Yeah.

They completely ignore panserpmia.

They just quote Isaac Asimov's writing from almost half a century ago (Europa). Ignores Enceladus, Titan, Venus, Mars; all of which have *BIOSIGNATURES* of a probability curve not too dissimilar to Europa.

They are likely a dilettante. Those folks do not do "prior art" research because they believe in the Auteur Myth.

  "An auteur is a filmmaker whose personal style and thematic focus are so distinctive that they are considered the 'author' of their films, a concept known as the auteur myth."

Real science isn't that. Real science is a rational discipline. The null hypothesis -- know what that means. Prior art -- know what that means. Mental biases -- know those, too; you'll see what you want to see, hear what you want to hear. Science is the discipline of mind that ensures you're not just spewing random nonsense. You verify what you think; that's the discipline.

As Isaac Newton said ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), "nani gigantum humeris insidentes."

Ignore them.

Everything seems obvious once it is explained.

Why do 12-14 steps of algebra, when calculus works in 2?

Obvious. People should know calculus.

Yet they don't.

Define Green's Theorem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- is obvious.

Everything is obvious *IN HINDSIGHT*.

Interesting discussion but I'm not sure the conclusion is sound. Judging difficulty on a sample size down around one or two isn't great. I could just as easy put out that zero is the number that indicates it's hard. Knowing life arose once suggests it's not "hard". Given the time-spans involved here, it could be very, very unlikely in any meaningful sense but the sheer amount of time allowed it to eventually happen, twice even... while leaving it statistically unlikely.

As for the Fermi's Paradox, I think the Occam's answer is Adam's Observation: "space is big. Really, really big..."

For any civilization to both want to and actually do something so incredibly massive that it's observable with our limited perception and rigor is... fantastic. There could be plenty of civilizations within two hundred years of maturity of ours very close and we'd never know unless we were really lucky.

Oh, no. I have it on good authority that computer vision is about to exceed human performance.

Wait - what year is it, again? :-p

Oh, so if Trump can cancel the next election, he simply remains president?

If Trump can cancel the next election it becomes a moot point. The presidency will be determined by the results of the ensuing civil war.

Touche. Well-done.

Because there are four categories of people here:
1} Non-indoctrinated non-investors... are freaking the fuck out right now but are powerless.
2} Indoctrinated non-investors... don't have money so don't care what Trump does to the stock market.
3} Non-indoctrinated investors... are quietly more interested in any money-making opportunity than principles.
4} Indoctrinated investors... have been encouraging all of this.

Category 1 is way, way outnumbered.

Remember when the very hint of being shady like this would disqualify someone from a office nearly as high as President? This is why I was upset when Trump started lying in his first term. He normalized deceit then and he's been normalizing corruption now.

This is Pandora's box; there's no real reason for anyone in the future to not follow this precedent because America statistically condoned it. Frankly without an armed revolt making it clear that misbehaving won't be tolerated, it obviously will be.

Astra correctly answers all 10 questions in the $2000 lightning round!

And now on to the final round. To win $32,000 cash, a brand new Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser, and an all-expense paid vacation for two to Puerto Vallarta, all you have to do is answer this single question to the satisfaction of our judges:

The Riemann Hypothesis: True or False?

I'm skeptical of this conclusion.

When we were primarily a farming civilization, the physical distances between kids and the nearest kids they weren't related to wasn't orders of magnitude different from what it is today. Indeed, considering how many people live in cities - offsetting the weirdos who live dramatically far away from any neighbors - things are much better for kids today.

Also, there's a difference between social media and contact. There's nothing preventing Australian kids from texting, calling, or even video calling each other. They don't need Facebook specifically. Stuff like TikTok isn't about person-to-person contact. It's about attention-adhesion.

Tim Waltz is a criminal mastermind. He's been hacking other states' water so that he can keep all 10,000 of his lakes topped off at the expense of hard working Americans.

Changing out running code on the fly probably increases the number of corner cases by an order of magnitude.

What could possibly go wrong?

Exactly. I think this is salty people who desperately want the AI bubble to pop and for it all to be a scam of 'stochastic parrots' and a modern Mechanical Turk. It somehow offends their humanity and they are sure there is a vast capitalist conspiracy to defraud everyone. The fact is some asshats like Altman are indeed overhyping BUT that does not change the fact that my team of programmers got cut by 30% yet we are kicking out bug fixes and new features faster than ever. At higher quality too because now a lazy developer isn't half-assing the testcases.

Agreed 100% about hard to predict. I love this analogy from Geoffrey Hinton: it is like driving in a fog. Your headlights see only a few meters ahead and then there is an impenetrable wall of fog. Anyone who tells you they can see exactly where the road is heading a mile ahead is selling you something.

I presume that this "God data structure" is referring to the Higgs Bogon, the basis of the bogomips metric. Splitting the bogon is the first step to creating a kernel that can run on quantum computers. Or, possibly, the first step to causing vacuum collapse and the destruction of the universe as we know it. Hard to tell when messing with God stuff.

If like me you use VirtualBox you should hold off on this kernel upgrade until you know VirtualBox is ready for it