hostiles.

Unless you want to up your probability of being treated as hostile.

This is an apolitical statement, as true about filming and following an employee of $disfavored_business as it is about wearing a yankees cap to a redsox game.

I wasn't there and all that, but if it were me with the camera, I might have taken the extra half a minute to go up to the guy and introduce myself before filming.

Let's reach back to what I hope is a basic level of bullshit detection we might have exercised at some point in the last few decades when a clueless politico said something clueless about the internets.

How does one enforce, or even measure, such a "slowdown" exactly?

The thing he's talking about policing is writing code and running it. Perhaps a little more capital intensive than writing a crypto suite without fully abiding by ITAR or reverse engineering DVD CSS, but not in any way that matters.

You're not talking about keeping a lid on the exact geometry of nuclear bomb design that's the difference between a boom and a fizzle, or the secret sauce of enriching uranium or machining plutonium. You're talking about typing code into a computer.

Presumably he knows this, or should know it. Perhaps he's yet another silicon valley figurehead, but either way: it's a joke and/or a lie whether he believes it himself. So who exactly is the mark who's the intended audience of this PR?

Politicians? Media? Investors? Idunno. None of those make much sense to me.

Maybe it's just a healthy dose of stupid.

Hey man. Don't knock it. I get paid the big bux for predicting the next token in my line of work. My predictive powers are better than yours, I'll wager.

How else does one explain a bot EMOTING to itself this way?

With blackjack, and hookers?

She was a robot the *whole* *time* !1!eleven

So it must be wrong.

Repent, sinners! The end is nigh!

Naw. Some require computing numerical integrals to do them justice.

Tfs appears to describe a frequency comb (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_comb)

The "rainbow" ooh ahh pretty is a shorthand for the fact that the frequency domain representation of a series of uniformly timed pulses (a "comb" in the time domain) is also "comb" in the frequency domain. That is a spectrum of narrow frequency bands at uniform spacing.

One of the fixed points of the fourier transform. The fourier transform of a comb is a comb. The fourier transform of a gaussian is a gaussian.

What this is really describing is an ultrastable pulse generator on a chip scale with some possible applications to the 20 to 50 GHz regime used for high bandwidth wireless devices.

You sound like a plant. Are you tasty and nutritious?

I tell you what I think and why I think it. I post on slashdot for fun.

Academics playacting as public intellectuals earn their salaries directly or indirectly from selling themselves as people qualified to tell you how or what to think, and they know it.

See the difference?

Yeah man. Just like back when mike pence rounded up the gays and put them on cattle cars. Dark times.

Citation required for every single thing you said.

No evidence I benefited from past nastiness any more or any less than any person alive today. The direct descendants of slaves are long-dead and the last people to come of age under institutional racial segregation in this country are past retirement.

No evidence the bag of crazy one finds in Robin DeAngelo (read her work, I did, and there's literally elementary school logic mistakes on every page), Ibram Kendi, or their many copycats actually does any good to anyone other than the consultants pocketing fees for their diversity training services.

Also no evidence that saying land acknowledgements ad nauseum, renaming columbus day, or prefacing all your statements with a header packet listing your ancestry and supposed guilt has the power to reach back in time and undo the slave trade or innoculate the natives against smallpox.

I was told to go along with race-baiting, race-essentialist, communist-adjacent propaganda so I voted for the guy who promised to fight it. And he is.

Scientists are fallible humans the way everyone else is. And my personal observation is that academic science is a magnet for several particular human failings.

At its best, the intentionally adversarial nature of the scientific process (in experiment, nature is your adversary; in publication your peers are your adversary) separates the wheat from the chaff.

At its worst (when money and personal reputation and prestige are on the line), it's far easier to go along to get along, get the grant, get the publication, get the recommendation letter. And bad ideas fester.

There are a lot of bad ideas festering in American universities. Not least of which is the idea that having the letters PhD after your name qualifies you to opine on $current_events with unquestioned solomonic wisdom regardless of whether you have any expertise in the subject or whether your next grant is riding on a particular direction of public opinion.

As someone who's been in and around American academia for close to 25 years, I can say with certainty that a large element of American academia absolutely earned its place in the doghouse.

Years and years of quiet ascent to this shit:
https://www.newsweek.com/smith...

will grate on you too. Twenty plus years ago almost every announcement for a grant or fellowship application in my university was followed up with "women and minorities especially encouraged to apply" and not too long ago my wife (both a woman and a "minority!") is required by her employer to put a disclaimer in every presentation she gives to medical students that she did her due diligence to seek out scientific and medical sources written by underrepresented minorities before she may proceed to give the lecture, citing the people who actually did the work in question. Complexion and chromosomes notwithstanding.