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You don't actually own your phone if ownership implies control over your property. You just get to pay for it. This was always the goal of our corporate/government "partnership" AKA fascism.

Can't wait for Windows 12 to have a mandatory S-Mode and a Microsoft account tied to your PII, for your protection. No anonymous writer can publish the 21st Century equivalent of the Federalist Papers and our tyranny is safe.

Absolutely. The closest analogy is the social upheaval and changes in societal institutions resulting from the printing press. Read Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable" for a sketch of the impact of the internet.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20052407

https://www.edge.org/conversation/clay_shirky-newspapers-and...

I used to design PID process controllers in industry. In watching this vid I realized one reason that designing a self-driving car is so difficult. Toward the end, in the process control diagram, he has [Vehicle] as the controlled process. This reminds me of the old math joke about "assume a spherical cow". The difficulty with a self-driving car is that it isn't just the vehicle that has to be controlled but [Vehicle + Current Road] so the controlled process is not just difficult to model but that it is changing all the time and sometimes rapidly.

I think learning it all on your own is not efficient even for a genius. At the very least (assuming you are a genius) you should do a double major in Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering and a minor in philosophy at a mid- or top-tier university. EE and ME are the practical expression of the foundation of classical physics. Einstein's early work was related to integrating these two fields. In short (I am a bit sketchy on the exact details since it has been a while), before Einstein there was an odd inconsistency in Maxwell's equations whereby the results differed if the magnets were moving or the coils were moving in generating electricity. Since all motion is relative, at least mathematically, it should not matter which was moving. Einstein's revolution amounted to modifying the concepts of space and time (using Lorentz transformations) to make that inconsistency go away BUT it is possible that that is not the only possible solution to the puzzle. Once you get your BS degrees you should get your PhD in physics at a mid-tier school or no one will listen to you.

The reason you need to minor in philosophy is to understand the history of the field going all the way back to the Greeks. Most importantly, you need to clearly define a theory of concepts and apply it to fundamental concepts such as existence, consciousness, free will, space and time. Current physics (and math, btw) are vitiated by inconsistent fundamental concepts. In fact, Einstein's concept of spacetime is a denial of consciousness (an axiom) and a deadend. The fundamental concepts in physics should be lightspace and gravitytime to avoid this error. You won't learn much in modern philosophy courses in regard to these issues but you need to understand the history and read Ayn Rand's Philosophy:Who_Needs_It, Introduction_To_Objectivist_Epistemology and the title essay of her anthology For_The_New_Intellectual.

It is always easier to find a job when you have a job. Once you have made the decision to leave then putting up with the on-the-job BS is psychologically easier because it reinforces your decision and you know that you are working on getting out, hopefully soon. Also, in today's environment (lots of tech layoffs incoming) it might take you a year to find a suitable alternative. Make sure you have some savings for the transition, brush up your resume and start networking with friends, asssociates or a head hunter. Do not bad mouth your current employer in interviews and don't tell your employer or any coworkers, that will move you to the top of the layoff list if word gets out.

Check out John D. Cook's blog https://www.johndcook.com/blog/

He has a math consulting business which seems very interesting a cool way to make a living. Maybe you can contact him and get some advice.

I didn't hate or fail math in college but it wasn't my favorite subject in engineering school. Math is now a hobby. In college math was either taught by the math dept. and stressed all the tedious proofs or it was taught in the engineering dept. so we just memorized "recipes" to setup and crank out solutions using math without much foundation or understanding of the math. I know it is a tough line to draw between the theory and the practice/use of math but to me this was the worst possible case and I hated both methods.

A few years out of school I ran across a math problem (not work related) that was interesting enough to dig in to and started hanging out on math stackexchange and later even bought mathematica to help me understand AND solve problems FOR FUN and I was hooked.

I have a modern car (2019) and the auto braking, collision and lane drift alert is a nuisance. False positives are common and there is no way to disable most of it. Some of it can be turned off but as soon as the car is restarted it resets to the default. I've even had the car emergency brake and come to a complete stop in the middle of the road due to a phantom collision. As soon as I pay it off I am going to sell it and roll back to an earlier model without all this mandated, modern tech and keep the older car rolling till I die. We will become like Cuba keeping 50's cars running into the 70's or even the 80's and this time it won't be due to the commies but the fascists.

In my own experience, alternating between bouts of self-doubt, hopelessness and despair followed by episodes of excitement, mania (the good kind) and progress from the fire of a new idea all seems normal and unavoidable to me. You just have to slog through the rough times and keep going. Don't listen to naysayers and don't give up but be sure to take breaks. Keep a journal of what hasn't worked in the past and summarize what you learned. Just writing it will put it in your subconscious for later use and occasionally you'll want to go back and revisit an idea that did not work.

Way back in the 90's in college I took some elective class (I forget the topic) and the prof had a lecture on how controlled burns prevent wildfires. He also said that govt policy was already limiting controlled burns even then and he predicted that in 20 years, unless the policies changed, that we'd be having giant wildfires and here we are.

TIL

Two that I've seen that made me laugh were "escape goat" for "scapegoat" and "water under the fridge" for "water under the bridge", I use these malaprops intentionally now.

Previously discussed here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12918362

They are reversing cause and effect. Initially higher inflation leads to higher revenues booked against historically lower costs of inputs (purchased before the inflation). It ultimately amounts to capital consumption via taxes paid on phantom profits. Any future output will be based on the now higher costs of inputs due to inflation and as long as inflation is increasing some fraction of the profits are illusionary.

It is a horrible way to fund the govt and blaming corporate profits as the cause of inflation is an age old dodge to deflect blame from the govt.

You should read her for yourself. See my comment above.

> The power of Capitalism, on the other hand, comes from its hard-nosed acceptance of humanity at its worst.

I had to stop here because that is such a superficial and erroneous summary of Rand's views (she explicitly argued the opposite) that it indicates he never understood her or is intentionally misrepresenting her ideas or smearing her.

In any case, Rand is not going away and if anyone is interested in why you need to read her books for yourself. She was crystal clear in her writing and you may disagree with her but she will definitely challenge your own beliefs. I recommend starting with The Virtue of Selfishness and Philosophy: Who needs it.

The Tonga Eruption in Dec/Jan of last year is probably a factor.

I think you misunderstood my point -- that isn't my rhetoric but the rhetoric of the banks and current authorities to demonize crypto.

Why is this a surprise to anyone? At bare minimum this was the expected outcome assuming that crypto was legit but nevertheless a means to circumvent the current SWIFT payment system and move money undetected world-wide without tracking and bank carrying charges. Anyone with a modicum of sense knew that there is no way the Feds would allow an alternative to their system of monetary control -- think of the drug dealers and the terrorist! Ask Gaddafi about his plan to circumvent SWIFT and we will have to wait and see how it works out for Xi and Putin and the rest of the BRICS.

That crypto was not strangled in its crib by regulators led me to believe that it was a See-Eye-Aye psyop from the start. The mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto was a S-E-A working group and is still a mysterious, anonymous and retired beneficiary of mankind for inventing bitcoin. It is more than a little suspicious that "he" never claimed billions of dollars worth of crypto owed to him in the first ICO in history. In any case, the goal is now obvious -- to lay the ground work and acceptance for FedCoin or CBDCs, etc. and total control.

Perhaps I wasn't clear. With the rising inflation and interest rates and deteriorating economy people lose their jobs and can't pay their mortgage. My point, and why I thought the line was funny in that article, is that the way SVB failed isn't the only way that banks can fail. Moreover, Tech is currently in a massive round of layoffs and if this spreads to the general economy (which I think it will) then holding large loan balances could become a problem for the banks.

From the Article> Thankfully, loan books make up a much larger share of assets at most other institutions.

I got a laugh on this one. Sure... other banks are safe from loss of client deposits and a bad bet that interest rates won't rise. I'm not so sure that with rising interest rates and a shaky economy these institutions with large loan books won't see too many loan defaults. We are seeing a lot of commercial property defaults already in the big markets. Can't pay your mortgage if you can rent out your skyscapper.

Time is how we perceive the continuity of consciousness in the context of memory (past) and imagination (future). We are only conscious in the present moment and claiming it is an illusion is a denial of consciousness.

All signs lead me to conclude that they want to make Window ?? as locked down as your phone, i.e. strickly a content consumption and user tracking device. Windows 11, which is garbage, is just an incremental step along the way to boil the frog.

> 3. Extracting useful energy would require capturing hot neutrons in a "blanket", heating it up, and running fluid through it to boil water to drive a steam turbine. The minimum practical size for such a "blanket" exceeds that of a large fission plant. To collect enough neutrons to be useful requires a huge volume of plasma, as even compressed plasma is very diffuse vs. fissiles.

I worked as a control systems engineer in the nuclear power industry for 8 years back in the '90s. I worked on Lungmen in Taiwan, ABWRs (Kashiwazaki 6/7) and even Fukushima (power uprates) in Japan and Grand Gulf and Pilgrim in the USA.

Fusion is billed as a "clean" alternative to fission reactors but I think this is (another) false hope of the technology. I still recall my nuke prof telling me that fusion (if it ever works) is going to be an even bigger waste problem than fission reactors. The 15 MEV neutrons are going to neutron-activate tons of shielding or heat extracting blankets which would be a huge disposal problem. He also thought that neutron embrittlement of plant structures was going to be a serious problem and is already a problem in fission plant cores that use thermal neutrons. Carting that waste away at EOL will kill the economics.

We should start building fission plants now which are safe and clean enough and can provide power until something better comes along.

I once went to a lecture on consciousness by a philosopher and he discussed how the mind or awareness is geared toward perceiving differences or the new. He doubted that you could actually be "aware" if all you were ever exposed to was a consistently blue expanse of sky with no clouds or variations in color. (this was years ago and his explanation was probably way better than my paraphrase)

This is also probably related to the fact that your mind is automatically ignoring all sorts of repetitive sensory inputs that it learns is "normal". I've noticed this when I get new glasses with different frames and at first the new frames are noticeable but that quickly fades into the background. If you ever listen to classical music the theme or melody is not just repeated the same across the song but has variations then often returning to the original notes. Following that across the song is part of the appeal and just repeating it would be boring.

Win7 had an occassional timing issue where it would try to start before the profile could be read so it would boot to a temp profile. The main symptom is that all the user's files and desktop icons were gone. I would just have them reboot then it would be fine but it would need a tuneup, chkdsk, delete tmps, etc. as long as the drive wasn't really old. It used to be more common before the move to SSDs instead of HDDs but a Win7 computer's drive is probably really old, so yes, time for a new PC.

In this case the deleted files would have to recovered. I recently use Easus Data Recovery Wizard and was able to restore a lot of files for a client who's photo storage drive crashed. It would be best to pull the drive and do the recovery on another computer. I think the free tool allows up to 2GBs of data recovery but in this case the client had 100's of GBs so he paid for a 30 day license for $65.

I think they are going to mandate 2FA soon.

My existence is self-justifying, or more correctly, requires no justification. As Rand put it, life is an end in itself, i.e. the ultimate end of all your actions and purpose.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/ultimate_value.html

I haven't fixed an amp (yet) but I have been able to fix a few electronic doodads and boards using EEVBlog.com forums. Great resource if you are into electronic repair or troubleshooting.

I agree with your theory. I watched it happen on a number of forums for my car and motorcycle that I had followed for 10 years. The forums got rolled up by VerticalScope and soon after they "upgraded" the software for a better mobile experience and the content/quality is now garbage. It really destroyed the forums as a community and VS is just harvesting eyeballs now. Posts are repetitive questions or drive-by posts that go nowhere and do not ellicit any discussions. Nobody is posting intelligent or interesting content while on the can or waiting in line at the DMV, etc.