psunavy03

So you're asking them, aside from objective truth, to also provide objective truth?

The fact that math and physics are provable proves the point. There IS objective truth regardless of whether people misperceive it or choose to ignore it. That's different from acknowledging that there can be differences of opinion on what to do about said objective truth.

The remit of an intelligence agency is to collect information on foreign entities which have first been proven to exist. The CIA almost certainly isn't trying to recruit agents in the Seelie Court either.

> this they were eroding and moving up river at least three feet per year and eventually would reach Lake Ontario which would empty the lake.

It wouldn't empty the lake. It would merely erode away the escarpment so that water flowed smoothly from one lake to the other.

AR is going to be on the back burner unless miniaturization improves for the price point. The only player in that space I'm aware of is Anduril's EagleEye, which is Son of HoloLens 2 for the Army's IVAS contract. AFAIK Anduril yoinked all the staff and tech from the HoloLens team (or a lot of the staff anyway) when it fell over.

MS and Magic Leap tried to make holographic AR work, but the state of the art wasn't cheap and compact enough for them to make any money on it.

I held a security clearance for 20+ years, and I am not in violation of my NDA to merely observe that government secrets tend to be a lot more mundane than conspiracy theorists often want them to be. Sometimes some really cool engineering is involved, but still.

The laws of physics are what they are, and governments keep things secret to avoid giving their playbooks and sources of information away to adversaries, not because they've re-discovered magic.

Pedantically debating who "Men in Black" are is not the point. My point is they don't actually exist and someone's irrational fear of them should be viewed as what it is: an irrational fear.

> That doesn't mean you should assume any instance of an em-dash means LLM content

No, it doesn't. But people are putting that out there, people are getting accused of using AI because they know how to use em dashes properly, and this is dumb.

And yet no one is ever able to describe what agency or jurisdiction these "men in black suits" will work for.

This basically is just demonstrating how people very very good in their field can still fail Civics 101. Men In Black were some funny movies back in the day, but they were just movies.

What's sillier is people associating em-dashes with AI slop specifically because they are unsophisticated enough never to have learned how to use them as part of their writing, and assuming everyone else must be as poor of a writer as they are.

It's the literary equivalent of thinking someone must be a "hacker" because they have a Bash terminal open.

That says more about your lack of writing skills and understanding of grammar than AI.

Don't we usually find that most of the times people predict some disaster befalling society due to the exponential growth of something, it ends up hitting a limiting factor that stops the exponential growth?

Because what we all need is to see the Ministry of State Security be the most capable intelligence agency in the world . . . wait, no we don't.

Direct democracy can only work if fundamental rights are also protected, otherwise it just turns into the tyranny of the majority.

One of the other things that strikes me about Switzerland compared to the US . . . there is no single President; there is a council, and the position of "head of state" is just a "first among equals" role which rotates through the council.

The older I get, I think one of the major flaws of the US system was creating a sole President. The great strengths of the US Constitution over many European ones (even given today's craziness) is that it explicitly sets up checks and balances amongst both the branches of the Federal government and between the states and the Feds. And it also uses the Bill of Rights to essentially ban even the most popular laws if they infringe fundamental human rights.

But despite all that, the singular President has turned into a king-like figure, because we can't seem to get around the fundamental human tendency to want a strongman leader. And this along with toxic partisanship is beginning to corrode everything I mentioned above. I really wonder if the Founders made a mistake not splitting executive power up amongst 3-5 people, merely because it might have counteracted this "worship the strong man" tendency in the human psyche.

I could understand the beetroot when I was Down Under, but the pineapple just had me go "?" similarly to when I was served eggs, pasta, and mushrooms for breakfast.

From an American perspective, this is flat-out not the case. The majority of American servicemembers come from the middle three quintiles of income - it is literally a middle-class institution. It IS an alternative means to acquire a college education for the lower middle class, but the bottom quintile, the truly poor, generally do not qualify to serve.

from primordial_chaos import Universe

# TODO: This is a complete hack that needs to be refactored, but it works for now.

def quantum_physics() -> Universe:

As a former Navy officer, the best description I ever heard of a conventionally powered submarine is "a mobile minefield." Nuclear is a different story.

OP seems to be blurring the lines between standard interservice banter and actually thinking their platform is the center around which all military operations revolve, which is something people generally grow out of after their first tour of duty.

I'm sorry, I thought the Secretary of Defense looked down on people using preferred pronouns.

Having had kidney stones, they're both used. I think for the sonic one they put you in a water bath because it conducts better. But as I understand it, the docs can pick whichever one is more optimal, be it shattering the stone sonically or zapping it with a laser.

This happens in tech as well. It's called COBOL and it refuses to go away, despite lots of people's best efforts.

I spent 20 years active and reserve in the US Navy, I'm a War College grad, and I'm well versed in what naval assets can and can't do, and what their strengths and weaknesses are.

This last bit above is just pure entertainment.

"In question" != "proven." Sure, Tom Clancy wrote a whole chapter on what would or wouldn't have happened if the Backfires had sortied from Murmansk. But it's funny how the people who push the idea of carriers being obsolete are the military equivalent of the chattering classes, not the people whose job it is to fight and win wars.

Armchair admirals can pontificate all they want.

Yes, 40 years ago, a submarine sunk a WWII cruiser. ASW is a thing, and subs are a legitimate threat. But this is also why we have submarines, because the best tool for hunting a submarine is another submarine. But claiming this magically makes aircraft carriers obsolete is largely internet fanboy noise.

The US military trains and fights as a team, and the entire point is to use the strengths of one platform to protect the weaknesses of another and vice versa.

While I support inter-branch shit-talking, even from you bubbleheads, when push comes to shove, CVNs aren't "targets" for SSNs. We're on the same team, fighting against our true enemies . . . the Army and the Air Force.

This "news" was 20 years ago.

The point is that the unions are there to allow the pilots to advocate for all kinds of safety-of-flight related things like fuel reserves, crew rest, and so forth that management would be happy to cut to save money. And to do so without fear of retaliation.

And if you don't think the airlines would love to lobby Congress about the regulatory backstop, well . . .

And the reason why those fuel reserves exist is to be a guard band allowing situations like this to happen without flames, wreckage, and death.

Having worked with many US airline pilots over the years, this is also why they are so proud to be unionized. Sure, senior pilots make as much as some FAANG developers, but the union is also there so that management doesn't get bright ideas about things like cutting fuel reserves to cut costs without the union telling them to stuff it.

Internet vibes, basically.