Generally by around junior year of undergrad as a physics major, you realize "holy shit, it's just progressively improving models all the way down - and none of these models get to a 'real' understanding of what's going on underneath the hood".

That's the reality. We don't know what quantum measurement or wave function collapse 'is', where the boundary between classical behavior and quantum behavior sits, why general relativity works well but we can't seem to get it to play nice with quantum mechanics - and the proposals to do so don't really yield a satisfying sense of understanding either.

Anyway, I find it very surprising that these would be revelations to any physicist. The thousandth time you write the "approximately equal to" operator as an undergrad or drop all the higher order terms from a diff-eq it is self-evident what level of understanding you can get from physics.

Yes, because you are a legitimate contractor, with contracting/pricing power who negotiates with clients. Gig workers are really not independent contractors, they are cheap employees.

I recently went to a restaurant (outdoor dining of course) where they told me they have renamed their "Black Manhattan" cocktail to a "Dark Manhattan" out of sensitivity to recent times, so this is only one step removed from reality.

Kind of like mask-wearing. The government was running around telling us it didn't work, while desperately trying to make sure hospital workers had enough masks. Meanwhile, Asian countries where mask wearing is considered good public hygiene when ill or during an outbreak all adopted it en masse and mitigated their COVID-19 epidemics much faster. This has all deservedly cost the US government, our anti-science President, the CDC and other agencies vast amounts of credibility.

As another poster implied, the President is so bad at his job of reassuring the nation and communicating complex information in a convincing but straightforward and believable manner that he would be much better off shutting the fuck up and saying "I am going to let the experts address this". What some of these Trump supporters call "Trump derangement syndrome" is just rational, well educated people reacting to an imbecile in the office who couldn't reason or explain his way out of a paper bag. Trump has some good advisors around, and some of them are surely feeding him good information from time to time, so he isn't always wrong (though he frequently is), but he ALWAYS sounds like a moron when he opens up his mouth.

It seems likely to me that HCQ is somewhat effective against SARS-CoV-2. I had what I believe was COVID-19 in early March (no tests available, fuck you California and your horrible lack of preparedness, so until I can get an antibody test I won't know for sure) and I megadosed on zinc lozenges and used benedryl and Albuterol to manage reactive airway inflammation and shortness of breath. I came through it fine, but it was scary and unlike any virus I have had in the past. I would gladly have added HCQ into the mix, but my doctor seemed to think I was doing fine and it wasn't so widely discussed then. I am a scientist, but recognize that in many scientific fields we have to make timely educated decisions based on less than perfect evidence.

China has a massive, truly massive, local government apparatus as part of the CCP control mechanisms. The United States has nothing at all comparable. How could cities and towns deliver groceries to all of their citizens? Our military and reserves could help in a few locales with a massive-scale call-up, but could not do this nationwide. The US economy and government is organized completely differently.

What we should have done is put better restrictions and public/private cooperation mechanisms in place immediately to reduce panic-buying and hoarding, ensure sufficient supply to go around, regulate safe delivery service operation, etc.

As you can see from other threads here, Amazon gets a list of 501c3s from the IRS and filters out bad actors from a list managed by the SPLC. If the government views it as a legitimate not-for-profit and the SPLC doesn't classify it as a hate group or other socially undesireable org, then Amazon is trying not to be in the business of curating which nonprofits are good or bad, given that there are apparently around a million on this list.

Maybe there is another category of organizations that support unscientific treatment of medical conditions? I just think that would result in blacklisting tons of charities that people want to support because a lot of people believe in woo nonsense. If Narconon is breaking the law and hurting people (beyond just fleecing then out of money for woo BS), then the government should be going after them, revoking their 501c3 status, pursuing the individuals involved, etc.

Amazon processes donations through smile.amazon.com to random PTA groups, to major charities and everything in between. I don't know much about Narconon, it may be shitty and Scientology associated, but if people opt in to supporting it on smile.amazon.com that is their business.

I personally use smile to support a charity in New York that develops schools and employment opportunities in a developing country in Europe. If that's not your cup of tea, that's cool, Amazon making that available on smile isn't an endorsement of the particular charity.

I hate Scientology personally, but Amazon processing donations to a vaguely Scientology-affiliated charity is no worse than lots of other causes or charities that I don't support or agree with and is not some sort of secret endorsement by Amazon of Scientology.

All supervised machine learning systems require labeled training data. All production speech recognition systems are included in this class. There is literally no way to do this without human annotators. All companies building speech recognition systems, by definition, will be transcribing sampled data. Anybody who is surprised by this does not understand what machine learning is and thinks it is some kind of magic. It is not. Nothing Google, Amazon, Apple or Microsoft is doing here is wrong, surprising or undisclosed. Stop panicking about it - if you don't like it, don't use speech recognition systems.

I dunno, if you use an Android phone with Google maps, by default, you can probably retrieve detailed info about your location and movements unless you've turned that feature off. I happened to have it on for several years, which turned out to be lucky if unintentional, as I used it to successfully defend myself in a legal matter. I could show times and places on a series of maps Google had tracking my phone checking in that were incompatible with the crazy claims of somebody accusing me of some totally irrational and false things. Creepy location tracking, true, but I was damn glad I had the info when I needed it.

I didn't say that it does mean that. I said it has come to be used that way. I support some prescriptiveness in language, but I am a realist about technical terms getting broad to the point of meaninglessness when they enter the mainstream. Fighting this is a frustrating and likely pointless endeavour (see: hacker).

Your theory seems to be that writers at TechCrunch think when they say a startup is using "AI" to improve recruiting or the sales process or even to process large volumes of textual data that they really think they mean artificial general intelligence. I believe they are using a vague catchphrase or abbreviation that gets clicks, and that they know that's not "real AI" but don't care.

Maybe the journalists at the New York Times or Washington Post are a more credulous lot and they really do think that is what it means, but I doubt it. They are all just capitalizing on confusion between Hollywood AI and machine learning for clickbait. That is what gets them paid.

At the same time, AI has come to be used in the tech press and mainstream press to mean "machine learning and related statistical techniques". Obviously this hurts the brains of many of us who still understand AI to mean "strong AI" or the newer moniker, "AGI" (artificial general intelligence), but we sort of have to roll with the language on this one.

Wikipedia insists that machine learning is a subset of AI. OK, sure, I guess that's fine, in that it is one of a series of techniques that can provide reasonable performance in solving certain human-level intelligence tasks.

When I'm speaking with a technical audience I go with more precise terminology - deep learning, reinforcement learning, unsupervised learning and try to avoid the headache, since we all know we are talking about statistical techniques in machine learning and none of it yet comes close to strong AI. Getting the mainstream press to correct their use of the abbreviation AI is about as likely as getting them to correct their use of the word "hacking".

In fact... this kind of service has always been held up as a shining example of how businesses are *supposed* to make money off of GPL.

Why? For large memory-requiring jobs and places where the latency of occasional cold start cases isn't acceptable, Lambda isn't the right tool. For periodic batch jobs, components in workflows, or response handling logic where some latency variability is acceptable, it's a great tool and saves a lot of costs over having dedicated but grossly underutilized EC2s.

"democratic forum"... "trash heap full of retards and emotionally-stunted dipshits" - I fail to see how these are materially different?

Just look at what we do with our democratic elections in the United States right now.

Plenty of groundbreaking things have happened, just not so much in physics. Which is why despite having a degree in it, I work in an area where far more exciting things are going on these days (machine learning).