Those of us who practically live along the coasts

Thats why we dont ask people who dont ("practically") live on the coast. We fucking measure it.

For reference, the sea levels have rose 7 inches since the 1970s. Wont seem much if your coast is a wall. But if your on a beach thats has an angle repose of 5-6 degrees, then you just lost 15 feet of beach.

"the manager" lol you sound like you work at a gas station

I can tell you for a fact that when I was working in Climate Science in the mid 2000s, Scientists where being heavily pressured to "tone it down" in terms of model tuning to avoid attracting the saurons-eye of conservative political lobbyists who, at the time, where busy going after the fucking weatherman with some outrageously mentally ill theory that weather stations where spookily lying about how hot it was, as if we hadn't been factoring in urban heat islands already since the frigging 1800s.

True, you aren't going to be running this at home. But then no one runs the SOTA models at home. You can GLM-5.2 on z.ai's hardware, using a subscription plan similar to the plans offered by Anthropic and OpenAI. The most notable difference is: it's 1/2 the price.

The problem with providers like z.ai is running into compliance problems and corporate paranoia. As an Australian company, the boss is paranoid enough about even letting the Americans access our cloud data let alone the Chinese who have always been shady commercially. Though to much groaning from the tech staff he's also recently discovered vibe coding so. who the f*** knows anymore.

Ah , ignore my other comment. That was attached to the wrong post :/

Yeah I've read Kuhn. Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method" is an interesting take too (he strongly leans on the chaotic nature of how real science is often done). Like yeah, I'm more just recounting the Poperian "party line" on science. However while certainly its always a lot more compicated and rooted in the cultural institutions of science and the dominant discourses on how-to-do-a-science I'd argue that when science is working *well* it is essentially a popperian enterprise, and can somewhat go off the rails when its not (see the competing madness going on at the bleeding edge of physics where thousands of physicists have put lifetimes into String theory despite the fact we have no idea if any of its even remotely true [and in fact we are starting to get some evidence its not, due to the failure of SuSy, which needs to be true for String to be true). I dont think thats a good state to be in, and a number of physicists are starting to arc up and say "Hey, this is madness. Lets go back to fundamentals, experiments, data, things we can actually reason about with proper scientific method"

I accidently attached this to the wrong comment before. Whoops. Reposting it in the right place to make it make sense.
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Copenhagen, and a few things like that I'd argue are exceptions not the rule, because we honestly dont fucking know and we might not even be able to find out until we can figure out how to test for it.

The truth of the matter is the QM Interpretations aren't really science, but rather science-adjacent in the best sense of the term (maths is science-adjacent, and very much part of the conversation). Until we can find a way a way to run experiments to start ruling out interpretations or even better stiill actually confirm one, all we really have is a statement of a problem "What is the physical form of this rather central piece of math" and we have some good, but 100% speculatory, suggestions.

QM is not alone on this. String theory is very much science-adjacent because we just dont have experiments that could disprove or prove it.

As a result, yeah, debates are all we have. And boy do those debates suck.

Copenhagen, and a few things like that I'd argue are exceptions not the rule, because we honestly dont fucking know and we might not even be able to find out until we can figure out how to test for it.

The truth of the matter is the QM Interpretations aren't really science, but rather science-adjacent in the best sense of the term (maths is science-adjacent, and very much part of the conversation). Until we can find a way a way to run experiments to start ruling out interpretations or even better stiill actually confirm one, all we really have is a statement of a problem "What is the physical form of this rather central piece of math" and we have some good, but 100% speculatory, suggestions.

QM is not alone on this. String theory is very much science-adjacent because we just dont have experiments that could disprove or prove it.

As a result, yeah, debates are all we have. And boy do those debates suck.

Science does not have truths. It has theories, and all of them are incorrect at some level. Some of them are useful and supported by data. See, for example f=ma and a falling apple. If it is truth yea seek, turn to math.

No. Some truths are straight up true. The wrinkle is that we can't truly know for sure. But we can build up a consensus built from experiments and robust exchanges of data.

Must really suck that Apple wont let you run interpreted code, huh?

That hasn't been true in nearly 20 years. Python on my ipad runs just fine. I mean fuck, half the problem with modern apps is all the javascript shit in them.

Nearly everybody I know buys them for sheet music

Which is a whoops move. I brought a tablet exactly for that, a samsung. Almost none of the software standardised in the music industry for sheet music actually runs on android (and thats partly because android historically had terrible audio apis, though it has gotten better). Ended up having to get an ipad. About the same price all up.

Somewhat counterintuitively, often broadening access to healthcare, and reigning in prices ends up reducing the amount of money spent on healthcare, and I suspect its because when people go to GPs earlier, they end up heading off more expensive diseases later. If you catch a prostate cancer early, its *relatively* cheap to intervene. if you catch it late, it can cost hundreds of thousands. Likewise catching and heading off type 2 diabetes before it becomes diabolical and preventing it via dietry interventions is vastly cheaper than dealing with it when its a full blown crises. Warning signals for Emphysema can be picked up years before it becomes the dread disease it does when it fully kicks in, and can be treated with various interventions.

Coupled with keeping people in the taxpayers pool for longer , it just ends up with a reduced taxpayer burden and personal health cost burden.

The US spends ridiculously large sums on healthcare and ends up with a system thats internationally notirous for leaving vast swathes of people unable to access healthcare until its really too late. By contrast euro UHC countries end up spending much less.

An interesting case study is US vs Cuban health outcomes. The Cubans are dramatically poorer people than the US, and its health care spend is around half, vs GDP,, meaning the US spends around 4 x more per person on healthcare. And yet the Cuban healthcare system, for all the countries poverty is widely considered world class and life expectancies sit squarely in the middle of averages for first world countries, rather than the much lower rates found in other developing countries. Its kind of the countries point of pride, and tthey like to show it off by exporting doctors (The cubans train a LOT of doctors and use the surplus for foreign aid)

It seems paradoxical, but the secret is the Cubans focus on preventative medicine. Doctors will visit houses on rounds regularly , and do health checkups on pretty much everyone , annually (its compulsary) for healthy folks, and more regularly for folks with condition or elderly folks. That way they catch developing issues early and put people on programs to head off diseases before they manifest into much more costlier conditions to manage.

Now, I'm not suggesting the mandatory regular checkup sort of stuff the cubans do. Obviously that wouldn't fly in the US. But a UHC or UHC adjacent system with a focus on preventative medicine and regular checkups would absolutely reduce the burden of health costs. Like, for all his insanity RFKs concept of getting everyone in the US to eat healthy is not a terrible idea at all. Its the bizzare implementation thats the problem. But an actual scientific approach to health recomendations, coupled with some interventions to making sure poorer folks actually have access to good foods, and spending on community health centers to make sure poor folks are able to get regular checkups, I suspect it would go a long way to in reducing the sort of money the US is spending on health care.

If you look at the climate change denial page you can see the hive mind in action.

Seems pretty factual and unbiased to me?

People keep thinking truth and science should be "balanced" and "fair" , but reality doesn't work by that. A scientific truth doesn't have sides and it doesnt function by debate. A thing is true or it isn't, and while the scientific process is a fundamentally statistical beast, its always been a process of pushing the knowledge curve against well defined asympotes. Its never had an obligation to pay attention to the opinions of the illeducated or dishonest. Because science doesnt deal with opinions, it deals with experiments and results.

Debates are for social media not scientific discourse. Sure there are robust exchanges of conflicting papers and studies where uncertainty exists, but it bears no resemblance to the shouty name calling and exchange of thought-terminating cliches that dominate social media. Science doesnt debate, and neither does wikipedia. The truth is not democratic.

True, misinformation coming from "trusted" sources is much more damaging than some idiot with a blog posting nonsense, simply by the fact that it's framed as something trusted by so many others.

False dichotomy. Nobody here is talking about an idiot with a blog posting nonsense.

False information coming from sources that "look" trustable but are actually not are very damaging - on purpose, as that is literally the intent.

Incomplete/biased information from trustable sources that are not deliberately attempting to mislead (as in sources that adhere to the ethics of not presenting information that is factually false, even if the picture is not "complete" as you suggest) is a slight wrong, and has existed since the dawn of the printed word - it's editorial in nature - but its effects on creating social problems pales in comparison to weaponized disinformation campaigns.

Hand-wringing about the later as if it's some kind of new thing, or something most people don't know about strikes me as super naive. The insidiousness of the former is simply that people don't appreciate the scale to which it's happening.

No, but treating two wrongs as the same degree of wrongness is pretty dumb.

Some of Ubi's earlier games where fantastic. The earlier entries in Assasins creed where straight up great games. Kinda went off the cliff in recent years though. Far cry was pretty great too.