ocschwar

> But how do you verify Facebook? Facebook computes what?

You start by verifying the permissions structure for Facebook posts.

And by verifying the shortest, least complex functions in Facebook's server side code base.

The trouble is the simulation tools are either proprietary and thus have only a small mind share among software developers, or academic, and either way, PLC programmers have not gone near them yet.

But a decent LLM should be able to translate the description of a plant to a TLA+ model (or Alloy, or something similar.)

> My fraternity was more tame and we used to have guys gazing each other in the main room during parties.

Joining a fraternity makes you jointly and severally liable for anything your frat brothers do. It's the very opposite of working or investing in a limited liability company. Makes sense for a fraternity to be more tame...

Which is why I am sitting right now in a meeting and the presenter is logged in from Bangalore and I don't even want to know what `TZ=Asia/Kolkata date` will tell me.

I'm often shuffled into teams where I am the only American and everyone else is Indian, working in India, and I take a small measure of pride in switching to the formal register that Indians like to use in workplace English, and using the idioms they have.

It didn't hurt that you can't play Fruit Merge on a TI 84

The strange thing is he picked a fight with a store of humanities papers rather than scientific ones.

Seems to me these LLMs have a critical mass of Python training data and Rust training data, so there's no advantage for Python there.

So as the article points out, an iterative process that catches the mistakes at compile time is much more suited for an AI than one that catches them at runtime.

The Pyramids have a recently noticed Tamil inscription from Indian tourists visiting 2000 years ago.

And the Neo-Babylonian Empire had the first tourism minister taking care of a paleo-Babylonian site.

The firmware for a diesel engine goes into a diesel engine. The company can be required to get a PE's signify for putting the firmware in. After that, if it's copied elsewhere, that's not their problem.

This is why we need Professional Engineer licenses for software.

There are times when a product design needs to be reviewed and approved by someone who cares more about his license than about his job. It doesn't happen as often with software as it does with civil engineering, but often enough that it needs to become a thing.

Well, the Tongan boys provide the only empirical data on how unsupervised children behave on a desert island.

Everything else written about the idea is speculation, from The Coral Island to The CHildren's Island to Lord of the Flies.

But Golding did observe behavior in a boarding school, and while the Tongan boys did also go to boarding school, they also were being raised in Tongan culture, and that culture, including its behavioral norms, was what helped them survive on a desert island.

Maybe it's time to do a Eurovision style thing for the quality badge. Everyone uploads to Arxiv. Every who's in the field votes on the worthiest papers (not allowed to vote for anyone you actually collaborated with).

Winners get to put a shiny sticker on their papers.

Who could have guessed that growing up in a Polynesian culture is a better preparation for such a thing than going to an English boarding school..

Whatever it takes to keep you from leaving your post.

The value you get from the health care system isn't just from the services they provide when/if you need them.

It's from the system existing and being ready to help you.

We're not talking about widgets, onions, haircuts, or pork bellies here. You can't opt out of the system existing. And you can't opt out of the horrific consequences if the system doesn't exist.

So it's a bit silly to talk about health care like it's something that has a free market.

My childhood was dominated by the smell of licorice in some places because chocolate was too expensive.

And then they enroll their patients in the Drug of the Month Club.

Young people moving out, and those who stay are not inclined to bear children.

It's true, but it's cold comfort. the amount of reading I can do in a single sitting has declined a lot.

It's things like having a grating monotone, and having to pause before speaking and willing yourself to adopting the right tone for your state of mind and the effect you want to have on your audience. Every. Time. You. Speak.

It's like being an actor, except the whole world is your stage, and you have to be conscious of your character, lines, and motivation, the entire time you're awake.

Discord servers are half of a good counterexample, since people try to avoid the extreme end of network effects and want their chat partners pre-screened.

But... it's all on Discord, not IRC or jabber or anything.

Until now, once you got a grant, you could count on it.

Now? One of your grad students says something a little too on the nose on Bsky, and your lab gets shut down.

This ends science in the United States.

You can't really enroll graduate students for a 5 year PHD project if their funding can be pulled at a moment's notice like this.

There are many contexts where doing an experiment with proper controls is literally a crime against humanity.

Which means, yes, that there are many studies where the control isn't quite proper. And that does slow down progress in medical science.

If you have access to statistics for the general population, you can forego the control group, I would think. But that requires doing the study in a country with a well run health care system and properly regulated medical records so that you can get these stats without privacy issues.

(Glances in Denmark's general direction.. )

Problem #3 is relatively easy to address: shift from journals to conferences. Organizing fake conferences is a lot harder than setting up paper mill journals.

Once you get that annuity you wind up embroiled in the fighting to decide who gets tenure next. Your proteges or other people's.

From 1945 to about 2000, academia in the western world was slowly growing. That made the pool of positions not-quite-zero-sum, and way too many people went into it expecting a much more genial environment.

> Detectives are "masked thugs to pop out of unmarked vehicles and grab people off the streets".

The moment they make an actual arrest (which is rare, since they prefer to maintain their cover), they identify and are held accountable for how they do it.

Something ICE is not doing.