aaplok

> we disagree

Which is fine. I am not trying to convince you, I am responding to your (and GGP's) question on why he is promoted.

> Must I fall prostate before their authority so as not to come across as "presumptuous"?

Of course not. On the other hand, denying that these people's literary opinion has value beyond some vile feelings about abhorring nature does come across as presumptuous.

Sade is transgressive, not against our society as much as against our inner souls. Reading him creates discomfort in a way that no other author attains. It's no wonder that Beckett likens him to Dante (as quoted in TFA), because ultimately it's hard to read Sade without feeling the fragility of morality.

Much of it so extreme that it is comical. What is both funny and transgressive is that he takes pretty much everything that we take morally granted and throws it back at us as just another intellectual construct. It is unsettling and I don't blame anyone for not liking him.

However, the fact remains that literary giants like Apollinaire, Breton, Beckett and more had a high opinion of him. Sade's influence was far from insignificant, and the dismissive tone of your comment comes across as somewhat presumptuous.

> when it no longer is (as is the case in much of Europe) it becomes problematic.

Not necessarily. What matters here is whether production matches demand. If the proportion of people in the workforce declines, but their productivity increases by the same amount (which isn't far from being the case in Europe) you don't have a problem.

And even that is too simple. As the population ages, demand changes. It increases im certain domains (health) so productivity increase might not suffice.

...but then of course the productivity of older people declines too, together with their health (higher unemployment, more sick leaves), so there is a lower and lower ROI as you put these people in the workforce. And then making people work longer accelerates the health decline, and so increases the demand. Except those people die younger on average, lowering the demand.

So it's a supply and demand issue, but not quite a supply and demand of workers. It's a complicated economic problem. All of this is talked about in the French debate, which is a lot more subtle than the loud vociferations reported in the news make it out to be.

This reminds me of the millenium drought in Autralia at the start of the century [0]. This is something that French (as other European) governments should have known was coming. Instead they just let it come and are now wholly unprepared [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000s_Australian_drought

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/politics/article/2023/01/03/who-co...

That's assuming they want to solve it. A lot of administrators live in lalaland because it suits them to. It is in the interest of society to fail cheaters and frauds before they graduate, but it costs the universities money to do it properly. So they will only address the problem if it comes to public attention.

That's a trend that we've seen over and over, for example with the corruption over admission to Ivy league universities. In fact chatGPT doesn't really change the landscape that much. All it does is democratising contract cheating, on which most universities only apply band aids. It might end up being a good thing, but only if it does attract public attention to the issue.

> 40 bits in superposition can represent 2^40 possibilities.

In classical QC yes, is this the case any longer in the Rydberg blockade configuration? From what I understood from the article, it's what GP said: the atom configuration implements the independent set problem using entanglement. So the number of qubits is the order of the graph, which is the size of the problem. I'm not sure where the quadratic bound is derived from, and I didn't understand where the solution to the maximum independent set comes from so maybe I didn't understand the article...

There are so many other gray areas in the article that reading it feels a bit like riding on the hype train.

What I ended up doing when I was in a similar situation is manually edit the XML(sh3d files are XML) with proper measurements and coordinates after first doing a rough sketch on the GUI.

I haven't used that tool for a while, but I think that it includes a table with all the items (walls, etc.) where you can enter the measurements.

Ultimately I think of sweethome3d as a sweet spot between paint and a full-blown CAD program. Nowhere as powerful as the latter but so much better than the former. Also my daughter had a moment when she preferred sweethome3d over Minecraft et al. as a building game.

> elevates a cis "ally" who feels trans people are icky

Are you talking about the author, who says at the start of the article that she is married to a trans man and spent years of her life working with and helping trans people? No matter what you think of the article, that claim is obviously wrong to anyone who read it.

What GP is saying is that he wrote the article without monetary retribution from Al Jazeera. He was paid by someone else (one of his employers) to write an opinion piece published by Al Jazeera.

It's not uncommon in academia.

> NATO has expanded because all those countries wanted to join.

Joining NATO is not like taking a membership card at one's local gym when one feels like it. If, say, Sierra Leone "wanted to join" it's unlikely it would happen.

NATO is a military alliance. It has a purpose, it has a governance and it doesn't just randomly expand to whichever country feels like joining. It's understandable that analysts analyze the expansion of NATO in a broader context. It would be naive not to.

> When some strangers expressed a wish to see Demosthenes, he stretched out his middle finger and said, "There goes the demagogue of Athens."

Dies anybody know if that gesture had the same meaning as today back then?

As unpleasant as these women's experience is, none of them are in jail, and none of them were murdered by the state for holding these views. We're a far cry from the Lysenko era. Especially because none of the parties (on either side) even claims to be doing science.

What I see in the articles you linked is a lot of noise on both sides of the ideological line, using twitter first and then traditional media. We live in a noisy time, and this may have deplorable consequences, including (self)-censoring. I don't see a systematic state-led ideological war using systematic jailing and killing.

We look back at Lysenkoism as a movement that promoted a wrong scientific theory using political means that led to censoring alternative theories and killing or imprisoning scientists.

Not only have nobody been jailed or killed for promoting views antagonistic to the view of this presumed "Newchurch", but you are writing your comment under an article about how these "Newchurch" views have been censored after a complaint against them in the name of science.

No matter how hard people try to believe it, we don't live in the time of Stalin and Lysenko. I feel it is disrespectful to their victims to claim that our petty frustrations are in any way comparable to their very real suffering.

> Authoritarian laws get passed because people want them.

I don't think I agree. Almost by definition authorianism doesn't acknowledge what people want. A law passed because people want it would be either democratic or populist, depending on whom you ask.

I think that the issue here is that all laws are authoritarian at some level, since the principle of a law is to impose. And indeed most citizens would probably support most laws. That doesn't really make the law "bad" or "good" per se, though.

Just as typical as it is for people who live in democratic countries to support democratic laws. I'm not quite sure what you expect us to conclude here.

The article being discussed here is about a Qatari official judging Western standards immoral, not the other way. This is particularly problematic because he is in charge of organising an event that is likely to attract primarily visitors from the very countries he is criticising.

There is a disconnect here. FIFA, as an organisation mostly funded from those countries where accepting homosexuality has become a moral standard, has been under pressure for decades to be more inclusive of homosexuals. In that context they made a mistake to award the world cup to Qatar. The same goes with women: they can't pretend that they care about making stadiums more welcoming of women and organise their main event in a country where organisers take the opposite view.

You will make mistakes. Lots of them. You will hate some moments. Often. There is a lot of Instagram parenting where everyone is oh so happy and oh so perfect, but raising kids is difficult and if you really spend time with them you will not do things perfectly, nor like it constantly. Good thing is, kids are resilient. They will live with your flaws. Just make sure you give then plenty of love.

Remember that children are human beings from the get go. They have a personality, and feelings. They are the ones doing the growing up, and all you can do is try to help them do it well. You might meet people who think that kids are infinitely malleable and that personality faults in them are intolerable. These people are ignorant in the same way racists and homophobes are.

Intuitively I'd say you're probably right. But computation theory is full of counter-intuitive results. Your statement might be provable by adapting the argument that Σ(n) is not always computable. Something like computing the sum would require solving some version of the halting problem.

Perhaps add a small edit to your article to highlight that this particular statement isn't to be taken as a mathematical proof?

> since we don’t know Σ(n) we can’t know the exact value of Ω.

Hmmm. Just because you don't know the individual terms of the sequence, it doesn't follow that you don't know their infinite sum. Here's a trivial example: take the sum `(-1)^n Σ(floor(n/2))`. The infinite sum is obviously 0, yet we can't calculate each of the terms, nor many of the partial sums.

That theory also guided the development of the EU, which has arguably been a significant source of peace and stability for the past 70 years, leading to great prosperity. This is only the second war we are seeing on the European continent in all that time. Compared with the previous 70 years it's quite an achievement.

It's a fallacy to focus on the one failure of the policy and ignore the other cases when it was working.

As for NATO its expansion all the way to the borders of Russia didn't prevent the war either, and it remains to be seen whether we won't end up with a war between Russia and NATO.

In times of war it's tempting but dangerous to feel like militarisation of the world is the solution. History doesn't show that to be the case in general.

The article mentions that "jihad rehab" is the name of the Saudi program the subjects of the documentary are enrolled in. She didn't chose "jihad", she chose "jihad rehab".

"Terrorist rehab" would be quite an ill-suited name. There is no indication that the men in the documentary ever were terrorists, aside from one of them.

You could have suggested "Guantanamo rehab". That would have better qualified the men in the film than "terrorists". Even then I think it's unfair to call racist her decision to name the film after that Saudi program.

Interesting. The page mentions Michel Ugon (who died in December 2021) as the "true inventor of the smart card". Where Moreno patented the memory card, Ugon invented the microprocessor card and then the SPOM, Self-Programmable One chip Memory). Chips on modern smart cards are essentially the same as the one Ugon created.

There was a lot of animosity between him and Moreno, and there were lengthy trials to invalidate Moreno's claim to the paternity of the smart card idea (allegedly stolen from Bull, Ugon's employer). Regardless of this controversy, it's sad that Michel Ugon didn't get the same recognition as Moreno, since he was the one who miniaturised the microprocessor and memory into one chip. Basically putting a computer in people's pockets decades before the iPhone. Moreno certainly worked hard to make it look as the invention of a lone (self-made) inventor, but the smart card was anything but that.

[0] https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Ugon

I didn't claim I agree or disagree with this. I answered GP's question on Haidt's argument, especially because I found the other reponses didn't do justice to Haidt by focusing on research that would contradict the dominant narrative. As far as I could tell from the article he didn't allude to that.

The question that triggered his reaction is (quoting from the article) 'whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.' Indeed in principle they could just answer that it doesn't. What is left out here is why they are asking this. If the purpose of the question is unclear then researchers may feel incentivised to lie to 'fit' the requirements.

My personal view is that this is much ado about nothing. More likely than not most people will ignore the answers. There will, however, be reviewers who use that to reject papers.

The key quote is this: "most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity."

In other words a researcher studying a topic unrelated to diversity will need to lie by claiming that there is a link.

Bloom's taxonomy is actually pretty useful for what it is meant to do, and it was rather radical at the time: their purpose is to reflect and identify how you are going to evaluate learning. The realisation is that for many topics there are different levels of expertise. You can be decent at writing small programs, but contributing to a large codebase is a whole different skill, and so is writing your own programming language, etc. Bloom's taxonomy helps narrowing the scope of the learning experience to something that is reasonable and realistic. Personally I use it to get students to design their own learning goals, and find it a very useful tool to scope the discussion on what makes a good goal.

Sadly as with many things in Academia, it is misused by management to the point where it's lost its substance. It was never meant to be used for bureaucratic control over overworked lecturers. It's not even useful for that purpose.

> What are we going to do, start getting rid of free markets?

This is a standard response to markets societies wants to apply boundaries to, yes. Obviously for illegal ones (slaves, child porn, hard drugs) and also regulated ones (medical advice, nuclear weapons).

> in any market there's winners and losers.

Most examples I gave above all have one thing in common: there is a moral objection to the free market due to the vulnerability of one of the parties.

This is an issue that needs to be addressed, and particularly so by proponents of free markets, in a more convincing way than "tough luck". Otherwise the "losers" have no reason to accept that free markets are desirable.

Not quite. Simplex is an algorithm to solve linear programming problems. Linear programming is (weakly) polynomial. The simplex algorithm itself has exponential worst case [0]. Whether there exist a polynomial-time variant of the simplex algorithm is an open problem.

Constraint programming is very broad — it encompasses many types of problems. Some of them are in P, some (most?) are in NP. In principle you can use the simplex algorithm for solving certain constraint programming problems, but mostly when people talk about constraint programming they refer to different techniques.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klee%E2%80%93Minty_cube

Legalisation is a very broad notion. What to legalise? Usage/consumption? Small business re-selling? Large private industry?

Arguments for it cover an equally large range. The argument about legalising consumption for public health reasons probably focuses more on reducing harmful consumption rather than all consumption. The article cites several strategies used by the sports gambling industry (eg QR codes) that encourage addiction, and harm. You don't need to make all gambling illegal to crack down on that kind of stuff.

Ultimately the question is one of control. Complete market deregulation is arguably the worse possibility here. With illegal activity the government can control through repression, and via a public monopoly they control the quality of the product and the chain of distribution.

This. And then applicants who tell the reviewers explicitly the information they need using phrases like "this application is innovative because..." tend to be more successful than those who let the reviewer guess.

As is clear in this thread people want bang for their buck. So applications are asked to justify what bang they will provide, and the successful ones tell it.

This is the extended Euclidean algorithm, to find Bézout's coefficients.

Column `d` contains the iterates of the classical Euclidean algorithm. Every row is the remainder of the two preceding rows. Eventually you get to the gcd.

Then, every number in `d` can be written as `ax+dy`. For the first two rows it's obvious: in the first row he sets `d=x`, so it easily comes that `a=1` and `b=0`. Similarly for the second row, where `d=y` then `a=0` and `b=1`.

Then from there it's basic algebra: if `a[i-2]x + b[i-2]y=d[i -2]` and `a[i-1]x + b[i-1]y=d[i -1]` you can easily prove that `a[i]x + b[i]y=d[i]`.