quantgenius

Stealth is somewhat overrated, especially 5th gen. Sure you get a lower radar cross-section which means you are less visible to X-band radar but near-peer adversaries or even non-peer technologically advanced adversaries don't rely only on X-band radar, to say nothing of distributed array radar where the transmitter and receiver are not in the same location. More than one networked war plane in the air are essentially distributed array radar. There are other bands which admittedly as not as good as X-band in terms of how much energy you need and how accurately you can locate things. But you can send a missile in the general direction using say S-band and have the missile turn on it's seeker once it's closer. Once the missile is close enough, a stealth plan can no longer hide. This is what the Russian S-400 and S-500 do for example.

Even when Serbia was bombed during the Clinton years, American stealth bombers escaped not due to stealth but because they used decoys towed by fiber optics which transmitted what the missile seeker expected to receive from the plane while also aggressively jamming the missile seeker so the missile hit the decoy not the plane. One stealth bomber was hit anyway.

Safran and other European manufacturers arguably produce decoys that are as good as anything US planes have, arguably better because they decided not to go all in on stealth and focus on other measures instead. Stealth is certainly better to have than not but stealth also means somewhat worse aerodynamics and much less serviceability. You need to apply stealth paint and cure it any time you work on the plane. The plane needs more work and is harder to work on because of the tradeoffs made to achieve stealth. So instead of 75%+ of the planes being available at any one time, you only have about 50% of the planes available at any one time and total operational costs are much higher.

Given these disadvantages, it's not completely clear how much of a benefit 5th gen stealth is in a near-peer conflict. If the US is fighting Iraq fine. Now, if you can actually achieve what defense manufacturers say they will achieve with 6th gen stealth, where you have much lower RCS to all bands of radar from all directions, that could be a game changer but we don't actually know yet. The F-35 still doesn't do everything it was supposed to be able to do when the program started, so I would take these claims with a large grain of salt. And stealth countermeasures will continue to evolve.

I don't know the situation at MIT in particular but overall creating some budgetary pressures for universities is probably a good thing. Every since it became near impossible to discharge student debt due to legislation in the Bush presidency that was designed to make student loans more easily available, the money spigot has been opened far too wide and this is largely funded by debt taken on by 18 year olds who aren't particularly good at making decisions. The result has been a massive amount or real-estate acquisition and a crazy growth in the administrative staff. I recently saw a Brown undergraduate talk about how they pay 90K a year because they have one administrative non-teaching staff for every two undergraduates. I went to the college directory of my own college and was amazed at the number of administrative staff relative to teaching staff. It was absolutely nothing like this in the late 90s. And the teaching itself is being eviscerated with adjunct professors and grad students being asked to do teaching and getting paid next to nothing. And you have universities complaining about how they don't have enough funding for research and they need MOOAAR. Like many government interventions, no matter how well intentioned, the Bush era legislation has led to much bigger problems existed then. It think it's a great that universities are being forced to tighten their belts and I hope this continues for at least a few years until some sanity prevails again in US higher education. Making student debt, particularly that taken on by 18 year olds who graduated with something like an English literature degree would do a lot to rectify the problems that have been created.

The idea that simply having a lot of parameters leads to overfitting was shown to not be the case over 30 years ago by Vapnik et al. He proved that a large number of parameters is fine so long as you regularize enough. This is why Support Vector Machines work and I believe has a lot to do with why deep NNs work.

The issue with Vapnik's work is that it's pretty dense and actually figuring out the Vapnik-Chervonekis (VC) dimension etc is pretty complicated, and one can develop pretty good intuition once you understand the stuff without having to actually calculate, so most people don't take the time to do the calculation. And frankly, a lot of the time, you don't need to.

There may be something I'm missing completely, but to me the fact that models continue to generalize with a huge number of parameters is not all that surprising given how much we regularize when we fit NNs. A lot of the surprise comes from the fact that people in mathematical statistics and people who do neural networks (computer scientists) don't talk to each other as much as they should.

Strongly recommend the book Statistical Learning Theory by Vapnik for more on this.

Nope. Abuse should never be accepted. The right solution for actual abuse of a policy like this as opposed to an error is to immediately fire the person conducting the abuse. The inability or unwillingness to make decisions like this fast is the root cause of a lot of nonsense that goes on at businesses.

If it's an error, you correct and accept errors as the cost of doing business.

> A good strategy would be to have them be a lead on a minor project that > requires technical chops and communication. Ensure there is a daily standup > and grind them on details and timelines. Get them some juniors as direct > reports to expose their lack of knowledge, then have meetings with these > junior devs about project performance.

Do not do this. You do not need a “strategy”. Just do it! Rip off the band-aid. Either tell them the truth or give no reason even if asked. Reverse the mistake asap and get moving on your company’s mission. You don’t need one second more of this. Nor does anyone else at your organization. Do it today! Do it dispassionately. Do it as nicely as possible. You are going to feel bad because you are a good empathetic human.

Some people will have a reaction. Some people will “have a reaction” to try to get more out of you. You are not responsible for either. You are responsible only for your own actions. Figure out what you should give them to be fair and add a little extra so you are sure it isn’t unfair.

Plan what you will say and do in advance and have someone you trust with you in the meeting. Stick to your plan. Even the best hiring processes succeed only 50% of the time (though this goes beyond just a bad hire). Firing, and firing quickly is just as important as hiring well.

Also remember that if an applicant tailors to a hiring process to this extent, that’s not just a failure of the process. It’s dishonesty. Even if the applicant were competent, you absolutely don’t want to entertain someone dishonest in your company.

Has anyone tried Mikrotik routers? The one I tried a while ago was fantastic.

If you enjoy writing and love writing with a Vanishing Point, this is a question that is very, very dangerous for your pocketbook. :-)

Kakunos are awesome. Really good nibs. Awesome value for money.

You do need to cap fountain pens because the inks are water based.

If you need to take quick notes and drying out is a problem because the pens are uncapped and capped a lot, get a Lamy 2000, vintage (not new) Parker 51 or a Pilot Vanishing Point. The first two have slip caps and hooded nibs so cap and uncap really quickly and don't dry out due to the hooded nib. The Vanishing Point also has a hooded nib but you click it like a ballpoint pen to expose and hide the nib. Also don't use quick drying inks.

If drying out is a problem because you don't write frequently enough, there are two solutions. Solution 1: Buy a Platinum (Preppy for low end, or 3776 higher end). It has a really good cap. Both will take a long time to dry out. Or even better, write more frequently.

It's extremely rare to get a nib that isn't tuned pretty much perfectly if you buy a brand new pen made by one of the Japanese big 3, Pilot, Platinum and Sailor from an actual fountain pen retailer (online or brick and mortar). I've never gotten a remotely bad nib from any of those nor have I heard of someone getting a remotely bad nib from one of them.

If you buy from eBay or used elsewhere or for that matter Amazon, you do sometimes get a bad nib because someone has tried to tune one of these nibs and botched it and then decided to try and sell the pen new.

The Pilot Metropolitans sold in Europe use standard international cartridges. The ones used in the US use proprietary Pilot cartridges.

I haven't had this experience with TWSBI. They used to have somewhat more finicky nibs before they switched to using Jowo nibs. I've found the nibs on TWSBI pens to generally be pretty well adjusted Jowo nibs. They aren't the same level of quality control as Japanese brands but are probably better than any European brand.

Plus they have a really good lifetime warranty. If your nib has issues, call them. They will probably send you a replacement.

While I love many Noodler's inks and have many bottles from him too, while this used to be the case, this hasn't been my experience recently. In my experience the inconsistency has if anything gotten worse recently. Worse, the bottle will sometimes contain ink that is different from the label.

I recently bought a bottle of Noodler's Navy to replace a bottle I actually emptied that was bought maybe 5-6 years ago. The ink inside the bottle was almost certainly Noodler's Aircorp Blue Black, which I also have.

In my experience, and based on anecdata from friends who also use fountain pens, Noodler's inconsistency and quality control issues have gotten MUCH worse in the past 2-3 years.

I haven't had any trouble with TWSBI's bought in the last 2-3 years. Besides they have a crazy good lifetime warranty. I've had a pen stepped on, emailed them and told them so and they shipped a replacement barrel to me for shipping cost. Ditto a replacement wrench that I lost.

Love my Pelikans. But the M800 and M1000 retail for more than double the most expensive pen on my list. They are awesome but not necessarily a better writing experience than the pens on the list.

Still, they mostly didn't make the list because while Pelikans are awesome, their nib quality control isn't what one would hope it was. In addition, you don't really know what you are getting in terms of nib size. I've bought Pelikan extra fines that make a wider line than Pelikan mediums.

If you know how to tune nibs or you budget and extra 50 dollars for a nibmeister to get it the way you like, or you buy from a retail store where you try the pen out first and know what to look for great. I suspect most here will buy online and won't necessarily know what makes for a problematic nib and how they want it to work.