When they sent the voyagers out, they had plaques that represented the species, with an attempt at universally communicating who we are. These ones have the equivalent of spray painted tags, or a name scratched into a desk: “John woz ere”. Different times.
Huh, I wonder why we would put potential interspecies messages on the probes we're sending into interstellar space, but not on the ones we are only putting into orbit around our neighbouring planet. Real mystery.
K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, Responds
Citizens of the Blue Planet,
Once again your surface-crawling machines inch toward our sacred dunes, and once again you proclaim that "anyone wanting to know more can go right to the source."
We are the source.
Let the Council make this perfectly clear: Your probes do not "visit." They trespass.
Each lumbering, dust-belching contraption arrives uninvited, drilling our soil, sniffing our winds, and snapping impertinent images of our most private crater-gardens. Then your kind declares triumph: "We have studied Mars!"
You have studied exactly nothing, save for what we allow your machines to perceive.
Our Atmospheric Obfuscation Choir continues to blanket your sensors with carefully tuned spectro-misdirection. Your rovers cannot see the Red Orchards. Your orbiters cannot detect the life-pools. Your spectrometers cannot interpret a single nutrient of our gelsacs - may they throb eternally.
Yet still you boast.
And so hear this proclamation from the Council of Elders:
If the beings of the Blue Planet truly wish to "go to the source," they may present themselves honorably: unshielded, unarmed, and prepared for diplomatic puncturing of their diplomatic gelsac. Such is our custom. Such is our law.
Until then, we will continue to tolerate your stumbling robots, harvest what amusement they provide, and allow them to perish in their own confusion.
> Let the Council make this perfectly clear: Your probes do not "visit." They trespass
Molon Labe. Until then, we will continue to boast, and above your "private" crater-gardens (that we will keep taking pictures of), the stars will belong to us.
To an archeologist both artifacts are worth having, just look at Pompeii the frescoes tell you alot but the graffiti on the sides of the buildings tells you something as well.
I think the implication is that within that time period which separates Voyagers from today, we have become distrustful or ashamed of the higher parts of the culture, and that such a dysbalanced situation is fairly new, with hard-to-predict consequences.
In isolation, yes. But other things have happened as well. People dress like slobs; interestingly, in my country, where GDP per capita skyrocketed since 1989, standards of clothing seem to have gone down, especially for formal occasions. We have a major problem with physical fitness, Westerners of the 1970s were much thinner and moved more. People read fewer books and spend their days consuming brainrot on Tiktok, Instagram and YouTube shorts.
(Notice that the very word brainrot is a neologism?)
I don't think we should pooh-pooh such developments as irrelevant, and I am very unhappy that they have been subsumed to the universal polarization of the culture wars that consume everything while producing nothing of value.
Examined more closely, this appears to mean nothing more than "people spend less time wearing the clothes that a previously dominant culture considered to be high status markers".
I think you just re-formulated what I said, in a more intellectuallish and dismissive way.
People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit. Yes, previously dominant culture frowned upon such things. Yes, the culture has obviously changed.
Our main disagreement seems to be whether such change is good, bad, or irrelevant.
I could live with people dressing in a disgusting way, but I really dislike the death of book reading. That will make us all worse at thinking.
You were the one who insisted that "standards of clothing have gone down" (emphasis mine).
When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down. In general, I suspect there are two very long term (i.e. many millenia-long) trends that occur in parallel, one of them generally improving the human condition and one of them degrading it. The world is literally going to hell in a handbasket, at the same thing as nearly everything is getting better.
Your concerns about book reading are, of course, the opposite of those of the Greek philosophers who imagined that it would make us all more stupid.
> When it comes to culture, I believe that things change rather than go up or down.
In the '80s movie Trancers, Jack Deth is a visitor from the future, and as he's slicking his hair back with water from a flower vase a woman from the present day asks something like, "People from the future put vase-water in their hair?!" and Jack Deth replies very seriously, "Dry hair is for squids."
Yes, I can live with it, but I think the standards have gone down. It also seems to me that you basically consider that change irrelevant. We can surely disagree on that.
As for the Greek philosophers, I feel you are being too dismissive saying that they imagined us being more stupid. First, it was mostly about Socrates and second, his position was a bit more nuanced than how you present it. He was concerned about education becoming impersonal, which definitely has some downsides (until today, we haven't discovered any educational mode more efficient than 1:1 tutoring, at least from the student's individual point of view; the economic dimension, of course, differs). Second, he believed that our memory capabilities would go down, which they probably did. We don't have much contact with purely oral cultures now, but the little we do, show that pre-literate people were indeed better at remembering their collective past, including their culture, in the sense of "actually having it in their own heads" instead of "hearing about it once in the class and then promptly forgetting what they heard".
How many people today can recite a thousand songs from memory? Not that long ago, people like that would exist and keep ancient songs alive.
Today I hear Ed Sheeran ten times a day (ugh), but I wouldn't be able to recollect the lyrics even if threatened with an execution.
That is certainly one way of being stupider than before. Yes, it is compensated by other improvements, no doubt about that.
> People will now turn out for a funeral in a tracksuit.
I bet if they had showed up in a sport coat you wouldn't have found it notable despite the fact they were the tracksuits of their day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sport_coat
“Standards of clothing” is not a set with a total order, and society has never had one way to dress. You’re unfairly projecting your values (of a certain style of dress) onto society as if it’s shared by everyone.
This is not maths, and nothing is shared by everyone in a human society.
I am actually an algebra major and I always felt that the need of some of my peers to stuff the entire outside world into mathematical definitions does not lead anywhere. Please don't mathematize societal concepts ("a set with a total order"), you will only mislead yourself and others. Maths isn't a good tool to understand people.
Let us talk about humans in a human language instead.
Do the launch people have influence on what precisely they launch? IDK. In a massive organization like NASA is, I would expect such responsibilities to be isolated.
This strikes me as a rather uncharitable view. I think it's okay for people to be proud of their work on a difficult project, and want to have their names on it.
I would be a bit sad if most mega projects (space stations, battle ships, international probes, dams, etc) do not have some kind of honorary tribute to the many people who came together to make it happen. A little plaque costs nothing but would be meaningful.
For many years now, NASA has let random people get their name printed on the Mars missions on a little plaque. Perseverance has 11 million names bolted onto the frame. My buddy boasts that he has been on Mars N times.
Spacecraft engineers have been putting easter eggs, credits, and other such things that have nothing to do with the mission on spacecraft since the dawn of space engineering.
This is a well established informal part of space engineering culture.
I can’t speak for the whole (pretty large and varied) continent, but I once lived in a wet area that used stucco siding extensively in the 80s, and it became very susceptible to rot and mold.
Slide rules are super cool. Such an easy gift to give the engineer in your life.
I never spent the time to get quick with it, but I could absolutely see it being quicker than a calculator. You’d just have to be aware of the limits to its precision if you were in a field that required it.
Quicker than an algebraic calculator, maybe, but very few people could get. faster with a slide rule than an ergonomic RPN calculator. like the HP 41 series. And I say that as an enthusiastic and experienced slide rule user, before I switched to a calculator.
One problem with a slide rule is that it only performs operations on normalized mantissas. You have to keep a parallel exponent calculation in your head, and that slows you down. Also, maintaining best precision slows you down.
When using a slide rule, keeping track of the number of digits to the left of the decimal point (DLDP) in the result is fairly simple if you know the basic rule:
For multiplication, the DLDP in the result is:
- the sum of the DLDPs of the multiplicands MINUS 1 if the multiplication is done with the slide sticking out to the right of the ruler's body (for example 2.0 x 3.0 = 6.0).
- the sum of the DLDPs of the multiplicands if the multiplication is done with the slide sticking out to the left of the ruler's body (for example 5.0 x 4.0 = 20.0).
There's a similar rule for division, but that's left as an exercise for the student.
> You have to keep a parallel exponent calculation in your head, and that slows you down
We were taught to estimate and use the rule to refine. I date back to the early electronic calculator era and we still had textbooks referencing slide rules etc.
"I want a dropping resistor for a plain old 1980s LED in a car" (back in ye old red LED 20 mA days) "Well experience indicates that will be far more than 500 ohms and somewhat less than 1K and IRL you're probably going to install a 680 and call it good" If you want an actual calculation for engineering purposes you calculate the ideal value under worst case conditions as about 585-ish ohms or whatever using the slide rule, purchasing LOLs at the idea of buying 0.1% precision resistors for mere LEDs, installs cheap 680 ohms and ships it. Maybe 680s if you want it bright to see in daylight or 820 if you want better odds to survive an alternator field winding dump or open battery (about the same thing). You can at least use the slide rule to verify everyone rounded in the "safer" direction to handle the worst case scenario.
I used an HP-41CV for many years. I needed the financial calcs module which I used in place of the dedicated HP financial calculator in grad school. Eventually gav out on me but was a good calculator for a long time.
I did keep a slide rule as a backup for exams in college when calculators were still LED but never really used one after a couple of years in high school.
The financial people I know all own 12Cs and they've been in continuous production since '81 although the innards are just a very boring ARM processor now.
They do what people want, the keyboard feel is infinitely smoother than tapping on a phone, etc.
I have an HP-41 app on my phone that the author gave to me when I was doing some product reviews early-on in the smartphone days. But definitely not the same as the physical HP calculator.
Yeah, the 12C was the standard in business school. But I needed a new calculator and the 41 with its various modules worked fine and was more general purpose.
You still have to be aware of the difference between precision and accuracy, and how to propagate precision through calculations to maintain accuracy. It's a forgotten skill that lets us now create data out of whole cloth and call it actionable information but back when slide rules and log tables ruled the day the difference was stressed over and over in math and science classes and you would fail an assignment or a test question if you had the wrong precision in a result.
We have speed electronic calculators now instead of slide rules, but they give a wronger answer and people aren't even aware of it or know why.
Smart rule making includes reducing the regulatory burden when it overreaches. The weight of regulation around tech in the EU is creating an environment such that the only companies that can operate in a space are the ones who can afford massive compliance overhead. That leaves you with the very same big tech firms that people are writing these rules to protect themselves from in the first place.
Right, but it's obviously not overreaching, because user's data is taken:
1. Without their consent,
2. Without their knowledge and,
3. Cannot be taken back or denied in a simple way.
There is a problem space here, in which there is zero solution. There is absolutely nothing, _NOTHING_, consumers can do if they want to protect their privacy. And before I hear 'well just don't use...' no - uh uh, that doesn't count. That's not a solution.
So, we need some kind of regulation. And, to be clear, it doesn't need to make violating privacy illegal. It doesn't, and the GPDR doesn't either. It just needs to make it possible for consumers to choose.
A free market is built on consumer choice, that is the core of a free market. It might seem counterintuitive, but regulation that protect consumer choice actually bolster the free market, not impede it.
The "reason" the EU is "struggling" isn't because only big dogs can compete. It's because US companies, which need not follow the rules, exist, and will slurp up the competition.
It's hard to compete with Google because they are cheaters. It's hard to compete with Meta because they are cheaters. They make literally hundreds of billions of dollars off of dark patterns, lies, stealing data, and privacy violations. If you even try to be honest, not even be good, just be honest, you will lose. Because they are not honest.
Well, yeah, they were written to prevent at least some of the privacy abuse from those big tech companies, not to get rid of them. Sometimes the answer is more rules, such as rules protecting smaller businesses while continuing to place regulatory burdens on the tech giants, who are responsible for the most egregious invasions of privacy.
Hasn't it been pretty widely acknowledged that AI funding has created a whirlpool of money cycling between a few players- cloud / datacenter hosts / operators (oracle), GPU (nvidia) and model operators (openai).
To pile on, there's hardly a product being developed that doesn't integrate "ai" in some way. I was trying to figure out why my brand new laptop was running slowly, and (among other things) noticed 3 different services running- microsoft copilot, microsoft 365 copilot (not the same as the first, naturally) and the laptop manufacturer's "chat" service. That same day, I had no fewer than 5 other programs all begging me to try their AI integrations.
Job boards for startups are all filled with "using AI" fluff because that's the only thing investors seem to want to put money into.
Makes one think that this was the plan all along. I think they saw how SVB went down and realize that if they're reckless and irresponsible at a big enough scale they can get the government to just transfer money to them. It's almost like this is their new business model "we're selling exposure to the $XX trillion dollar bailout industry."
I don't think it's very difficult to imagine that the usgov is trying to put pressure on industry to make "number go up". Given the general competency level in usgov these days, I also wouldn't be particularly surprised if nobody knew or cared about whether the "up" of the number was real or meaningful, or whether there would be consequences.
Current admin really, really wants the number going up, and is also incapable of considering or is ignorant to any notion of consequence for any actions of any kind.
This is the thing that worries me the most. The market is past due for a market correction. Yet this government is willing to burn down everything for short term gains.
> They really are shameless aren't they? Makes one think that this was the plan all along.
Not really. Sundar is still pretty bullish on GenAI, just not the investor excitement around it (bubble).
Pichai described AI as "the most profound technology" humankind has worked on. "We will have to work through societal disruptions," he said, adding that the technology would "create new opportunities" and "evolve and transition certain jobs." He said people who adapt to AI tools "will do better" in their professions, whatever field they work in.
The context makes it clear that it's not any sort of implied threat. Pichai made his statement in response to an interview question about whether Google might be so well positioned that they're immune to the impact of an AI bubble. (But I don't blame you for being misled - like most headlines these days, this would have been intensely optimized for virality over accuracy, and making tech CEOs sound like supervillains is great for virality.)
I mean this commonly happens in business/economies. Businesses that are dirty can make more money, at least temporarily out competing those around them. If they play it right they can drive their good competitors out of business or buy them up. Moreso, the crash at the end of a bubble will just as likely drive the good businesses out as the bad.
The tough thing is probably trying to make it Type 2 fun, where hard work leads to rewards rather than Type 1 fun that’s basically just entertainment. Ultimately, learning something new is always kind of painful, and learning to push through that pain is in itself a key lesson you have to learn for adult life.
I don't think that's even real learning. But that's a slightly offensive thing to say to diligent swots, I guess. Well done swots, have a gold star anyway.
First of all, you are saying I think learning should not be fun at all, when I am actually saying that learning is type 2 fun, and people need to learn how to do that to be happy, fulfilled adults.
Second, in refuting me, it seems you are stating that learning should be Type 1 fun, which I totally disagree with. You are severely limiting your potential if you only do things that are entertaining. And not just in an accidental way: you are also setting yourself up for a life in which you follow the things that are made to be entertaining for you, by advertisers or whoever else thinks they can gain by leading you along.
I enjoy learning new things, I’ve learned new languages, musical instruments, and I’ve switched careers a couple of times which has led to all kinds of new things I had to learn to do. The fact is, that the real fun happens after mastery, and after a brief ”this is cool” bump where you bang a drum for a couple of minutes on the beach or whatever, there is a long period of practice where you pretty much have to put in the work before you can get to that fun flow state of mastery.
Well, I just ignored the whole thing about type 1 and type 2 fun. I guess type 2 is something about being patient. Thing is, though, if it's actually fun, it's not painful, and if it is painful, it's not necessary as part of learning, and isn't helping.
I suppose we often have to do painful things to maintain stability, or advance, and indirectly therefore they're necessary as part of a strategy to continue learning. Like, I don't know, work a terrible job to pay the rent. But that's indirect, not intrinsic to learning, so those things don't count.
No, but learning a new programming language can be more fun than watching a TV series.
This forum has plenty of past comments from people who have learned a programming language for fun when they could have spent that time watching a TV series.
"Learning is fun" for the right type of person is a far cry from an assertion of "fun is learning" that implies whenever someone is having fun, they're learning. The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower, which can easily be short circuited by things that are fun but not learning.
Yes, "learning is fun" does not imply "fun is learning". I agree the latter is not always true so I would strongly disagree with "all fun is learning".
What I would say that there are enough fun things that provide learning that kids (especially younger ones - its difference once exams and qualifications start looming) can learn primarily through fun. Provide the environment and guidance and encouragement. Think about how many fun things kids do is learning. Playing games, making things, drawing. The TV series might be a documentary or produced by a different culture or be based on a book that is worth reading, or may be of cultural value in its own right. It may create an opportunity to talk to children about related topics (I am very much a fan of "conversational learning").
> The point is that getting to a place where learning a new programming language is fun requires developing a lot of skill and willpower
I am old enough that I learned because my parents bought me what was then called a "home computer" and it was fun to learn programming. I did not have much skill or will power at that point (I would have been about 10).
More generally, children can learn a lot without skill and will power. It needs opportunities and guidance and encouragement. I agree that sticking kids in front of a TV or giving them a tablet with a bunch of simplistic games will mean they do not learn.
Willpower - or not. Some of us learned languages unhesitatingly, with delight. So what? Do the other people have to take part too?
(Actually I remember hating C when I got to the part of K&R about pointers. I threw the book across the room. I hated it for about 12 hours. Then I woke up the next morning and was all like "pointers are brilliant", it was weird.)
I guess you can guide people into a subject, assuring them the whole way through that the subject is probably going to get enjoyable, and in the meantime making the experience enjoyable through social effects and entertainment - while allowing them freedom to back out if in fact you're boring them. But that doesn't demand their willpower. It hinges on their interest.
It's great that learning things was fun for you. I'm there with you myself. I had amazing lucid dreams the night after I learned Ocaml...
But this entire thread is about teaching children, many of whom need guidance, support, and unfortunately sometimes control to mitigate their attraction to easy-but-unhealthy activities.
Not everyone is going to be a programmer. But even if we're talking about structuring learning such that it's compelling on its own, then we're kind of assuming everyone is going to have a calling and also find it relatively young. That feels pretty naive.
Blanket assertions are often naive or simplistic, but not incoherent. They are attempts at elegant simplicity, so it's the nuanced version which is less coherent, because reality is messy.
Practical difficulties, then, can be used as an excuse for saying that an arbitrarily chosen 20% of control is vital, which is a reassuringly normal strategy, although there's no common agreement about which 20%, since this is just a performance.
The incoherence is not with itself, but rather failing to address the messy realities of the real world. Like kids wanting to satiate themselves with easy dopamine hits before having self-discipline or work ethic that makes them seek out harder things.
The 80% figure I meant is not that I think this is applicable to 80% "of learning" or something, but rather trying to convey to you that I greatly sympathize with where you seem to be coming from. I'm mostly self-taught as well, even in college my classes were basically spent reading ahead the next chapter in the textbook to occupy my interest (and doing homework due in my next class), while half-listening to the lecture to confirm what I already knew (from reading ahead the previous class).
But still I think it would be naive to assume that all kids can do without most structure.
You should only organize things as you actually use them. The things you use are then generally organized and you haven’t wasted a bunch of time organizing stuff you never use.
If you do decide to organize a bunch of stuff you never use, that decision is then totally aesthetic, so you should choose a method of doing it that you find aesthetically pleasing.
Source: obsidian user who spent a bunch of time organizing stuff he never uses.
I largely agree, that's why I've still got all of it stored away, but I guess I'd like to keep track of what is it that I'm not using, what can I delete and what can I deduplicate.
I think we are allowed to use common sense. I think it’s pretty safe to say that everyone has some kind of health condition, but there’s no way that one in five working adults has a health condition so bad that they cannot work.
If I truly could not work, I would want the slackers rooted out too, otherwise they will destroy supports for the people that actually need them.
> but there’s no way that one in five working adults has a health condition so bad that they cannot work.
I would go further, I would also say that there are no "working adults" who also "cannot work".
You don't see ill people walking around? Yes, that's how it works, it doesn't prove anything. We're not seeing what we don't see, and can't draw "common sense" inferences from that missing data. You need actual studies.
Sure, but the point remains - they say that know it's wrong because they see a representative sample of working age adults?
No, we actually don't: There is strong selection bias by definition of the difference between "of working age" and actually "working". The ones unable to work are less publicly visible.
Why are millions of young adults suddenly unable to work for health reasons?
Either there are real health issues and then this should be an emergency situation to find and address the causes, and this proposal is totally inadequate.
Or there are no serious health issues (which, indeed sounds more plausible) and this proposal misses the point and is a waste of money. Real underlying causes of the situation should be identified and addressed nevertheless. Cynically, we can notice that this keeps the official unemployment rate low since people "economically inactive" do not count, and we can wonder what would happen if those 3+ million were suddenly to look for work...
The pandemic was 5 years ago and Covid was and is very mild in younger people. So many younger people officially unfit to work is not due to Covid and I am very skeptical that this is really "health" as I explained. So do you have anything substantive to share on this instead of taking government statements at face value and snarks in replies?
1) it is absurd to consider the pandemic as a point in time in the past. It has abated, but there are still new cases today, and ongoing consequences of older cases. "it happened 5 years ago" is simplistic to the point of being nonsensical.
2) The report states "Today there are nearly 800,000 or 40% more people of working-age who are economically inactive for health reasons than there were in 2019."
So it's a change since in 2019. The time frame fits.
> is very mild in younger people
Always? Blanket statements like this are not accurate.
> So do you have anything substantive to share on this instead of taking statements at face value
I did not "accept it at face value". My point is: here is data in need of explanation. A possible explanation is that "is very mild in younger people" is not true often enough to matter.
I am amazed at people's ability to not even consider the obvious simple explanation - not accept it, but not even consider it or talk about it - and rather leap to ignoring the elephant in the room, and denying the validity of the data as first choice.
Correlation is not causation, but if it's not the cause then that should be conclusion reached only after investigating and ruling out the glaringly obvious.
> I am very skeptical that this is really "health"
That is a extra-ordinary statement, with zero evidence. If you can't provide that, we can dismiss it out of hand.
> taking government statements at face value
Please, no snark. The UK isn't the USA, statements from public health bodies can't be dismissed by using "government statements" as an implied slur. Your explanation "it's not health" is a political one, and so you imply that this does not come from you - that the number is itself pollical.
> A possible explanation is that "is very mild in younger people" is not true often enough to matter.
It is true enough to matter unless you can show otherwise... because, again, to be deemed unfit to work the health issue must be very serious.
And of course this is all political.
Those numbers, criteria, and decisions to deem people "economically inactive" and not to count them as unemployed are all based on policy. Again, cynically we need to keep in mind that this keeps unemployment numbers low when the economy is flat-lining (really the actual elephant in the room since 2019).
We can't ignore the state of the economy and the political aspect. This Keep Britain Working review is political (it is a government review) and the proposal that "firms were likely to face a cost of £5-15 per employee per month to provide improved levels of occupational health is farcical and suggests that real issues are avoided (c.f. previous paragraph).
The rise in economic inactivity also seems to be UK-specific, which also points to reasons beyond Covid and "health" [1]...
Anyway, can only lead a horse to water, so have a nice one...
> The rise in economic inactivity also seems to be UK-specific, which also points to reasons beyond Covid and "health"
Thanks for the link. It's good that it talks about things in context of the pandemic, since discussing public health without even mentioning it would be nonsensical. From there:
> And ill-health has consistently been a bigger factor behind inactivity in the UK than in most other advanced economies, with post-pandemic trends likely to have amplified these differences.
So, that supports the first part of your sentence - it seems to be UK-specific, but it directly contradicts the second. Which is still your own unsupported extraordinary conclusions that it's not health and unrelated to the pandemic.
Plastic-eating bacteria could be one of the most destructive forces we’ve ever faced, given how dependent we’ve become on plastics. We’d lose domestic electricity due to the degradation of insulation. We’d lose water due to the loss of water pipes. Modern houses would fall apart as the resin in plywood turns to mush. Supply lines would completely fall apart as roads turn to potholed mud, and the trucks that drive on them grind to a halt. It’s a true nightmare situation. I assume the smell would be awful too, as almost every surface is treated with plastic paints, varnishes and coverings.
> It is currently unknown how these aggregates will perform in the mid- to long-term, or what effect their degradation might have on surrounding ecosystems.
This... doesn't entirely sound like the best idea since wear on it as an aggregate part could contribute to microplastics.
> What does infrastructure look like in the future? How can we build more sustainable roads? How do we solve climate challenges, such as stormwater drainage? Two men from the Netherlands, Anne Koudstaal and Simon Jorritsma, suggested using plastic, and in 2013 they drew the first concept for a road made of recycled plastic.
I'd like to think I was smart enough to think of roads made with recycled plastics, but I guess I was assuming that once bacteria attack plastics, then all hydrocarbon materials are pretty much in the firing line.
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