domain:rifters.com
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Did you pay with a credit card? Selling purchasing data by credit card companies is probably super-duper illegal but I'm pretty sure it happens.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
If I can tell it's AI I refuse to read it. I would prefer a hard ban on non-spoilered AI content and stringent restrictions on spoilered AI.
birb_cromble
1d ago
rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country
professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
So to avoid politicizing scientific research, we should water down the quality of the researchers and let a bunch of activists take over the institutions, and that would genuinely be the best move for the country?
Am I reading that right?
anti_dan
1d ago
The problem is the whole ecosystem is corrupt and tries to launder political propaganda by citing to things like Tao's work and other stuff like it. This is what happens when good people operate within a bad system, they become part of the problem.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
The headline is almost objectively a lie. It’s completely incompatible with the stat you quoted and so I suspect they are gaming the word “failure” to mean something most people don’t consider it to mean.
ThenElection
1d ago
If you're anticipating capex in the 13 figures, it's still surprising that large companies don't do more research on fundamentally different learning algorithms and hardware. Which isn't to say they don't (e.g. there are a couple researchers at GDM doing excellent work in neuromorphic and more brain-inspired learning), but I'd be surprised if the aggregate research spending among the big three on this (as opposed to tweaks to make transformers perform incrementally better) exceeds $1B/year. Any given research path is likely to not lead to anything, but the potential payoff is enormous.
zoink
1d ago
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research.
If it's paid for by taxes it's political.
thejdizzler
1d ago
As someone in the sciences (doing my PhD at Hopkins) these cuts have hit us quite hard. The NSF has basically been dismantled, and the NIH funding system has become much more restrictive. To me, none of this makes a whole lot of sense. These grants were pennies on top of the giant stacks of dollars that the military, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security represent. Yes you get a bunch of duds, but a lot of the research funded has an extremely high ROI. I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).
This is also bad because it explicitly politicizes scientific research. Which I can't really blame the Trump administration for. It was the idiot professors and students who tried to make the department officially pro-Palestine, admit a bunch of diversity PhD students who aren't up to snuff, and antagonize the administration because they thought Trump was a fascist who started this whole thing.
So it seems to me once again a case of Trump punishing the people who tried to screw him over, rather than something that genuinely would be the best move for the country.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
as there is still a long and ugly history of nasty jewish pedophiles making use of their jewishness to evade justice.
Correct, insofar as pedos (and many other sorts of criminals) seek to flee overseas to countries without easy extradition to the US. The Saudis, for example, seem to have something of a state policy of bailing out and whisking away their nationals away from American justice.
But I strongly suspect that all of this a rounding error being blown out of proportion because of who's involved. If there are base-rate statistics showing that jews are disproportionately likely to commit sex crimes, that would clearly indicate a problem. If there are statistics showing that that jews accused of crimes have disproportionately lower rates of conviction once charged, then that's likely a problem whether or not they are abusing aaliyah as the mechanism.
Otherwise it's just chinese cardiologists.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
· Edited 1d ago
The main grant for IPAM is already unsuspended anyway (possibly because UCLA bent the knee).
Further, the grant DID fund DEI programs in the past, such as (from the latest annual report):
“PUNDiT: (P)racticum for (Und)ergraduates (i)n Number (T)heory” is a 2-day intensive program which will showcase number theory broadly interpreted at the introductory level. A goal of this program is to expose Southern California students traditionally underrepresented in number theory (such as women and historically marginalized minorities) to the beauty of the subject.
And as tracingwoodgrains points out, Tao already chose a side His complaints about "political directives" ring hollow.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Because anyone can be a sensationalist?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
There are people who say "would" to Slaanesh daemonettes; fucking Eldar isn't even something they would blink at.
yunyun333
1d ago
Terence Tao: I’m an award-winning mathematician. Trump just cut my funding.
In just six months, the United States has seen a wholesale assault on the scientific infrastructure that helped make it a world leader in innovation. Grants have been cancelled mid-project, fellowships for the next generation of researchers gutted, and federally funded institutes stripped of the resources they need to operate. These decisions are not the result of scientific review or Congressional debate, but of abrupt political directives that bypass long-standing norms, disrupt multi-year projects, and erode the independence of our research ecosystem.
In that time, I have seen first-hand how sustained federal investment—channeled through agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF)—powers the collaborations that link universities, government laboratories, and industry. At UCLA's Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), where I now serve as Director of Special Projects, those collaborations have laid the groundwork for both theoretical breakthroughs and practical technologies. My own research at IPAM, for instance, helped lead to the algorithms that now cut MRI scan times by a factor of up to 10. This is the America I chose as my adoptive home: a place where science is valued as a public good, and where researchers from around the world come to contribute their ideas and energy.
It is therefore stunning and devastating to discover that the new administration, in just its first six months, has deliberately attacked and weakened almost all the supporting pillars of this ecosystem. Executive actions have cancelled or suspended federal grants with unprecedented scale and speed, with billions of dollars worth of ongoing research projects and experiments disrupted. This is not because of a negative scientific assessment of the work, but instead by seemingly arbitrary justifications. Critical funding has been pulled for as insignificant a reason as the presence of a key word in the original proposal that is retroactively deemed unacceptable.
Federal support is, of course, a privilege, not a right; and Congress has the constitutional authority to set the budgets and rules for any expenditure of public funds and resources. But many of these executive actions have not waited for either explicit or implicit Congressional approval, and in some cases have even directly ignored past Congressional mandates for appropriations. Relative to the sheer size of the federal government as a whole, the amount allocated for supporting science is not massive. The NSF mathematics and physical sciences (MPS) directorate, for instance, is the largest of the subdivisions of the NSF, and has an annual budget of approximately $1.7 billion. This looks significant until one realizes that it amounts to about five dollars per US citizen per year, and less than a tenth of a percent of the federal budget as a whole.
He seems to be referring to how the admin took an axe to science funding by ctrl+F-ing for 'woke' dictionary terms: underrepresented, minority, diverse, etc. The problem is that the effects seem to be about indiscriminate regardless of whether you were a true believer or merely box checking. Will we see upgraded diversity science pledges in the next democrat admin? Researchers might have to carefully consider the political leanings of their funding proposals in election years.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
Well, one schmuck and a handful of carefully selected, credentialed experts. They had reasons for selecting the schmuck, but they didn't really expect him to deliver.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
Do you have any strong flashbulb memories from a fictional media experience? A video game, a book, a movie?
Flashbulb memories are memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event. Hearing the news that President Kennedy had been shot is used as the prototype case. Almost everyone can remember, with almost perceptual clarity, where he was when he heard, what he was doing, who told him, what was the immediate aftermath, how he felt about it, and one or more idiosyncratic and often trivial concomitants
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
1d ago
>space elf society starts debating the moral rights of monkes
>the alien women find monke men’s primitive ways irrationally attractive
>space elf company creates human dildos
>alien incels begin claiming that some fraction of space elf women would rather fuck a monke than an ugly space elf
>space elf women start fucking the humans
>space elf males’ sense of unearned status is irrationally compelling to human women
>women start fucking the space elves
>mfw alien interbreeding solves the fertility crisis
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1d ago
I mean there’s a pretty big opportunity cost to things like mars colonies. I’d give a conservative estimate that it would probably cost several trillion dollars a year to build human colonies on Mars. Keeping in mind that it’s going to cost that per year as everything they need is probably coming from earth. Now if we’re spending $10 trillion a year just think of some of the other much more useful projects you could fund for that amount of money. The NHS costs about £3000 per person which is roughly $4050 per person. At ten trillion dollars, you can give everyone on planet Earth access to first world health care. Or we could give every human on earth clean water and electricity. Or work on carbon scrubbing technology to mitigate global warming. Send every child on earth to not just through K-12 but through university.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
There was no single 'invasion' of India, in any case, but control of India's europeanized human capital was part of the motive for direct British control over the subcontinent; that's why it happened after the sepoy revolt.
British culture was(and is) legitimately better at everything that matters compared to Hindoo culture; many castes performed close enough to Imperial par when properly anglicized.
Shrike
1d ago
Interestingly, legally the definition of a UAP includes "transmedium objects or devices" and "submerged objects or devices that are not immediately identifiable and that display behavior or performance characteristics suggesting that the objects or devices may be related to the objects or devices" that are unidentified aerial or transmedium objects.
The DoD's definition (same source) is that UAPs are "sources of anomalous detections in one or more domain (i.e., airborne, seaborne, spaceborne, and/or transmedium) that are not yet attributable to known actors and that demonstrate behaviors that are not readily understood by sensors or observers."
I'm sure a nonzero percentage of them are clouds and/or equipment errors anyway.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The fact is that we are sitting at the bottom of a rather inconvenient gravity well.
The early modern European powers colonized the world because that was a very profitable thing for them to do. Crossing the Atlantic with a ship full of spices or gold was hard but doable.
By contrast, going to the Moon today is much harder today than crossing the Atlantic was in 1500. If the moon was full of gold nuggets which you just had to pick up, that would still not pay for the expense to bring them to Earth.
Settling Antarctica or the shallow parts of the sea is actually much easier than settling space.
At some point we will probably get Netflix to sponsor a human Mars mission as reality TV, but settling there?
Migrating to North America was a great idea for many because even if you made it across with just the clothes on your body, there was plenty of land (once you genocided the natives). You just had to clear the land and then you could grow your favorite staples from the old world.
By contrast, until we get von-Neumann machines, in space you will depend on Earthcrafted goods for a very long time. Just imagine the settlement of the Americas in a world where every plank of wood had to be shipped in from the old world for the first 100 years.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I'm generally convinced that at least getting the vaccines was sensible (and pushing their roll-out was good policy, though the compulsion to take them was deeply illiberal), but this data doesn't seem too compelling to me considering the obvious confounders. I would assume Red America to have a significantly larger number of old and unhealthy people with inadequate access to medical care.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
It's also possible that we get a lone alien craft who was drawn here following an amateur radio signal after his home planet was destroyed in a nuclear war, which he survived because he was in the orbital guard at the time.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Based on a current understanding of physics, the only reason to launch an invasion would be to acquire the population as human capital for empire building
That sounds awfully confident given that we can make no assumptions about the utility function of the aliens. Perhaps they just want to fuck koala bears and think wiping out humanity is easier than convincing them to leave 95% of Earth's land mass to the koala brothel project.
Perhaps they are the superhappy people, who would simply invade because Earth allows kids to experience pain on the level of stubbed toes.
Perhaps it is just a science fair project on conflict in the early nuclear age.
Even if you assume that any alien life could only have an instrumental interest in Earth, we have a ton of species besides humans. Not that capturing or subjugating a few billion humans will do them much good -- much easier to transmit the human genome and synthesize humans on their home world if they need humans for some weird reason.
FistfullOfCrows
1d ago
>you meet the space elves
>they are hot
>Immediately they start calling you monkeigh
Did they have buddies with them?
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