robocat

You believe signatures by engineers matter.

That is your belief, but I've never seen that belief backed by fact.

Most open source software disowns liability in CAPS in the license. Yet somehow FOSS like Linux gets used for safety critical infrastructure.

Microsoft would love certification requirements for engineers - that would kill open source to their conpetitive benefit.

Do you honestly think if we required Microsoft Certified Professionals to sign the internals of Microsoft OS then Windows would be more secure or reliable?

The bigger issue is that signatures and criminal consequences hardly matter across jurisdictions.

The capitalist issue is that businesses want scapegoats when things go wrong. That would be the outcome of signatures: engineers as fallboys for systemic failures across organisations.

Note how often pilots are blamed for accidents due to the design of planes.

It is just an idealistic belief based on feelies that software certification would achieve the goals you imagine it would.

Signatures are an anachronism: from an alien past.

International business uses different mechanisms for safety.

Our world is intertwined complexity. You somehow think that the buck should stop at engineers?

If engineers signed off on everything then we'd have no more disasters like New Orleans floods?

Who signed what for the Grenfell towers tragedy? Which engineers were reprimanded? Did they decide that more signatures would help prevent future disasters?

Also read this comment by a real biologist:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734849

How greedy you sound.

It is so easy to rationalise the idea of taking everything off someone who has more than oneself. We've got political phrases to justify it.

But beware because you are the wealthy: that person living on the street wants everything you have; and maybe 95% of the world deserves to take everything you own (that's only fair right?).

In New Zealand we have MMP voting, and minority parties want to bring in wealth taxes: taxes to take between 25% and 100% of retirement savings (assuming someone has managed to save enough to own a nice house). Double taxation since those savings were after already getting taxed at 30%+.

Incentives matter. Overtax the creators, and they either won't create new businesses or won't grow their businesses.

Consider moving to a poor country if you want things to be fairer.

People need to be incentivised to create wealth for their country. So that the country can afford to pay for nice things like healthcare and social services.

Balance is required to disincentivise the parasites (loan-sharks and many finance verticals seem parasitic to me)... We don't need scumbags that take wealth from everybody without creating any surpluses.

"Regressive taxation" is regressive for business building. It's a risky, shit job. Put the taxes too high and why would anyone do it? Haven't you noticed that little don't create businesses in lots of countries (because why the fuck would you!!). Go on: kill your golden geese in the USA (flatten the world market).

I've helped create a business that brings in important overseas income to NZ. I'm taxed so highly regressively that I lack the incentive to risk my precious hours to earn more money.

I hate the greedy fuckers that pontificate about taxing me. Armchair wankers can go create a business then gift their ill-gotten gains to their own governments. Just beware that the median return for a founder is approximately $0.

Do you feel like an inadiquate imposter or something? I'm assuming you work in software.

Watch some engineers in other disciplines and you soon recognise that many of them have about the same responsibility as a software engineer. Design is design.

Or read about engineering failures like flight QF32 (mostly a success story):

  A paperwork review showed that the required signatures were missing from 131 out of 138 retrospective concessions issued between 2009 and 2011

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Australian Quantas, with a UK Rolls Royce engine on an Airbus, with engines maintained in Aussie.

Safety is now often made up of interlocking: regulations, standards, quality systems, safety management systems, insurance, international legal contracts. Certified engineers and signatures are usually only a very small part of those systems.

Certification matters less than you might think across international borders.

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but beliefs in certification seem so irrational to me. What is it? Jealous desires for status? Desire to have guilds/gatekeepers? Complete misunderstanding of how safety occurs in "real" engineering?

Do you happen to live in a country where your government departments are known for rapid processing? (not weeks of delay like we're talking about here).

I generally see my legal system create severe delays (regardless of how much that victimises or costs everyone involved)

I try to record many specialist professionals (after asking first).

Experts know what they are saying, and they often rapidly download dense technical information. I first noticed the problem after asking a friend for advice on handling a psych issue with a friend's child.

Otherwise experts talk and I listen and I understand, but I can easily forget nuance and detail.

I also learnt to record medical specialists talking to my mum, so I could replay the details to my dad.

Why would dad trust my recall? And will he trust facts if I've repeated them as a non-specialist? And perhaps dad picks up different aspects due to his own experiences.

Sounds like we mostly agree.

I dislike scammers, and when travelling I practice my skills at recognising them. I'm okay at avoiding getting targeted (using a variety of techniques).

If scammers are feeding their families, and relatively rich tourists are sufficiently incautious, then I don't have huge sympathy for the tourists. The rules of the street are everywhere in the world.

I don't support drug users in my home town either.

Of course I've run into many selfish arsehole scammers including ones with their police on thier side.

Options against bent cops in foreign countries are more limited.

But yes, my government always wants to increase taxation, and they are rather deceptive about everything.

But I pay my taxes and I'm mostly okay with what it is used for. Without our social and legal infrastructure, I wouldn't have got anything.

> learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly

You probably have some natural ability - or even just drive given your interest. Interests and abilities often hold hands.

The the other major issue with languages is that our teaching methods are rather hit and miss.

This is interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/sep/02/languages.... -- although I cynically worry that he was perhaps rather better at selling himself than doing teaching.

> For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple

I've poorly and unclearly explained the idea sorry. Writing is hard.

Not even close. Evolutionary selection pressures don't usually act directly on genetics. Perhaps you are incorrectly attempting to rely on intuition, and over-simplistic phrases like selection pressures. Intuition is incredibly misleading with evolution.

Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.

Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.

Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.

Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).

I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.

It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.

> crosswalks

And their a11y/internationalisation is horrid.

We have pedestrian crossings, not crosswalks. We don't have fire hydrants (instead a different solution). We don't have yellow schoolbuses. Our traffic lights look different (and have different names in different cultures). And those examples are just the obvious problems with some captchas. Usually there are more subtle problems with verification UIs.

You're being extremely dismissive and you're denying somebody else's reality.

Demand varies a lot by location, type of contracting, price, etc.

>> You know what kind of customer this pushes away? The kind that

They are saying their belief about how other people act. I'm guessing they themselves do care.

People typically underestimate others. All too often bosses do. It's like the common belief that only other people respond to advertising: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_effect

A prevalent problem everywhere: most dangerous in politics where we tend to call it hipocrisy.

> most) consumers don't even have a clear idea of what "quality" looks like

I think it just requires too much work. Your cynicism is unfair.

Also cheapest is just the simplest option, even though you know it is crap. I sometimes just give up on investing effort and time and money trying for better, because I've been repeatedly stung by expensive failures of top quality/brand items.

If I want a cordless drill, I don't want to have to learn about batteries, brands, or any esoterica relating to the quality of it.

For many goods I used to spend time looking at reviews, and cultivating my knowledge. I'm sick and tired of having to do that.

For cordless, I do like Makita, but I use a battery adapter (because their batteries are NZD250 instead of NZD50). But I usually buy a crappy bigstore brand for most cordless tools (a rebadged Einhell). They mostly work and they do a good replacement warranty.

People want a simple measure of quality.

Price doesn't work. Threadcount doesn't work for sheets (they cheat the numbers). Some brands are still worthwhile, but even that is becoming unreliable.

Some stores seem to have quality standards (in NZ Kmart goods seem mostly useable for the pricepoint, however our local 'The Warehouse' has gone downhill).

Many goods are now so complex that stores can't make a price versus quality compromise. Choosing a mobile phone is frustrating.

Complexity is the killer for choosing quality.

Our cheapest goods are surprisingly complex: e.g. socks.

I suspect the underlying issue is that we are all terrible at unthreading cause from effect.

Words matter. Talking about "species level" is misleading because talking about an effect (blue phenotype) distracts us from the cause (a gene for blue).

And evolution is confusingly another step removed: the red survives because the blue did not.

Most of us struggle to see the counterfactual absence of a something.

The blue "species" never exists - our brains want to find groups and patterns. Our words mislead us.

The same thing is alluded to in the paper: the deaths of people without the gene is what is driving the gene to spread (through reproductive success of those that didn't die).

Reproduction is what matters (which death or sickness may interfere with).

Even the paper is confusing because it talks about 50 year old women (measuring survival bias; not whether they are expected to pass on genes at 50).

(reedits for clarity).

You are suggesting that people should illegally hide their crypto from their government and taxation.

I assume if you live in say Argentina, then you really have little other choice.

But they don't have the knowledge to be safe, even though they strongly understand the need for security. I prefer not to advise other people to perform risky actions.

> you should never allow anyone to take advantage of you or any tourist

And you should never tell other people what to do.

I am actually pretty okay with being generous and paying "too much". I've traveled to places where I'm relatively a fucking rich bastard. I don't see that I should be a selfish arsehole towards people that earn cents compared to me.

I hate foreign governments ripping me off because I know the money isn't going towards anything useful.

But I attempt to be thoughtfully generous towards individuals.

Although I avoid tipping culture (as a New Zealander it feels prostitutionally sleazy to me).

I remember some Germans telling me I was ruining it for other tourists by not haggling enough. Fuck those tight wankers.

Yeah, why you want to know the language strongly matters.

My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words. Learning by talking and mimicking is not my strength at all.

I suspect that is why I've noticed the pattern that natural mimickers are the ideal language learners (who I would like to emulate).

Although my beliefs are incoherent... I want software that starts with substituted latin letters into a Korean layout that slowly morphs into Korean (maybe choosing words carefully that have been taken from English).

A la Meihem In Ce Klasrum by Dolton Edwards: https://www.ecphorizer.com/EPS/site_page.php?issue=7&page=29

Nothing about evolution feels sensible or right: and the vast majority of people have severe misunderstandings about how it works (for example the Darwin awards are highly misleading). Even science reporting is often highly misleading[0]. Intuition is not trustworthy for this topic, and neither is our ambient knowledge.

  and one group ate their dead relatives’ brains at funerals so consistently that they gave themselves a mad cow type disease called kuru, which killed a large percentage of their population and then, within a few generations, evolved a genetic mutation[1] that protects against it, one of the fastest cases of natural selection ever documented in humans

Referencing the Wikipedia article on kuru which references this paper: https://researchonline.lshtm.ac.uk/id/eprint/4514/1/nejmoa08...

The suggested evolution is:

* there is one ancestor with a gene that protects against kuru.

* children and mothers without that ancestor often die from kuru

* children of that ancestor have a much higher chance of survival

* eventually everyone is a child of that ancestor

* any children of that ancestor that didn't get the protective gene also eventually die out

The gene is selected for. There are no population effects.

The key part in the paper is where they mention adult men with the gene, because they are measuring the counterfactual of the many males that died because they didn't have that gene (males that ate brains as young kids but then died because they didn't have the gene from that ancestor).

The paper is hard to understand in part because of the confounding effects of males not eating the brains. Plus the confounder of stopping cannibalism in 1960.

The idea of "Group selection" is fundamentally wrong - regardless of how sensible the belief feels. Anybody using the words "group selection" is indicating their belief system, and they usually then have biased narratives to 'support' their belief.

[0] horrifically incorrect sciencedaily link in Wikipedia.

[1] We don't fucking evolve genetic mutations

I'm no polyglot, but talking and reading are very different skills.

My personal working theory:

Native speakers learn to speak first, then they learn to read and write.

From talking with high-level ESOL speakers, those that learned from written material have some very strange patterns of mistakes you can hear in their English - where they've programmed their pronunciation incorrectly very early on with basic mistakes.

Although English is an outlier here. Because English native speakers learn lots of different ways to manage how speaking and spelling are different. Plus because making speaking mistakes after learning words in books is such a social status mistake.

Personally I think if you want to learn a language, the ideal is with someone who corrects all mistakes, as though one is a baby. Although it is difficult to find this even when one can spend months in a foreign country. Not everyone feels comfortable correcting an adult.

The people that have learned English that I have spoken with that are the best all have a common trait: they've lived in a country and they MIMIC. The most amazing was a hippy Japanese guy: I remember one sentence where he shifted in the middle from broad East London to a strong Aussie accent due to where he learned the words.

I learnt conversational Spanish when I was 30. Next attempt will be 2-3 months immersed Korean as a middle aged guy so I'm looking forward to trying out my opinions!

I spent months in South America and tried to use crypto in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. I was motivated because of this pro-crypto article: https://devonzuegel.com/inside-argentina-s-currency-exchange...

People in many South American countries should be highly motivated to use crypto because fiat is usually damn shit.

I was motivated because cash machines were extremely crappy for a tourist (when you could find an ATM that even had any money in its cassettes). Argentina was a USD8 withdrawal fee plus the super shitty official exchange rate and half the time you could only withdraw maybe USD30 maximum so you maybe needed to do multiple transactions. I also had NZD bank fees and poor exchange rates from my own NZ bank added.

It was a total shitshow trying to use crypto. I would honestly have been better wandering around with gold in my pockets.

Crypto was high risk: dangerously unsafe. Also mostly unavailable unless you were really lucky. Complex. Massively taxed for recipients if they used anything that officially supported crypto. Arbolitos (street money changers) would take a 10-15% cut and it always felt super effing dodgy (felt like a risk of getting kidnapped).

I can't recommend it. There was no way to learn how to do crypto transactions safely, even though I have conversational Spanish.

Scary as all fuck. My kind of holiday, but I couldn't recommend anyone take those risks unless they're as stupid an idiot as me.

I'm mostly relaxed about countries taking advantage of me (or other tourists), but South America was so OTT that I mostly wouldn't go back. That said, I loved Brazil even though I can't speak a word of Portuguese. That's the only place I would make an effort to return to from my 3 months travelling in South America.

One of the hidden jokes of the hitchhikers books is that they never ask Marvin what "the question" is.

Chapter 11, Marvin says: "Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to take you down to the bridge". Also: "Further circuits amused themselves by analysing the molecular components of the door, and of the humanoids' brain cells". They are eastereggs for later events.

And Marvin says: "Let's build robots with genuine people personalities," they said. So they tried it out with me. I'm a personality prototype.

Although he was programmed to be depressed, he never gives up.

Some of those videos are misleading. They sometimes slide a finger off one key onto another: taps need to not move.

Personally, I use the slyde to type rather than tapping to type and have gboard installed for when slyde doesn't work (I think the Apple algos are not quite as good as Google's).

Yeah, and adverts only work on other people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_effect

Fortunately I'm from Wobegon and I'm above average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The_Lake_Wobegon_...

You don't know what contracts he has signed.

VCs typically include clauses to be able to sack CEO and retain board control under specific circumstances. I've seen this happen in a small company I was at, to a CEO that didn't meet rather ambitious financial targets. AFAIK it is all very carefully designed and the power is extremely important to VCs, plus the legalities are well tested (since most losing CEOs will fight it in courtroom).

Yep - meant to be on parent comment sorry.

Fast electrons through air mostly have elastic scattering making their long distance path a 3D random walk with exponential dropoff which dominates the inverse square geometric dropoff.

Sr90 beta decays emitting an electron becoming daughter decay product Yttrium-90. Yttrium-90 then beta decays (after a half-life of a few days) emitting more energetic electrons than Sr90, and those electrons travel a mean distance through STP air of maybe meters and effectively don't travel further than say 10m.

At long distance through air the Bremsstrahlung xray radiation dominates? It is generated by the fast electrons curving when passing close to nuclei. Xrays through air are inverse square? I guess it depends on the absorbtion characteristics of air.

AFAIK the above is mostly correct but I haven't checked anything properly sorry.

Basically anything to do with radiation is usually deeply complex and you need to look at all the different factors before making assumptions.

Unavailable outside US/Canada.

See "Is Passport available outside of the U.S.?" section of: https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096220-...

  PBS is not a producer, but rather a distributor of programming.

Some details that imply workarounds might be difficult (although I suggest instead better to Google for how to access):

https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/12000096659-...

https://help.pbs.org/support/solutions/articles/5000694871-i...

That's such an unquantifiable accusation.

Plus it is an unfair standard since so many scientists in the past have been caught unethically using the work of others without attribution (and so many more have been accused).

In history we also repeatedly see the phenomenon of multiple discovery or simultaneous invention. If that happens to AI because the topic is pregnant, would you call it "plagiarism" just to disparage AI? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Dr. Buckmaster sounds unsanitary.

Recklessly prompting OpenAI without a care to the safety of their knowledge.

And after that trying to cast aspersions at OpenAI?

Hopefully we get some better facts, because OpenAI are disliked enough that a smear campaign could work against them.

Edit: also the narritive is getting framed as OpenAI versus Anthropic. A highly political extremely capitalist fight is going on, and facts are victims.

Regular people optimise for silly numbers too.

Threadcount, Watts, cubic inches: different products use different misleading measures.

Assuming only one rotor cracks, then the radiation is from one rotor IBIS and the detector electronics could detect radiation levels that ripple synchronously with the rotor speed.

The Strontium-90 is a beta radiation emitter.

  The external radiation level of the IBIS [is] 75 mR/hr at 12 inches in the failure (extended) mode.