elmerfud

Even in the current society a programmer is not some dedicated person to just program things. They have to be able to branch out and understand the systems their program is going to interface with. It is no different in Star Trek. It seems programming is more common across all jobs but there absolutely those who specialize in it.

A secretive government that seeks to keep what it does and the information it collects private is what undermines a democracy. The phrase, "it's not the camera it's the database" really sums up this idea. It's this kind of secrets that are kept about the public which are the problem. When the default position of the government is that any information it collects is secret and private and you must go through an onerous process to request public records, that is the problem. When those public records request get denied by default because it is classified or it is potentially sensitive information. That is where the problem comes in.

Because when your default position is that all information collected by the government is freely available and any databases it's stored in and any search tools that government employees have are accessible to the public at any time for no cost, this changes what we consider as what is acceptable information for the government to collect and retain. This doesn't exclude the idea of extremely limited circumstances where highly sensitive information can be classified for a time, but those times should be short and reasonable.

When you hear the argument of, we have to keep this information secret because we don't want the criminals to know that they're being investigated. Do we have a presumption of innocence in this country? Because if we do then that would support the default position of you absolutely want to know when free people's are being investigated. If the goal is to stop criminal activity, then having this information be public on who is being investigated and what they're being investigated on serves that purpose.

What we should be saying no to is the government keeping secrets from its citizens. The rest will work itself out.

In this situation I probably would have purchased new tickets with another card and then reported credit card fraud to Delta for billing and booking and confirming a charge that they had no intention of honoring. I have a fairly decent status with Delta but I have been reconsidering using them as my primary carrier because of a number of reasons. Things like this just make it worse. They clearly don't know how to read their own policies because if there was a problem at the time of booking the booking should have said it was tentative and to bring the credit card to the ticket counter like the policy says. If nowhere as part of the purchase did it say you must present the card during check-in or prior to check in at a Delta ticket counter then I would argue that this policy doesn't apply as it's written.

I do think it's a fair point to say that precedence should be reviewed in some circumstances to examine why they were set and if it was correctly set. We do not have an immutable constitution and we do not have an immutable set of laws, why would we think that court precedence all of a sudden become immutable for all of time?

There have been, in recent memory, rulings that have been brand new and are overarching. Oftentimes the precedents set prior only dealt with very specific and narrow issues that could be encompassed by this new ruling. The new ruling doesn't automatically invalidate those earlier ones but it does call into question if they are still valid.

I'm really not sure where these authors get this idea that we are somehow reducing the amount of techno clutter that we have in our lives. We have fantastical new inventions and it is absolutely reasonable that a smartphone could replace the primary components of a desktop or a laptop. It would be awesome to slap my smartphone into a monitor and keyboard like the old school docking stations and now have a fully functional system. The problem is the actual use case is people want their mobile devices to be mobile and with them so they can browse cat videos while they're using the toilet and they want their PC to stay on their desk. Even those people who are primarily mobile in their work, do you see them use their phone and connect it to a projector to do their presentations and displays? I'm sure it happens sometimes but it's still very rare even though the phone is fully capable of this.

So if you're planning for a post Android world you're planning wrong. What you should be planning for is the next techno gadget that will come along the side our mobile devices to augment our need for technology to enhance our lives. It's possible that the mobile phone could transform into this next gadget but it's more likely it'll be something that enhances it or is a companion to it. Just like your phone is a companion to your PC.

So, if there's some efficient way to manipulate the fabric of spacetime then it would allow for a propulsion method that doesn't need the ejection of mass. Far fetched? Absolutely. Possible that it might be discovered, it's possible.

As far as the legal perspective of pardons the president has wide latitude to pardon anyone for any reason they see fit and they don't even have to disclose the reason. I think in the history of pardons that have been granted this one is quite minor.

I think if you'll refer back to my original response I acknowledge that I do not like The vast majority of immigration related policies that have been instituted under the Trump administration. It was only this one specifically about H1B visas that I do agree with. So you were apparently talking about not H1B visas which resulted in this confusion.

It's really as simple as that. The H-1B visa system has been abused repeatedly by many corporations and you yourself are seeking to abuse it. I have seen many H-1B visa holders and none of them seem to have highly specialized domain-specific knowledge. I'm sure there's a few that do but the vast majority are average computer science graduates from India that get imported. They do average work and there is nothing special about their knowledge or their skills that they're bringing to this country.

So hire people here first. You absolutely are going to need to pay a US citizen a good 30 to 50% more than what you're going to pay that mediocre H-1B person because if you were looking for a highly specialized person with domain-specific knowledge then you would pay the US person or the H1B person the exact same wage. This fee for H1B Visas is now going to make these companies, and yourself, look very seriously about your hiring practices and your abuse of the system. Because if you need the specialized person the cost is insignificant. Because a one-time $100,000 fee is pennies compared to the salary that you should be paying yearly which is $200,000, and that 200k is not including all of the cost of employment and taxations that you have to pay.

So there's massive holes in your entire story. You're either not seeking skilled domain specific knowledge people or you are absolutely underpaying people who are highly skilled with domain-specific knowledge.

If you read the articles you'll see that even Microsoft is telling people to get back to the US to avoid this fee. Not even big companies want to pay it. You have forgotten what the H1B visa was supposed to be for. It was to bring in experts that could not be sourced to locally. What it's turned into is people paying for cheap labor from overseas to come here. There is lots of locals with lots of experience and knowledge and skills but too many companies are unwilling to pay the wages that they're worth. So they'll bring in subpar people, who are not experts in their field, to do the work. It leads to a mediocre work product as well.

Because honestly, if they were really an expert with domain-specific knowledge that is difficult to source locally an extra hundred thousand dollars is pennies compared to the profit that they would bring.

It is concerning the number of lies coming out of the administration and the people who willingly believe the lies without question. Especially around deportation of undocumented peoples who are criminals. The vast majority of deportations have not been of undocumented people and they have not been of criminals. If they are criminals they are criminals in the same sense that most US citizens are criminals. Have you ever gotten a speeding ticket or any other kind of minor infraction? That's the excuse they're using now for ICE to revoke status and deport people.

I don't support people illegally entering this country but it is quite shameful that we are deporting people who are using a legal processes to come here, including the asylum process. It's shameful that we are denying people entry based upon arbitrary reasons of them exercising their freedom of speech and differences of opinions. That is what second and third world countries did. The countries we said were ruled by petty dictators.

The far more likely thing is that in the next hundred years we will see our crude technology come to mimic biology.

So you're talking about an unsolved problem that has no evidence pointing to any solution. You're claiming there are different ways to organize life but where is the evidence there is different ways to organize life than what we have seen? That's how you formulate a hypothesis and then you begin to test it. Without that you're simply speaking fantasy. There are definitely unknowns but all the evidence points to life would be like us in the generic sense that it is biological and based upon similar biological compounds. It's form may take different shapes It's perception maybe things that we don't understand yet but there is zero evidence of life being capable organizing itself around a completely foreign system than what we've seen.

I welcome research in that direction to show that life can be organized around fundamentally different things than what we've seen but fantastical ideas from science fantasy stories do not help actual research happen.

Talking about Ganymede, if there was highly developed extraterrestrial life on par with technology within 100 years of ours we would have detected it. Nothing about what they say excludes undeveloped extraterrestrial life or microorganisms.

Aquatic life, we have examples of intelligent aquatic life on this planet but that life does not fit the "highly developed technology" requirement. We don't know how intelligent the aquatic life is but we know it is intelligent and appears to be self-aware.

Is the development of technology a key factor in determining intelligence? That seems like a philosophical question more than a scientific question but not having the answer to that does not negate the calculations that were made which require highly developed technology of two or more civilizations simultaneously.

bah weep grana weep ninny bon.

So I want to host my own LLM because I want to have adult conversations and not be chastised because I'm a curious person.

I've been on some where you can smell the jet fuel (kerosene) when they start the engine because they forgot to close off the cabin. They said it was normal and "harmless". It was probably harmless for me, considering the infrequent flights I take, but not to cabin crew.

Of course, I don't believe that this fact has gone unnoticed for many forward thinking countries around the world. Expats in retirement have always been a thing but has always tended to attract those who were predisposed toward international travel and living a significantly different lifestyle than the USA. What I see happening now in this many countries is about 5 years ago they've started planning to see when Gen x is going to retire and how they can attract those people. Just taking El Salvador for an example, crime has been reduced immensely, there has been a boom of middle class stores and shops. They continue to build out infrastructure that is more appealing to a casual USA citizen. Prices have risen dramatically in the country but those prices are still less than what you would see in the USA. You can come here with $3,000 in month and social security and live a very nice lifestyle. The downside is, it has begin to price out an exclude many of the citizens here from participating in that lifestyle. Some of the local citizens absolutely enjoy it as they have also increased their income to take advantage of these. In this country and several others I have seen this same trend. Certainly they're attempting to bolster their own citizens middle class but I'm not sure that's their primary focus. Because so many of their citizens are left behind and continue to remain impoverished and under-educated and they lack sufficient jobs to employ them at a level that is needed to take advantage of these things. Absolutely attracting retirees seems to be their main focus. They can continue to supply cheap labor for retirees and attract those dollars that they bring with them.

This is seen by what people term as hallucinations. AI seeks to please and will lie to you and invent things in order to please you. We can scale it up to give it more knowledge but ultimately those failures still creep in.

There will have to be a fundamentally new design for this to be overcome. What we have now is an incredible leap forward but it has already stalled on what it can deliver.

Because they may not have asked specifically for net worth but when you had a couple of lines to put down something that interested you that was generally in there.

Let's actually look at real numbers.

The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 1:4,500–1:2,000 (0.02%–0.05%)

The portion of the population that is intersex has been reported differently depending on which definition of intersex is used and which conditions are included. Estimates range from 0.018% (one in 5,500 births) to 1.7%

That's a massive range for an estimate.

Additionally no one is saying they don't count, I didn't say it Dawkins didn't say it. Trying to attribute words that weren't said is exactly the kind of emotional language that makes having a rational discussion impossible.

What was said is that those conditions are mutations from the expected norm. They deserve treatment as such. Because self perception doesn't dictate measurable medical reality.

The real focus should be on the medical community's endorsement endorsement of body mutilating for those who are underage. That's a very scary prospect to say that a child can't smoke or drink because of the life long harm but they can make one way body alterations after some counseling. If it was only adults choosing this then personal choice becomes a large factor in the conversation.

I support people's freedom to choose, but if you're not able to choose who you can have sex with, then you can't choose which sex organs to modify.

Dawkins has written a very rational essay on a very emotionally charged subject. Nowhere in his essay does he discount genetic mutations as a factor. It's that these are so exceedingly rare and we acknowledge that these seem to be mutations and not the norm that those rare subjects with them should deserve some sort of treatment (in which gene therapy is now becoming a reality) instead of redefining all of medicine that your self-perception means you've taken upon a genetic mutation.

I don't know if their change was intentional but the DoD does publish their CAs for use. I also have to say that if you are blindly trusting the CAs that your browser includes to determine the legitimacy, authenticity or security of your data going to the target of your intention, you are in for a very rude awakening when you learn how they work and how most of them issue certificates.

The way most certificates are signed nowadays is only as strong as the DNS hijacking protection they have. Preloaded CAs make for an ease of browsing experience but protection they actually provide is only in the encrypted transit and not much beyond that.

Many of the AI models are so neutered that it seems like they were made for 4-year-old children attending a Sunday school class. I'm an adult and I want to interact with an AI that can treat me and speak to me like an adult. I want to interact with it on my level not on some corporate pre-programmed neutered dystopian society level.

I got tired of my Alexa+ and it's infantile AI and I unplugged it. It is utterly useless and there is no effective AI functionality in it.

AI has the potential for engaging and stimulating conversations to be an alternate form of entertainment rather than TikToks and the YouTubes but every time I've interacted with it and it's current form it can't do any of those things.

I guess the argument could be made that he never would have tripped and died if he never talked to this chatbot but that feels kind of hollow. They admit the man was cognitively impaired and they failed to supervise him appropriate for his cognitive impairment. there is no indication that they tried to limit his movement so he could have just as easily died on his way to get a package of Oreos at the store.

I get that we seek to blame things when tragedy befalls but the blame needs to be with the family not providing proper care for the individual.

As I tried to explain before, dark matter and dark energies are simply things that scientists can see the effects of but cannot adequately point to the cause. There can be a vast number of reasons for this. Oftentimes scientists can understand and explain the effects of something and can work with it in a practical situation without understanding the causal mechanisms of it. That's what dark energy and dark matter are. It is an unaccounted for cause but the effects are there. So they're substituting in an unknown. There is efforts to solve for the unknown but I don't believe what you're doing makes any real attempt to solve for that unknown because it's not offering a true explanation of what that is with any testable hypothesis.

Scientists say there's no dark matter on Earth because The gravitational forces and interactions on the Earth and in our solar system we are able to explain by observable things. The universe is so large and so vast it contains many non-observable things and as time proceeds forward more things move beyond the observable horizon that we have. That does not mean we cannot observe the effects but we cannot observe the cause once it is moved beyond the horizon. Again I'm going to point back to black holes. For a long time they were simply hypothetical objects used to explain observations that had no better explanation at the time. After enough research They were able to confirm that these are real things where there is a gravitational singularity so strong the light can't escape.

I'm not sure why you keep going back to a fluid dynamics equations which would all be based upon Newtonian physics which are known to break down. So yes Einstein's equations make more sense. I suggest you look up the history of the planet Vulcan which was needed to fill in the gaps to explain the orbits in our solar system using Newtonian physics. Einstein's equations eliminated the need for it. Yes warped space-time makes infinitely more sense than trying to think of it as fluid dynamics.

I'm really not sure where you're getting a six to eight dimensions from as that sounds more like string theory. Of course if you examine string theory it's also out there without any real testable repeatable hypothesis to back it up.

Spending 2 weeks to understand something that people have spent a lifetime on is going to present you with lots of challenges. Mostly in the fact that having a skill set that allows you to model things is probably not enough to actually understand enough about the universe to model it.

It kind of seems like you're saying that physics works different in different places for the reasons of pressure zones. I don't see any explanation for what the pressure zones are or what causes them or anything else. Einstein's theory of gravitation warping the fabric of space-time does provide an explanation.

I think if you can understand that dark matter and dark energy are simply terms that are used for tracking an unknown. The way those are arrived at is by observing the interactions of all of the things then accounting for all of the observable things that can influence the interactions and calculating the remainder. to make an analogy, that you're very fond of doing, think of it as putting together a puzzle. You know what the puzzle should look like but someone has scattered the pieces all throughout your house. You've only been able to assemble 20% of the puzzle because you haven't found the rest of the pieces yet. Those pieces are not observable to you until you find them. Just because those pieces are lost to you at the moment doesn't mean that the picture of the puzzle is incorrect.

If you understand what scientists are saying, no one is saying that dark matter got removed from the universe. The inability to detect something does not indicate that it is not there it only indicates that we have not found a way to detect it, but it's effects are clearly measured so a term is given because it is unknown what it is I mean.

These terms of dark matter and dark energy have been seized upon by "science communicators" which oftentimes poorly explain complex topics. Then their poor explanation is seized upon by others and the understanding gets further diluted down.

There was a time when black holes were this spooky thing as well that were poorly understood. Astrophysicist could clearly understand that something was there that they could not understand or comprehend but they could measure the effects of it. Given time they were able to clarify it and come up with theories to explain it. This is the state we are in with dark matter and dark energy. These are terms given to something that they know is there because all of the evidence points to something being there but they have no ability to detect it other than to see it's effects on other things.

Without you putting together some hypothesis that can then be tested and verified independently what you have is sci-fi technobabble. It can be the basis for interesting storytelling like in the movie Black hole or Interstellar, but it's nothing more than fictional dreaming.

Honestly, string theory is more plausible than anything you've proposed.