Haha, I'll be fine. Thanks for your concern. It isn't even the most disgusting thing I've come across this week since I read the news regularly. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Public Service Announcement - So, I'm game. I checked in and grabbed a random IF thing. I didn't read the fine print and ended up in some transhomo indoctrination fantasy. Don't be me - read the disclaimers, or rue the day.

Thanks, neighbor. Your timely and insightful post was spot on and immediately helpful. I wish that I had some mod points for you.

Science gets a bad reputation because we're no longer getting information from the source. Instead, we get science from every pundit who has a political or philosophical axe to grind. Facts can be misused in all kinds of creative ways, but people don't like being manipulated if/when they finally realize what's going on. Because of this hack/dogma->science association, people have become skeptical to the point of incredulity when presented with scientific evidence.

It certainly doesn't help that we've created negative incentives at every turn for the scientists in question. Funding, exposure, reputation, and influence are all peddled to the researchers in order to control the output of their work. Scientists are people too, and everybody needs to live on something other than hope, dreams, and idealism.

It seems to me that for something as critical as airplane landing and airspace scheduling, a ground-based system of guidance signals would be a desirable backup (or even primary) system. Such a thing would be far more robust than the greatly attenuated GPS signal, after all. Security could be built in such that counterfeit signals could be identified and discarded.

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? This seems eminently doable, but I'm just spitballing.

As for the twist, of course Meta would hit back hard. Sowing a distraction within The Wire is well within their purview, and all they need is some plausible deniability. Try too hard, and it looks to others like you care. In other words, don't ever expect the truth to come out cleanly in this instance. It should be morbidly entertaining, at least.

To a person who lacks self-control, many commonplace things become dangerous. Children are notorious for lacking self-control, especially emotional self-control, and are generally more susceptible to suggestion than mature adults. When my kids were growing up, my wife and I paid a lot of attention to their environment to mitigate the kinds of negative influences they weren't prepared to handle alone. I never tried to pawn off my responsibility as a parent to questionable Internet companies, school boards, the government, or anyone else. At times I failed, but even that did not deter me from my duty to my children.

My kids are grown now, mentally healthy, and it gives me a wonderful sense of accomplishment to know I managed to navigate the minefield of childhood development with them. As you might imagine, I cannot fathom a situation where I would neglect my child enough to turn them loose on social media without taking strict precautions. Most of the time I didn't have to bother protecting them directly from bullying, peer pressure, or other social negatives. Rather, I tended to let normal life happen and taught them the coping skills they needed to deal with the issues as they arose. But - only to the point that they would be effectively able to handle them at their current maturity level.

My kids never liked or pinned or whatever 10k+ social posts glorifying suicide. That's way beyond the pale, and I would have stepped in long before that to help them deal with their issues if I could or to obtain specialized help otherwise. Requiring social media companies to clean up their act is needful, but parents need look no further than themselves for the responsibility of failing to facilitate their child's development to this degree.

I grabbed this to take a look. It took me about 20 minutes to completely install. Consider that I also installed git, gh, ffmpeg, and Python 3.10, as well as all the prerequisites in whisper.git. For my test, I grabbed episode 49 of the Hikaru no Go anime that I had lying around and trimmed out the first 30 seconds of dialog.

ffmpeg -ss 0:1:40 -to 0:2:10 -i HikaruNoGo_49.mkv -map 0:a:0 -acodec copy test.flac

Then I decided to give it a translation run to compare with the provided subtitles:

whisper --model small --task translate --language Japanese test.flac

I have a pretty new laptop, and the spectrogram creation took about 14 minutes and 460 Mb of space. I had first tried the large model, but it wanted an hour and a half plus 2+ Gb of space, so I killed that for now, hoping that the more resource-gentle small model would prove out well. I'm predicting that the actual translation took a very small fraction of the time relative to the transcription. That portion of the process took about 4 minutes. Next is the list of translations and subtitles for each:

Let me...
Let me...

Let me win, Hikaru!
Please let me play, Hikaru!

N-No way!
You've got to be kidding!

If I let you win, I'm sure you'll win!
If I let you play, you're going to win for sure!

Shindou...
Shindou...

You've finally come this far.
You've finally come all this way.

I've been waiting for this moment.
I've been waiting for this.

Hande? (Note that this word was spoken in English, which no doubt confused the translator)
A handicap?

If you let Hande win, the way you shoot will change.
He'll have to play differently if he has a handicap.

I'll shoot you with that!
I'll play with one!

As you can see, even the small model worked out quite well (in my estimation). This looks like it'll be a fun tool to play around with.

Haha, same. At first, I had no mass storage (think I was 11 at the time), so I quickly became adept at typing from having to constantly reenter my BASIC programs. I wrote my own games and composed my own 3-voice music (plus noise!) and generally had a blast. I eventually saved enough to purchase a tape player for mass storage and an uncle gave me an Assembler/Editor cartridge...and it was on. For my 7th grade science project, I did an assembled logistics simulator with the TI-99 and blew the volcano entries right out of the water with line graphics and cheesy self-composed background music, heh. Good times.

I've been affected by a handful of mergers over the years, and they're always followed (if not preceded) by efficiency purges. Who in their right mind expects otherwise? Yes, management is tasked with retention until the last moment, and they'll deceive you to keep you going until the axe drops. Creating jobs is not the intention - it's simply money.

Indeed. I went to the site and took a look around, and the first thing that came to mind is, "This has nothing on anidb." Still, I'll keep it around for reference. Who knows where it'll be in a few years?

How are these things going to take off and land? On the highway? Probably not - so, we're talking airport access or landing strips. That's going to turn into a bottleneck at scale.

"USA Today ends its analysis with a definitive summation: Our fact-check work is supported in part by a grant from Facebook."
Okay, nobody in their right mind believed the assertion in the beginning, but you just had to go and undermine your credibility.

So, here's the thing. TFA states that it was a appeal, i.e. everyone. It also says "we are all Ukrainians", but that's just a metaphor. Nobody here is suggesting that Ukrainians not defend themselves. Non-Ukrainans are the subject of the warning.

Haha, that would require people to RTFA, which is another anachronism.