What's really unfortunate here is that due to OpenAI's drastic exaggeration of what happened here it distracts from the real capabilities here. Being able to efficiently find sources in the literature is an incredibly useful tool. And even aside from that there are now multiple examples where professional mathematicians have used GPT-5 in the thinking mode to make progress on math problems. Nothing as major as any Erdos problem, but still clear use. Terry Tao for example used GPT-5 in thinking mode to help locate a counterexample to a conjecture here https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmathoverflow.net%2Fquestions%2F501066%2Fis-the-least-common-multiple-sequence-textlcm1-2-dots-n-a-subset-of-t. Now, he could have almost certainly done this on his own, but it clearly saved time. Similarly, computer scientist Scott Aaronson used it to get a specific useful suggestion for a function with specific properties he needed that he was then able to use to do a specific thing https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fscottaaronson.blog%2F%3Fp%3D9183. In neither of these cases was anything deeply groundbreaking done by the LLM. But the LLM clearly helped and likely saved many hours of work otherwise. And these systems continue to improve.

I've been there.

I was so frustrated that I taped my banana to the wall!

There have been many studies at this point showing that exposure to dirt, dust, and dander early in childhood results in low rates of asthma. I'm personally fondest of the one a friend of mine (Hi Dubes!) worked on in Papua New Guinea where they found the westernization of formerly isolated cultures where dirt floors are replaced by cement results in an increase in asthma.

I recall recently hearing of a study where it was determined that when an infant's pacifier falls on the ground, and the parent cleans it by putting it in their own mouth first before returning it to the child, the children end up with substantially stronger immune systems than if the pacifier is cleaned more vigorously.

As with many aspects of developmental biology, we are born with scaffolding that needs to be trained in order to function properly. A lack of that training leads to disease. So, yes, let your kids play in the dirt.

Anyone, conservative or liberal, that isn't extremely worried about Trump's authoritarian regime's jailing people without due process in out of the country prisons, attack on free speech of any opinions he doesn't like (such as denying press reporting on the pentagon if it's not cleared by them first, something even Fox News and Newsmax refused to agree to), and overall vague claims to having the power to do whatever the hell he wants are the ones suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I've lived through multiple Republican Presidents, I've disagreed with both Republican and Democrat presidents, I've never been worried for our country before. This isn't political, and anyone who thinks it is needs to wake up from their cult of personality.

Remind me which of those countries were subsequently annexed by NATO countries?

I think a lot of that depends on whether the flags in the court have gold fringing or not... Or I might be mixing up Russian propaganda with plain old home grown US disinformation... Of course, there does seem to keep being more and more evidence that a lot of that actually is planted by Russia in the first place, so who knows.

"Our", right... In any case, sure, the US is imperialistic and pushy and obnoxious on the international stage. Prominent European nations also have a lot to answer for in the history of imperialism. So what though? Two rights don't make a wrong. I can simultaneously think that Russia is wrong to do something while thinking the US was/is wrong to do other things. For example, US occupation of Guantanamo Bay? Completely illegal with no valid justification. National sovereignty is not some gift bestowed by the US on other nations.

So, yeah Russia did overthrow the legitimate government in Crimea, and in Donetsk and Luhansk. As for the rest of that, pretty much all bull. There were no agreements that would have re-united the Russian occupied Donetsk and Luhansk with the rest of Ukraine. Not unless you mean surrender demands by Russia which would "re-unite" them by making them all Russian Oblasts.

No, it is actually entirely accurate. It leaves out the nuance that it is for Putin's own glorification, etc. but it is accurate.

More bull. I am sure you love the concept of the Russian Mir, but being an ethnic Russian or Russian speaker does not mean that Russia owns you. The overthrown politician in question was actually overthrown by parliamentary procedure. There are some excuses that it wasn't valid because of some constitution juggling that was going on beforehand (also one of the reasons for his overthrow), etc. Of course, while it was already well known how incredibly corrupt he was, the aftermath showed the sheer, disgusting scale of his corruption.

While it is, to some degree driven by Russian ethnic hostility towards non-Russian Slavs (what do they call Ukrainians again? Khokols?) the broader reason is Russian imperialistic expansionism.

That is hilarious. The Russians are only maintaining their presence in Ukraine through the continuous mass sacrifice of their own people and whatever foreigners they can trick into dying for them. This war has made it entirely clear that NATO forces, or pretty much any of the major NATO countries individually, could roll through Moscow and St. Petersburg (Pretty much the only major parts of Russia that the Russians who matter live in) within a month in conventional warfare.

Did US Intelligence Agencies hack the national timekeeping agency to set their clocks back 10 minutes in order to make it seem like everything was running late?

It's not that James Hansen is a fanatic, it's that he he is in his mid eighties and formed many of these opinions earlier in his life. He was ten when the first power generating nuclear reactor came online and 12 when the "atoms for peace" initiative started. So, we have a budding young future scientist who grew up in what they were trying at the time to dub the "atomic age" which was when the US government most heavily propagandized nuclear power. That's bound to leave an impression. Likewise, his impression of things like solar cells would have been formed in his college years when they were just starting to become more widely available, but were tremendously inefficient compared to today. Back then is when they started throwing around notions that solar panels would never produce more energy in their life time than they took to make. It may have been pretty close to true at the time. Basically through most of his life, those renewables were not as advanced as today and were not yet ready to be viable as cost-effective, efficient power sources. At a certain point, older scientists do tend to get fixated on certain ideas without keeping up so well with the state of the art. Hansen was around 74 when he made the statement you attribute to him above.

It is worth noting that, despite being a prominent climate scientist, Hansen has many, many critics in the field on his pro-nuclear stance. While I am not a prominent climate scientist, I am one of those critics because the economics and logistics don't work out.

Well, for citations of cask storage failing that all depends on whether you would consider a reactor containment building to be a cask. If you would, then one failed when used fuel exploded out of the top of the "cask" and ended up scattered all over Chornobyl (and large areas of Europe). Or the time it melted through the bottom of the immediate "casks" and ended up pooled at the bottom of the primary "cask" where it is only kept cold by continuous cooling water and has been there for a decade and a half and will probably be there for three or four more decades at least.

That is tongue in cheek of course. As I have said, I have no doubt that dry cask storage is no worse than all of the other inadequate schemes for storing more conventional long-term toxic waste out there. I actually agree that it is not really, but itself, any sort of reason to worry about nuclear power. I only mention it because you keep mentioning it. My objection to nuclear power for general electrical generation remains the same as always: It is too expensive, too slow, and too inflexible.

The problem with that approach is that it heavily disincentivizes research into these areas because it adds additional costs to something that is already very expensive to develop. A better approach is to require that the abandoned systems have any hardware or software source code opened so that maintenance is possible. If a company is abandoning something they shouldn't care if anything related to it becomes free and open. If it were worth anything they could have sold it.

I've heard that the cause was a string of news stories several decades ago about rare but potentially fatal allergic reactions in children that caused parents to remove children from exposure to potential allergens. You can probably already spot the irony in this because the reaction by the parents to try to protect their kids actually made them more susceptible to the problem in the first place.

It's a bit like how the news can run a story about shampoo shortages and within a week the stores will have empty shelves in the shampoo aisle. Not because there was any actual shortage, but because people all thought there was one and rushed out to stock up on shampoo, even if they didn't need any.

More generally, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

> Because I don't have a billion dollars to blow tailoring propaganda to your specific tastes to *make* you like my side.

Your side spent more on their campaign and got blown away by the side that spent less just a year ago.

Your side is losing the messaging war, not the financing war. You just had a weekend with a big paid protest. And everyone is making fun of you and your side is using 2017 footage to make it seem you drew a crowd.

Your side is a cult.

No, windows installer for Win 10 or Win 11 is *easier* than, say, an Ubuntu desktop install -Windows doesn't ask the installer about LVM/disk layout. That isn't a hard question, and a sentence saying "if you are unsure, just accept the default choice, it's suitable for most users" could neutralize the issue, but my point is Win 10 and Win 11 installer is really, really simple. If you think it's hard, you haven't tried it lately.

> The fact that you see a giant platform of kids having fun and think "pedophilia"

No, it's the fact that it has a known pedophilia problem that's well documented at this point.

It has been in the news for years at this point and your failure to see it is your own, it doesn't change the facts.

> it's a wonderful platform my kids use

You're an awful parent. Your kids can learn programming safely without being exposed to the groomers on Roblox.

So if this is the "golden age of stupidity" does that mean MAGA uses technology like AI then? Our current regime can't even deal with an autopen.