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.

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.

RMS's bullshit is why there are essentially no proprietary forks of the Linux kernel, or the GNU userland. (Almost. Red Hat have finally figured out the loophole. And f them. But companies like Apple like permissive licenses like MIT and BSD because they can take what they want and give nothing back to the community.) RMS's bullshit is why share-alike licenses exist. RMS's bullshit is why there was a *nix userland available to put on top of Linus' college hobby project. He may not be popular, nor woke, but his 'bullshit' has changed the world, and much of that change is a good thing.

This is a Welcome Offer, so you can only apply it to one item, and if the order is less than $8, you have to pay shipping.
Given that you can get proper brand (e.g. WD Green) second hand 120GB SSDs off eBay for around $10-$15, I think I'd go for those instead.

I don't have an SSD this cheap, but I have some supercheap brand ones. Something these supercheap SSDs are useful for is as an alternative to memory sticks for installing an OS. They are much quicker to write to (many times quicker), and quicker to read from, and can be rewritten more times. So this speeds the process. On the other hand, if it stops working, chuck it in the bin and grab another one.

I've not tried these, but at this price I may grab a few and see.