It's possible that cetaceans have a true language. They certainly have something that seems to function the same as a "hello, I am (name)", where the name part differs between all cetaceans but the surrounding clicks are identical. The response clicks also include that same phrase which researchers think serves the purpose of a name.

But we've done structural analysis to death and, yes, all the results are interesting (it seems to have high information content, in the Shannon sense, seems to have some sort of structure, and seems to have intriguing early-language features), but so does the Voynich Manuscript and there's a 99.9% chance that the Voynich Manuscript is a fraud with absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Structure only tells you if something is worth a closer look and we have known for a long time that cetacean clicks were worth a closer look. Further structural work won't tell us anything we don't already know.

What we need is to have a long-term recording of activities and clicks/whistles, where the sounds are recorded from many different directions (because they can be highly directional) and where the recording positively identifies the source of each sound, what that source was doing at the time (plus what they'd been doing immediately prior and what they do next), along with what they're focused on and where the sounds were directed (if they were). This sort of analysis is where any new information can be found.

But we also need to look at lessons learned in primate research, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, to understand what ISN'T going to work, in terms of approaches. In all three cases, we've learned that you learn best immersively, not from a distance. If an approach has failed in EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE, then assuming it is going to work in cetacean research is stupid. It might be the correct way to go, but assuming it is is the bit that is stupid. If things fail repeatedly, regardless of where they are applied, then there's a decent chance it is necessary to ask that maybe the stuff that keeps failing is defective.

Only idiots spy in person. They either pay for an insider or do all monitoring remotely. When was the last time an actual foreign agent was caught in a base? Now look at the number of times they've used USB keys to import malware, used cash to pay off insiders, or used remote sensing technology like microphones capable of analysing vibrations in windows, or other tracking devices.

I'm looking at where spies are caught. And they are never caught trying to be janitors on bases. If they're caught at all, then it's because the people they bribed to do all the inside work were themselves caught.

You have to go by the evidence and the evidence doesn't suggest infiltration.

Regulation in the modern US is not about a level playing field, it is about corrupt businesses and corrupt officials using regulations as an excuse to persecute competitors.

Look, it's obvious that this will cause an absolute flurry of lawsuits so deep that it will become the new record holder for the world's tallest mountain.

I don't think anyone seriously doubts that.

However, if enough geeks and nerds back up enough of the films each, it could become another DeCSS John/Beowulf moment, where the status quo (who aren't currently in this collection) is untenable and a new dynamic is forced on the industry. It's blatantly obvious the industry intends to be stupid and naive, and learn only through pain, misery, and suffering on all sides, but we can at least TRY to reduce the trauma as much as we can on our side of the equation.

The addictive nature of social media is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of social media companies. It is the fault of local and national governments in failure to maintain services and failure to actually meet the costs of having a society. In the end, the price will be paid, but it has been paid through mental health.

Enough is enough. The sheer incompetence of successive administrations is a disgrace and a dishonour to this nation. The government should pay the bill for having a functional society, not create a pit of despair and then blame corporations for society jumping in. This is nobody's responsibility beyond Number 10.

Sometimes it is the right and appropriate thing to do, but I'd hardly call it "first response". The Snowdrop Petition circulated after Dunblane, but not Hungerford. It took the repeated failure of government to actually do anything useful that caused society to demand a ban.

After the Traveller threre-day festival in a farmer's field, the UK government tried to ban going places for a common purpose. A man claiming to be the reincarnation of King Arthur sued on the grounds that he couldn't join up with his knights if that was illegal. The UK courts determined that he was vastly more credible and overturned the ban.

In the 1950s, when the government restricted freedom of movement, the Mass Kinder Trespass forced a right to roam act.

In short, we don't give a damn what the government wants, and never have. We know our rights and defend, whether that means increased freedom or introducing bans. The rules are decided by the public, the government has really no say in the matter and never has had.

There's a problem with that -- it fools those whose opinions are irrelevant, but masks the presence of those whose actions are extremely relevant.

There is absolutely nothing easier than hiding in a group of nutters. With surveillance for the last 50 or so years being mostly remote and passive, that's all they need to do. As long as the signal-to-noise ratio is poor for those trying to maintain secrecy, but exceptionally good for those trying to steal those secrets, then such efforts are counterproductive.

The F-117 and B2 were so well-known to just about everyone that model kits of it were being sold in stores for 20-25 years before Congress were officially told of it existing. Why? Because the only thing the lies achieved was a total inability to detect that detailed plans were circulating amongst the public. By the time acknowledgement existed, the source of the leaks was so well-hidden by time that we will never discover how Airfix and other modelling companies were able to get the blueprints.

A glorious achievement of lies this was not. No, if you'd wanted to hide the program, then the USG needed to make this boring. The more boring and mundane the better. Make it such an utter snoozefest that the spies and nerds would stand out like a sore thumb, not be totally drowned out by the crowd.

The first problem is signal to noise ratio.

That sort of disinformation ramps up the noise fast. The signal then merely needs to look indistinguishable from the noise. It is so so much easier to hide out amongst freaks, geeks, and weirdos. Even Johnny English could hide out in such a crowd and not remotely stand out.

Nononono. If you want to pick out the signal, you need to reduce the noise in both quantity and volume. The signal then has nowhere to hide.

The second problem is the advertising.

What does it really require to monitor an aircraft? Active RADAR? No. Passive RADAR using civilian radio transmissions would be undetectable and can be done in post-processing as long as you have a good enough recording that's adequately timestamped and location stamped. And if it's stealth? Then detect it by the shadow. A marked dip in cosmic rays coming in from a narrow point where your passive RADAR shows nothing wouldn't be hard.

Throw in thermal cameras and you've got the temperature of the engines. Recordings through diffraction gratings will tell you what molecules are in the exhaust.

And what's needed to do all this? Well, as long as you record the data at the site and process it offline at someplace like GCHQ or the equivalent in other nations, then it requires very little on site. A motor home would likely be big enough to lug around what you need to do the recording side and who the hell is going to notice one motor home amongst a group of thirty?

No, advertising is a very poor way to do anything because you can potentially learn most of what matters both passively and remotely.

However, we have to factor in that we cannot evaluate the relative credibility of sources if ALL of the sources are outright dishonest.

Should we expect honesty from the MOD/DOD? If it is to cover their backsides due to wilful incompetency on their part, then we should require them to be honest, yes. They are in an extreme position of trust, where one wrong move could easily endanger the safety (and possibly lives) of everyone in their respective countries. These are not establishments where failure has any business being an option and face-saving exercies are not helpful.

But it gets worse. Those face-saving exercises have led to a slowly-building but now almost unstoppable wave of induced delusion, paranoia, and psychosis. This, in itself, is creating enormous dangers. During the COVID epidemic, it killed half a million in the US alone. The US life expectancy is plunging. Gun crime in the US is so bad that mass shootings have risen to between 2-3 a day. THAT is the consequence of a system that puts ego and vanity over and above trust and wellbeing.

The UFO case is a very minor piece of that jigsaw, but it is symptomatic of a completely degenerate philosophy where image matters more than anything else.

(And yeah, it was a fun degree. Just a BA :) Decided to go back to school for a second degree on a topic that had long been of interest to me)

DNN-based, like nearly all modern AI. Not Transformers, as far as I'm aware.

Explain how this doesn't count as reasoning. Or this. To name just a couple examples.

Yes, they work by fuzzy logical reasoning. That is literally how neural networks, including the FFNs in Transformers, work. Every neuron is a fuzzy classifier that divides a superposition of questions formed by its input field by a fuzzy hyperplane, "answering" the superposition with an answer ranging from yes to no to anything in-between. Since the answers to each layer form the inputs to the next layer, the effective questions form grow with increasing complexity as network depth grows. Transformers works by combining DNNs with latent states (works on processing concepts, not raw data, with each FFN detecting concepts in their input and encoding resultant concepts into their output) and an attention mechanism (the FFNs of a given layer can choose what information they "want to look at" in the next FFN).

Although I absolutely agree with you, attempting to control the narrative on - well - just about everything is precisely what the USG has gotten into trouble over, pretty much every year since it was founded.

Although there is absolutely no evidence for aliens, it was important that this conclusion was reached organically by researchers. Paranoia and delusions of "secret knowledge" are the natural result of being told what to think, which means that you ideally want to avoid telling people what to think.

Governments and officials like to control power, information, and behaviour.

In practice, you can tightly control at most one of those. Try to dominate all three, and the other two usually decay into something dysfunctional and ultimately malignant. That is the price of over-centralising everything at once.

If the government had confined itself to power, and the Air Force to discipline and airspace, while allowing researchers to access and assess the evidence properly, we would likely have far fewer delusions and far less paranoia today. Yes, that would have required the Air Force to maintain secrecy through actual competence rather than narrative management, but that discipline would probably have done them a great deal of good. They might even be better able to distinguish fact from fiction now.

Which is how I teach. It is sound, logical, and promotes reasoned thinking and reasoned discussions. The enemy is rarely people, the true enemy is usually assumptions.