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> * I am not looking for political battles here or to spread propaganda from either side. I am not sure that a Tibetan store in Berkeley CA is a neutral and accurate representation of Tibet's history.*

What do you think is an accurate representation of Tibetan history? I've also been to Dharamshala and spoken to Tibetans in exile. They also echoed similar views, which I'm guess you will now discard as being unrepresentative of Tibetan history.

> The starting point is that geography makes access to the Tibet region much easier from the East and North than from the South. So-called "Greater Tibet" extends East and North East quite beyond the current Tibet Autonomous Region in China.

Greater Tibet is a made-up concept. It includes places like Arunachal Pradesh where Hindus outnumber Buddhists, and Hindus themselves are outnumbered by Christians. The same width Ladakh. It's just communist propaganda to justify a Chinese land grab.

> Perhaps as a consequence, Tibetan are ethnically closer to East Asians than to South Asians (I think that is visually obvious).

Thank you for your opinion, but I'm not interested in 18th century racist tropes.

> Their language is not related to Indian languages and neither is traditional clothing.

I like how you dismiss the fact that their script is directly derived from Brahmi but consider their language very important. For the record though, plenty of languages related to Tibetan are spoken in the north and north east of India.

Also enlighten us on what you think traditional Indian clothing is, and what traditional Tibetan clothing is.

> Historically Tibet has had close contacts with China and was periodically under Chinese vassality/rule since at least the Tang Dynasty in the 7th century.

Yes, the Chinese have repeatedly tried to invade Tibet. If you think that is a claim for Chinese culture being close to Tibetan culture, I don't know what to tell you! Do you also think that French culture is similar to Arab culture because the "Holy" Roman emperors repeatedly tried to invade Jerusalem?

Another way of looking at it is that two of richest countries in the world from 300 years ago spent the most of the past 300 years with most of their citizens in extreme poverty. Now that those countries are catching up again, we're seeing these reductions in extreme poverty.

In other words, these improvements are not the result of a valiant effort to fight poverty, but a regression to the historical meaning happening because the effects of colonization are beginning to fade away.

> Tibet has been close to China, as opposed to India for more than a thousand years.

That is just laughably false. If you live in the US, I suggest visiting a Tibetan store to disabuse yourself of this communist propaganda. (There are tons of Tibetan stores in Berkeley, CA for instance.) You'll find them selling many items that are instantly recognizable to Indians that Chinese people wouldn't have a clue about. Things like Ganesha figurines, Rudrakhsha malas and kurtis.

An easier option is to try asking an actual Tibetan person. They'll tell you the same thing that I'm saying.

Uighur's and Tibetans have historically not had significant ties with mainland China. The Uighurs are Turkic and have closer cultural ties to the likes of Kazakhstan. The Tibetans are more closely tied to India/Nepal.* After the Mao revolution, the Chinese annexed these territories and started a huge bout of propaganda claiming these regions were always part of China. The propaganda has worked on the mainland Chinese, but obviously, the Uighurs and Tibetans don't buy it because they know their own history. There's been some recent unrest in Uighur autonomous region, so China is starting around round of indoctrination and police state tactics.

*I know this is a controversial claim especially for people of Chinese origin. So if you doubt this, a couple of facts worth pointing out are the following. The Dalai Lama's government in exile is headquartered in Dharamshala in Northern India. Loads of Tibetan kings have had Nepali wives. Tibetan is most closely related to languages spoken in Ladakh, Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal -- two of these are Indian states and the other two are effectively Indian protectorates. Some of the most important "gurus" in Tibetan Buddhism (e.g. Rinpoche aka Padmasambhava) were Indian. The Tibetan script is based on Brahmi which is an ancient Indian script that gave rise to all modern Indian scripts such as Devanagari (used for Hindi/Marathi etc.), Gurmukhi (used for Punjabi), Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, etc.

I feel like I both agree and disagree. It is true that beating glucose or lingeling at the SAT competition would require a lot more engineering than just plain CDCL + 2 literal watching. At the same time, I think a lot of the new stuff (which in my book is everything that's happened in SAT post 2007ish) is primarily focused on winning the SAT competition by taking a sort of kitchen-sink approach.

For instance, CryptoMinisat first implemented XOR detection along with Gaussian elimination. They were using SAT on cryptographic problems, so it made sense to specialize for that domain. But now there's a bunch of crypto-based problems in the SAT competition and many of the other solvers also implement Gaussian elimination. But I'd guess that most users of SAT solvers wouldn't see a noticeable performance difference if you got rid of Gaussian elimination from the solvers.

Another good example is Alan Mischenko's ABC which wins the hardware model checking competition every year but uses a fairly ancient version of MiniSAT as its SAT solving engine. It's not that a faster solver wouldn't make ABC faster, but that the real smarts in model checking are in what queries you send to the solver, not in squeezing an extra 2X or 3X performance out of the SAT solver using the same old dumb queries.

The practical significance of SAT is that almost all modern verification techniques are based on SAT solvers.

The algorithm he describes is not very interesting because it doesn't even implement unit-propagation. The idea with unit propagation is that if my current assignment has set a variable A=True and I also have a clause (~A + B) then B must be true for the instance to be satisfiable. Unit propagation is about propagating such implied constraints. If he'd implemented unit propagation along with his brute force search he'd have ended up with what is called the DPLL algorithm for SAT.

Modern SAT solvers are actually even smarter and have two important improvements over DPLL: (i) Conflict-Driven Clause Learning (CDCL) which introduced a very cool technique called non-chronological backtracking, and (ii) 2-literal watching which is an extremely clever data structure for efficient unit propagation. Both of these ideas are generalizable to many other versions of constraint solving (e.g. sudoko, router search, etc.) so they are well worth learning.

CDCL was introduced by this paper: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=244560 while 2-literal watching is from the Chaff solver: https://www.princeton.edu/~chaff/publication/DAC2001v56.pdf.

Isn't that a much weaker claim you're making than what Taleb sets off to argue for in the beginning of the article? The article begins with the following:

> It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.

It's a far cry from that claim -- that a minority as small as 3-4% can force the majority to submit to the will of the minority -- to the claim that a majority will accomodate a minority as long as extra cost incurred by the majority is not too much. The former is an unbelievably strong claim while the latter is obvious and inane.

The beef intolerance argument isn't convincing at all because an overwhelming majority of Indians don't eat beef. Taleb's argument is not that a majority can force its will on the minority, it is the exact opposite of that.

References on beef consumption in India:

https://www.livemint.com/Politics/RhPVLUFmclIDWRIiSoTC7N/Who...

https://www.quora.com/What-percent-of-Indians-dont-eat-beef

If the argument is that a majority will accommodate a minority as long as that accommodation is unnoticeable to most members of that majority, then I am totally on board with that claim.

What I'm trying to push back against is Taleb's ridiculously broad statement that a tiny minority (only as much as 3-4% of the population) will force the entire population to submit to the minority's preferences. This is just not true.

I think we're both saying the same things.

I said in my response to abiro that "easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated". Which is obviously true.

But that is a very inane and obvious claim, and not at all what NNT is saying. He claims the minority will "win" and that is not a claim he's able to support in any meaningful way. Unless we're redefining the the word "win" to mean something totally new and different, I think he's overstating his case.

And again, I will offer in support of my case that meat is actually more expensive in India than are vegetables.

His argument is not that minorities are also provided options suitable to them when it is economical to do so. He makes a much stronger claim -- that minority preferences will "win".

He supports this by using the anecdotes about how airlines don't serve peanuts and how he had a social encounter where only kosher food was served. And from these two incidents, he jumps to the claim that "Europe will eat halal."

Notice he doesn't make the claim that Europe will increasingly offer halal food as an option. That would be a plausible result of having more Muslims in Europe and would in fact be equivalent to the Indian scenario where people are given a choice of vegetarian as well as meat options. But he says Europe will eat halal! If that were true, we should've seen India eat only vegetarian food given we have way more vegetarians than Europe has Muslims and yet that has not happened. Is this because Indian vegetarians -- of which I am one -- are uniquely tolerant, or is it because he is absurdly overstating his case? I think it's the latter.

Except, the claim he's making is not that easily accommodated minority preferences are often accommodated. This is obviously true.

He's making a claim that minority preferences will "win" -- his word, not mine! That claim is not supported by anything at all in his argument, nor is it what you are claiming.

If this were true, then India would be a fully vegetarian country. Except it is not, and it is quite routine to find meat and fish served at public events here.

(FYI, the actual stats are that only 30% of Indians are vegetarian, although the proportion varies quite a bit from state to state. Some states in the north are about 70% vegetarian and other states in the east are nearly 100% non-vegetarian. Your anecdata about how you couldn't find meat at a particular event should weighted appropriately based on these stats.)

He has written some interesting stuff. In particular, I recommend his book the Black Swan -- it is a very nice description of why there are often structural incentives to disregard unlikely/low-probability events.

But he's also definitely over the hill as a thinker. About the only notable thing he's done in the last few years has been sustaining a long-running and personal feud with Nate Silver (of 538) about who among them better understands probability.

An alternative explanation is that they routinely bury similar negative stories so they have good reason to believe that obsfuscation and spin will work.

As the article says, the Amazon rain forest supplies 20% of the world's oxygen. We all need it. If we won't do what it takes to prevent the people there from killing it, we will all get exactly what we deserve.

It might helpful to introspect on why you'd rather have the money spent on one side of an imaginary line the ground rather than another.

That's why I said you need to get laws passed making beef consumption extremely expensive. Individual acts of voting with your wallet are unlikely to succeed.

If you are seriously concerned about climate change, pressure your government to impose a large tax on beef and pay the proceeds from that tax directly to the people living in the amazon basin. That will incentivize them against deforestation.

Expecting poor people to voluntarily give up on the opportunity to make money because you are threatened about your children's future but can't even be arsed to reduce your own consumption of beef is wishful thinking at best.

What is the citation for the drivers being "mostly illiterate"? Sounds like bullshit to me.

The country is something like 70-80% literate and a significant part of the illiterate population consists of old people.

> Mutual assured destruction may be the only thing limiting the Kashmir conflict, for example.

On the contrary, Kashmir militancy project was started by Pakistan in the late eighties after a botched attempt by the central government in India to rig an election in the state. This was well after the first Indian nuclear tests in 1974. Subsequently, India did another round of nuclear testing 1998 and that too resulted in an attempted stealth invasion of Kargil. So if anything, nuclear weapons have escalated the conflict not the other way around.

Just to be clear, there were always separatist elements in Kashmir, just like there used to be some in Punjab and there still are in Balochistan. But with development and intra-country migration, it becomes hard to sustain a separatist movement and that's why all the other movements in India have all but petered out. It is likely this would've happened in Indian-controlled Kashmir too, given that the valley was largely peaceful after 1948 and until the 1990s.

But a concatenation of unfortunate circumstances -- first the rigged election, then Pakistani arming of the separatists, the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets winding up which meant the ISI and their jihadi cousins-in-arms were looking for a new project, the Indian Army's human rights violations and introduction of AFSPA in the valley, harassment of and violence against Kashmiri Hindus which caused a mass exodus of pro-India elements from the valley, and the western policy of ignoring jihadi violence in Kashmir until 9/11/2001 because they were historically aligned with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia rather than India which was assumed to be in the Russian sphere of influence --- resulted in the conflict blowing up to where it is now.

You'll notice that many of these contributing factors have disappeared and the situation is likely to get better in the next couple of decades.

As someone below noted, there's nothing Bangalore-specific about this. This is coming from a native Bangalorean who moved away about eight years ago.

It's just human nature to want to sit around and chat rather than actually spend hours of your time on hard work which may or may not pan out into something useful.

I think we disagree on this. I interpret the failure of OWS et al. as the inability of the protestors to take their ideas mainstream. While gerrymandering, voter targeting and propaganda via mass media do dilute the protesters' votes, change is clearly possible. We saw this with the Arab Spring where the protesters were up against a much more authoritarian and anti-democratic state.

If I had to guess, I'd say the problem facing the American left is complacency. A lot of people still think things are going reasonably well and simply do not empathize with the concerns of OWS or the sunrise movement or the BLM movement. It's hard to move the needle politically if a significant minority simply do not believe that there's a crisis worth reacting to.

A related point made by Zeynep Tufecki is that mass protests in the past used to be show of force. If you could get half million people to travel to Washington and participate in a mass protest, that meant these people cared enough to take time off from work for a few days, spend money on travel and participate in a policitically and socially risky activity. It also meant you had several tens of thousands of organizers in diverse parts of country who managed the logistics of getting so many people to come together for the protest. The implication was clear -- give us what we want, if you don't, we definitely have the votes to take you down.

In the age of Twitter and Facebook, protests are a lot more convenient and a lot less difficult to organize. It is not clear that half a million people protesting in NYC or DC means much in terms of actual electoral consequences. Whether they can articulate it or not, politicians definitely know this and react accordingly.

This was a great recommendation, thanks!

Is there a good textbook that covers these? I am primarily interested in a computer science perspective to these algebraic structures.

Nah, the blowback they'd get from not honoring the purchasing would be terrible. More generally, Amazon are one of the few companies who understand that short term losses can lead to long-term goodwill and profit.

So anyway, my prediction is that they will do nothing about your purchase.

> This article repeats the claim that the MCAS software was faulty, but is there any evidence of coding-level errors?

No, there isn't. The Verge (and IIRC other sources) have reported that the crashes were due to failures in the angle of attack (AoA) sensors. No program in the world is going to give you correct output with garbage input.

Verge link: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/2/18518176/boeing-737-max-cr...

I think computer architecture is especially prone to this sort of nonsense. The whole field has a weird insider-bias and most program committee members seem to come from the same schools, have the same advisors, and write the same sort of papers.

I find it kinda interesting that Moritz Lipp and Daniel Gruss have revolutionized our understanding of microarchitectural side channels and not a single one of their papers has appeared in ISCA/ASPLOS/MICRO. And yet, obviously flawed nonsense supposedly addressing side channels regularly manages to appear in these conferences.

Journal reviews can be stacked with friends just as easily. In fact, most top CS/EE journals ask authors to recommend reviewers. (In theory, the editors will make sure the recommendations are conflict-free and sensible, but given their workloads, I wouldn't be surprised if at least some of them took the authors' suggestions at face value.)