gustavus

> The law prohibits any program, office or initiative that has “diversity, equity and inclusion” in its name or “asserts that meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist.” It also requires student support services to be open to all students, outlawing efforts that focus on students of certain races or genders.

The actual meat of the article, either good or bad depending on your viewpoint.

> To picture that dimension, Vafa said, think of every point on the imagined surface of our four-dimensional world and attach a small loop to it. That loop is (at least schematically) the extra dimension.

So I'm not a physicists and don't have much more than a layman's understanding of all this. But isn't this just Kaluza-Klien all over again, and how is it any different than string theory?

Like really honestly for me the bigger headline is that "String theorist makes testable prediction".

I really question that, id believe that 300,000 jobs from tech companies have been lost, but 40% of all tech jobs. Sounds like nonsense, especially since the source is an outplacement company.

I'll admit that I am somewhat ignorant here. But I thoughts the "Alzheimer's is caused by plaque buildup in the brain" theory was on its last leg and pretty much disregarded by most new scientists.

MS's core product offering is the same as AWS being an already approved vendor to buy from, so no one has to go through approvals process for them again. Thus they are a defacto monopoly within large organizations. Who cares what the actual value add is it checks all the boxes required by law and they have a huge expense account to get the win.

I work in the security space. It is the dawn of an era where all the makers are stamped down under the boot ridiculous security theater via regulation for "security" and "protection" and the current interests become entrenched to ensure a couple of guys in their garage can no longer upset the behemoths of the tech space.

Intellectual property isn't.

You know I hear this argument a lot, but had a revelation recently. Everything people are saying about apps and the app store could apply equally well to web browsers and webpages. After all there are plenty of malicious webpages out there that can do bad things, but we decided that it is fine, that's a risk we as society are willing to take. The alternative is to allow large organizations like the state and corporations to tell us what we can and can't do with devices we own and what we can or can't look at.

In conclusion "Information wants to be free."

This seems like part of an ongoing campaign to demonize open source models in an attempt to ensure only the "right" people have access to it and so that only those who have been "approved" can take advantage of this. By which they mean those in corporate and political power and their allies, for "safety".

And for anyone arguing that this time it really is too dangerous and we need the big benevolent administrative state to watch over it this time, you guys would've been screaming the same thing about the Internet when it first came out. So thank Stallman that you yahoos lost then, I pray to Vint Cerf you lose again.

"Information wants to be free."

> Analyzing the relationship between GDP per hour growth

I cannot think of a more contrived metric than "GDP per hour growth" this reeks of someone who already had an opinion and wanted to prove it and the best they could come up with is to prove it doesn't for sure help productivity.

"I come in and mostly stare at my computer so it looks like I'm working. I'd say in a given week I only do about 15 minutes of actual work. It's a problem of motivation if I bust my ass and Initech ships a few extra units I don't see a dime of that. So where's the motivation Bob?"

I'm between a 1/8 and a 1/4 dutch and I emphasize with what the speaker is saying, sounds like the Dutch may be my people.

I find this subject interesting because it isn't as cut and dry as it looks. The problem is attackers took data and leaked passwords from previous breaches and then were able to access an account. The question becomes what should 23andme have done in the first place?

You provided a valid password and username so why wouldn't they grant access?

Now being able to harvest a bunch of other people's data after is more problematic but I find it an interesting edge case as 23andme performed the function they were supposed to of allowing access to an account to people that had credentials. Should they have forced MFA? Where does the users responsibility for choosing appropriate passwords and an organizations responsibility for deciding of their own volition not to let someone in, end and begin?

At the scales were talking about it's somewhere between Going to the beach and getting shot by a swimming dog carrying a gun in its mouth and the problems caused by doing flybys of Jupiter.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/146/

I see people claim this all the time but don't often see any real solutions just general grousing.

What would you do? Get rid of mobile computing altogether by government fiat? Ban providing a smart phone to someone under the age of 18? What about tablets and computers, how would one even enforce that? Would you force kids together to socialize for a period of time which is just as likely to develop trauma as relationships?

The only reasonable solution I've heard to the phone problem is individual parents getting involved and active in monitoring and limiting their children screen time, and unfortunately, involved parenting is not something that can be legislated into existence.

I've been noticing when I was growing up weed was in fact the cure to all problems people had depression, anxiety, anger issues? "Smoke a joint man it makes everything okay." People were out there claiming weed cured cancer, that the whole reason weed wasn't legal is because the evil pharmaceutical industrial complex didn't want people to do it because it would cure all their problems, that weed had absolutely no bad side effects and if everyone was just puffing all day all their problems would go away, etc. etc. Well weed became legal in most places and research started being done and it turns out weed didn't cure everyone's problems, weed does have side-effects and risks with using it, especially if you smoke or vape it, and it isn't the magical silver bullet to all mental health issues.

I feel like I am seeing the same cycle happen again with psychedelics, especially shrooms and LSD.

Or maybe you know she shouldn't have said that calls to "gas the Jews" requires context to determine if it constituted hate speech.

Or if she hadn't plagarized massive amounts of her work continually without accreditation and then threaten retaliation against those that brought up the issue, like in this letter: https://freebeacon.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Complaint2...

That might've had something to do with it. But no I think you're right that evil Elon Musk and the ultra-MAGA twitter overlords are the ones who caused her to be kicked out. Not to mention the racism as she said "threats fueled by racial animus." it wasn't her fault she plagiarized it was the evil white patriarchial system that forced her to.

> 1. If mass incarceration worked, the US would be the safest country in the world. The US has 5% of the world population but 25% of the world's prisoners [1]. The US has the highest rate of incarceration of any country in the world [2];

I keep hearing this and I just have a hard time believing it. Like okay maybe technically Saudi Arabia does have fewer people in prison than the US but that's because the punishment for theft is having your hand removed rather than going to jail, I guess yes technically that isn't prison, but generally in an elightened society we moved away from those methods of punishment for the most part. Then of course China, I mean China also consistently reported the lowest COVID numbers, and are their numbers including people all those Uighyr's that are undergoing "reeducation"?

Honestly every time I hear this I get the same feeling as when the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women condemns the US treatment of women's rights despite having on it's board such well known champions of Women's rights as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Suadi Arabia, The Russian Federation and Turkey. Something just seems to not smell quite right.

You are correct to an extant although there are mandatory sentencing guidelines, and plea bargains play into this.

But at the end of the day my point is to help introduce nuance to the discussion which often seems to be an argument between a loud group that advocates that everyone in prison is just a misunderstood jan valjean that was a victim of circumstance and should be helped instead of punished, and those who feel that criminals are need to be punished for violating the social contract and are sociopath threats to an orderly and just society. The first group likes to point to young people who had incredibly difficult environments as justification for their point whereas the latter group points to child molesters and cold blooded gang members for their point.

Both exist, both should be taken into account, and trying to depict all criminals as one or the other leads to nonsensical, impracticable ignorant solutions that come more from a desire to feel right than actually doing good.

This fuels my growing distrust of academia. The person who is the president of one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the world it turns out has been consistently violating some of the most basic principles of academic integrity. Beyond that there is questions if this individual was qualified for the position in the first place or if they were selected on account of other factors.

So maybe sometimes it pays to be skeptical of "the experts".

I mean not to argue against your point, but Federal prisoners are generally not going to have committed violent crimes as those kind of crimes are the purview of the state and lead to state incarceration not federal.

Here's something I've noticed recently is that people on different sides of the issue usually end up talking past each other.

I'll start by pointing out I feel that the prison system is incredibly in humane and we need serious prison reform to a large degree. But I think there needs to be some understanding that there isn't a one size fits all solution, on one end you have a kid of a crack addict who gets in with the wrong crowd and ends up getting busted for being involved in an armed robbery because his buddy asked for "help" with something. Is the proper solution to throw the book at this kid and put him away for 20-30 years? Probably not.

On the flip side you have serial killers like Ted Bundy or the BTK killer, those people don't need rehabilitation they're simply monsters and deviants that need to be removed from society forever.

Any discussion that fails to acknowledge both of these groups exist is probabaly fallacious.

I love how people act like Meritocracy is oppressive, or something like that mertiocracy is as simple as this.

You have a choice of two surgeons to operate on you for a rare and risky surgery. One has 80% of his patients die on the operating table the other has 10% of his patients die on the operating table. Which one are you going to choose? That's meritocracy

Another example, you need to hire a carpenter. Both your neighbors recently had to hire a carpenter. The neighbor on the right hired a carpenter that showed up late, overcharged, and did shoddy work that is already coming undone. The neighbor on the other side hired a carpenter that was punctual, did good work and finished ahead of schedule. Which carpenter are you going to choose? Congratulations you're reinforcing the "Myth" of meritocracy.

Ya so if some kid whose 16 is messing around on his computer figures out some cool app starts publishing it and then bam the incumbents can smack him down.

The regulations are designed to deepen the software moat, and security theater, and I say this as an InfoSec professional.

> exactly as it was in Germany.

Oh you mean the Germany that had to turn to massive amounts of coal to keep up energy production in order to keep their people from starving because clean energy didn't pan out. Sounds like a great example especially when climate change is an existential threat to the entire human race.

Hey I remember seeing this before in another European country. Can't remember the name of it, decided to shut down nuclear, renewables didn't turn out, put them in a precarious position when the geopolitical situation changed. Can't remember exactly what happened after that. Anyway I am sure it all worked out fine in the end.

I have a story from a client I worked with. They had 3 or 4 positions they needed filled for their team ranging from Jr to Sr level. But because they worked at a big company they couldn't do the recruiting directly, everything had to be through HR. While the problem was their assigned HR person was unresponsive and slow on the uptake and then took a huge vacation. So they just started looking at the applications that had been submitted through the portal and asking the division's secretary to reach out and start setting up appointments. Time to interview and make a decision on people went from literal months to 2-3 weeks.

Unfortunately this isn't a happy ending to the story. HR threw a hissy fit that they were being sidestepped (because they were completely incompetent ninnies.) And management had to come down on the manager who was doing it and tell him to follow the process.

Yeah and all those people on the other side of the Appalachians can just take a hike, why do they need power anyway. They brought the problem on their selves with their dirty coal mining habits time for them to pay the price.

Ya that's a level of unmitigated bull** where I live there is usually several days out of the year where the temperature is -40 (doesn't matter the units at that temperature it's the same) and massive wind chill. There's not really a reasonable way to heat a houseduring the day and have it remain warm with tempratures like that without major changes to the way houses are built.

This seems like the quintessential example of some Cali tech bro nor understanding that there is anyone outside of their little bubble and assui everyone just lives like them.

It seems to me that having a couple of nuclear reactors as base load spread throughout the country would be more useful than having a massive spread out battery & solar infrastructure.

I mean as an example many companies, especially PG&E can't maintain adequate powerlines, who is banking on the fact that they'll do an even better job when we quintuple the amount of infrastructure and they have to develop a whole new domain of expertise based in battery technology.

Not to mention even the supposedly clean, solar and batteries, still have an enormous amount of carbon emissions involved in their supply chain, and need to be replaced on a fairly regular basis.