pbmonster
3d ago
Are the current national labs "part of the government" in any meaningful way?
pbmonster
3d ago
You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced
Agreed. I proposed a solution for that downthread: move all university STEM research to national labs, and have them train grad students. Undergrads stay with their "teaching professors" at the current universities.
pbmonster
3d ago
I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts. STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture.
Yes, absolutely. And the only reason I'm doing that is because the current culture warriors rampaging through universities and science funding are doing the same.
I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs. All undergrads stay at the current universities, where only "teaching professors" remain. Even in STEM, most undergrad classes don't benefit greatly from having an active researcher teaching them - but graduate level classes do.
I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.
I kind of disagree. There's a lot of small stuff happening behind the scenes at universities and then silently creeping into products all over the world. There's two relatively recent prices for lasers, those came from "classic-size" groups. Advances here (independent from those prizes) also still frequently make it from universities into (e.g. telecom) products. In biochem, CRISPR/CAS9 was an incredibly small team. In material science, I expect small university groups making big contributions to high-entropy metal alloys and to further improvement of semiconductors.
pbmonster
3d ago
So then the question is if we really want to mess with the system that globally is the best at driving fundamental research in the hard sciences - because of a pretty small number of people spreading garbage on TV or through their private blog. Which, arguably, those people would be doing anyways (there's plenty of idiots with normal jobs successfully spreading garbage through the same channels). So really, we would only be changing their title from "Professor" to "Doctor".
pbmonster
3d ago
"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities?
Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.
As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.
Research (and upstream activities of future research, like teaching and mentoring) are strong-link problems. Your end results only really depend on the very best that do it, the "not stellar" don't effect overall outcomes much. The problem is - as in most strong-link problems - that you don't know who the very best will be in advance. So having a lot of "not stellar" people have academic freedom (and have little to show for it 30 years later) is just the price of doing business.
So, what's the solution? Don't worry to much about it. Hire already successful mentees from the previous generation of strong links, punish outright fraud (Alzheimer research scandal, ect.) and leave them alone. And then don't trust any of them to much - if you're making policy decisions on their advice, you need a large meta study anyway. Usually, a strong link contrarian will appear.
What you shouldn't do is have a new crop of elected representative fight their way deep into the system every 4 years and topple everything. That actually affects outcomes.
pbmonster
4d ago
one of my roommates, who never practiced polyamory per see, but always had a "rotation" of girls going (maybe this is the cool chad version of poly, idk)
There's a joke along the lines of "Ah, so you sleep with a bunch of different girls, who each also might or might not sleep with a bunch of different guys - but you really like them, and one of them might be your housemate? Back in my days, we used to call that 'being single in college'."
Depends on how they do it. I've read so many tariff stories from industry insiders, and they all go "We used to import this for $80, shipping, handling and fees brings it to $100, and to account for our overhead we sell it for $300 plus tax. But now, we import it for $80, tariffs brings that to $110, shipping and handling brings that to $130, and to maintain our margins, we have to sell it for $390 plus tax."
They ignore that because of tariffs, they now make $260 of profit instead of $200, and half-heatedly claim that this is because of "margin" and because of "overhead". This insistence to preserve the gross margin percentage (instead of preserving the dollar amount margin per product) makes absolutely no sense to me, but they literally all do it. Margin is a percentage, end of story.
So, you probably can't learn much from looking at what Amazon claims are tariff costs.
pbmonster
16d ago
- Day 1: Approach day. Drive into the mountains, ascend to camp/the mountain hut by evening.
- Day 2: Summit day. Spend the day hiking and preferably climbing. Chill at camp/hut to soak in the views, or (ideally) move to a new location.
- Day 3: Summit secondary peaks, take a detour back to the car.
pbmonster
16d ago
If I were queen, my hard rule would be no sexuality in school for any kid under 12. At 13 or so, obviously you need to explain sex and how babies are made
Bit late, isn't it? By that time, most of the girls will be menstruating and a few of them might be sexually active already.
And sure, you can argue that the parents should have prepared them for all of that, but realistically, some haven't. I'd prefer it if the schools make sure they have some idea what's going on, at the very least the biological reality of their situation.
pbmonster
25d ago
While we have advanced pretty far on the "reacts to sensory inputs" front lately, the "autonomous reproduction" is still sorely lacking.
pbmonster
26d ago
US phone manufacturing capabilities have little to do with "AI killbots"
How do you imagine the first generations of killbots to look like? I imagine a state of the art mobile processor, a lithium battery, a camera module, lidar, GPS, compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, modem, beam forming GHz antenna package. Motors, props, shaped charge explosive.
Remove the last three and add a screen, what do you have?
pbmonster
30d ago
How is such an obvious target not immediately blown to pieces via airpower?
The Houthis are operating in a much smaller area than the Somali pirates did before them. The oceans are big, the horizon is small. Finding a pirate ship via aircraft hours after a call for help (which is how long it takes until airpower arrives if your navy isn't dominating the seas and your allies are far and few between) is difficult, especially if you try avoiding blowing up random fishing boats.
And both Somalis and Houthis are extremely low tech. Doesn't take much to give a pirate ship thousands of miles of range.
pbmonster
30d ago
For a less insane aproach just have soldiers with RPGs and Snipers with shoot on sight orders stationed on every ship.
I'm not convinced. The escalation is to easy for the pirates. Current Somali militias could do it if they cared. Slightly bigger ship, 10 tons of hand mixed concrete to form a ghetto pillbox, soviet artillery piece. Done.
They can't board as easily anymore, but they can threaten to blow up the cargo ship's bridge.
Escalating for the cargo ships is not as easy. They already have to keep most of their hardware and mercenaries in international waters on their floating armory ships, they really don't want to install naval guns every time the mercenaries board a cargo vessel.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Yes, important point. Buy a "2.4 GHz/5 GHz wifi antenna" on Amazon/Ali Express, not a "12 cm full band dipole antenna" at your local HAM/radio nerd supplier. That should get around the problem.
pbmonster
1mo ago
The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick.
Make sure there isn't an external antenna somewhere in the box, or at the very least the port for an external antenna on the back of the motherboard. The plug will 99% be SMA, which is a little coax port with an outside thread. If there is one, get a cheap ($10 max) dipole antenna for it.
If there isn't, it's magic you get any signal at all. The PC case is a Faraday cage, and the back of the mainboard is a really bad place for a compact print antenna - it almost certainly points the wrong way. In that case, just get an external USB wifi card with external antennas. I've got an Alpha Networks card with two antenna ports for $25. I replaced one of the dipole antennas with a directional patch antenna. The thing gets signal at the other end of my parking lot, through several walls, inside the car.
The reason phones and laptops have such good wifi is that they usually have 3 antennas built in around the inside of the screen, behind the plastic bezel. Much better than a single antenna in/behind a Faraday cage.
pbmonster
1mo ago
How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back?
From personal experience: you just wait a little. The medical establishment has the gigantic advantage of actually performing miracles every day. Doing that reliably certainly helps in (re-)building trust.
I used to be very skeptical, almost averse to what doctors and the medical establishment were doing.
But then they just healed a very annoying genetic condition I have, restored 100% of physical ability after life wrecked my body, I watched them save my child by emergency C-section, and a family member was diagnosed with advanced cancer. The last two were scary, of course. Seeing the medical machine throw its full weight towards you with urgency puts some real fear into you.
But it worked. Healthy son, cancer in remission with remarkably little side effects. So I had to admit: "OK, many of you actually know exactly what you're doing." And of course, they're pretty nonchalant about it. "Chances were decent to begin with, actually so much better than 10 years ago..."
Sure, the field is a mess and some skepticism is more than justified. But I mostly trust doctors again.
pbmonster
1mo ago
But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?
For the average technologically inclined student, there's still all the other engineering disciplines. My prediction is they will be much, much harder to crack for AI than software engineering (there's just not that much training data available, the training data that exists would need lots of experienced engineers to be curated, and the data is not actually all that much... text. It's models, drawings, phone calls and proprietary SAP processes) and they will be somewhat safer from off-shoring.
The American economy still needs a whole lot of mechanical, electrical, chemical and construction engineers. Most (by number) of them, especially outside of the big corpo design jobs, can't realistically do more than a day or two of home office per week - because their day job is still very much boots on the ground, solving problems directly involving hardware and the people that run/make that hardware. So much of the problem solving is looking at hardware, talking to people, identifying the problem, solving the problem, and then talking to people again to get it fixed.
Is that clear? The enemy certainly is competent, and good-enough to
pbmonster
1mo ago
How cringey is the first-person narration?
I had already forgotten that it's first person. Flipped through it again, I think it's well done.
pbmonster
1mo ago
A genre I really enjoy is "competence porn," in which a character or characters overcome challenges and trials via being really good at what they do, either against the uncaring Universe or against an opponent who is also really good at what they do
I've just finished Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City by Parker. Loved it, fits your genre perfectly, and it was a nice first for me in that it's in a fantasy universe, but there's no magic or monsters. It's a quick read.
There's also an interesting subtheme of the meaning of duty and loyalty - the protagonist defending empire, even though empire is of course fundamentally unjust, even to the protagonist personally.
Electrification is all well and good (clean air!) but why go to such a great effort in steel and cement?
Steel is 7% of global CO2 emissions, cement is 6%. And both are actually easier to electrify than agriculture, ocean shipping and jet flight - each also single digit percentage points of global emissions.
So if we stop short of steel and cement, we're so very much short of Everything, we might as well just give up and accept that global warming will be a continuous process that only stops after human civilization ends. I'm not yet willing to accept doomerism of that kind, I'd much rather build great things - which needs more steel and cement, meaning we need to electrify it in the field as soon as it begins to be cost competitive.
Just build more nuclear plants when we need more energy, keep them running 95% of the time and then switch over to fusion power.
I share your frustrations, but I've been waiting for a reform of nuclear regulations for decades now. It's not going to happen, middling public support and close to zero political will across the aisle. We just can't do it, and now it's too late. Even regulatory nuclear revolution followed by a Manhattan project 2.0 would not make nuclear in any way relevant in the west. The timelines are too long and renewables+batteries have full industrial momentum now.
France, South Korea and China had the political will 30 years ago, and thus have momentum now, but nobody else does.
But they've been saying this for ages. It hasn't happened.
It has happened for everybody who bought solar cells. Investments in rooftop solar amortize in 5-10 years, after that it's pure profit/free power.
The rest will follow with cheap batteries. Technologically, we could roll out vehicle to grid today, and connect several TWh of batteries to the grid. Grid scale batteries are economical today, you just need to wait in the grid interconnection queue for a year or two until you can get your GW connections approved. It's happening right now, and it will only get faster from here. The price is right now, and shortly the full force of capitalism will do the rest.
Consumer prices might not follow, of course. Lots of monopolies, stupid regulations, lots of new investments...
pbmonster
1mo ago
This leads to a situation where both literal and free translations of compositions that draws from these classical elements often loses both some nuance and undertones of the original phrasing (if the translator isn't incredibly liberal with their word count), and almost always loses the lyrical quality of the text.
I fully agree. For me personally, this means the translator - especially of works for which classical translations already exist - should not even attempt to replicate the classical elements, the nuance and undertone, but attempt to create a text with a lyrical quality all on its own.
I'd almost always prefer a more free/liberal translation, and things like word count don't matter to me at all.
For some reason, translations like that exist for ancient Greek and more modern Russian literary works, but often not for Chinese.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Green hydrogen isn't even a thing, surely most physicists could tell you the concept is a fantasy.
I disagree. I'm a proponent of the Electrify Everything movement, and I'm convinced it's going to be cheaper for 90% of the economy than burning fossil fuels is, within two decades.
You want green hydrogen for two things: blast furnaces for virgin steel (steel from iron ore, not from scrap) and cement kilns for concrete. Both processes will be difficult to electrify without hydrogen. The rest of what you're saying is true, of course. You only ever store hydrogen if you have access to a subterran salt cavern - because then its economical to run the electrolyzers when electricity is cheap, and make steel/cement 24/7. In all other cases, you just make the hydrogen on demand, and you throttle down production if electricity gets temporarily expensive.
If you have a truly gigantic salt cavern (those exist) and most countries in the west continue to refuse reforming their nuclear regulations, you might be doing seasonal energy storage on the side. Because in a future grid without nuclear, the renewables will need to be at least 30% overbuilt, which means you have zero cost electricity for months. In that case, adding a few GW of gas turbines or fuel cells to your steel/concrete plant might be worth it, even if you only run them during the yearly dunkelflaute.
pbmonster
1mo ago
Spanish is probably a better choice anyway.
Depends on why you learn it! Pro Spanish:
-
Talking to people in the west? No use in learning Chinese, they all will be much better at English than you could realistically get at Chinese. Especially in the US, this is not true for many Spanish speakers.
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Career opportunities? Little use in learning Chinese, because again, there's already hundreds of millions of people who are better at English and Chinese than you could ever get.
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Travel? Both the Spanish and Chinese speaking world are beautiful, and the people living there mostly don't speak English. But learning Chinese to travel is frustrating: even after years of effort, you won't understand people in most Chinese speaking regions. The dialects are tough.
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You'll acquire a new, fully functional language in a fraction of the time when you chose Spanish. Like, by a factor of 10.
Pro Chinese:
- While Spanish has some great literature and film, it's not even close to Chinese. Also, I found Spanish-English translations to be mostly enjoyable, but I absolutely hate Chinese-English translations. Maybe the languages/culture are to different. Maybe the style of translation differs, and Chinese translators mostly refuse to translate in a free/dynamic equivalence style.
I mean, sure. And the Marines are part of the DoD. Does that facilitate ideological capture, especially one that differs between administrations?
My personal experience in both cases says no, not really. The government can't significantly change the ideological makeup of either the national labs or the Marines, and both are ideologically not significantly different than the median of the population.
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