Peteragain

I was talking to someone two nights ago who grew up in the USSR. I grew up on Australia. The common thread was after school clubs, and a well funded state run and centralised system for spotting talent, and then scholarships to institutions set up to develop the talent. In Australia the club's are mostly sport, and they fed into the Australian Institute of Sport (which gave you a good rounded education for when you didn't get rich and famous, plus the specialist stuff). The soviets had sports, maths, chess, gymnastics, music ...

I did an apprenticeship in metalwork many..many years ago and I seem to recall the zinc is meant to be in compression. If a zinc plug pulled out, it was in shear. Sounds wrong to me. Vincenti: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Engineers_Know_and_How_Th... Has a chapter on flush pop rivetting which discussed the loss of this kind of knowing.

He's not the only one. And as I said you at least get told his bias. The BBC (see the trump court case) edited time lines and claim to be unbiased. The idea (not mine; "critical discourse analysis" I think) is that all news is biased and the right way to report is to state the bias up front.

It's rambling, but highlights a point. The big picture IMHO is that news as we ingest it is like history. History is viewed through a lens of the present and its concerns. News is viewed through the same lens, filtered by the concerns of, not journalists, but what journalists think we are concerned with. Real journalists (IE investigative) don't present "facts", but interpret "facts" against a world view. Good journalists state how they do that. Just to put the cat out and see what happens, Michael Moore is definitive at this, irrespective of whether or not you agree with his world view, at least you know what his world view is. I've just had a piece of Reform UK advertising through the mailbox, and it is printed in the format and style of news. Nice trick. I guess that is what 70 million GBP of overseas funding buys you.

We laugh at Russia's "fields of rusting armour" but one interpretation I saw somewhere said these scrap heaps were (plausibly) set up to be a source of components for whatever military requirements appeared next. It also kept the armaments industry ticking along for the last 80 years. The Japanese build two submarines every two years, by two companies. Unless they stuff up, each company can plan developments with forward looking. The contract system in the US has its drawbacks.

There is the effect that it takes more words to say something new in a way that is convincing than to say something your audience already believes.

Nope. The point of the original argument was the path to autocracy, not the current state of things. This article focuses on the here and now. The point is the trap is in front of us, we are not in it yet. Stop talking about how nice the bait looks everyone!

I think you miss the point that power is a global market. In the UK we pay international prices because otherwise our state/corporations/establishment would sell it overseas. Yes, electricity is linked to natural gas, just because they can.

This is a much more sensible research programme.

IMHO translation of anything interesting requires the cultural background for context. To do it with a new language requires the translator to "go native". The mega fauna gets media attention, but they would have more chance of success with one of the many dolphin pods that live up close and personal with humans. For example Shark Bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_Mia In the 1990s we had field linguists interested, but the tech sucked. It's good to try again, but a lit search might help.

We saw a talk on this at EMF Camp and it is inspiring. The main technical challenge in the short term is collecting the data. Talking to non humans is a grand challenge - and one I think is really interesting - however..

The article is about the aesthetics and supply chains, not WiFi or designed obsolescence. I agree: the products are un explainably ugly.

Electricians are a bit like airline pilots in that they are paid for knowing what they know, the limits, and making timely decisions. Good ones are paid well, and bad ones kill people. Other tradies have super skills. Welders - who knows how they (reliably) do what they do.

A cute example of the idea that the state provides basic services, and individuals/companies are free to make money out of doing it better. Water, Comms, transport & housing anyone?

Found it! Thanks for the pointer: https://researchportal.hw.ac.uk/en/persons/rob-stewart/

My argument is that verilog is to FPGAs as assembler is to pdp11s, and C is closer to assembler than Java or prolog. High level languages are easier for programmers, but interestingly, the high level language Haskel readily compiles to FPGA. What's happening here?

Well c does look much like the hardware of a PDP11 and verilog LUTs look like FPGA hardware. But my wife (a. CS prof) says the same: programming is what programmers do.

Okay. I like this article and I've thought about it regularly since it last made the rounds here. 1) C is a low level language for a PDP11, or for a single core on a GPU. 2) But what would a low level language look like for an FPGA? Probably verilog. 3) The point worth pursuing however is whether there might be a Hardware agnostic "low level language". 4) yep Haskel by the looks of things. If only I could find the reference.. :-/ There's a set of slides from a crew in Edinburgh doing the history of functional languages. Does any one remember something similar?

Some friends and I are having a conversation about "caring" - not necessarily for others but care in what you do. Wim Wenders 2023 film "Perfect Days" is relevant here.

I'm not sure the situation has changed for AI. For a real scientific agenda we need to at least attend to the things a demo can't do, not just what they can. The trouble with such analysis of current ai systems is that the negative examples are instantly included in the training data.

Economy of scale is an engineer's wet dream: the biggest of everything (And a fit with the bureaucrat's dream of a bigger budget). Move fast and break things says the opposite. Set up the production line to make one small one, and the next one better. Repeat. This is a far better approach with developing tech, and applies to power provision. The challenge is to get a market for the early versions when we all know the next will be better. Saying LiPo suck, and Chinese Tech is bad? Just part of the PR sales pitch to get us to try the better alternative. I'd bet on non rechargeable mag-air batteries made with sea water and off peak wind power myself :-)

.. and soon to be dependent on US military funding? Controlled by someone who has run-ins with universities? This'll end in tears.

The government funds some libraries, and for some publicly acceptable reason. That reason should apply to web infrastructure, and indeed the small web. Other libraries are community run. Again whatever motivates that probably applies to small web stuff.

More how they exist.

I'm very keen on public libraries. I'm fortunate in that our village has a community run one, there is the county one, and I can get to The British Library. Why do these entities exist? A real question - not rhetorical. Whatever the answer, I am sure the same mechanism could "pay for" public hosting.

There is indeed something beautiful about traditional boats but this is a different kind of beauty. And 40 knots in 3 metre waves? Wow! Like F1 cars don't drive like road cars the automated control means this is not a boat but something else wonderous.

I love some of the crystal clear poetic expressions Pinyin speakers come out with. When Charles was a prince he was called "number one son belong missus queen". I certainly don't want that "made better".

I think they missed a trick. This phone could be replaced - I think it might be time - but it works fine. I won't replace it now, but if I could use it for something else then I would likely go okay, if I get a new phone I also get a baby monitor!

I'm going to use that stat. Even if 78.4% of quoted stats are made up.

From a linguistics perspective "environmentalists worry" is a phrase designed to trigger a certain response. It sets up an us versus them scenario with "us" being anti environmentalists. "Concerns over" would include the reader. More interesting for the journalism for some.

I suspect we focus too much here with good old Methodist values around improvement and work. I seem to recall a study in Arnemland (North (wet) Australia) where the indigenous population spent about 10% of their time hunting and gathering - not an 8 hour day by any means. Two points: this was normal, but of course their numbers were controlled by inconsistent weather. The feast and famine cycle over the year mean even that 10 was not evenly distributed. The people are also of course nomadic, but not as much as you might think in that the procession follows a 'route' which looks much like the seasons in agricultural society. I suspect medieval society also partied hard, and bitched about their love life mostly, with the local brute squad creaming off most of the men for their wars, or disease or crop failure decimating the population every few generations.