goethes_kind

I am especially disgusted by the German leaders. Especially Robert Habeck. To think I could have voted for him. Even Macron who is as Machiavellian as they come didn't put his full support behind Israel.

Both sides have extremists who resort to terrorism, but ultimately, the Palestinians are still the victims, and the Israelis do hold the power and therefore the responsibility to put an end to the conflict.

There is sort of this weird cognitive dissonance that happens in the brains of first worlders. When they see a rich developed country oppressing a poorer powerless people. They recognize the wrong, but they sort of accept it as some sort of inevitability. When the poorer people then dare resort to violence, the first worlders are then suddenly aghast with horror.

How much do you protest the settlements in the West Bank? How much did you protest the inhuman statelessness of the Palestinians? How much do you protest when every couple of days Palestinians are murdered with impunity by Israeli settlers? How much do you protest when the IDF decides to intern without any legal recourse anyone of Palestinian descent? How much do you protest when the Palestinian hostages in Israeli prisons are tortured and raped, and even beaten to death? How much do you protest when the IDF targets Palestinian journalists in Gaza on purpose to hide their war crimes? They also bomb their families too. How much do you protest when the IDF targets medical infrastructure in Gaza? How much do you protest when Israeli IDF snipers murder civilians at random for sport, including journalists, (foreign) peace activists, Christians, medical personnel and children?

They are nothing more than pimps grooming naive teenage girls into selling their bodies.

Because smart moral people don't let themselves be used for evil and smart people also have options to work elsewhere. The guy knew he was going to get fired and he did not care because he was already determined not to work for an evil employer.

He could have left quietly, but he decided to take a personal hit to bring awareness to the issue. That makes him a hero in my eyes.

There's politics and then there's writing code that some Israeli fascist might directly plug into a system that will decide which apartment complex to bomb next.

Both sides have resorted to terrorism. In fact that seems to be the modus operandi for both sides. What Israel does every day is also terrorism. The random bombings on civilians, the targeted bombings on key entities (doctors, journalists, authors, peace activists, ....), the detention without judicial recourse of Palestinians, the torture and rape, beating and murder, that happens during those detentions. The stealing of homes in the west bank, the evictions, the harassment of non-Jews (and even some non-Zionist Jewish sects) in Jerusalem and the west bank. The illegal settlement and the constant bullying and taunting of the armed settlers with their rifles and their IDF body guards. The destruction of all Palestinian means of production, whether it be shops or olive orchards. That is all terrorism and that has been happening for decades.

But that the end of the day, Israel IS the oppressor and the Palestinians are their victims. That is a very important distinction.

Some comments on this publication: Their approach is to train a learned downsampler of the boundary and initial conditions, and pass it through a learned coarse-grained "simulator", but the output is only a specified target property, not the full PDE solution. The claim is a decrease in training data needed and faster execution.

The limitation is that you need to have a target property of interest which is not always the case when trying to simulate something.

The paper as it is written is very low quality. They basically ran no real benchmarks and ignored all the other work on this topic. They used a plain NN to act as a baseline and their justification for this was that if you used any of the other published surrogate models to predict a target property you would end up with a NN. This is not a good faith comparison at all. Besides that, they also only ran very tiny experiments which is not where the need for surrogate models lies. And even the layout of the paper is very chaotic.

Unrelated question: Is Nature considered a low quality journal for ML papers?

The way I read this article it's an old guard of elite trying to warn you about the new guard of elite. The Guardian is bitter that real news does now flow through mainstream publications like theirs anymore, and they and their ilk are relegated to publishing sponsored opinion pieces. And then they accuse Facebook of the same, but at least on Facebook you can still find a variety of different sponsored opinions instead of just one.

At the end of the day, it's almost tautological that you wouldn't want to have any elite at all determining the future, because they won't have your best interests in mind. Duh! But I don't think that is possible, at least not with the current maturity of our social institutions. And as max_ said, these "tech bros" are the only ones with a vision and building something.

I don't get the repeated attempted public lynching of Elon Musk. What did he do so wrong to become so hated by some of the other US elites? Is it simple envy? What's so special about him that draws such negative attention? I am not talking about the general public perception because that is something else entirely. But why do some other American elite capitalists seem so determined to try to put him in his place?

I disagree completely. Once you commit to a very well understood market like consumer vehicles, your growth potential is going to be much more grounded in reality, which means TSLA goes down, which means Tesla has less to work with. Secondly that is really not where their strength lies. Car manufacturing is a fairly competitive market so any innovations they can came up with will only result in a very temporary lead. Plus all the talent they recruited would be wasted if they were just building slightly up market EVs.

I could see Tesla branching out in many sectors and become something like the new Samsung/Siemens/Mitsubishi...etc.

Reading this, it occurred to me that a good conscience is like a high intellect, a gift which only a minority possesses. Most contemporaries of Orwell surely convinced themselves that the way they were behaving was perfectly moral and upstanding. There's very few people that have the capacity to self-reflect and question everything they ever believed in and to pounder the morality and justice of it all. These are the people moving society forward. We wouldn't have arrived to any notion of human rights, personal freedom or democracy without them.

I did not read the article. I skimmed over the Chinese section. I am not Chinese nor do I ever intend to live in China. I skimmed over the Russian and Turkish sections for similiar reasons. I was expecting there to be a section about censorship in western countries: US, UK, Germany ...etc. Disappointing.

I cannot relate to this Michael. When I am in a relationship I have tunnel vision. Prettiest girl in the world could come up to me and I would walk right past her to go spend time with the girl of my obsession. Ironically I feel as though this attitude of mine tends to be detrimental during the dating phase. I give them way too much attention and they lose respect for me.

Honestly I hate this new trend of AI/ML papers not even describing the model anymore. They used a graph neural network model called M3Gnet. It's mentioned in the APPENDIX.

Have you considered being a product owner instead of an individual contributor?

I find it suspicious that they would use user engagement and retention and none of the normal benchmarks to test their model.

Something they don't tell you about Germany: there's loads of corruption that is so normalized that nobody even recognizes it as such. Siemens is one of the big pushers of gas technology in Germany. One of the excuses they use is that eventually they will switch to a hydrogen mix and eventually to pure hydrogen. It's all just an excuse to build more gas turbines and grow/maintain/protect their business.

I think it is interesting that people accuse Germany of being "irrational" while if it was Italy for example, people would immediately call out the corruption.

Interesting anecdote. But I don't envy Fenyman. I would rather be like the guys I know you can just sit down and get to work conscientiously without any such intrusive thoughts whatsoever. Those guys have a superpower they don't appreciate.

I don't think the "weird nerd" who is obsessed with the truth ever existed.

Is the lamentation that academics today are less objective, and presumably the tech and finance workers would have been more objective? I don't think the tech and finance people would have been academics in the precise areas of research that are suffering from an objectivity/truth crisis. Certainly it's not computer engineering that everyone is lamenting about.

As for the supposed objectivity of the "weird nerd", I don't know what to say. I have met more conspiracy theorists in my interactions with "weird nerds" than in my everyday interactions with normal people.

Just guessing but maybe heat pumps have a lower max power rating, so that you'd need better insulation to reach a desired temperature during colder days.

The point is not to get the socialized housing yourself. The point is that the private market rent prices go down, which is objectively true of Vienna.

Governments should just build a bunch of socialized housing and rent it at a rent just high enough to offset the expenditure (i.e. way below private market value). That would put downward pressure on rents. That is what Vienna did and they are the only popular city in Europe without a serious housing crisis.

"Season battery storage" sounds very wrong to me. Maybe he is talking about some kind of flow battery where you can just add more tanks of electrolyte. But we don't have that yet.

I was talking about carbon neutral synthetic kerosene which is a step beyond green hydrogen in the power-to-gas pipeline.

Maybe I am naive, but let's say that using liquid hydrogen instead of synthetic kerosene would use 1/3 of the input energy. OK. To me, it seems way more feasible to triple the amount of input energy capacity (build more solar, wind, nuclear, ...whatever), than to completely redesign aviation around a fuel with such unforgiving constraints. What am I missing?

Is electric propulsion even viable for passenger jets?

Stealing money and fraud are very serious crimes, because they have the power to completely destroy a person's life, just as much as a punch or a kick can, in fact much more.

Every industry is trying to claim that every other industry is THE worrying source of GHG emissions. And every individual points out at the activities of others as being more polluting.

It is all a bit self-serving.

Technical companies tend to be more modestly valued than consumer oriented companies. Why? Maybe part of it is because of the inflation of tech stocks. Maybe because if you are providing a new service or product for a highly technical market, the total possible market capture and subsequent payout for venture capitalists is much more easy to calculate. Maybe because scale is limited. Maybe because the pace of adoption will be slower.

I was thinking about this recently. What is your definition of meaningful work? I am myself also not a fan of consumerism. But is not most of our economy essentially spinning the hamster wheel of consumerism, in one way or another? Think about it. What is the goal of every industry? To keep us alive, fed, clothed, sheltered, safe and healthy. And what is the ultimate goal of reaching this Nirvana of human existence? To be able finally relax and be entertained. It all seems a bit pointless from this vantage point. This line of thinking will end up in you questioning the meaning of life.