So Clippy's had a gender change, now calls herself Eliza and would like to help you write a letter to yourself about how you feel. Great.

Though WP51 had an annoying bug when some erroneous character appeared, and then the bottom half of your document became inaccessible. Eventually I learned that you could save the document, open it up in Norton Utilities hex editor, and change the bad character back to a space. Caused some major headaches when writing school coursework against an impending deadline.

The word they should use is something like lease, with conditions and possibly a minimum guaranteed term (violation of which would be grounds for a refund). But like a certain director said, you don't own it unless you have a physical copy that you have the keys to access.

While it's suffering the death of a thousand cuts by a government hell bent on privatisation, the UK's NHS wasn't for-profit, and we had no trouble finding people to do it. And people in the UK don't get bankrupt by medical bills like those in the US do. The pay up or die model is only good for a small number of private health providers and pharmaceutical companies -- nobody else. There is a need for healthcare, it needs to be delivered, but leaving it to a rich and greedy free market simply isn't a good solution to the problem.

I often quote Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Researchers must publish or perish, whether they have something to publish or not.
Thus there is a strong incentive to publish poor quality (though non fraudulent) research just to get a publication out.
Then there is pressure to optimise your metrics, which is easier though fraud.
And if you have nothing publication worthy to publish, you have to get your publication material from somewhere,
hence the incentive for fraud.

What you see is an evolving system adapting to match the metrics it's designed to optimise.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I remember trying to explain to a CND person, a decade ago, why AI is a far bigger threat to the world than nuclear weapons. I think it went in one ear and out the other.

I didn't buy it for this, but ended up with using a refurb 2014 mac mini as a media centre. My Fire stick hasn't been used since. Sure I have to use a mouse and keyboard, but it runs everything and can be controlled over ssh, which is nice. So I use VLC instances with http and telnet so that they can be controlled remotely either by web or by scripts.

Task Manager -> End Task

Maybe that will shut the up.

Quantity of publication and reputation of journals have become targets which researchers are forced to aim at.

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

Honest researchers are outcompeted by frauds (or at least less honest researchers) when it comes to these measures.

You don't get to come back a year (or a century) later and say, "Hey, I just found out what that painting is actually worth. Give it back."

Actually... Why not? You said yourself you're in the wrong and you certainly acted in bad faith, so why shouldn't your victim have their demand to annul the deal enforced?

As opposed to people with nativist and inward looking views, companies like Apple HAVE to work overseas, and if you keep following the US govt kool-aid, then you will only be able to do business with Western Europe and other allies.

Try to understand that a big part of the world actually sees the US as the big bad empire that they portray China to be and it makes sense that they ask Stewart to tone it down a bit.

It's not that China is a big bad empire, it's that Xi is an emperor who's unable to placate his people with promises of a better tomorrow due to China's economy having caught up enough that the rubber band has gone slack and dictatorships being inherently incompatible with the rule of law which a strong economy requires, so his only hope for survival is to placate them with promises of glory which makes a confrontation with China and West pretty much inevitable, and Xi knows that. It's the same deal as with Russia, US is simply being wiser than EU was.

Basically, what's business to Apple is a weapon to China, and China is a fundamentally hostile nation to anyone who doesn't think Xi would make a great world leader, which he wouldn't judging by everything I know about life in China and also because he's a genocidal tyrant. That's not "nativist" or "inward looking", that's simply realism.

I recently saw a very insightful interview where dictatorships are defined by things you cannot criticize, like the CCP in China, Kim Jong-un in Korea, etc. In the US the thing that will absolutely get you canceled will be talking about the Israeli lobby and the influence such a small group holds over US culture in general.

Seriously? You're equating getting canceled with getting disappeared?

Note that such a system would also prevent Slashdot from leaning left and censoring conservatives, which they're doing now by institution an idiotic "karma". Slashdot karma is all about politics. And Slashdot is left leaning. One could express that cutely as "CowboyNeal is an imbecile".

But you're not being censored. Your comment is right here, readable for all who care to engage with users with bad reputation. That you have managed to earn a bad reputation through your own actions does not reflect badly on Slashdot or CowboyNeal, it reflects badly on you. It is the consequence of your actions, in other words, your karma.

That most people ignore you doesn't mean you're being censored, it just means that they think you and your opinions are not worth listening to. That your response to this is that the government should force them to pay attention just serves to demonstrate that their judgement is completely right. It's not a political judgement, it's a judgement about you as a person.

Given your vitriol here, I think you know that too, and judging by the fact that you keep posting on Slashdot despite hating the place I doubt you're more welcome elsewhere either. So perhaps you should reflect on the only common factor for a change, try to see your self from other people's eyes and maybe, just maybe accept that you might actually be the one who's in the wrong and needs to change? It's painful, but so is eternal bitterness, and there is no government big enough to make other people like you, so those are your options.

With Starlink and friends, ground=based astronomy is basically f***ed already.

Eigenfunctions of something are inputs to something (say a transformation) which retain their nature. That is, their nature survives the transformation. Other things do not. This is survival of the fittest.

If you take an audio feedback loop (e.g. holding a microphone near a PA speaker), the signal evolves towards frequencies which interfere constructively, and everything dies out. This is evolution again: certain frequencies suited to the evolutionary niche survive and grow, and the other frequencies, ill-adapted to the feedback loop, die out.

When it comes to our brains, our immediate future brain state depends largely on its current state and its neurological input. Thought patterns which survive this grow, and those that don't die out. Thus the patterns in our brains evolve, going from thought to thought as animals go from generation to generation.

I've said to friends for years that evolution should be viewed as a very general phenomenon. As we get more specific, like biological evolution, then our notion of evolution takes on more particulars, and conversely, at its most general, all we know is that the state of a system depends on its present state, input from outside, and the laws which determine the immediate future state from theese.

The term I used at the time was Pattern Resonance. Just like resonance in many mechanical systems is a matter of frequency content, in the sense of sine functions and the Fourier transform, when it comes to mind and nature, things cease to be a simple function like this, rather what matters is some broad, general, complex notion of the stuff that is analogous to the sine functions in e.g. signal processing. I simply use the word Pattern.

Nature evolves, mind evolves, the state of the universe evolves, the outputs of recursively applied functions evolve. Wherever there is feedback there is evolution.