Mudguard

Yeah, even the so called reliable news sources can be wrong sometimes, and they can certainly have their biases. But at least they supposedly have an internal fact checking system in place, which is a big step up from posts on social media. To me, citing a Twitter post is essentially no different than citing a random Reddit post as an authority or factual source of information. Sure, it could be accurate, but it could also easily be complete bullshit, and I have no interest in trying to fact check a Twitter post or any other type of post on social media. It boggles my mind that so many people get their news from Twitter, Facebook, Ticktock, etc. Even the NYT and other major news sources cited a Twitter post from an alleged ex-government image analyst for his conclusions on the Israeli strike on Iran. I hate this practice, but I see it more and more often.

He cited a twitter post from some guy called AbuAliEnglish or something.

Saw something similar in the NYT. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/20/world/israel-iran-gaza-war-news#satellite-imagery-shows-that-a-precision-attack-damaged-an-air-defense-system-at-an-iranian-base That's good enough for me. I'd rather wait for reporting from a reputable news source rather than scouring Twitter for random tweets.

Not convinced. First, why should I believe a Twitter post from AbuAliEnglish? Never heard of the guy, and as a general rule, I don't take anything from Twitter as factual. There's way too much misinformation on Twitter. He also cites a Saudi blogger for this photo, but doesn't provide a link to the original source. The after photo is heavily photoshopped, with dramatically different level changes. Show us an image with similar color and light dark levels.

I saw a report that asserted this on ABC News, but none of the other major news networks that I looked at are reporting this. There should be satellite imagery of the destroyed radar base if this is true, so I remain skeptical. If we don't get satellite imagery in the next day or so, I would assume that the report is incorrect.

I made it onto a jury as a lawyer. The area of law I specialize in was different than the relevant law in the case, and that looks to be the case in the Trump trial as well. I don't think it's a problem to have lawyers on juries. As a juror, I'd just be there as a fact finder and to answer the questions set forth in the jury instructions, just like any of the other jurors.

The UK had been working on their own nuclear bomb technology, and then worked in conjunction with the US for a time during WW2, before they were cut off by the US. From start to finish it took the UK more than 10 years to develop a nuclear bomb. And they had some of the top nuclear physicists of the time working on the project. I don't think Canada and similar countries have access to any top secret nuclear bomb building technology. They have access to the same publicly available information that is available to everyone. Iran, for example, should have access to the same information that Canada has, excluding information the countries obtained through their own nuclear weapons research. If it was that easy to make nuclear weapons, Iran should have developed a bomb long ago.

No chance in hell in producing your first bomb without any actual testing. Computer simulations are only as good as the models used in the simulation, and with an untested design, your first model is going to be pretty garbage. As you test your designs and get data, you can improve your models. The reason why the USA can rely heavily on models nowadays is because we did extensive real world testing and accumulated tons of data that we can use to refine our models.

It's not a requirement to have a nuclear power plant to build a nuclear bomb, but I agree, it would take much longer than a year to build a nuclear bomb. I'm talking about a fission bomb, and not a dirty bomb. It's not a trivial engineering feat, and would require extensive testing that is hard to hide.

I’m extremely skeptical that the error rate is that low. Unless they share their validation methodology and allow an independent review of the data, I don’t buy it. It’s almost certainly a shit model trained with shit data, and now deployed in the field using more shit data.

Development of the characters is the weakest part of the books, and even though I think the show improves on this, it's still not great. It's a fair criticism. Where the series does its best work is in the world building and some of the storylines I thought were strong, particularly the main storyline of the second book which was set up at the end of first season of the Netflix show.

The books are really worth reading. I probably will listen to them again as audiobooks to refresh my memory. There's nothing comparable to them that I can think of, with how interactions with alien civs are depicted, weaponry, and what happens to humanity in the future. Completely different than the Star Trek / Star Wars type universes that dominate science fiction. The books are packed with so many interesting ideas that make up for relatively weak character development, which is one area that the show really improves on.

The decision to hire her was mind bogglingly bad. I question the judgment of all the NBC News leadership that thought this was a good idea. If I was an employee there, I would have zero confidence in those morons.

The only thing this appears to address is the amount of energy used by the industry, which is an odd concern to me at this time. This has zero chance or reason to be implemented as a regulation right now. It’s a solution to a nonexistent problem that only serves to handicap domestic AI development.

This doesn't seem workable in practice, unless the entire industry was centrally planned by the government. If the cap was placed at the industry level, and one company just decided to consume as much as it wanted, how would that affect other companies?

Yes, but I don't see how you would practically regulate the industry based on power consumption. It's not clear to me what the ultimate goal of the regulation is.

Do you have a link? What are they trying to accomplish by regulating the energy used? How do they propose to implement this regulation? This doesn't seem a practical solution.

Very sad to hear all this. It's a massive waste of engineering talent. Something needs to shake up the airline industry. It's gotten very stagnant for a very long time now. The way that government contracts are awarded, at least in the past with cost plus type contracts, just rewards waste. Reminds me of the space industry, which really hadn't moved significantly forward for decades until SpaceX came along. I know Musk is problematic for many reasons, but objectively, SpaceX has been a catalyst for the space industry. All these airline manufacturing companies need a real competitor that threatens to put them out of business to force industry change.

In the CNN article I linked above, there was this tidbit: So at the very least, Russia was aware that the US warned it's citizen's in Russia about a potential attack. Putin's speech several days ago didn't age well. Doubt that Russian media will point this out. I googled a bit to try and find confirmation of this speech, and one website that was linked was to a Russian news source from the day of the speech that confirmed the story. I'm wondering if those Russian articles will get scrubbed.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/22/europe/crocus-moscow-shooting/index.html Isis claiming responsibility for the Moscow attack. Don't know whether ISIS has a history of claiming credit for things they didn't do, but ISIS wasn't at the top of my list as potential suspects for this. ETA: https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-68642036?src_origin=BBCS_BBC BBC live report thread has some interesting details. I'm not familiar with Russia's problems with ISIS on its own soil, but this makes it seem more likely that ISIS really was responsible, even though in the past ISIS has claimed credit for attacks it didn't do.

I assume that the US shared their concerns and at least some of their evidence with Russia about the potential terrorist attack, especially if they were going to warn US citizens in Russia of this risk. There was a large terrorist attack a little while ago in Iran, I think, where the US claimed that they shared intel with Iran that a potential terrorist attack was imminent.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/22/media/ronna-mcdaniel-nbc/index.html This seems like a bad idea to me. What is NBC News going to do if she continues to behave as one of Trump's mouthpieces? Do they think that adding McDaniel is going to attract Fox News viewers to their channel? I think it's more likely that they are going to just alienate their own viewers.

Yeah, way too early to assert that it's a false flag operation. Unless I'm missing something, no one has been blamed yet for the attack, at least not in the live report thread that you linked.

I really liked the books, liked the Tencent adaptation, and so far, I've liked the first few episodes that I watched of the Netflix adaptation. The Tencent adaptation, which also covers just the first book, is more faithful to the books, but I'm OK with the changes in the Netflix adaptation. The first book is the most straightforward to adapt on screen. Very curious about how they will adapt the second two books. The final two books span a huge amount of time.