Wololooo

> One could name it "the aggressive and perhaps unprecedented transition of federal power going on in the US government right now" -something like that.

That is a tame way to call a coup a coup...

> but I have to point out that to invoke the analogy of Weimar is already to assume your conclusion.

If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck...

> If what-happens-after-Weimar happens, I'll be happy (well, not happy, but willing) to admit having made the wrong bet, if there's still time to do so.

Interesting way of seeing things go terribly sideways in a nicer light...

Though I have to put my loaded comment in much more nuanced terms, people call for neutrality in general but with the current happenings, and even if myself am not an engineer nor a US citizen nor living in the USA, but a physicist, I have to recall to most the duty of the Engineer

"I am an Engineer. In my profession, I take deep pride. To it, I owe solemn obligations.

As an engineer, I pledge to practice integrity and fair dealing, tolerance and respect, and to uphold devotion to the standards and dignity of my profession. I will always be conscious that my skill carries with it the obligation to serve humanity by making the best use of the Earth's precious wealth.

As an engineer, I shall participate in none but honest enterprises. When needed, my skill and knowledge shall be given, without reservation, for the public good. In the performance of duty, and in fidelity to my profession, I shall give my utmost."

In those trying times I think it is important for all of us to uphold basic principles that were guiding principles for the giants we rely on in our daily lives, and while I understand that some of us are bound by our work duties, I would like to wish that they would not cloud judgement for what is right.

Regardless of where we are, and what people might or might not believe, we are in for tough times ahead. And I still appreciate moderation and moderators, although it is a thankless job that usually gets more flak than it should...

I will give you a little thing to read that might shed another light on the issue, which runs deeper than just doing what you are told https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/how-and-why/why/radica...

This is why people actually speaking out about swooping changes in their administration is important.

I find it very odd that you find that upholding democracy matters, even if it means to enact and act on behalf on people that are actively dismantling it or have a proven track record at effectively ignoring the popular vote, which since you are a fervent democratic believer, I am guessing you are also against various different problems such as: gerrymandering, purging voters of certain groups from the ballots, attempting to manipulate election results and even in some case ignoring the popular vote altogether in a more than dodgy manner (see this description of the 2000 election https://www.uvm.edu/~dguber/POLS125/articles/pomper.htm )

This is without counting that an important number of members of the current administration, refused to acknowledge January 6 or admit that the previous administration was indeed legitimate...

So yes people should do their jobs, but should be held to standards, even a soldier is bound by the oath to the constitution, as does everyone appointed to a Federal position:

"An individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services, shall take the following oath: “I, ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God."

Again you pledge not to the administration but to the institution and the constitution, so I do not think your point do really stand here.

Someone is going to be going out of business soon and someone at a university is going to get very fired.

This goes at a significant premium for on average OEM parts that are subpar. Buying individually yields much better results and these days it's less of a hassle than it used to.

> by ignoring this aspect of what makes us human we've really moved the goalposts on what counts as AGI.

I would not say so, some people have a great interest at over selling something, and I would say that a great number of people, especially around here, completely lack a deep understanding of what most neural network actually do (or feign ignorance for profit) and forget sometimes it is just a very clever fit in a really high dimensional parameter space. I would even go as far as claiming that people say that a neural network "understand" something is absolutely absurd: there is no question that a mechanical calculator does not think, so why having encoded the data and manipulated it in a way that gives you a defined response (or series of weights) tailored to a series specific input is making the machine think, where there is no way to give it something that you have not 'taught' it, and here I do not mean literally teaching because it does not learn.

It is a clever encoding trick and a clever way to traverse and classify data, it is not reasoning, we do not even really understand how we reason but we can tell that it is not the same way a neural network encodes data, even if there might be some similarity to a degree.

> if its output was totally indistinguishable from a human's, would it matter?

Well if the output of the machine was indistinguishable from a human, the question would be which one?

If your need is someone does not reflect much and just spews random ramblings then I would argue that bar could be cleared quite quickly and it would not matter much because we do not really care about what is being said.

If your need is someone that has deep thoughts and deep reflections on their actions, then I would say that at that point it does matter quite a bit.

I will always put down the IBM quote in this situation "A computer can never be held accountable, therefore must never make a management decision" and this is at the core of the problem here, people REALLY start to do cognitive offloading to machines, and while you can trust (to a degree), a series of machine to give you something semi consistent, you cannot expect to get the 'right' output for random inputs. And this is where the whole subtlety lies. 'Right' in this context does not mean correct, because in most of the cases there are no 'right' way to approach a problem, only a series of compromises, and the parameter space is a bit more complex, and one rarely optimises against tangible parameters or easily parametrisable metric.

For example how would you rate how ethical something is? What would be your metric of choice to guarantee that something would be done in an ethical manner? How would you parametrise urgency given an unexpected input?

Those are, at least for, what I would qualify, a very limited understanding of the universe, the real questions that people should be asking themselves. Once people have stopped considering a tool as a tool, and foregone understanding it leads to deep misunderstandings.

All this being said, the usefulness of some deep learning tools is undeniable and is really something interesting.

But I maintain that if we would have a machine, in a specific location, that we needed to feed a punch card and get a punch card out to translate, we would not have so much existential questions because we would hear the machine clacking away instead of seeing it as a black box that we misconstrue its ramblings as thinking...

Talking about ramblings, that was a bit of a bout of rambling.

Well, time for another coffee I guess...

Isn't this normally particle at synthesis time?

If you want open source alternatives, I remembered seeing now a little while ago this https://blog.eowyn.net/netlistsvg/ but never tried it myself, you might give it a go.

Yep.

A corollary of this is the following paper

https://web.mit.edu/nelsonr/www/Repenning=Sterman_CMR_su01_....

Basically stating the fact that people fail to see the value in reinvestment of time and resources for improvement. Being Idle is not a failure but a way to think and be ready if a period of higher intensity comes. And it is healthy to have sometimes more time for a menial task.

People get so crazy about the idea of optimization, but fail to account for severe issues that arise when time is always occupied by something, which seems to happen more and more these days...

This is very bad.

The warning signs were there

https://news.mongabay.com/2009/02/burning-rainforests-meltin...

I'd lie if I'd say that I'm optimistic about the future.

It's a useful tool if you're immersed in the language, it's not key to your learning but it can tremendously help.

> I am aware, and that behavior is despicable, but I still don’t believe that this puts all the responsibility for climate change on oil companies generally or Exxon specifically.

They should pay, they knew what they were selling and were misleading people now we are in a critical situation because of their actions. Individuals can do only so much and most of the people don't even really grasp and understand the implications of their actions, but gets appalled when they do...

You can turn the problem in all directions, the manipulation of public opinion to freeze any attempt at reversing climate change is actually a crime against humanity...

Fucking Bart, if that guy kicked the bucket everyone would be better off...

Valve moved a lot of Indexes because of it.

I realised through hearing through channel 5 and average Americans that they don't really get it. They don't want to think, they want an easy solution to complex problems and anyone coming with a pre made thing is seen as the Messiah. The other part don't care because they saw a lot of screaming and failed to grasp what was so bad about Trump. If he was so bad why was he still nominee? If he was so bad why wasn't he arrested? If he was so bad... You get the picture...

This can be seen as the democrats also not understanding the average person and this is where Bernie was actually hitting good points, his message was consistent and he was never demonising Trump on his name but explaining what they could do better by explaining policies in a way that people understood what they would get from them or lose if they didn't get implemented...

Of course the issue is a bit more complex, but they exacerbated the people that were unseen instead of helping the healing and some actors of course were way too happy to fan the flames.

This is a very bad day that is marking the beginning of a very bad period for everyone...

Even if I am not a radio astronomer, this instrument was unique in nature and still in use for very specific observations and until the very end of its operation was able to deliver data. It is disheartening to learn that it was indeed due to gross maintenance negligence (as assumed originally by many) that the final fatal failure occurred, when potentially the structure could have been salvaged.

Uuuuh... No...

The W Z have only mass from the Higgs and nothing else for example.

But to answer your point completely here is an answer which is in the two following links making the point for the Dirac fields

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/607435/what-part...

https://cds.cern.ch/record/292286/files/B00008237.pdf at page 46

Or have I misunderstood your point?

So the main issue here is how people were presenting it, in Quantum field theory, as stated by other people, each force is associated with a field and has at least one force carrier, the exact number is linked to the specifics of the mathematical framework underlying it

To that extent you can build 3 fundamental forces, electro magnetic, weak (that are called together electroweak) and the strong force. You have an extra force carrier through the Higgs that allows you to give mass to everyone.

Now you need to consider gravity because you know that gravity exist and since everything under the sub is quantised, well so should gravity.

The main issue with gravity is that it is interpreted so far as a curvature of space time, it's mainly fine for big items, but the implications for quantum field theory is that you should modify the small integral element that you use (space shouldn't have the same size) except that you look locally at space that is mainly flat... And changing the integral does not lead to well behaved behaviours.

You can start to introduce new fields but doing so also causes an issue...

Funnily enough even in the standard model something is missing, everything mostly fits, but that's the trick, mostly, neutrinos have mass and this in itself is a problem because the Higgs mechanism doesn't provide mass to them ...

Long story short, people take shortcut when explaining the messy gritty part of it, which is "fine" but not really, and from a simple standpoint one would like to have a simple field from which gravity is born, which might be but so far, to my simpleton understanding, this hasn't been too successful, unless some form of string theory is realised. But the pre requisite for this is a form of supersymmetric theory existing which is currently disfavored, but could exist in the unproved energy scales from here to the plank energy scale.

Sorry this ended being a tad long and I'm not sure this is clarifying things.

No need to excuse yourself as a French speaker but not French, the baguettes will indeed unscrupulously bend people over if it serves their own interest without excuses or valid justification.

Some subreddit got purged over the years, some for the best, some for the worse, I couldn't find where in the new UI you could find moderator names.

Aaron is probably turning once again in his grave...

I used to moderate a fairly large subreddit, used to, I decided to leave and never come back after the API debacle, it was a long time coming though.

I think if the business model had been thought in the sense of the communities and involving mods and users in, it would have been genius, a lot of smaller companies would kill to have people genuinely recommending their products/tools that are hidden behind the biggest wall of them all...

Alas they completely ignored this as a viable avenue and went for the quick buck.

But this won't last and at some point people are going to move on from mass scraping, either because they already got what they want or because garbage goes in garbage comes out or because most of the content will be bot generated and require too much filtering to be useful.

Of course this is the opinion and rambling of a moderately educated individual and I might be totally wrong.

Change can often be for the best, pretty sure it wasn't in this case...

We already make the data available publicly...

http://opendata.cern.ch/

I know this is not your main point, and you touched briefly on it but, cmake is absolutely terrible.

It is supposed to make the building process more straight forward and painless but what it brings to the table is

* Weird bugs: In one version of cmake would return the python version that I had to be 0.16 (????) and the only fix was to update the cmake version

* Messy Structure: Under the guise of giving freedom to the person designing their build with no real enforcement of any rules, in any way, people can write their own absolute craptastic version of cmake scripts which really really is going to make you lose your mind (mind you some people leverage it but it is the exception not the rule)

* Opaque process: Due to the fact that the structure can be messy you are never really quite sure of what it is doing and which compile flags are effectively fed to the compiler as well as sometimes totally ignoring the library you explicitly ask it to use and trying to find another one...

OK maybe this is a bit superlative, but unfortunately for me, reflects well my experience with using cmake and feels like an extra item between me and getting things working painlessly... But I might have been doing it wrong.

Actually, that's not a problem anymore...

This is much more common than one would think.

This is a classic thing with Industry, they qualify a process that is working and shows good performance, but this process needs to be changed for reason XYZ, often because it is maybe a bit too expensive or doesn't align with the rest of their processes. The small change in the process wasn't that small and takes a little while to be identified because by the time you catch it you might be further down the line and this would be caught by a QA process and not a QC process, that might have deemed at that point not necessary because you had no reason to fault the part.

The second part is that some things are rated and verified but not tested extensively, since you might have prototype you might misdiagnose a failure of a component for a behaviour of your prototype, when in fact you had a deeper problem, but timelines with the added fact that so far you didn't think about that problem because it shouldn't have been a problem can catch you really off guard. This is usually where people testing the same thing in an exotic environment can ring alarm bells for others and that often happens at conferences...

People often under estimate how much you can get bitten in the back by such little details that become huge details.

Depending on the electronics and where the MOSFETS are, I would be them I would probably trash the electronics, take the spare that they had, validate components that get in and rebuild a control box and re-integrate it, provided that this is doable. It's expensive but provided that you have no choice that gives you a backup system that you can test code on before pushing it on the actual probe and might help for problem solving by being able to do measurements and test on the actual setup... Provided that they have the time and resources. Otherwise I wouldn't YOLO it given the fact that it might just straight up not work at the moment you need it the most and a little delay is better than nothing and they can spend the time re-checking part of the design that might also be weaker...

But heh, who am I but a random guy on the internet...

And they even cover the expenses for shipping the unit back to them for recycling ...

Given how niche of a product this was I'm not sure people are going to be really upset at this ...

"We did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it was going to be easy."

Yes.

But usually you realise after the fact learning that it was when you could have interacted with it.

Those things exist then through legends and the collective that still remembers, though that collective is very prone to just misremember.

"Oh shit the Americans have some issues. Hey Andrej, what the fuck is Ivan doing with the server room?"

"I don't know, dude is usually black out drunk I will go check on him"

5 min later

"Yeah he was passed out on the floor, I threw a bucket of water on him and rebooted the thing it should come back up shortly."

Happy little accident.