inglor_cz

Most of the ethnicities/nations that adapted Roman way of life did not attempt to secede from Roman rule for centuries after that, if ever.

While it is true that learning from Rome was very useful for its later challengers, this usually was not the primary motivation for adoption of Roman culture, especially before ~ 400 AD. It was more about the higher standard of living plus legal stability, as long as Rome could enforce its Pax.

Politicization of science is never good.

The "pots aren't people" wave wouldn't be problematic per se (e.g. obviously a lot of non-Latin ethnicities adapted Roman way of life), rather because it sought to be the dominant theory.

We have a very similar "intelligence and nature-vs-nurture" situation in biology, caused by the very same thing - defeat of the Nazis, which made some ideas extremely dirty and other ideas very attractive.

This has an interesting consequence in that we do not know much about natural human intelligence today, which is coming back to bite us in the age of emerging artificial intelligence. The topic of human intelligence has been a political minefield for nearly a century now. It is probably safer and easier to study intelligence of octopuses and crows than that of humans. You're definitely freer from political repercussions there.

Maybe China hasn't yet spent enough money to foment "grassroots" movements against data centers in Malaysia?

Given the globally relevant character of AI, I would be very surprised if all the anti-AI sentiment on English language social networks was organic.

We humans are vulnerable to anthrax or sarin as well, but countries exhibit restraint in using such agents, because retaliation would be gruesome. Having someone going full rogue with cyberattacks could even unite the US and China temporarily in order to whack them.

"Seatback entertainment in aircraft are not critical."

Until it is. Swiss Air Flight 111 went down with 229 lives lost because of a new infotainment system whose electrical cables started sparkling.

Yes, not every part of a critical system is critical. Determining which is which is a complicated task, though, as parts interact. Not too long ago (and by this I mean within my lifetime), we were ignorant enough about our own bodies to think that our microbiota was almost irrelevant to our health and that bad teeth were mostly a cosmetic problem.

Back to IT, Heartbleed was caused by addition of a feature that looked as harmless as you could think of. But it wasn't.

Judging real critical-ness of bugs is hard. Yeah, capitalization of an error message is likely harmless, but I would treat, say, any buffer overflow as serious.

This is probably inevitable once you combine winner-takes-all voting systems with the organized hysteria that is social networks.

Given that many of us here have helped the latter emerge and dominate the entire societal discourse, we should meditate somberly upon the law of unintended consequences. It certainly did not look this way when it started, but social networks are a major channel for hate and allow the worst of the worst to set standards for everyone else.

Frankly if AI can mitigate this, it would be a positive development and I would tolerate all the sickly-sweet sycophancy if it also steered people away from hating one another with passion.

Once upon a time, there was also the Soviet propaganda effort in the West. Many of the Cold War reactors could be used to produce not just electricity, but fission material for nuclear warheads. Meaning that if you could persuade big countries to give up nuclear energy for good, you'd also reduce your adversary's capability to build and maintain their nuclear arsenal, or preempt its future acquisition in the first place.

It is still quite tribal, with whole mutually hostile clans that stem from a particular professor or workplace. Plus the economy of academy tends to be quite zero-sum.

Also, the US academy specifically cares about your race a lot.

I was told by the cardiologist who ordered both scans that MR results are very precise, while ultrasound is more of an "orientation scan" and small variations in how the doctor holds the probe and interprets the picture can add up to milimeters of difference. If there is a discrepancy, MR is the gold standard for decisions about treatment.

This was at IKEM in Prague, one of the best cardio units around, so I trust their judgment.

https://www.ikem.cz/en/

On a similar personal note, I had a half-year health scare that ended just today.

In May, they told me on ultrasound that my dilated aortic root has grown by more than 2 mm in the last year and that if the progression does not stop, an operation will sooner or later be necessary.

I got a referral to magnetic resonance and had to wait for it until October. Was there last week, nervous. Today I got the result: compared to the MR from 2021, there is no progression at all. The same 44 mm as then. The ultrasound was just not as precisely done, or the doctor measured it slightly askew or what.

Ooof.

I would argue than no one is really competent in a language that has been dead and unused for millennia.

The entire cultural context of that society and work is gone and we have but a few shards thereof.

This really reminds you of the Chernobyl station computer printing all the warnings and recommendations to shut the reactor down when they started playing around with it ... and Comrade Dyatlov overriding it.

Dyatlovs seem to be born everywhere.

"bypissing procedures"

I know that this was likely a typo, but it is also a genuinely great word for the sort of attitude related to these situations.

I started thinking about agentic programming from a totally different perspective.

Personal accountability in software development is actually hard, and less useful than it seems. What good is it if you discover a 12 y.o. vulnerability and can blame a specific person? (Like the recent one in PHP?) You may learn the name of that programmer who made the mistake, but it does not really tell you anything about that person, unless their overall record is terrible, and you are not entitled to any damages anyway.

In closed source, this is even worse. So a certain Windows function sucks. Now what. You never learn any other provenience than "Microsoft did it". Tough luck even getting support, and you certainly don't get your license fee back. This sort of accountability is worse than useless.

The only exception I see is knowledge within a specific development team. We usually know what sort of errors our colleagues are prone to, and we may be able to work around their personal weak spots.

Agentic coding done well has a dimension of trust that human coding cannot achieve. I can tell my agents to aim for 100 per cent test coverage without overburdening them or running out of budget and time. I can ask other agents and other models to review code written by the first agents, and then again. Every layer of such review adds some credibility to the result, and its mechanistic character ensures certain level of repeatability. Sure, it can happen that all involved mechanisms share the same weakness and let a particular bug through. But it is similar to several sieves over one another lining up perfectly to let something through, and that is quite rare.

If I had to choose, I would trust code designed, implemented and reviewed by three different SOTA models over code designed, implemented and reviewed by three median programmers today. Three elite programmers would have been a different story, but that would also be expensive like hell, and much like you don't eat most of your dinners in a Michelin restaurant, you have to economize with your code development in a similar way.

While this is indeed not how trees work, it puts the number into a useful perspective.

Finland, comparable in size to Montana, is basically one huge forest (75% tree cover) dotted with lakes, and a lot of those forests are harvested every year. Of the entire EU, this is probably the place where trees are the least rare.

250 thousand trees cut down in England would have been a very different story.

This is quite similar situation indeed. It was once easier to adopt the metric system when the infrastructure was not yet as developed around the previous ones.

Austria-Hungary adopted the metric system in the 1870s. Back then: no cars, no highways, no speeding laws etc. Oxen-drawn wagons in the countryside were not built to a precise spec.

Only the railway, the architects and the artillery had to really switch. Ordinary people would still ask the grocer for half a pound of ham in the 1930s.

USA in the 1970s would have to remeasure all the land communications etc., or end up with a weird hybrid like the UK.

WHat we have in IPv4 and IPv6 is the weird UK-like hybrid...

This reminds me of the following XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/927/

Now this is an interesting map.

First impression: Poland stronk. Even Czechia strong. Charles IV.'s realm restored. Russia in shambles, not a very efficient conqueror of the address space. And the glory of Rome restored, with pitiful Constantinople looking at their backs from afar.

Second impression: Morocco, Kenya, Egypt and South Africa as the African heavy-weights. Corresponds to what I know.

Third impression: the real bosses are Taiwan and South Korea - just wow.

"You might be not interested in the war, but the war is interested in you."

The point about finding problems in documented processes (Enveda: manufacturing and filings) is unexpected but interesting. One of our civilizational problems is that the sheer volume of documentation has slowly exceeded capabilities of humans to produce it reliably and without flaws.

Same applies to construction projects, BTW.

I found this essay interesting in the "out-of-the-box" sense. In a time when anti-AI sentiment dominates everywhere, its author argues that AI can actually bring people back from the fringes where social media pushed them.

Unfortunately only paid subscribers can comment there, and I am not one. I would definitely ask him about at least one failure mode: if you simply omit some information from the learning context. Chinese models will likely never hear about Tiananmen Square Massacre, and a Chinese user will get "accurate" information in that context only.

"real cost of production is unknown due to skirting of copyright laws"

Copyright laws themselves are not completely "real", not in the sense that digging coal out of the ground is. They were once tailored for Disney to maximize its profit; now that Disney is no longer the juggernaut it once was, they may be re-tailored to maximize the profits of the new juggernauts.

IDK if things are fundamentally different in Czechia, but I talked to a lot of Czech NIMBYs and they almost never mention home prices. What they usually obsess about is change in a neighborhood that they are used to and want to keep intact. The resentment against new people and new buildings is just palpable, even if the newcomers would be solid middle class.

Noise and dust from construction are often mentioned as well. Construction means heavy trucks entering places where they usually don't intrude.

Reason, absolutely yes, but capability, no.

Arianespace has been for decades an extension of the French government, which needed at max several launches per year and didn't give a damn about its market share. As a result, it is seriously behind in reusable rocket development. The space port in Kourou may be the most underused space port in the world, even though its location is unbeatable.

I am not sure if this gap can be closed. Maybe some of the smaller startups like Isar Aerospace can do it, but the giants are ossified Molochs. Not that Boeing is any better, ever since absorbing MacDonnell Douglas and its pathological management structure.

All library projects, certainly not.

But the top 1 percent by usage/downloads, I can imagine, and PHP probably qualifies into that top slice.

I'd say that for someone like PHP, in this era of AI-driven vulnerability/patch race, having a private CI/CD pipeline is a necessity.

PHP is written in C, I'd be surprised if similar problems didn't lurk in other places.

Maybe they will construct the private pipeline after this crisis. Millions of websites are probably now waiting for all the downstream Docker images to be built and pushed.

"suffering aside."

This is precisely the thing that cannot be put aside without making the solution much less useful / efficient / solution-esque.

After reading this sentence, I don't trust the author. Misleading as hell.

The success of GLP-1 is based on the fact that the patient can eat less without suffering. No food noise, reduced feelings of hunger, smaller stomach capacity.

Saying that the platitude works is like saying that "just stop doing fentanyl" is the recipe to solve the fentanyl crisis in the US.

In German, you can also use the word Küken, which is very clearly a cognate of English chicken.

Know this song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Yce3AxF9c

It is my impression that the topic is being constantly rehashed precisely because the effects of GLP-1s are observed to be significantly more pronounced than what can be attributed to the weight loss alone.