At 0.9c the relativistic time dilation is such that 2.3 days on Earth pass for every day shipboard time, meaning the crew would experience less than 4 years of travel in total: https://www.fourmilab.ch/cship/timedial.html
I've been working on a P50 since 2016; It is holding up.
Flaws:
- There is cosmetic degradation
- The laptop is gradually losing hassle-free hardware support from the latest popular Linux distributions. (Trackpoint crashes randomly in Ubuntu; Sleep/power management has never worked properly).
- I had to replace the keyboard after 3 years (the keys mechanically wore out and became loose). I had difficulty finding new replacement keyboards recently (although this is more an indictment of the UK's trade situation).
- The buttons on the main touchpad are slowly failing; Near as I can tell it isn't possible to replace these without replacing the entire "top case". I use an external mouse to slow the decline.
> The laptop is gradually losing hassle-free hardware support from the latest popular Linux distributions.
That's disappointing. How well do Debian and Fedora hold up from that POV? Even if support has also regressed there, those are probably the distributions where tracing and reporting that regression would be easiest.
Submit manuscripts as e-mail attachment to the Editorial Office at ajmds@scihub.org, A manuscript number will be mailed to the corresponding author same day or within 72 hours
(Blitting unicode glyphs to screen is not hard or slow; In this project, the glyph rendering code turned into spaghetti to save on space. Cleaner rendering code is possible if using uncompressed bitmap fonts. If there is a concern about size on disk, you could only install the codepages needed for a given locale? But then again, unless you include the various pages of Chinese characters, we're still talking no more than a few hundred K to store all of Unicode as a bitmap font. True, handling combining modifiers probably would increase binary size and maintenance costs, but again... if it fits on an Arduino it's probably OK for the desktop. And if you're already OK with not supporting unicode, you're probably OK with supporting most of unicode except combining modifiers.)
What about l-r vs r-l text? What about mixtures of l-r and r-l in the same document?
Supporting Unicode half-assed may be relatively easy. Supporting it properly is hard, and requires a team of experts. I doubt even John Cowan is enough an expert in all the fiddly little corner cases to do it all himself.
But you still have to do it.
Thankfully, there is libpango and libharfbuzz, which take care of many of these details for you.
I think part of the mystery is that computers can copy binary information losslessly, ad infinitum. So they can move information as often as needed with (almost) no error. We don't think neurons are as reliable, and excessive copying is expected to degrade a memory/representation. It seems like this might work for discrete categorical representations, whose activation is essentially binary, but would gradually fail for anything analog/continuous.
If the computational hypothesis for minds and brains is true, and it is only conjecture though a tempting one, I can only see one way out. Analogies are a wicked thing to indulge in here. But bear with me.
If an engineer designs a computer that computes on encrypted information, from an observer's naive perspective, the entire contents of memory is rewritten with a random value for each step. Yet there is a mathematical relationship between those seemingly random bits and whatever is encoded. Even just using some error correction and non-deterministic parallel processing and it might look pretty much like noise if you don't have the decoder ring.
Something like that is the only explanation I can come up with. Information is stored at a level of abstraction in a structure that is maintained by being continuously re-encoded in the ephemeral computations at a lower level.
If I understood correctly, I think I agree with your loose analogy. I've tried combining some error correction with ongoing re-learning. It stabilizes things against drift, but not indefinitely. This is all in an extremely preliminary cartoon sketch of a model. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.08.433413v1....
The Xilinx 6200 series could safely run randomized bitstreams without damaging itself. Genetic algorithms could be applied to create circuits that worked despite being riddled with what would normally be fatal design flaws.
Considering that mystifying presupposes that the function of the brain is to represent lossless or perfect memories in a static way, rather than say, maintain coherence or consensus across experiences. It's not clear at all that altering or evolving memory is bad for the system overall.
It might very well be a feature of this drift that old memories or information is gradually adapted. After all evolutionary speaking you wouldn't expect the brain to optimize for archiving but for making fitness optimizing decisions in the world.
But human representations do degrade to the extent we forget detail, and also the information changes (sure, the odour might be the same and the experimental controls perfect, but an organism probably should change how they process it over time "new, unfamiliar odour", "smelt that yesterday"... "wonder if anything's happening related to that odour which emerged recently", "meh, background odour") so some of the information update is additive
I think the point is that there are smells that we do remember for a lifetime, which must be explained. Either these stable memories aren't mediated by the cells in piriform that Schoonover and Fink recorded, or there is a mechanism that supports drifting yet stable distributed representations.
Or sometimes you get drift, and then you don't remember a smell, and this happens all the time - which is why if we re-smell something, we don't necessarily hit the same neurons, but we also remember old smells, because those didn't drift. Or is that excluded by the experiment?
My understanding was that these experiments didn't completely rule out the possibility of a stable sub-population. Also, the olfactory bulb projects to other areas besides piriform, and those might support long-term stability. My extremely speculative unfounded conjecture is that piriform is actually a novelty encoder, and plays a role in encoding new memories in a changing environment. But, I think the data don't quite support this at this time.
I'm (weakly) leaning in this direction as well. But, there are other proposed functions of dreams that are hard to reconcile with this. Some people think that dreams prevent overfitting and/or sample the negative gradient in a contrastive learning algorithm. Perhaps these are the same thing in end? But I'm not sure how it all fits together.
I'm working on this at the moment; Reconsolidation should work, but requires that representations/memories be periodically re-activated so that the neurons can re-learn how to encode them. Still very preliminary: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.08.433413v1....
Not a lot of content in the comments yet, so I thought I'd just copy-paste the Wikipedia note regarding this controversy:
> Palantir has come under criticism due to its partnership developing software for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Palantir has responded that its software is not used to facilitate deportations. In a statement provided to the New York Times, the firm implied that because its contract was with HSI, a division of ICE focused on investigating criminal activities, it played no role in deportations. However, documents obtained by The Intercept show that this is not the case. According to these documents, Palantir's ICM software is considered 'mission critical' to ICE. Other groups critical of Palantir include the Brennan Center for Justice, National Immigration Project, the Immigrant Defense Project, the Tech Workers Coalition and Mijente. In one internal ICE report Mijente acquired, it was revealed that Palantir's software was critical in an operation to arrest the parents of illegal migrant children.
- It is an international human right to be allowed to seek asylum from danger and poverty
- ICE is treating immigrants in ways that flagrantly violate international human rights law, such as separating families, witholding adequate nourishment and healthcare, recent reports of forced sterilizations, sexual assaults, and many more that are just a google search away.
- For any reading who aren't familiar with this line of argument: "they're just enforcing immigration law" is a common victim-blaming strategy that blames immigrants seeking asylum for their own abuse at the hands of our immigration agents. It implies that anyone who violates a country's laws, no matter how unfair or in violation of international human rights, deserves any punishment that comes their way.
Not everyone might agree but, taking a global view, I would interpret Article 25 of the UDHR [0] - right to standard of living - combined with Article 2 - right to nondiscrimination - as supporting the right to flee poverty in general. Going further, the relative wealth of countries like the U.S. is tied with exploitation and imperialistic meddling in the places where people are fleeing from, so it takes on that extra layer of responsibility. I argue that poverty is a form of persecution (exploitation) of the poor by the rich, which meets the letter of Article 14.
> your third bullet also implies that all illegal immigrants are refugees seeking asylum.
How much would the human population need to contract in order to provide everyone with the same wasteful quality-of-life that the average citizen from a western industrialized nation has?
Yikes, I appreciate the insight into your perspective but this terrifies me that otherwise intelligent people hold the disgusting ideas so confidently that you do.
I don't think it's that, it's actually pretty radical a position in the US to say we shouldn't enforce immigration law or we should effectively have open borders. The controversy comes in the harsh manner in which DHS has been enforcing those laws in the last few years. It seems like we're not even treating immigrants like human beings, so any company that enables this by partnering with DHS, even if not directly working on targeting migrants, rightly comes under scrutiny and ire.
For anyone unsure of what you meant by "The controversy comes in the harsh manner in which DHS has been enforcing those laws in the last few years. It seems like we're not even treating immigrants like human beings" see
https://www.valleycentral.com/news/local-news/new-mcallen-fa...
When the Intercept published those reports, there was a stir among employees, because the internal messaging had also been "we work with HSI, not ERO, and the lamestream media are too stupid and venal to know the difference and are out to get us anyway, don't listen to them."
So the directors organized some small, private, closed, unrecorded sessions to placate employee concerns. The takeaway was:
- Palantir wasn't consulted on that particular operation.
- It's not as if we can control what the software is used for, anyway.
- It is important to maintain ties with CBP regardless of what ERO does.
- There is no red line that ERO could cross that would make us stop work with them, but we're definitely constantly evaluating the situation and doing what's best for us and for the nation.
I thought it was breathtakingly tone-deaf, but a lot of hobbits found it persuasive.
