It's far from indisputable. Indeed, it's hotly disputed within the aviation industry. That does NOT mean that it was a short-circuit (although that is a theory that is under investigation), it merely means that "indisputable" is not the correct term to use here. You can argue probabilities or reasonableness, but you CANNOT argue "indisputable" when specialists in the field in question say that it is, in fact, disputed.

If you were to argue that the most probable cause was manual, then I think I could accept that. If you were to argue that Occam's Razor required that this be considered H0 and therefore a theory that must be falsified before others are considered, I'd not be quite so comfortable but would accept that you've got to have some sort of rigorous methodology and that's probably the sensible one.

But "indisputable"? No, we are not at that stage yet. We might reach that stage, but we're not there yet.

Globalization happened. You can't rewind the clock and pretend it didn't. The situation we operate under now is different than what we had in the mid-20th century.

The weird thing about that scenario is, they made it into a kid's movie.

You're not thinking it through -- the goal isn't just to put everyone on benefits and make them spend the rest of their lives clicking the TV remote and waiting for their next welfare check. If you want to do it right (and the robots provide sufficient surplus resources to support it), you go a step further and hire people to do the job they always wanted to do, whether it makes a profit for anyone or not. If that means we have 100,000 ski instructors and 300,000 mediocre artists, then so be it; the robots do the grunt work, and the people are paid to do their preferred avocation.

Not that I expect that to actually happen, of course; in the event the robots actually can replace all labor, the upper classes will make sure that economic surplus goes to themselves, with only the absolute minimum getting distributed to anyone else.

Honestly, they don't "need" robots or anything else; they could just keep doing what they've always done and hope for the best.

However, unlike some countries I could mention, the Chinese government has a vision of what it wants its future to be like, and is willing to work and invest to realize that vision. Hence robots, and other economic development.

Does that include getting out of American influence also?

Yes, it is basically Netherlands office going rogue.

If it were a Chinese office with a Netherlands owning company, you can be sure the /. headline would be "Chinese Office Going Rogue Against Netherlands Owning Company".

By calling it "Civil War" the headline is misleading people into thinking both sides were on equal footing.

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

One of the most insane things is how after Russia's surprisingly poor military performance in the Georgian war, the Merkel government was disturbed not that Russia invaded Georgia, but at the level of disarray in the Russian army, and sought a deliberate policy of improving the Russian military. They perceived Russia as a bulkwark against e.g. Islamic extremism, and as a potential strategic partner. They supported for example Rheinmetal building a modern training facility in Russia and sent trainers to work with the Russian military.

With Georgia I could understand (though adamantly disagreed) how some dismissed it as a "local conflict" because it could be spun as "Georgia attacking an innocent separatist state and Russia just keeping their alliances". But after 2014 there was no viable spin that could disguise Russia's imperial project. Yet so many kept sticking their fingers in their years going, "LA LA LA, I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and pretending like we could keep living as we were before. It was delusional and maddening.

The EU has three times Russia's population and an order of magnitude larger of an economy. In any normal world, Russia should be terrified of angering Europe, not the other way around. But our petty differences, our shortsightedness, our adamant refusal to believe deterrence is needed, much less to pay to actually deter or even understand what that means... we set ourselves up for this.

And I say this to in no way excuse the US's behavior. The US was doing the same thing as us (distance just rendered Russia less of a US trading partner) and every single president wanted to do a "reset" of relations with Russia, which Russia repeatedly used to weaken western defenses in Europe. And it's one thing for the US to say to Europe "You need to pay more for defense" (which is unarguable), even to set realistic deadlines for getting defense spending up, but it's an entirely different thing to just come in and abandon an ally right in the middle of their deepest security crisis since World War II. It's hard to describe to Americans how betrayed most Europeans feel at America right now. The US organized and built the world order it desired (even the formation of the EU was strongly promoted by the US), and then just ripped it out from under our feet when it we're under attack.

A friend once described Europe in the past decades as having been "a kept woman" to America. And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman, and both sides can benefit. America built bases all over Europe to project global power; got access to European militaries for their endeavours, got reliable European military supply chains, etc and yet remained firmly in control of NATO policy; maintained itself as the world's reserve currency; were in a position that Europe could never stop them from doing things Europeans disliked (for example, from invading Iraq); and on and on - while Europe decided that letting the US dominate was worth being able to focus on ourselves. But a kept woman has no real freedom, no real security, and your entire life can come crashing down if you cross them or they no longer want you.

(Score:X, Troll)

And yet, your imaginary friend still isn't real. ;)

They do. Some people don't use them; and (if disciplined) use one or more worksheets to store data and refer to it purely internally and (otherwise) just sort of ad-hoc mix data and formulas.

In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.

Coming from the IT side; and having to field questions from the perpetrators of some absolutely hideous excel sheets from time to time(no, I didn't even know that there was a way of creating a type of embedded image that actually quietly triggers the print spooler subsystem to do something that generates a new image based on the contents of another region of the spreadsheet, still don't know how they did that; but it's objectively depraved) I understand the hate; but I do have to admit that spreadsheets are pretty good for napkin-math thinking-it-through type processes.

Like when you work it out on paper; you've got your input, then you have a cell with the contents of the first transformation you wanted to make, then the second, then the third, and so on, and at each step you can think "does this value make sense?"

It rapidly gets out of hand in quantity; but as a rapid sketchpad for thinking something through you could do a whole lot worse. It's also tempting(again, tempting down the path of darkness in quantity) for dealing with jobs that need both a bit of string munging and a pretty-printed output.

You send the intern down to storage with a barcode scanner and have them start snagging SNs and MACs and stuff from the shipment of new gear. Turns out various vendors use different prefixes on different barcode values to inform their own ERP/inventory system/warehouse people which of the 5 closely spaced barcodes their scanner hit. And each vendor uses a different set of conventions, and while obvious enough they aren't documented. Ok, no problem; intern comes back with raw list; all the Lenovo SNs get a 'last x characters' substring; all the Cisco MACs get another transform, whatever.

Obviously if it were your inventory/warehouse system you wouldn't be treating the barcode scanner as a raw HID device and doing ad-hoc transformations, there would be a program that automatically uses the prefixes to populate the correct parts of the form; but you want to stick your head into ERP project hell rather than come up with maybe a dozen lightweight string manipulations? Obviously, you could also do it in your choice of scripting language and iterate through one CSV to create another; but that mostly just conceals what you did from anyone who doesn't use that scripting language; while you can walk basically anyone employable through the logic of the spreadsheet prettifying.

When a cop asks you what time it is, simply respond: "I do not answer questions and I invoke my to remain silent."

Oh dear, I might find myself in a bit of trouble then.

They clearly didn't even use a proper image generator - that's clearly the old crappy ChatGPT-builtin image generator. It's not like it's a useful figure with a few errors - the entire thing is sheer nonsense - the more you look at it, the worse it gets. And this is Figure 1 in a *paper in Nature*. Just insane.

This problem will decrease with time (here are two infographics from Gemini 3 I made just by pasting in an entire very long thread on Bluesky and asking for infographics, with only a few minor bits of touchup). Gemini successfully condensed a really huge amount of information into infographics, and the only sorts of "errors" were things like, I didn't like the title, a character or two was slightly misshapen, etc. It's to the point that you could paste in entire papers and datasets and get actually useful graphics out, in a nearly-finished or even completely-finished state. But no matter how good the models get, you'll always *have* to look at what you generate to see if it's (A) right, and (B) actually what you wanted.

And clearly God (who as we know, is a scalar field) is an AI. That's why there's so much "slop" in the Bible - factual errors, contradictions, different versions of the same text that heavily contradict each other, etc etc. It all makes so much more sense now!