I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

Charity is about who benefits, not about who decides how to provide that benefit.

The idea of choosing a charity based on the donor’s will of how it will get spent describes almost all types of charity. If someone donates to any charity at all, they have made a choice on how to allocate their resources and they just take it on faith that that’s the people who need it the most.

Furthermore, any given dollar of his can only be spent once. The money he spent on himself enriches himself. It’s a considerable amount of money but it’s a tiny fraction of the money he controls. Any dollar he gives away can’t be spent to enrich himself.

Finally, Buffet has donated over $57 billion. How is he supposed to distribute that? Fly a plane around the country and dump cash out the window? Send a huge check to the IRS? Give it all to your favorite charity? The obvious answer is that he sets up an organization that will analyze existing charities for need and effectiveness and then distributes his assets accordingly.

That would be true if he were secretly using those charities to enrich himself but there’s no evidence of that at all.

There’s an odd trend of labeling everyone with even the slightest advantage a, “nepo baby”.

Nepotism is when you give friends or relatives special consideration for jobs or positions. As far as I know the only job Buffet ever had from a relative was working in his grandfather’s grocery store. The closets I could find for Elon Musk was that he started one of his companies with his brother.

Elon’s father was an engineer. That certainly put him in a comfortable position, particularly as a white engineer in South Africa but it definitely doesn’t get you recognition from old money families. Buffet went to public school.

They both had advantages growing up but if we expand nepotism to include people like that, it becomes a pretty meaningless term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network

It isn’t even the root of the indo-european languages and the Indo-European languages are just one of many language families around the world.

Source I am from Austria. :)

That’s inherent to the idea of theft. We judge thieves based on their thefts.
It’s irrelevant if they also happen to have a bunch of stuff they didn’t steal.

A few stolen artifacts corrupt the legitimacy of the entire exhibit.

I pulled this same thing in college. I was a CS major in the late 90’s and I took a class from the writing department on changing discourse in a new digital era.

The professor was really good at literary analysis and knew next to nothing about computers. He was spot on that big changes were afoot but he was as wrong as anyone else on what those changes were (spoiler: we all thought we would have an alternate universe in Cyberspace TM).

We had the option of creating a website as our final project and we realized that if we just put in every possible feature we’d get an A. Animated backgrounds? Moving fonts? Music? A goofy mouse pointer? No feature was too dumb. If it was something you couldn’t do on a piece of paper, we added it to our website.

We got our A. It was a dirty A but we took it.

If we’re just talking math, triangles can be defined in terms of 3-element subsets of all 3 (A)ngles and 3 (S)ides:
SSS - unique
SAS - unique
ASS - may be unique depending on the lengths of the sides
ASA - unique
SAA - unique
AAA - infinite solutions

Maybe someone cleverer than me can figure out how that maps on to love and gender.

It kinda looks like your arguing that voting doesn’t work.

Maybe.

Kessler Syndrome doesn’t impact the ability to produce or launch satellites.
It impacts the ability of satellites to function in orbit but it’s not a fixed limit.

Humans have a pretty good track record of developing technologies that break through insurmountable theoretical barriers.

strains credibility

Not sure why.
Security professionals are constantly complaining about insiders violating security policies for stupid reasons.
Security publications and declassified documents are full of breaches that took way too long to discover.

The Navy may have great security protocols but it’s full of humans that make mistakes. As they say, if you invent a foolproof plan, the universe will invent a better fool.

The original article said the Navy hadn’t provided all the details.

It looks like those 15+ people included at least one person who should have been monitoring for such things and a bunch of people who wanted to follow sports.

They didn’t give the password to most of the crew and they tried to keep the commanding officers in the dark. It sounds like everyone involved faced disciplinary action.

Those chiefs and senior chiefs who used, paid for, helped hide or knew about the system were given administrative nonjudicial punishment at commodore’s mast, according to the investigation.

It looks like that’s an administrative process. https://jagdefense.com/practice-areas/non-judicial-punishmentarticle-15/ Potential penalties are listed near the bottom.

The original article goes into more detail https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

It sounds like there were over 15 people in on the scheme. At some point people noticed that there was some wi-fi network called “STINKY” and rumors started circulating about it. It took a while for those rumors to reach senior command. Then they changed the name to make it look like a printer, which further delayed the investigation.

It doesn’t look like they actually scanned for the access point. I suspect that’s because it would be hard on a ship. All the metal would reflect signals and give you a ton of false readings.

They only eventually found it when a technician was installing an authorized system (Starshield seems to be the version of Starlink approved for military use) and they discovered the unauthorized Starlink equipment.

The Starlink receivers have gotten fairly small. It seems like that was pretty easy to hide among all the other electronics on the ship.

The original article says there were over 15 people involved https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2024/09/03/how-navy-chiefs-conspired-to-get-themselves-illegal-warship-wi-fi/

With that many people, it’s only a matter of time before someone spills the beans.

There are several steps they could have taken to make it much harder to discover. I expect more and more people will take those steps and we’ll never hear about it.

We’re likely to see a variant of Moore’s law when it comes to satellites. Launch costs will keep going down. Right now we have Starlink with a working satellite internet system and China with a nascent one. As the costs come down we’ll likely see more and more countries, companies, organizations and individuals will be able to deploy their own systems.

A government would need to negotiate with every provider to get them to block signals over their country. Jamming is always hard. You could theoretically jam all communications or communications on certain frequency bands but it’s not clear how you would selectively jam satellite internet.

There’s a much bigger story here.
Think about how hard it was to discover this access point. Even after it was reported and there was a known wi-fi network and the access point was known to be on a single ship, it took the Navy months to find it.

Starlink devices are cheap and it will be nearly impossible to detect them at scale. That means that anyone can get around censors. If the user turns off wi-fi, they’ll be nearly impossible to detect. If they leave wi-fi on in an area with a lot of wi-fi networks it will also be nearly impossible to detect. A random farmer could have Starlink in their hut. A dissident (of any nation) could hide the dish behind their toilet.

As competing networks are launched, users will be able to choose from the least restricted network for any given topic.

Yes and emergent behavior goes both ways. Organizations have many properties that the individuals they’re made up of don’t have and they lack many properties that individuals have. Organizations don’t have feelings. Even in the rare cases when the feelings of the people in those organizations are homogeneous, the organizations almost never manifest those feelings without significant alterations.

Are you seriously comparing Joe Rogan with NATO strategists?

There’s a bit more to it than that.

NATO is a strategic alliance lead by the US. NATO doesn’t have any feelings and isn’t pleased or displeased about anything. Instead it generally does whatever is the US believes is most strategically advantageous.

Those strategist are typically smart people who listen to all kinds of things. They’re definitely careful about what they say though and won’t go around promoting information they don’t want suppressed.

The effect is mostly from the total number of computer users increasing.

That is, the total number of “tech-savvy” users keeps increasing (https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science-110701) but the number of “non-tech-savvy” computer users has absolutely exploded (https://semiconalpha.substack.com/p/global-semiconductor-sales-increase) (that actually undercounts computers since every dollar in 2020 buys you much more computer power than a dollar in 1987)

You had to pass a nerd gauntlet just to get online in the 80’s or 90’s that meant that everyone you met online had also passed that gauntlet and was tech savvy. Even if you looked in the social usenet groups, a lot of non-technical users were just filtered out. So it looked like everyone was tech savvy but that’s because we were sampling a tiny, tech-savvy portion of the population.

Now anyone can get online. The tech savvy gen-zers are still there but their hidden in a sea of non-technical users. If you go to places like Github or Hackernews (or even more specifically technical fora), you’ll find plenty of enthusiastic young people poking at technology and trying to make it better. They no longer have to mess around with autoexec.bat and config.sys to get their mouse working but they can (and do) get a bunch of Jupyter notebooks and start playing around with Tensorflow.

A great modern example of this is 3-D printing. Modern 3-D printers suck. If you’re a big company you can get super expensive 3-D printers that take up giant rooms and need a team of experts to run. If you’re a home user you can get a cheap FDM printer but you best be prepared to tinker with it. The first thing most people do with their Ender is print mods for their Ender. Bambu Labs is a big improvement but they also attract a lot of users who at least could mod their printer https://forum.bambulab.com/c/bambu-lab-x1-series/user-mods/19

Some day we may have little boxes like in “Diamond Age”. Kids in the future may not even know about crap like bed adhesion and stringing and they’ll concentrate on whatever the new problems are revealed once the current ones are taken care of.