alexhill

More than the header image I reckon.

I’m still not at the point where I jump to “AI” when encountering writing like this and spend way too long waiting for the facts and research to show up.

> They don't even know how to ask the right questions to get to what they want to know.

You're right. If the questions were being asked of someone who was genuinely motivated to answer them, this wouldn't be an obstacle.

The phrase "all your personal data" (or the quote from the article, "every bit of data associated with a given user account") feels vague and imprecise only if you have an internal understanding that for practical purposes, it really is impossible. The Facebook engineers know that and everyone here knows that. It's not literally impossible - an internal team of digital archaeologists with unlimited resources and no deadline might be able to do it for a single user. But practically impossible across the whole userbase.

If you were genuinely interested in providing insight to the hearing, you could explain all that, and then explain how you could go about creating a rough sketch of an answer, and how you'd go about adding some detail to that sketch.

The Facebook engineers have no real motivation to provide insight off their own bat. They can take the question literally, and answer honestly that they don't know, that nobody else knows, and that it's probably impossible TO know. I'm not even sure if this is acting in bad faith. I can easily imagine feeling cagey in this situation, and responding as such. Experiencing an emotion isn't acting in bad faith.

All that said...these questions were asked by a court-appointed subject matter expert. Either the subject matter expert is not the right person for the job, or...and now I realise that of course I haven't read the transcript and there's every chance that what's quoted in the article is not the most insight the court managed to prise out of the engineers. posting anyway in 3 2 1

I love it. Something I always wish for with linters is an easy way to run them only for the lines changed in a particular diff, to allow a codebase to gradually converge on consistency without breaking git blame by reformatting everything. Is there a nice way to do that for any Python linter?

It would be available day and night and not as susceptible to weather fluctuations.

This video is great. It's made me really interested in the new camera, and the relative lack of actual information presented about it, in contrast to what's presented in that video, is frustrating. Are there more details available somewhere?

AFAIK there isn't a widely-used, solid JS compressor written in Python, so you're adding a dependency either way. You either need a Java runtime for the Closure Compiler, or you need Node to run uglify or similar.

> that journal peer review is non-existent

This isn't about peer review, because the paper was knowingly submitted only to journals known not to conduct peer review. Quoting from the article:

> We needed to get our study published pronto, but since it was such bad science, we needed to skip peer review altogether. Conveniently, there are lists of fake journal publishers.

And later:

> The new publisher’s CEO, Carlos Vasquez, emailed Johannes to let him know that we had produced an “outstanding manuscript,” and that for just 600 Euros it “could be accepted directly in our premier journal.”

This is really more about science journalism than about science.

These kinds of journals are difficult for a lay person to tell apart from actual, scientific journals, but distinguishing between the two is exactly the kind of job a competent science journalist would do. Inept science journalists, on the other hand, give these fake journals a reason to exist by citing them unchallenged.

96% of fissile material converted to non-fissile material, and that energy is then converted to electricity at normal steam turbine efficiency, 30% or something. This as opposed to less than 1% for Gen III reactors.

Edit: I posted that fuel handling is a batch process, not continuous – that might not be true for molten salt, not sure.

I don't think the author would disagree with much of your post.

I did not understand the point to be that wine critics are frauds – it's that they're playing a game that someone lacking the "deeper understanding and appreciation" simply doesn't have to participate in by buying expensive wine.

As you rightly say this applies equally to all areas of taste, but wine is a good one to call out because people seem to feel a bit bad about knowing nothing and overspend to be on the safe side.

Interesting.

> The assertion that the world must be internally consistent is quintessential rationalism, not materialism or empiricism at all. Science's core value is empiricism, NOT rationalism.

I don't assert that the world must be internally consistent. I merely believe that it is, for the entirely boring reason that there's a mountain of evidence that seems to say so. Empiricism may be the core value of science, but I think it's fair to say the scientific method also assumes the world to be consistent – that's the property that makes it worth hypothesising about.

If the external world isn't consistent, we will at some point run into some phenomenon that the scientific method simply can't accommodate, and there'll be no way to know when that's happened. Maybe it's happened already and consciousness is that problem. In any case, overall I think that puts me on the empiricist side of the fence, right?

> This is one of the weakest epistemic arguments I've ever heard. But also very honest.

> If you can't describe the position of the authority (PoA) that you trust in

> most fans of science have no idea what science is actually saying and couldn't survive a brief cross-examination of their "scientific" worldview

I do okay, but literally nobody could survive a brief cross-examination of their "scientific" worldview if you pick the right questions. I believe that the world exists outside my mind, so I have to accept that there are truths about the world that I don't know. All I'm saying is that I believe that other people know more of them than I do.

You have used quantum physics to justify your position elsewhere in this thread, so I take it you can justify this kind of belief-delegation as well.

> So now you see why philosophers like me think "New Atheists" are anti-intellectuals ... having the same religious ignorance and fervor that is common among Christians.

This is only superficially true. The whole "because science!" meme is annoying and a bit cultish. But although you've clearly thought about it in much more detail, the same logic that allows you to use quantum physics to support your arguments is what affords these people their beliefs. Even the most unthinking atheists grasp the structural difference between religious faith and so-called faith in science, that "God" is an empty expression whereas "Max Planck" refers to a human being not unlike themselves, etc.

(My source of frustration is that many people on the science train don't apply the mindset to themselves at all – generally giving their personal perceptions and intuitions, particular concerning causal relationships, far more weight than can be justified.)

> most self-proclaimed materialists, if asked to describe their beliefs, will describe them inline with the classic Newtonian or Cartesian formulation of matter.

I suspect many self-proclaimed materialists might do that, but more likely in an imprecise expression of vague support for a scientific worldview that they haven't learned or thought about too much than in an active rejection of established principles of quantum physics.

I'm just the same; I don't pretend to have a deep and detailed understanding of quantum physics, but I accept it as true because I believe at least that an internally consistent external world exists and a global conspiracy of physicists doesn't. If you quizzed me, at some level of detail I'd have to start guessing. My incorrect guesses shouldn't be mistaken for intentional rejection of established theories.

I'm not the parent but I'll stop considering myself a "materialist" then. I'm not wedded to the term. What should I call myself? A physicalist?

I'll try to describe the position that I (and I think most of the people you're debating with here) hold, without leaving too many terms undefined.

There exist reliably measurable external, non-mental, things. Ok, the physicalist says, consciousness does not arise from little material billiard balls bumping into one another. We have a more complex picture now of the composition of the external world, and so consciousness arises from that. This position does not rely on determinism; it can comfortably coexist with the kind of structured randomness seen in quantum physics.

It also doesn't logically exclude dualism, but as far as we know, only permits a kind of one-way dualism where some conscious substance exists as a consequent but not a cause of physical processes. Put another way, I don't believe we have discovered anything about the external world that requires the kind of explanation that consciousness can provide.

I understand your annoyance – I feel the same way about people who say they aren't "atheist", then go on to describe their textbook atheist beliefs. Though I end up doing it more than I'd like, it doesn't help to reprimand those people for what I see as a misuse of words, any more than you calling people "completely illogical" helps here. Arriving at different conclusions based on different definitions of terms is entirely logical. It's more constructive to find common ground in what people mean than to argue about definitions.

Can you articulate what you mean by Python 3's "accountant-like seriousness"? Is there more to it than print-as-a-function?

I code in both every day and just don't see what the fuss is about. To me, they're barely different dialects; more like different accents.