestly, fracking is a better deal than a data center.

I know this is a bit of a tangent, but fracking is an absolute plague, and I would encourage you to do more research about it's downsides if you think it is mostly benign. Aside from the better known ground water poisoning from leaks and dumping, fracking creates actual earthquakes that can be felt tens of miles away. My family has property that has been damaged by these earthquakes---in a region with no active faults where there wasn't an earthquake in living memory before the fracking started. Now there are at least several per year strong enough to rattle a tea cup off the table. A few people get paid, but it's a horrible deal for almost everybody else in the county.

I'm sure there's plenty of people who say that (on earth), but how many are going to have buyer's remorse after the first month? We tend to only send the most exemplary humans to space because you have to be in excellent physical and mental health just to weather the difficult conditions.

Looking out for the best interests of your members isn't activism.

"French scientist denied entry to US over anti-Trump messages"

<https://thehill.com/policy/international/5205954-french-scie...>

"Korean Scientist With Green Card Detained for a Week and Denied Access to His Lawyer"

<https://www.commondreams.org/news/korean-legal-resident-deta...>

"A US-born NASA scientist was detained at the border until he unlocked his phone"

<https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/12/14583124/nasa-sidd-bikkan...>

"Russian scientist working at Harvard detained by ICE after being stopped at Logan Airport"

<https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/russian-scientist-wo...>

"Chinese American researchers targeted at US border"

<https://concernedscientists.org/2023/03/chinese-american-res...>

These are just cases that make the news. There is a very real possibility of being detained, having devices confiscated, or being refused entry if you are an outspoken critic of the president.

This comment is devoid of data.

So is yours...

Most of China's large projects are actually some type of competition with the US. The Tianjin Grand Bridge was basically built to eclipse the Causeway and showcase China's engineering prowess. The massive Shanghai subway buildout was a direct challenge to New York City's subway hegemony. Those 20+ story pig towers? Totally unnecessary way to do farming, but a source of national pride when compared to the already impressive scale of US factory farming. China is building record numbers of both solar and coal plants, which seem to be at environmental cross-purposes, but it makes sense when you consider they are trying to beat the US at both clean AND dirty energy. It's in the five-year plan.

"Grains" usually refers to cereal grains. Everything you listed except for oats is typically classified as a legume or a pulse, not a grain.

I think your second point is a good one, although most economists would probably say this is an argument against the minimum wage rather than an argument for tariffs.

The ultimate problem with your first point---that tariffs boost domestic industry---is that the time horizon for reshoring manufacturing and domestic supply chains is longer than the expected lifetime of these tariffs. Trump is a second term president, there isn't broad consensus or even majority support for the tarrifs, and there is a great deal of opposition from business owners: all signs the tariffs are not for long. Who wants to invest in an expensive factory and workforce when the only thing guaranteeing your competitiveness is the remaining years of Trump? It's actually much worse than this, of course, because the tariffs are being used primarily as diplomatic leverage rather than economic policy, so they change frequently and unpredictably.

There are also serious downsides to the Trump tariffs that don't exist for traditional tariffs that are predictable and operate on a long time horizon. These tariffs create price shocks to domestic industry and retailers, which tend to disproportionately hurt smaller businesses and those with slimmer profit margins. They've also damaged the US's reputation with long-term partners, particularly Canada and the EU, which are now exploring competing trade deals with China and are figuring out how to extract themselves from dependence on US arms and tech companies, two major exports.

The effect of these tariffs is not going to be short-term pain for long-term gain. A great deal of US economic competitiveness comes from investments in diplomatic and military partnerships that have now been undermined. These tariffs will spur reciprocal tariffs from other nations and will accelerate the remodeling of the global economy away from US exports, trading competitive US exports for uncompetitive and commodified domestic industry.

Economies of scale aren't specific to states. That's something every cooperative group benefits from.

Historically, the formation of most large states was not a voluntary merger of smaller states for the benefit of all but the conquest of smaller states by larger states.

Here is my (hot take) proposal for regulation:

1) *All major players open source their unobfuscated training data.*

a) The evidence so far shows that every major AI company engaged in intentional and historically unprecedented copyright violation to obtain their training data.

b) LLMs have now poisoined future data for any new players. This is a massive negative externality, and we shouldn't accept this externality as a moat locking out future players from competition.

2) *Levy a 20% royalty on all future genAI revenue to authors and artists who appear in the dataset and exempt genAI from future copywright violations.*

a) The current copyright model is bad for both authors and AI companies. It's hard for authors to collect from violations, and it's expensive and tedious for AI companies to comply with innumerable individual copyrights. Simplify the regime for everyone, and properly reward the people whose work is the foundation of these models.

b) The specifics can be worked out, but, among other things, the royalty should be proprotional to the token count of a work, not just number of works.

Simply, the scale of observation matters. Making observations at scale is categorically different than manual observations. And yes, there is a spectrum. But the important thing is that there is a difference between the ends of that spectrum.

The solution is to recognize that ease of observation interacts with expectation of privacy and legislate what can be done at each point on the spectrum. I have no expectation that someone won't take a picture with me in the background while I'm in public, but I would find it jarring to be filmed at every public location I went, have that video indexed to my name in a database, and have all my behaviors tagged. You write the law so that the latter thing is illegal and the former thing isn't. When there's a dispute about what's illegal, you have it resolved by the courts like every other law.

I bet it could be done if even a fraction of the Artemis budget were devoted to it.

The parent is correct. JFK famously didn't consult with engineers when picking the timeline. It was just lucky that it all worked out.

It's a significant feat to even get a robot safely to Mars. We've never gotten one back to earth. I think you are underestimating the complexity.

The British won out over the Spanish because they realized they didn't need enormous warships to win naval battles. The Spanish weren't ignoring the need for a navy--they miscalculated and misallocated resources.

The irony is that the commenters saying we must go back to the moon are more like the Spanish: sticking to a sentimental 1960s vision of human-based space exploration despite evidence clearly favoring robotics and remote control.

So what would the actual mission be if we went back, taking into account all these advances? Gather more rocks? Build a permanent base to... gather more rocks?

I love space exploration too, but its expensive, and we should focus on areas that have the best scientific or economic payoff. Sending humans back to the moon just isn't the best use of resources.

Your example does not support your argument. Unlike heart surgery, there hasn't been a major shift in what we could do if we went back, and more exploration probably won't change the commercial or military prospects of the moon.

I'm leaning toward this being top-notch satire, but I can't be entirely sure---and that's a good thing.

Without those standards, the profession would lose its weight, its dignity. If becoming a doctor were simply a matter of competence and compassion, we’d all be wearing name tags and making $60,000 a year.

This is very similar to the minor fraud of an academic publishing an overstated / incorrect result to stay competitive with others doing the same.

I completely disagree.

For one, academic standards of publishing are not at all the same as the standards for in-house software development. In academia, a published result is typically regarded as a finished product, even if the result is not exhaustive. You cannot push a fix to the paper later; an entirely new paper has to be written and accepted. And this is for good reason: the paper represents a time-stamp of progress in the field that others can build off of. In the sciences, projects can range from 6 months to years, so a literature polluted with half-baked results is a big impediment to planning and resource allocation.

A better comparison for academic publishing would be a major collaborative open source project like the Linux kernel. Any change has to be thoroughly justified and vetted before it is merged because mistakes cause other people problems and wasted time/effort. Do whatever you like with your own hobbyist project, but if you plan for it to be adopted and integrated into the wider software ecosystem, your code quality needs to be higher and you need to have your interfaces speced out. That's the analogy for academic publishing.

The problems in modern academic publishing are almost entirely caused by the perverse incentives of measuring academic status by publication record (number of publications and impact factor). Lowering publishing standards so academics can play this game better is solving the wrong problem. Standards should be even higher.

The story is really worth a read. The writing speaks for itself:

The biographical questionnaire Snow referred to as the “first phase” was an unsupervised questionnaire candidates were expected to take at home. You can take a replica copy here. Questions were chosen and weighted bizarrely, with candidates able to answer “A” to all but one question to get through. Some of the most heavily weighted questions were “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: science, worth 15 points) and “The college subject in which I received my lowest grades was:” (correct answer: history, for another 15 points).

"31 Amphibious Ships are 'Not Enough,' Expert Says" [0]

I guess the US is about to invade Cuba.

[0] https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/4/5/31...

Less capital cost, less labor, less wasted inventory, less chokepoints

I don't think this is a fair comparison without considering the subsidies that go to trucking, which are substantial: the interstate highway system, manufacturer and consumer auto subsidies, municipal tax codes and development that favors single family homes (further bolstering auto and road industries).

Consider that most of the damage done to roads is done by heavy trucks, but the cost is spread across everyone. That is effectively a huge subsidy.

The well-being literature does seem surprisingly fuzzy. I can only speculate what is going on there. A more robust finding seems to be grades:

"The effects of mobile phone use on academic performance: A meta-analysis" [0]

"Results indicate the summary effect of mobile phone use on student outcomes is r = −0.16 with 95% CI of −0.20 to −0.13."

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

Look up "informative vs uninformative prior".

For the most part I don't think there is a difference. It seems like once all the common factors of divisiveness and brainrot are removed, the main difference between TikTok and the others is that it would be harder for certain powers in the US government to corral TikTok into toeing the line on State Department foreign policy goals than western companies. Considering the largely homogenous, biased western media coverage of e.g. the lead up to the 2nd Iraq War, Patriot Act, US-Israel policy that has shaped American viewpoints, I don't think it is obvious why having a major non-aligned media source is a net negative.

A forced sale will not get near the price as a deal you can walk away from. Two very different markets we are talking about.

All of your points except 1. are true of American social media companies. 2., in particular, is widely documented: the Facebook mood manipulation fiasco, Cambridge Analytica, Musk's personal tweaking of the Twitter trending hashtags, and YouTube's heavy-handed censorship of legitimate medical advice during Covid are just a few of the higher profile instances of this.