It may be pathetic; but the 'make america great again unless it sounds like actual work might be involved' attitude is, at least, consistent.

Polysilicon requires large amounts of hydrogen and nitrogen. The hospital and the welding shop both use oxygen. The plants run continuously and are not turned off at sunset.

Welcome to industrial scale.

By the way, the green line for wind plus solar isn't looking too good today.

https://transmission.bpa.gov/b...

It's possible that the summary is missing an important qualification; but wouldn't it only be possible, even in principle, to conclude that something could or couldn't be a simulation on a specific type of computer rather than in general?

If, say, you were able to demonstrate that you had an actual RNG, not a pseudorandom number generator, you'd know that it isn't being simulated on a turing machine; because those do determinism only. However, in practice, we build computers with what we think are RNGs all the time; because connecting the deterministic finite state machine to a peripheral that's full of thermal noise or radioisotopes or lava lamps or whatever is a totally doable design decision. Were someone in one of our simulations to conclude that non-deterministic behavior falsified the simulation theory they'd simply be wrong; because (it appears) that the reality in which we construct our computers is a little stingy when it comes to things like infinite state storage; but reasonably helpful on high quality entropy.

In the case of this 'non-algorithmic understanding'; it sounds like you may be successfully demonstrating that the simulation would only be viable on a somewhat more exotic machine; but basically just one that has a lookup table attached that it can use to check whether an unprovable statement is true or not. I would not want to be the one stuck building such a device; but it doesn't sound any more exotic than quite a few of the various 'oracle machines' that are supposed, for purposes of theorizing about computability and complexity, to have a black box capable of solving certain classes of problem.

We even interact with a much humbler example of an analogous thing more or less all the time: the reason we bother with storage devices is that there's no way to know what a given series of bits "should" be. Absolutely trivial(assuming sufficient time and RAM) to go through all possibilities for what it might be; but no way to decide between the possibilities. So we suck it up and plug in our flash drive; then copy off the cat picture that we actually want. Essentially a block device is an oracle that answers the otherwise algorithmically impossible question of "what is the state of those n bits?".

I don't say this out of any particular affinity for, or belief in, 'simulationism'; and further acknowledge that the authors may have made a meaningful(but rather narrower) statement by formalizing certain requirements for what a simulator would be required to be capable of; I'm just unclear on how you could make the claim to have disproved simulation, in general, unless you managed to come up with something that could not be implemented as an oracle even in principle, which it doesn't sound like they have.

It does seem to at least suggest the possibility of excluding 'trivial' nesting of simulations: someone simulating us would appear to need hardware that we would not be able to implement under the rules we are provided; just as someone in a deterministic simulation wouldn't be able to implement an RNG, which we at least appear to be able to do(at least, if they are PRNGs, they hide their state somewhere very cryptic); so if there is anyone out there who thinks that it's totally possible that, like, the universe is just big 486s all the way down, man, it would appear that they are on thin ice theoretically, with at least some details suggesting that the simulator need be fundamentally more capable, rather than just bigger, than a system that can be implemented within the simulation; but my impression is that any serious consideration of trivially nested simulations had foundered purely on the size problem among all but the densest rocko's baselisk bros already.

they haven't proven or disproven anything at all. They make reference to popular theories and what those theories suggest. This is not proof, it's speculation. They go on to talk about some interesting limitations of the theory. That proves absolutely nothing, but points out that our current theories don't cover all the bases. Then they go on to assume that the limits in our theory are somehow limits to reality itself (utterly unfounded assumption) and therefore simulations are impossible.

The philosophical sloppiness here is remarkable. I suspect that something significant has been lost in translation between the researchers and the article's author. But even then, it sounds like someone is just seeking attention by claiming a proof where there is nothing but wild speculation.

Of course, the notion that our experience of reality is itself a simulation is equally wild speculation, to begin with.

Where the evidence is lacking, the word "proof" generally doesn't apply. The honest scientific answer is "we don't have enough data to draw any conclusions about whether or not the universe is a simulation." And that's that.

I'm a little unclear on what anyone thought this elaboration was getting them; unless it was purely pessimism about the existence of any sort of untapped channel where cute but relatively crude steganography wouldn't be necessary or could be better-handled by any of the myriad excuses to send bits of encrypted information(altering the agreed-upon portions of encrypted JWTs returned by some auth endpoint or the like).

There's the very specific case of 'warrant canaries', for which there's some US case law around compelled speech vs. compelled nondisclosure that might given them better constitutional coverage vs. just ignoring gag orders; but even that is a matter of some uncertainty; and this sounds like it's both more expansive in terms of what jurisdictions could take a dim view of it and much more overt in just being an obfuscated disclosure.

Clearly if the obfuscation keeps you from getting caught that can work; but as a legal strategy this seems to be a straightforward "just flout the order" that would be relatively simple for any peevish feds to prosecute accordingly; quite possibly even providing a few extras to throw in because doing financial transfers to facilitate crime sometimes counts as an additional issue.

You must be young,

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”

Or

  'America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests'

  Henry Kissinger

And those were when I was a kid. Trusted partner? Snort snicker tee-hee.

I read your post and immediately remembered Clara Oswald saying nearly the same thing.

Life follows art again.

Our ancient ancestors had a means of building cars without computer chips. I wonder if this lost technology can be re-discovered, and greatly alleviate these economic woes.

Even if the people who know how didn't move on over the last few decades, surely they would have been fired some time in the last few months as part of the overall effort to weaken the US economy, health, and defenses.

Is there anyone left who knows how to do the job? Can they be hired back, after the Epstein shutdown is over?

Apple could just stop being evil.

Problem: adversary has you in a headlock.

Solution: wait for the adversary to change allegiance.

No, hypocrisy is when you claim one set of values but act on another. Like lying while telling others they shouldn't lie. Mocking one religion, but not another, doesn't qualify under the definition. If one mocked religion while telling others it is wrong to mock religion, THAT would be hypocritical. Mocking one religion but ignoring another is just being selective.

And the simple act of avoiding danger isn't cowardice, either. Usually that is just simple practicality. One is not a coward for avoiding walking on the freeway, for example. To qualify as a coward, one must fearfully avoid things that are not very risky, or things that might qualify as a duty. Neither applies here.

I, for one, think that Christianity and Islam are both equally founded on unprovable claims about reality that include admonitions to give lots of money to the religion's ringleaders, making them both scams. And worse than that, the religious leaders abuse their influential power to cause harm (such as oppression of homosexuals and sending people off to holy wars), making them both equally evil.

This sure sounds like something that can be completely solved by getting a new account. But then there's this hilarious excuse for insisting that the problem remain:

Although users can "abandon the accounts and start again with new Apple IDs," the report notes that doing so means losing all purchased apps, along with potentially years' worth of photos and videos.

If there's any risk of losing photos and videos, then they should already be working on fixing their backup system immediately, before something bad happens. This isn't so much a problem as a wake up call that they haven't yet done one of the most basic first-things in using computers: get data backups going.

Loss of access to an external data storage account is just one of the risks they aren't protecting themselves against, with regard to that data. (And geez, since they're already cloud-storage enthusiasts, what was their plan for what they were going to do if they ever found a better cloud provider?)

As for proprietary apps: same problem, they already faced the risk even without this parental splitup. Either stop doing that, or accept that you occasionally have to repurchase your proprietary software. Given how much crap is monthly subscriptions now, I suspect there's very little loss here anyway, since having to continuously repay is already the status quo for an increasing number of .. [sighing and trying to remember to be nice] .. inexperienced computer users.

But if it's not (yay! it shouldn't be), then either suck it up that you have to re-do a "one-time" purchase, or [gasp] contact the manufacturer of that software and tell them the problem.

Oh, it's some company who is unresponsive or says "fuck you, pay me?" Well, then you're the one who decided to do business with an unresponsive company. You were already fucked and just hadn't run into the already-looming disaster anyway. Glad you're learning about how stupid that was while you're a teenager instead of later, when the stakes are going to be even higher.

All objections to "get a new account" are bullshit. And worse, they just point out problems that these people can/get-to/should face now, before anything bad happens.

Keep in mind we are only hearing her side of the issue. Women can be just as vicious as men or even more so. As my ex told me, "women don't believe in limited war."

According to Christian belief, Christ's return heralds the end of the world.

So, that means that Gelsinger is trying to use AI to hasten the end of the world.

I guess that checks out.

I can see the appeal. It we really do have a serious problem of "Dunning-Krugers" spouting utter nonsense online with confidence and presentation that reaches a significant audience of similarly ill-educated people, convincing them to take action that is wrong and harmful. They don't think "huh, maybe I should seek out the opinions of professionals on this matter" and instead just fall back on ego-soothing anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theory nuttery. There are a lot of these people, and their ill-guided actions cause real damage.

On the other hand, the proposal here is just another form of censorship, as you pointed out. It's a little bit tamer since the messages can still be presented by those with degrees, but the option to control who gets those degrees and what they must learn to get those degrees puts it right back in the domain of censorship.

As much as I dislike it when the ill-educated spout nonsense on a popular platform, I have to support their option to do so because censorship is even worse.

I just wish there was some way to turn more people on to actual critical thinking (not just thoughtless contrarianism) so they would pay less heed to the "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" crowd.