agarsev

I'm in Europe so maybe my view is different, though there's a lot of that thinking over here too: the only possible value of higher education is the advantage it gives me in relation to others (competitiveness, perception...).

But there are other more important (imho) values.

First, it is an excellent opportunity for personal worth. Socially: change of social group, freedom to explore, independence without much responsibility. Intellectually: mastering an advanced topic, in a program less directed than previous education, geared toward people with some demonstrated skill/affinity, meaning more depth. Also, no teacher or parent asking for grades, meaning more responsibility over own learning and organization.

It's a time for exploration. As it's said in classical AI, too much exploitation and not enough exploration means suboptimal solutions.

But also, higher education provides a resource for society. People with niche knowledge, expertise in a variety of topics, means a society is more resilient to disruption, and also more likely to innovate.

University is also a place for intellectuality and individuality, values very important to sustain a democracy, since democracy's main enemy is the inside enemy, in the form of ignorance and gullibilty.

Of course, to me all this means higher education is mostly a public service and therefore should be mostly taxpayer funded, but again, I'm from Europe :)

I fail to see how the two accidents, which seem to have very "down to earth" explanations (maintenance failure by workers, protocol override by operators) are being assumed to be a political responsibility so quickly by some and asking for the minister resignation. Now, two in a row seem to point to systemic issues. Is this responsibility of Adif or Renfe? maybe those state companies have to be thoroughly revised. is it due to lack of funding? maybe taxes should be raised, or money diverted from somewhere else (though seeing the spanish budget, it's hard to tell where from, both teachers and doctors are currently protesting for lack of funding). Maybe it is, in the end, a political directive that should have responsibilities declared in the executive. But seeing so many interested parties jumping to that conclusion literally hours after the crash means it's not done out of any reasoning but political animosity

southern europeans have had to deal with the northern cultural view that we're lazy, and modern work culture imported from those countries has virtually ended siesta. well, now it's hot over there too. we can be nice and tell them "see?" or we can be mean and have them live with the consequences of their moral positions. Right now I'm leaning a bit to the later, but it might just be the heat getting to me :P

Original title: President vs Parliament: Metsola overrides MEPs in bid to force through child abuse law

Content from TFA:

> Ambassadors on Friday will consider an “invitation of the President of the European Parliament [to] proceed with the Council’s first reading position” on the proposal to allow tech companies to choose to scan for CSAM

> The European Commission proposed the temporary CSAM bill as a stopgap measure to allow companies to scan while legislators agreed on a more permanent solution.

> Tech firms continued to scan, despite the legal limbo.

> If capitals choose to adopt their position, the law does not automatically pass: The Parliament would need to either accept it or re-enter negotiations. “There is no certainty that [the Parliament] would adopt the legislative act in second reading in line with the Council’s first reading position,” Cyprus wrote in the note.

> Gregorová rejected the suggestion that lawmakers would budge. “The Parliament mandate is clear: A majority voted it down, meaning that we reject the extension.”

as a researcher in NLP slash computational linguistics, this is what I tend to think :) (maybe a less strong version, though, there are other kinds of thinking and learning).

so I'm always surprised when some linguists decry LLMs, and cling to old linguistics paradigms instead of reclaiming the important role of language as (a) vehicle of intelligence.

Interestingly, one advantage SignWriting may have over IPA is that while you cannot easily represent sounds in a visual medium (thus letters are mostly arbitrary) movement and hand depictions in SW are highly iconic.

Also, just as you can drop many IPA symbols and just get the basic set needed to represent a particular language, I guess you could use "simplified" SW ignoring the fine differences.

It's a way to write sign languages. Think of like the alphabet, but for hands, movements etc instead of sounds.

Now, it may not be obvious that there is a necessity for a writing system for a minority language embedded in a larger community (spoken language), but there are many uses: preservation, digital use, teaching, linguistic study...

Since an organism characteristics depend a lot on its evolutionary history, classifying organisms like that helps us make predictions and assumptions based on our knowledge of related organisms, so it's quite beneficial to humans. Also, the other classifications like tree, shrub, fruit, whatever, are also valid and used in biology, just not the main classification system. The other feature of phylogenetically classifying organisms is that it's valid for all life, which is a nice property.

I use both (neovim instead of vim, i3 as wm) and you got me thinking. I think the point of both is actually not having to use the mouse. But the mouse is not the problem per se, probably is the spatial/visual interaction paradigm. I don't care where the window exactly goes, I just want it right/on top/minimized. I don't want to search visually for a button that does what I want, I know what I want, I can just "tell" the computer. It's not about keybindings as shortcuts to do something, it's talking to the computer via keyboard using my language center without the intermediary of the gesture/spatial metaphor. Maybe? I just thought of this sorry.

I don't think democracy is about having the "best" government, that'd be technocracy, I guess. Democracy is about sharing the power, and having the most legitimate government based on the principle that everyone's voice is equal.

Also, it's not a zero sum game at all. First, even if the long stretches of good and bad governments equalized over the long term, it's much worse to live all your life under a bad government than have one half the time. Also,thinking as an engineer, think about the stability implications of a wildly swinging signal vs a smoothly swinging one, even if both are centered.

In any case, coming from a country which had a long dictatorship until not so long ago, it's fairly clear it's not a zero sum game.

> much of the available energy was being used to pump water from low lying river basins into reservoirs – the only practical way to store energy on a large scale. However, this capacity has a limit and, with the reservoirs almost full, it cannot continue to be stored indefinitely.

There has been unusually heavy rain in Spain for an unusual length of time now, and reservoirs are well beyond average capacity.[1]

I wonder if this anomalous situation has anything to do with the blackout. Maybe the inability to continue pumping water led to the shutdown of the solar, maybe for economic reasons as is suggested in some other comment?

[1] https://www.embalses.net/

Nintendo at least has a good history with this, at least in my experience. Both 3ds and WiiU e-stores were closed, but I can still play all my digital games on both. I can even make backup copies of the game on external media and everything works as you would expect (save online multiplayer, which is a shame but that's a different story)

Sign language researcher here! I would recommend you look a bit at the scientific literature on the topic. I know it can be a bit overwhelming and hard to know to separate the actual info from the garbage, so I can try and select for you a few hand picked papers. IMO, trying to understand sign language oneself, or at least getting basic notions, is fundamental to understand where the real problems lie.

Unfortunately there's no getting away from that. While the scarcity of data indeed is an issue, and your idea is nice (congratulations!) the actual problem is the scarcity of useful data. Since sign language doesn't correspond to the oral language, there are many problems with alignment and just what to translate to. Glosses (oral language words used as representation for signs) are not enough at all, since they don't capture the morphology and grammar of the language, which among other things heavily relies on space and movement. Video + audio/audio captions is nearly useless.

Good luck with your efforts, this is a fascinating area where we get to combine the best of CS, AI, linguistics... but it's hard! As I said, let me know if you want some literature, by PM/email if you want, and I'll get back to you later.

disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area

The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome.

On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again.

And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model.

PS: So sorry for the wall of text

Dr. Geoff Lindsey just put out an interesting video on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6duEGj04Mg

not tldr but provocative thought derived: why insist that "it's" as a possessive is wrong, when it follows an existing pattern (john's, everyone's) and speech doesn't make the distinction?

I studied math, so I can never understand the insistence that the truth of the fourier transform is that it converts from the time domain into the frequency domain. What if you apply the fourier transform twice? Something similar is done in voice processing, and it's perfectly valid. And the origin of the Fourier transform is not in the signal world, but rather in the diffusion world, and there's not necessarily a signal in time involved.

I think the concept of the basis of functions, a series of functions which you can combine to approximate any other function is something that engineers should be able to understand. Then you can see the time to frequency as a (very useful) application.

BTW, the visualization in the post as to how the transform works is awesome, and can also work with the function basis explanation instead of the frequency one. In fact, it might make even more sense! And the posterior mention of the cosine transform wouldn't need to be hand wavy about real and imaginary parts.

In any case, I've seen so many engineers insist in the time to frequency explanation that it must somehow be easier to understand for people. I just lament that the beauty of function spaces is lost in these explanations, as well as the underlying understanding of why Fourier transform is not only useful but deep.

You can dump the metadata and then restore it, maybe that'll work for you?

I setup authelia specifically for this and it was barely a morning's work, and works beautifully.

I'm reading my thesis next tuesday, and the advances in AI the last couple of years have already made most of it obsolete :/

Anyway I'm excited and looking forward to the code and models to be released, hopefully I can use them for my research! I think it's easy to overlook how revolutionary the transformer "way" of doing things has been, and the fact that so many different tasks can be reformulated in a "language" way I believe hints at something deeper about how the universe, our minds and language work.

If I understood correctly, to me there seem to be two keys to the proposed method:

1) they use a single, shared embedding space for the two languages, forcing the model to learn "semantics" independently (or rather, interdependently) of language 2) using back-translation for training. I'm not sure that I got this right, but this seems to be round-trip translation? So the model can self-assess its performance by checking the spanish->english->spanish difference.

Sounds very promising and interesting! However, it seems they only tested on spanish and english. I wonder if the similarity of the languages at the lexical level made these results possible.

Well that's what we humans do, isn't it? :)

In any case, text seems to stil form a part:

> During training, we use monolingual speech-text datasets

So there's still a way till machines learn language as humans do, i.e. with sounds as primary modality. But nowadays I won't bet as to how long any ml task for language will take to be solved

I still don't get the MITM argument. To me, it feels like there is a lot of heavy lifting beneath the could in "a EU government could MITM any other EU country citizen". Can somebody walk me through an example of how could the Romanian government MITM a portuguese citizen in Portugal accessing a website hosted in Sweden? Maybe there's something I'm missing? To me it feels like it would require a lot of third party cooperation (ie ISPs).

As to the tracking potential of eIDs, I agree it could be lessened by improving the legislation as the letter proposes, but to me if feels like it adds a small risk of abuse for a lot of benefits (digital access to the administration, and better security through relying on modern practices instead of handwritten signatures). Again, what is the threat model for being tracked with this ID? Will a random t-shirt shop ask me for my ID? Will this give them better insight into my online habits than asking for my CC number?

I see a lot of security professionals warning against this law, and I tend to defer to people who know more than me, but time and again, and as with other EU legislation, the arguments seem to feel unconvincing and mired with "potentials for abuse" and slippery slopes.

Just adding a perspective (not necessarily mine, I'm still on the fence) supporting this legislation from a tech-literate person in the EU.

The digital administration in my country has made my life so much easier. We all have mandatory ID cards since decades ago, but now they have a chip with some certs for auth, signing, etc. I can check my taxes, fill government forms, see any traffic tickets, sign official documents from my home thanks to this. However, as far as I understand, this relies on my user agent accepting some particular CAs. This is critical, to the point of my browser preventing me access to some parts of the administration if the CA is not up to date or recognised or whatever.

What this legislation proposes, if I understand it correctly, is putting in the hands of the government the power to administer (part of) this CA infrastructure. As with many EU-related legislation, this forcefully transfers power from private (often American) entities to EU governments. I guess when trust in your government is higher or equal to trust on private firms, this doesn't sound so bad.

Not saying this is right or wrong, but maybe this helps understand why many people in the EU may not be so against this type of legislation.

This has no OS (at least that you can access). I have one, have written a number of drafts with it, and regret both purchasing it and it not being a better machine. The software is really bad and there is no way to tinker with it, no way to write custom software. Indeed, in the last update before it became abandonware, they made updates cryptographically signed to make it more difficult for people to jailbreak it. The hardware is pretty and the keyboard is nice but the battery is really bad. It lasts only a few hours and takes forever to charge. And if the battery is depleted, it takes too long to get to the charge level necessary for using it even while plugged. Please don't buy this.

If I understood correctly, Pilate lived during the empire, a few centuries after the system described in the blog post (middle republic).

The press release contains a few errors and imprecisions. The abstract from the scientific article is more informative:

In this paper, we present BodyTrak, an intelligent sensing technology that can estimate full body poses on a wristband. It only requires one miniature RGB camera to capture the body silhouettes, which are learned by a customized deep learning model to estimate the 3D positions of 14 joints on arms, legs, torso, and head. We conducted a user study with 9 participants in which each participant performed 12 daily activities such as walking, sitting, or exercising, in varying scenarios (wearing different clothes, outdoors/indoors) with a different number of camera settings on the wrist. The results show that our system can infer the full body pose (3D positions of 14 joints) with an average error of 6.9 cm using only one miniature RGB camera (11.5mm x 9.5mm) on the wrist pointing towards the body [...].

Mutations also happen in one individual. This gene then enters the pool of the population, and it can spread. The genes from a hybrid individual diffuse into the population when it reproduces. Speciation happens when a population accumulates enough changes to be distinct from other populations of the same original species.

In Spain (and according to a sister comment, in Austria too, so maybe it's EU-wide) the price of every MWh is set by the last MWh that enters the market (apparently it works like an auction). The last to be sold is the most expensive, thus renewables are being priced like combined due to this rule. In fact there was some scandal in Spain I seem to remember because apparently energy companies were doing the expected according to the incentives set, which is manipulating production so that combined is always used, increasing profit by doing nothing.

There are many articles not on sci-hub, especially if they are more or less recent or in niche (and not so niche) topics.

Given that the spying on catalan independentists started under the previous government (right wing, strongly centralist), I wouldn't discard it extended subsequently to the current one (coalition of left wing and extreme left, some of which friendly to catalan nationalists). It remains to be seen if the analysis they are conducting now reveals other members of the government who have been spied too.

I guess this could come from the previous government, rogue elements of the state, or an international actor, but I wonder if we wil be told when and if it is found out.