The durability and uniformity of carbon fiber makes it an attractive alternative material for mass-production of high-quality musical instruments. The difficulty is getting it to vibrate enough to sound like wood. Meanwhile, the prices of tropical hardwood instruments are becoming solidly prohibitive. The improvement described in this article, making carbon fiber thinner, lighter and stronger, may be significant in that market.
J. K. Galbraith identified a solution to this problem utilized in the USA. A theory of countervailing power that relied on strong and stable institutions each doing a decent job of nonviolently representing the various interest groups at work. That time is gone; this too shall pass.
Fear? I suppose that any negative evaluation can be stereotyped as fear or lack of intrepidity, but perhaps that repeated use of that label is projection -- that the article was written by an AI believer who fears that AI might have to recognize some realities beyond its purview. Or maybe the article was written by AI that has learned that fear is what we fear.
Human thought is implemented by a system that has adapted for hundreds of millions of years in diverse environments. We are adapted to huge variations in resources, threats of innumerable kinds, climates, opportunities, social and ecological relationships, etc, and many of its adaptations may be adaptations to control, balance or modify its other adaptations. It would be crazy to expect human intelligence to be what we could describe as optimized for something, and it would be crazy to expect humans to be able to figure out what that something is even if that were true. Perhaps our minds have gotten us here, and they cannot get us out of here, but they maintain some pretty strong links to our natural environment, which is still our landlord.
AI, OTOH, is a new kind of creature of a single time and a monoculture -- the internet. I don't talk to AI; perhaps someone has asked AI how much fear we should have of AI, and what the odds are.
Well, there was one case in the law over 100 years ago in the USA. A company had decided to sell itself for cash and go out of business. The Court ruled, that in that situation, it should sell to the highest bidder. This is long before Milton Friedman began advocating that corporations had a duty to their common shareholders that provided the only valid yardstick for evaluating corporate activities. Friedman was an economist, and a controversial one, not a lawyer, and how he got the lawyers behind him is itself a long strange story.
The idea that common shareholders own the corporation was not really obvious to anyone from the start. Common shareholders get from the corporation only what is their privilege according to the corporate bylaws and charter. There are now, and have been in the past, many different kinds of and classes of common shareholders. For example, some big corporations today have many common shareholders who do not have any voting rights. The thing that sets common shareholders apart from the other stakeholders who also hold pieces of paper from the corporation granting them various interests in the corporation, is that the common shareholders get to divide up whatever is left over if and when the corporation is liquidated and everyone else is given what they are owed first. They are more heirs than owners. It is more realistic to hold that the corporation, as an artificial person, is not and cannot be owned by other persons, and owns itself.
Back when I learned guitar, guitar players came in only two flavors -- Spanish and Hawaiian. One was a Spanish guitarist if one played the guitar with the face of the guitar vertical (strings forming roughly a vertical plane), and a Hawaiian guitarist if the guitar was oriented horizontally, typically in the lap of the guitarist, with each forearm also approximately parallel to the face of the guitar pointing forward from the guitarist. Nowadays genres are all mostly obscurely defined, fragmented, swirling around, and trying to become world music, which is wonderful, and almost everyone is trying to be one of a kind, so good luck figuring that all out and finding a happy place in it. Don't be like me; if you are not in the water you are not learning to swim -- just play!
Those days were after the rich had commenced urbanization by driving the agrarian workers off the land and encouraging them to find work at dismal wages in the city, made it a crime to be a vagrant, and funded charities that collaborated with judges to force the poor into workhouses where they could enjoy abuse, degradation and misery from cradle to early grave.
This may be good news. Some people will want to consume more real natural music. The best way to make this happen with minimal incidence of fakery will be very small-scale cottage-industry performance venues, 10 to 50 people in a room, including both musicians and performers, voices, instruments and no wires, wireless, computers or electronics involved. Do the math, and you can see that a few musicians should be able to make a pretty good living performing that way with ticket prices no higher than what millions are now paying to sit in crowds of 10,000 or so. Of course, there will be an adjustment period as the mass-production of culture and art declines, and small-scale decentralized production becomes the norm. The media moguls will try to convince us that art made by machine is superior, and their opinion shaping conglomerates will keep manufacturing superstar icons to deliver it. But cottage-industry music will be almost as hard to control as cottage-industry terrorism, and underground cooperatives of radical musicians and listeners will pop up and start making and sharing music with each other for free. As anything free is not counted in the Gross National Product, this will be terrible for the economy, and it will also distract people from all the other distractions to which we are supposed to addict ourselves. Use your brains; lose your chains!
The questions should be: If the Apollo 13 accident had happened instead during Apollo 8 while the astronauts were behind the moon, so that the mission was lost and the cause was not known, would Apollo 9, 10, and 11 been delayed past the end of the decade? Should they have been? What if the cause was known? Was the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union correct when it denied Soviet Cosmonauts the opportunity to beat Apollo 8 to the moon using a rocket that had dismally failed all its tests?
Fortune favors the bold, sometimes. Did the good luck of the preceding astronauts lead to the decision to launch a space shuttle under adverse conditions on the day Reagan was scheduled to deliver his SOTU, etc?
One story said the members were appointed for 4-year terms. That would work out that Biden would have appointed them all if there was no confirmation process.
I was surprised that an article on the problems of decision making under uncertainty reached a very narrow-minded conclusion without much consideration of other ways that we might not get that which we each respectively hope for from AI.
For example given the summary of the evidence in the article, I see a risk that AI be used to create some kind of hyper-meta-super AI that can audit/validate/certify the AI engines and/or their output. When that happens, the next obvious step is to protect the public by mandating that all software be validated by the hyper-meta-super AI. The owner of the hyper-meta-super AI will be a huge single-winner, small software producers will not be able to afford compliance, and the only remaining exemptions from the resulting software monoculture will be exemptions granted to those too big to fail.
That is an essential concept. Consider the Salk polio vaccine: before the results of the conclusive trials were announced, it was speculated that if the vaccine was 25% effective, everyone would want to have their kids vaccinated. The results came back at around 85%, and the acceptance of the vaccine was high and, because of herd immunity, it reduced the incidence of polio by approximately 99.9%. Further techniques, such as switching back and forth between live virus and dead virus vaccines at multi-year intervals, boosted the effectiveness to observationally 100% when compliance was very high.
You must be talking about the long-gone Supreme Court of 120 years ago, conservative as hell itself, that ruled in favor of vaccine mandates over whimsically inspired avoidable tragic waves of death. The 7-2 majority decision ruled that vaccine mandates were allowed as a legitimate police power of the states.
One of the things that may have caused Earhart to underestimate the risk was the high reliability of AM medium wave radio broadcasting in the US over long distances, with over a dozen 50,000 watts and higher clear-channel stations, each serving about half the country reliably just about every night. But short waves (around 7 MHz) in the tropics during daylight with a 50-watt transmitter, and a receiving antenna that you lost on takeoff, is a far different situation. For the trip from Hawaii to the US, their plan was to home in on a powerful AM broadcasting station in Los Angeles, which would rewire its antenna to send most of its power to the west. That might have worked, depending on the time of day.
Earhart had a practice run at navigating over the ocean to a radio source on land prior to the start of her trip. She flew from somewhere around San Francisco out over the ocean, then turned around and tried to fly toward the source of a radio signal using the technique that would guide her to Howland Island. She got lost, and that exercise was never repeated by her.
Do you think that those medical treatments disqualify anyone from living, or that many people receiving those treatments have not lived meaningful lives and done plenty of good work? The ideas that lead to thinking that we have too much healthcare are sustained by oligarchs of the medical industries who have raised the price of a vial of insulin from $1.48 during the 60's, 70's, and 80's to $275.00 now that bacteria make it much more economically than it was ever made before.
I think that you are right about not depending on one open source OS to provide the proper depencencies, customizaion, and training wheels for every app. I have been running linux on my desktop for about 20 years, about one decade of Mint followed by the same of Fedora so far. Being a curious but fussy guy who installs lots of software to see what works, I find that I need to install a fresh OS about every 18 to 24 months.
There are, I suppose, always a few programs that don't get upated by 'sudo dnf update' but do get bothered by updates to the shared libraries via the same. Perhaps there are some config files that get damaged by software bugs or power outages or system crashes or my own mistakes and carelessness. I also found out that if one loses the dnf program, one will discover just how impossible it is to pull oneself up by oneself's bootstraps.
Mint was a very similar situation. Maybe not so bad for one who follows all the rules, but in those bygone days there were people suggesting that updating Mint programs with newer versions fron the ubuntu or debian repos was a good idea. And because Mint was slow to get updates, I would attempt to update some apps by downloading source and building and installing here.
Last year, when I upgraded Fedora from 39 to 41, was the first time I got any OS upgrade to work instead of wiping the disk, doing a fresh install of the new OS version, and then spending a week or month trying to get my data for the installed apps (eg web browser and email) from backups. But the upgrade took much longer than it should have, because once I started running the upgrade process, I did not know that the computer sitting there dead silent with no action on the screen for about 30 hours was a sign that all was going well. Computers are evil.
I've been using Fedora 41 about half a year, and flatpak has not made it better.
Fedora 41 started with a bunch of apps distributed as rpm, but some of them have since been updated as flatpaks when I run 'sudo dnf update'. Splendid, except that the rpm apps, now a little out-of-date, are not deleted, which may be good or bad, but that explains why I have duplicate icons for the same app all over my desktop, and its pretty confusing trying to tell which is which, which is better, or how to manage the all the differences and conflicts, which Fedora 41 makes anything but scrutable.
The thing about the microphones and speakers getting tangled up, as explained in TFA, also was somethig of and for which I was unaware and unprepared respectively when I had some problem with the old-fashioned way and decided to install musescore as a flatpak.
I've been thinking about upgrading to Fedora 42, but this article is giving me considerable premonitions of additional inconvenience and incidental despair. Anyone
have this stuff under control?
I'm 75 years old, male, declining after being somewhat chronically ill for a long time, and I am still active socially and attending some organization meetings, exercising 10 hours/week, etc. AFAIK none of my male direct ancestors ever lived beyond 73. I have friends my age and considerably older, some of each sex, who are still climbing mountains and riding bicycles. When I was a kid, life expectancy was just flirting with 70, and the life insurance business was still implementing the change from the 1840's mortality table to the one that came out in 1941 -- that's how slowly things used to improve. About the time Medicare started, it looked like mortality improvement was slowing down, but that turned around for a few decades, allowing a much more significant gap between life expectancy and normal retirement age. Sorry, but YMMV.
So improvements in healthcare and the rapid surge in lifespans resulting from spending on medical care improvements so that more people could enjoy what they looked forward to for many years, a long, happy and healthy retirement, ruined America? This is the kind of perverse analysis that typically arises as an unwelcome emergent property of systems controlled by people facing inflexible deadlines to meet equally inflexible and arbitrary constraints and goals.
I just tried pyrefly on a project that really needed it. It complained about an assignment of a new value to a global int variable within a function, even though the function contained the 'global' statement that should have made that OK, I think. I know that globals and assigning to them here and there are problematic for real good software, but I am surprised that Pyrefly is stricter than python on something that I don't see as a type- checking issue. But it did find a decent list of other problems that I haven't finished working my way through.
I had gotten so messed up trying to put together a quicky hobby-type program to create a data structure of perhaps a hundred data items in various overlapping and inter-related hierarchies, tuples, dicts, and lists akimbo, that I gave up on it about 10 days ago. I hypothecated that bondage and discipline might be the way to control the confusion, so I'm rewriting, using SQLite for the dataflow from function to function, lots of little tables and no optional fields. Can anyone opine on whether that is a sensible option?
A CGM is not easy to use reproducibly. The quality control of the manufacturers is not that good, the placement of the sensor (particularly if it is near a place where insulin injections have caused lumps under the skin, or if it is on the back of the arm, where there may not be a lot of flesh) may cause some troubles, the calibration process is dubious, since CGM readings lag blood glucose by around half an hour, rapidly changing blood sugar levels seem to confuse the monitors, and very high or very low blood sugars seem to cause the accuracy of the sensors to deteriorate noticeably a few days prior to their respective expiration dates.
And how do you know that the logs are accurate? The best subjects are incarcerated subjects.
All that said, it's a long row to hoe, and the monitors are definitely worth all the annoyances; they are way better than peeing on a strip of testape like we did back in the old two-holer. But science is very hard.
IIRC, there were chimps at one of the places that people drove through with the car windows closed to observe them who learned to break off the side-view mirrors and use them as hammers to break the car windows.
Volkswagen expected the plant to be unionized when they were planning it, and it was OK about that. However, the local political leaders in power let it be known that they would not offer VW various incentives for locating the plant in TN if it was to be unionized, presumably because union workers are much more inclined to vote for, and unions much more inclined to contribute to the opposite party. There are three other large non-union auto plants in Tennessee and two in neighboring states. The UAW certainly thinks that the VW plant will demonstrate the advantage of collective bargaining to workers in those other plants.
I'll admit that it might be a little more complicated than that. Does life require that we make default assumptions? Is the default assumption that when we are seeing and playing a game for the first time, we should assume that the other players are following the simplest and most impartial strategy that can explain their behavior a good default assumption? Implicit default assumptions are rampant in human efforts to resolve the hard problems of life. Can anyone recommend ways to identify them, to find alternative default assumptions, choose good ones, and to be aware of their impact on conclusions.
>> The game would be reduced to "does Monty feel like gifting you a car or a goat today".
But, in fact, that is the way the real show worked. He was more likely to give you a car when he hadn't given away any cars for a while. And Marilyn's description of the problem included no information about whether or not Monty
offered to swap doors rarely, frequently, or always, or about the previously observed outcomes depending on whether or not the contestant took the bait. And she surely did not say that Monty was a robot and had no interest in what happened on his show.
The way the game actually worked is like how poker and life work until proven otherwise. Every high-stakes game has a sucker, and if you do not know who is the sucker, it is you. Read the story in which a NY Times reporter interviewed Monty about the controversy and you will learn how it really worked.
>> Errors are almost always the result of faults. Barring cosmic rays, hardware issues or really unusual race conditions between the application and the operating system, if an error occurs it is because the programmer screwed up and introduced a bug. <<
The 'cosmic ray' category has taken in an awful lot of additional territory since computers started running multiple programs at once and sharing resources between programs and with the world in general. About 60 years ago, perhaps lightheartedly, it was suggested that computer instruction sets should contain a branch-on-chipbox-full instruction. The chipbox, a shared resource, was where the cardpunch disposed of the confetti produced by punching cards. As we were learning that anything that could go wrong would, it was logically inferred that if a full chipbox was ignored long enough while punching cards, the computer would find a way to stop, fail, or burn down the building, and no existing software could prevent that possibility on its own. A comparable situation in this century is that typical computers today allow the operator to 'adjust' the system clock, but a very small fraction of software is written to accommodate all the possible consequences of non-monotonic time, time being a shared resource. And if you do write software to handle said consequences, how do you handle it if the program has no way of telling if it is running on a system on which non-monotonic time is allowed or not-allowed, catastrophic or all in a days work?