omginternets

Applying a bit of abduction, I see two narratives that track:

1. Some other illicit activity was going on in or around that plane.

2. The pilot thought he could make the whole mess go away by erasing physical evidence of the crash; his reasoning might be along the lines of "no evidence, no feds".

I find both equally credible. I'm stumped.

One thing stands out to me:

>The consumption of insoluble fiber tended to be more effective than soluble fiber intake in reducing the risk of total mortality and mortality due to CVD and cancer.

My hunch is that this is an epiphenomenon, and that what's actually happening is:

1. people eating large amounts of soluble fiber are consuming fiber supplements (e.g. psyllium husk); and,

2. people eating large amounts of insouable fiber are eating salads, etc.

Hello! No rush -- I'm happy resume discussion later, after you've gathered the necessary info.

In the meantime, I'm noting a few things from your comments. Can you confirm my impressions are correct?

1. Field communications are difficult, presumably due to Russian signals intelligence.

2. Russians have a weaponry advantage. Presumably this is mainly driven by artillery? Last I heard, airspace is still contested. Is that still the case?

Taken together, I'm under the impression field mobility and coordination is a challenge. Indeed, this is why my mind jumped to car parts, batteries and radio. Do you find yourselves needing to do things on foot? If so, I'm sure I could figure out a way to send things like socks, footwear and rain gear.

Also, please let me know if there are any supplies that could help with morale. I've also spent some time in a fox hole, so I know how much little things like coffee and chocolate can mean to someone after several days of rain or snow.

If you would prefer to speak about this somewhere else, I have a Matrix account I'm happy to share with you.

Are you saying we shouldn't be suspicious of causality, here?

The Google keyword for you is “deontology”.

Addendum: I suppose the point would be that special-interest lobbying is corrupting academia.

Thanks for the conversation. This has been interesting :)

Are you guys in need of any specific supplies?

Coffee? Batteries? Radios? Car parts?

I’m taking bets that there will be exceptions.

Seriously, any takers?

Those states have a hell of a lot more variance in their government systems than other modern republics, e.g. in Western Europe. I think your calibration is way off on this topic.

It’s explicitly against the site rules.

Ask him? I'd encourage you not to make it a loaded question, though.

>It's difficult to tell where the initiatives are coming from because the willingness to write and accept empty claims of relevance appears to exist at all levels and stages in the process.

Is it, though? In the case of DEI, it appears to me (on the surface, anyway) that these initiatives are being implemented at the request of very vocal special-interest groups, and at the orders of the politicians who represent them. It seems like a fairly straightforward case of lobbying by institutions whose existence depends on the existence of a social problem. It's a rough analog to Eisenhower's Military-Industrial Complex idea.

The same is true with what you call "questionably applied number theory". The only difference is that special-interest group isn't defined along ethno-racial lines, but instead comprises various bean-counters and ad-men who sell various forms of investment.

In my view, there used to be a consensus that such lobbyists were not welcome in universities, or at least not in droves, because of their tendency to subvert intellectual pursuits in favor of short-term profits.

That's a separate point (and we'd be largely in agreement, I suspect).

In fact, I'm sure you've noticed the heaps of government-funded software trash.

Come now, the charitable interpretation is that the OP is not considering dictatorship as the alternative to democracy.

The United States of America is a republic, my friend.

>The problem is, our brain is constructing reality, it can 'make things up', this has been shown in countless studies. And now that we have AI doing it too, it seems like easy association to make.

I'm with you until this pair of sentences because I believe you are confusing ontological subjectivity (which is fine, for our purposes) with epistemic subjectivity (which isn't).

Hallucination is an ontologically subjective phenomenon, requiring an experiencer to experience it. "Making shit up" similarly implies an "intentional stance" (Dennett), wherein the AI agent is constructing a world model as it interacts with the world. That isn't required to arrive at a "stochastic parrot" that spouts nonsense.

"Generating nonsense" is closer to what the AI is doing. It's generating text that we are unable to interpret, not revealing its errors of reasoning through its speech. It's not reasoning; it's generating tokens.

tl;dr: Ontological vs epistemic subjectivity. There's no reason to affirm AI is hallucinating because there's no reason to affirm its experiencing anything.

(Please forgive my multiple edits; it's a clumsy-words kind of day.)

>where there's no such thing as basic research anyway

Did you mean "applied research"?

>It's not like there's a shortage of it especially in the humanities and social sciences (where there's no such thing as basic research anyway).

Careful where you cast stones, my friend. There is a lot of bullshit in software engineering, too.

Gestures towards pile of discarded JS frameworks...

At the risk of being controversial, the latter half of your statement tracks very well with my experience of organizational DEI initiatives, in particular. We have reached a point where tenure-track faculty are expected to provide justification, in writing, for the value of their research to various marginalized communities. That alone wouldn't be a huge deal if conference talks, research funding and, increasingly, tenure committees weren't being similarly pressed to provide these kinds of justification.

From where I'm standing (I hold a Ph.D in a scientific field, and my spouse is a tenure-track academic), an unsustainable portion of academic work consists in justifying one's research program, on grounds that have little to do with the subject of study.

It should hopefully be obvious that I'm not trying to stir a DEI flame war. Rather, I can't shake the feeling that DEI activism isn't accomplishing much beyond creating bureaucraty, and that this benefits neither research in general, nor marginalized groups trying to establish themselves in academia.

Anyway, this seems like a specific instance of a larger trend you're pointing to. Possibly not even the largest or most absurd one.

100% agreed. I've noticed major differences between companies that are deliberately organized to facilitate remote work, and companies that deep down wish they could convince people to RTO.

The difference is palpable in, for example, whether and how explicit norms around asynchronous communication are implemented, whether office budget is repurposed into services and materials that enable remote work (including, for example, company offsites), etc.

It's obvious that certain jobs require in-person presence, but I think the big reveal is that most white-collar jobs don't.

If you want to equate "emergence" with "making something up", then fine, I guess. I'm just not sure what what you can possibly conclude from that equivalence.

>Note: if the result is someone reporting having made a decision before brain activity is seen, my next question is going to be "How does that work?"

My Ph.D is actually about this. Here's a paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

We don't "make up" consciousness, but yes, there is a processing latency of around 250-300ms.

It's worth noting that as of 2020, Subaru is running an entirely new platform for their cars, and it has been remarkably solid. The FA24 engine, in particular, appears to be running unusually generous tolerances for things like cylinder pressure, oil pressure, manifold pressure/temps, etc.

For tuners it's been a box of wonders. For ordinary consumers, that maps directly to reliability.

If you google around, you'll see mention of head gasket problems in association with Subaru. This issue has been resolved for the better part of 20 years. Today, the intersection of people who blow up Subaru engines and people who drive like drunk, teenage morons is effectively a perfect circle.

Are you modded or tuned at all? I've admittedly fallen into that rabbit hole, and been steadily getting drawn into mechanical engineering. The WRX is such an easy platform to hack on, it's crazy. It's right up there with the Miata, it seems.

Whoops. Semantic collision with Tony Hoare ^^

Very possibly. Still not sure what to make of these rankings though…

> they would have probably released an STI variant for the new body :(

Pow, right in the feels :’)

But in reality, I suspect this has more to do with the following two things:

1. The STi package has always had abysmal fuel economy, and I believe there are regulations that enforce an average fuel economy across an entire manufacturers fleet

2. Many (most?) of the modders and hooners are put off by the price. In fact, most aren’t really interested in a track car, but rather in a cheap, fast box to drag race between traffic lights.

P.s. the new BRZ might also be stealing a bit of the market, despite the reverse-Zoolander issue it faces with oil pressure…

Maybe something changed? Subarus used to suffer head gasket failures, and still suffer from this reputation despite the fact that it’s been fixed for nearly two decades.

Does this account for driving habits? I’ve just purchased a Subaru WRX, and I can’t fight the feeling that the reliability score is in some way influenced by the hoards of idiots that flock to this car for its tuning and hooning potential.

I think you're probably right, though I'm lacking a non-superficial explanation of what this means at a societal level.