lisper

This seems huge, like not quite p=np but in the same league. Am I missing something ?

The question is: do the bees see music and art in their structures. I doubt it. One of the defining characteristics of music and art is that they have no obvious direct connection to reproductive fitness.

There are such civilizations here on earth: ants. Termites. Honey bees.

I'm not saying it's not cool. Parlor tricks can be very cool, and this one is. But it's still a parlor trick because it's not good for anything other than being cool. When people think of flying cars what they generally have in mind is not a car that can do a flip, it's car that can take them somewhere without needing a road so that it doesn't get stuck in traffic. This car can't do that. All it can do is backflips in a parking lot. That's not nothing, but the novelty will wear off very quickly.

> It’s an incredible engineering accomplishment

Many of the best parlor tricks are.

> Ok, so it actually flies.

For a few seconds. It's a parlor trick. And the flying configuration will not be street-legal.

Maybe things have changed, but in my day when deploying code to an interplanetary spacecraft, code reviews (emphatically plural) were not optional, and being offended by them would have been a career-ending move.

Why would anyone care about what the Open Group has to say in this day and age? Is anyone actually still using SCO or AIX any more?

> Assuming past performance is indicative of future performance.

Yeah, well, there's yer problem right there. We will not colonize the solar system, and certainly not the galaxy, because we haven't figured out how to stabilize the situation here on earth. Yes, we colonized the planet, but for most of the history our lack of planning was compensated by technological limitations and limits imposed by the laws of physics. Those are mostly gone now, and I'll be a little surprised if civilization doesn't collapse before the end of my life (and I'm in my 60s). I would be very surprised if it lasts to the end of the century, though of course I won't be around to see that.

> Imagine someone saying, "We're doomed because people walk very slowly

I think I may not have made myself clear. The analogy here is not that "we're doomed because people walk slowly". There is nothing that happens here on earth that is even remotely analogous to the constraints that the speed of light imposes on interstellar processes. Even at a leisurely walking pace, a human can circumnavigate the planet in less time than it takes light to reach the nearest star. Human walking speed is blindingly fast (relative to the size of the planet) compared to the speed of light (relative to the distances between stars).

The reason we're doomed is not that we're not walking fast enough, it's because we won't stop walking and take time to think about where we should be going. We just go.

> More likely just not seen yet, our furthest reaching signals are maybe 50 light years away at best

This is the key. On interstellar scales, things move very, very slowly and you have to plan on time scales measured in millennia. IMHO we are doomed simply because we can barely think beyond the next election cycle. (At least that's true for Americans. The Chinese seem to think in terms of decades and, occasionally, centuries.)

> Is that actually better (in practice, not in terms of entropy) than /dev/urandom?

It offers protection in the event that your /dev/urandom is compromised. Otherwise no.

(Of course, if your /dev/urandom is compromised then whatever process you use to compute a hash of a photo is likely compromised as well.)

I don't understand how your name could not have been carried along on the cap table all these years. In my experience when I've made an investment in an early stage company and they have a liquidity event, they come looking for me.

Private pilot here. No, I'm quite sure very few of you here would have made the same mistake as evidenced by the fact that literally hundreds of thousands of aircraft land successfully every day, many of them under much more adverse conditions. This is not a oh-it-could-have-happened-to-anyone kind of screwup, this is a did-this-guy-really-go-through-basic-pilot-training kind of screwup.

You seem to be missing a basic fact about how the world works: there are two classes of people, those who make the rules, and those who are expected to follow the rules. These classes are largely disjoint.

> Errors by the Census Bureau in the 2020 census resulted in significant over counts in blue states

And the 2020 election was stolen too.

It is at once obvious and hard for people to internalize that there will come a time in the future when our time will be as far in the past as ancient Rome is to us. We might not be interested in old magazines and artifacts from our grandparent's childhoods, but they will be (at least one hopes). There are so many ways that we ought to be more considerate of future generations, and this is one them. These museums are our Libraries of Alexandria.

No, we are talking about Page Rank, which is an algorithm on directed graphs. Web search is one application, but not the only one.

You clearly don't understand how Page Rank works. It is not just a matter of counting the incoming links.

Um, no? It works in non-adversarial environments. Such environments are rare in today's world but they still exist, mainly where there isn't a profit motive. Believe it or not, there are still some people in the world who believe that there is more to life than money.

Thanks. I don't have time to watch the video, but the article still leaves me skeptical. Matching myths to past events seems to me fraught with all the same potential pitfalls as matching them to future events and thence labeling them as prophecies, especially when the event in question is as common as a volcano erupting. But I will admit it's not entirely implausible either.