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Comment Re: Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1) 199

And there you are wrong and quite obviously so. I will not even argue that point

Can't argue the point so you'll pretend to be taking some sort of high ground.

Your claim is obviously stupid, and since it's obvious I'll say why. Unlike you, who cannot say why which is why you didn't.

People, ordinary people go between multiple roles in their life while remaining the same person. Within a job people get promoted and may have some management duties, which may well involve deciding pay levels to some extent. Sometimes people strike out on their own and do contracting and start a company at which point they have full control over what they offer subcontractors or employees.

And even for those who do not people still get other jobs done via contractors, like plumbers, electricians etc, at which point they decide they pay levels as much as any business owner.

You like many people are absolutely bending over backwards to reinterpret the results to be what you want.

Comment Re:Day after midterms (Score 1) 93

Given the rate of global warming, it isn't sustainable even if we're careful. As soon as the Arctic melts and all that permafrost gives up its CO2 and methane, we can expect to move into the global warming fast lane. The Oceans will also suffer a catastrophic loss of the base of the food chain. You might have heard of it, it ends at your grocery store. It will end quite short of that in the future.

And that doesn't count in the environmental shocks that we are inflicting on the earth as a system.

While your concern is applaudable, explain how during times in the past when CO2 was much higher than now, the world didn't end.

This is not for a second to deny the energy retention of an atmosphere being controlled by its gaseous composition. This is not to suggest that this isn't a big problem.

Your idea is pure FUD. Fact is, we've been through warming and cooling cycles before. The world is not ending. The oceans will not become lifeless. There will be problems - some substantial. But doom and gloom hand-wringing doesn't help.

Comment Re:mostly mash-ups of existing techniques (Score 2) 113

This gets to some extent into the issue of what we mean by "novel" and admittedly that has some subjectivity to it. One take on what is going on here is that this should be showing us how much that we thought of as creative was just rearranging things. There's a legitimate argument that the AI isn't doing anything creative or clever here, and that if someone says, "Well, by that metric the vast majority of human mathematicians aren't doing anything creative or clever," and while I see that as a pretty hard response, one response is to just say "Yeah, go bite that bullet."

Comment Re:A few comments on the problems (Score 2) 113

Thank you, may I ask did you use AI to draw your conclusions?

Here? None.

I am most interested where you say "the technique it uses here is not in the literature" , does this suggests novel creation or derivation?

I'm not sure where the line is there. For at least some of these, part of it seems to be the AI importing pieces of techniques used in other areas of math. In general, no human discovery is completely novel. Newton's work relied on prior work of Galileo, Oresme and many others. Einstein's work relied on ideas of hundreds before-hand. At the same time, there's people whose work really does look like it is fundamentally different in many ways than what went before, and both of those are examples. In math, Peter Scholze's perfectoids for example clearly build on existing ideas, but there's a lot of stuff that looks deeply new. How to draw the line here isn't always clear. For what it is worth, Harald Helfgott, who is a much smarter and more knowledgeable mathematician than I am thinks that of what he's looked at it seems like the AI is still producing things in what amounts to almost the "convex hull" of known math or close to it. But his idea of what that looks like may be much bigger than my idea.

Comment Re:Summary ... (Score 1) 277

Yeah humid here like that too. Often 35C (about 95F) at midnight, those nights play havoc with people's sleep. You just can't sleep and live in AC constantly so as much dark as possible is needed to make up for that just so you can open the windows and get some fresh air at night.

With the stupidity of loosing DST the tradies would start in the morning when it is finally cool enough to get some decent sleep for a few hours.

I hadn't considered that part, and it is a really good point about people starting their day around the only time they can get some decent sleep.

For people who might be living in more arid parts of the world, humidity can be a real beotch. And we're"used" to it here. At one of my work sites, it was a beautiful fall day, sunny, 70 degrees, around 55 percent humidity. I was loving it. I was working with a guy based in Southern Arizona. He was suffering. Good thing he wasn't here in July!

I can think of other reasons to keep DST however sleep would be the main one. With DST it's some help in getting sleep and that hour makes the difference between functional and fatigued, between getting home or having a car accident.

Unless, of course these morons are proposing to add a legally mandated afternoon siesta to their proposal.

I don't think they think that far ahead. So unintended consequences bite them in the backside all the time.

It always helps to ask questions like Why did time get coordinated in the first place? Until the early 1800's most places kept local time, as in directly tied to the sun. So every town/area had it's own time. Think of it as hundreds of thousands of mini time zones.

Then along come the railroads. As they branched out, there was a need to have more coordinated time. Needed to have it known what point in time what train was likely to be where. We don't want the trains running into each other.

So we had to sit down and figure out time zones in a manner that made for easy calculation, taking into account that even from east to west in any given time zone , sunrise and sunset will differ somewhat. since the world operates on a 24 hour clock, 24 time zones was then logical choice.

Especially radio which was a worldwide communication tool, everything had to be synchronized. If I have a contact in say, Japan, and we need to talk at a certain time, we bother have to know just what time it is. Enter Greenwich Main Time, known known as Universal coordinated time. When it is 0910 in Eastern US it is 0910 in Japan. Just figure out the local time which is either added or subtracted.

But what this fixed time and time zoned approach does not have is a lattitude based differential As noted, places near latitude zero don't have much difference in day/night length, and the further north or south you go, the larger the variance in seasonal day/night cycle there is.

So DST was born. It wasn't a group of stupid people creati gnit, and it wasn't people trying to kowtow to farmers in Minnesota. It was dealing with the issues created by necessary changes in a connected world.

It's why people in my latitude don't want the sun to rise at 8:30 A.M. in December and January if we go permanent DST. And as noted before, I'm at around 40 degrees latitude.

Unfortunately, few politicians are versed in physics, so I guess this will be a case of FAFO. The likely result is a repeat of the 1970's permanent DST failure.

Comment I doubt we will see 10 billion (Score 1) 93

There's basically two ways this plays out. First the Epstein class wins. If that happens we become a techno feudal hellscape and you'll have a about 50 to 60,000 people at the top and then everyone else will be living in abject poverty at the level of medieval times. Disease and starvation will wipe most of them out and keep the numbers down.

The other less likely possibility is that we go with a cooperative global civilization. You know that cookie spooky socialism crap. If that happens you will quickly see the population not just stop growing but shrink. People who aren't desperately trying to crank out babies without access to birth control so they can use them as cheap labor to replace machines that don't exist just don't have a lot of kids. When you take away the economic incentive it turns out the birth rates drop faster than even the projections your citing.

Either way the reason we have this huge population boom is because we were in a very bizarre and unique situation where we had just enough technology that a primitive culture that squeezes out babies left and right wasn't dropping dead constantly from war and disease and general lack of medical Care. That's not sustainable and it's not going to last. The Epstein class won't allow it. So we either get rid of the Epstein class which does not seem to be on the table or we let them turn us into something worse than serfs

Comment Re:Excellent Move (Score 1) 131

The fraud of firing 6000 workers and immediately hiring 6000 H-1Bs was too in your face.

The Dept of Labor did the right thing by suspending Microsoft from the PERM program.

Oh, you think this is about doing the right thing... the US government... the current US government? I mean it's cute that you believe that.

Adobe, MS, et al. are being targetted because they've got deep pockets. A few million given to the right orange madman and this problem goes away. They don't even have to do it in secret any more.

Comment Re:Day after midterms (Score 0, Troll) 93

Maybe the real end of the world, if Trump reacts badly enough.

Population growth is levelling off and we will end up somewhere between 10 and 12 billion by the end of the century. It's sustainable as long as we are careful... Which we tend not to be. Most of the growth is in Africa, which has a lot of scope for it.

In fact the main reason population is still growing is people are living longer. The global fertility rate has dipped below 2.1, the steady state level due to childhood deaths.

Submission + - Hegseth Planning Public Execution (bbc.com) 1

hadleyburg writes: The BBC reports the Pentagon announcing that "Fort Hood attacker's execution by firing squad will be livestreamed".

This would be the first public execution in the US in almost a century. "We'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public," Hegseth said. Only Iran and Afghanistan are known to currently carry out public executions.

There are some who suggest that such an execution could have the effect of lowering support for the death penalty in the US as it would "force a level of transparency that we have probably never seen before in this country".

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