Comment Oh, no, not again (Score 1) 66
I remember those horrible "Count Dracula seatbelts" from the last century that would try to strangle you when you got into the car. No thanks.
I remember those horrible "Count Dracula seatbelts" from the last century that would try to strangle you when you got into the car. No thanks.
Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.
Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).
For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)
Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)
It's kind of surprising it isn't all squealing nonsense.
Give it a little more time. B-b
We had a lab known to be unsafe. A lab known to be performing gain of function on the specific type of virus that emerged in public. We have a lab in close proximity to the market where the outbreak was traced back to.
We also had rumors that low-paid lab techs supplemented their income by selling test animals they'd been ordered to destroy to the nearby wet market.
So current AI training procedures - which amount to "read all the internet you can" - fall for astroturf campaigns. Why am I not surprised?
...an article worth considering from Princeton University's Zeynep Tufekci:
We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives
Since scientists began playing around with dangerous pathogens in laboratories, the world has experienced four or five pandemics, depending on how you count. One of them, the 1977 Russian flu, was almost certainly sparked by a research mishap. Some Western scientists quickly suspected the odd virus had resided in a lab freezer for a couple of decades, but they kept mostly quiet for fear of ruffling feathers.
Yet in 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic, they were treated like kooks and cranks. Many public health officials and prominent scientists dismissed the idea as a conspiracy theory, insisting that the virus had emerged from animals in a seafood market in Wuhan, China. And when a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance lost a grant because it was planning to conduct risky research into bat viruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology â" research that, if conducted with lax safety standards, could have resulted in a dangerous pathogen leaking out into the world â" no fewer than 77 Nobel laureates and 31 scientific societies lined up to defend the organization.
So the Wuhan research was totally safe, and the pandemic was definitely caused by natural transmission â" it certainly seemed like consensus.
We have since learned, however, that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story. And as for that Wuhan laboratoryâ(TM)s research, the details that have since emerged show that safety precautions might have been terrifyingly lax.
There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)
Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)
Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.
Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.
No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)
The tournament was for a few thousand dollars, if you think that Elon only getting $750 instead of a thousand makes any sort of difference for someone remembering something three decades later, I have a bridge to sell you.
The fact of the matter is that even if it was a small tournament, coming in second place is coming in second place, and it was the first professional Quake tournament, so to call Elon lying about it after finding proof he wasn't lying about it just shows that Jobst has negative integrity.
I don't like lots of people, I suppose, but I don't just invent lies about them.
If you want to call yourself some sort of reporter as Jobst does, you can't undercover conclusive evidence someone wasn't lying and then still say they're lying if you have any integrity at all.
Jobst ran a video accusing Elon of lying about being a good quake player here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And in the video it turns out that Jobst did, in fact, find conclusive evidence that Elon did in fact come in second place in the first professional Quake tournament. Which is all Elon ever claimed. But Jobst still claims, somehow, that Elon is lying because it was A) a small tournament, and B) Elon had a fast internet connection from working at a startup. So what? The claim checked out. The fact that Jobst still calls it more or less a lie tells you everything you need to know about Jobst's intellectual honesty.
>This is clear evidence that the problem is not that people are no longer interested in having a night out watching a film but that Hollywood is having real trouble making films that are popular.
Yeah. Since the pandemic I have seen: Dune, Dune 2, and the Super Mario Movie (for some reason). That's it.
And what I've noticed is that when I'm out of theaters and not getting theater promo reels, I'm a lot less aware even of what movies are out there, so I don't go to them either.
From what movie trailers I have seen none of them interest me, and when I walk past posters for movies at the mall none of them catch my interest either.
I watched literally every Marvel movie except one before Endgame, and have seen exactly zero Marvel movies since then, since they all seem to have gone into the toilet in terms of writing quality.
I think it's mainly a matter of Hollywood not making good movies.
There is one scientist later on in the first part who does say they couldn't rule out someone who may have been infected at the lab visiting the market and starting the ball rolling, but they also say there is no evidence to back this up. Considering the number of people who ride that line each day, if there was a sick person from the lab spreading their infection, there should have been far more people getting sick all over the place. That didn't happen. The earliest known infections were all clustered around the market.
It doesn't have to have been an infected human. An infected experimental animal - or a pest animal that had come into contact with lab animals or materials - could have been an initial vector.
For some time stories have circulated that low-paid lab techies at the Wuhan lab had been known to supplement their income by taking experimental animals they had been ordered to kill and dispose of safely and instead sell them at the wet market.
is it just me, or does that sound like a sexy place?
I hear chines live-food-animal markets are called that because they typically sell seafood (fish, lobsters, etc.) which are kept alive in big water tanks.
Traffic is horribly non linear.
So is fluid dynamics.
It's also very complicated and counter-intuitive, to the point that even experts had to resort to models in wind tunnels and scaling laws, until supercomputers and their algorithms could model it down to submicroscopic levels and handle the details of the positive-feedback transitions.
By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown "phantom" traffic jam with no obvious cause. "Just keeping away," he says, can help traffic flow smoothly.
Some driving techniques make traffic behave like fluids: Compressible gasses (Car ahead of you slows - you slow some but progressively more as you get closer, Car beside you jogs left two feet, you jog one foot. etc.) Liquids (cars close up and hold constant distance) Crystals (at a traffic light or full stop, cars close up into a tight ordered array.) Condensation (similar near-constant spacing but not so ordered and flows (more easily), Chrystallization, Melting, Sublimation, Evaporation (when the obstruction clears and the first cars can speed up, then later ones,
Spacing out lets you behave more like a gas - or the first of the liquid behind a bubble - rather than a liquid or solid. When a sudden speed reduction throws a shock wave at you at several times the traffic speed, you can let the gas compress or the cavitation bubble shrink, diffusing the shock wave into an acoustic wave and avoding a collision with the car ahead. It also lets you even out the flow, remaining laminar rather than starting an eddy and going turbulent.
"I have just one word for you, my boy...plastics." - from "The Graduate"