No matter how poorly one thinks of westerners and their leaders, it is clear that in general they can look beyond themselves and their immediate surroundings when optimising their impact.
The same cannot be said about Indians and other poor people from poor countries. Their optimisation lies solely on themselves or immediate family. This has consequences at every level and even at the political level.
It is just the case that the west and its leaders have had the luxury of choice and have only seen relative poverty but not absolute poverty for various reasons.
When your are poor and basic necessities are difficult to meet, its natural to optimize for self and not care about the big picture.
This is not correct. First, in crisis situations people tend to cooperate more, even though naive model predicts that people would act in self-interest. Second, there have been cases of countries that collectively decided not to be poor, and they stopped being poor once external pressure has been removed. Case in point is a huge part of Eastern Europe after the fall of communism.
“America’s sophistication is reflected in the depth of its financial markets. It is unusually good at creating tradeable claims on the profits and revenues that its economy generates. In a more primitive system, these spoils would mostly accrue to the state or tycoons; in America, they back a vast range of financial assets.”
That largely just seems like a pop density map of those people who are likely on the English internet. Or in other words: the shows the base rate of UFO sightings is relatively location independent
Much more people on the English internet, including a huge number of Indians. But the map does seem to correlate well with the population density of Anglo-Americans in particular. Which is telling me that this is not a map of "all UFO sightings" at all and is massively biased towards sightings by Western English-speaking people.
A world where individuals are incentivized to use some wasted space to place low maintenance automated trading batteries to make a little money on the side seems like it'd be an interesting solution to the renewable energy storage problem. Put a few units in otherwise useless locations like on roofs or in between highways and make some cash, sounds like a decent investment.
Would there be any expected problems in doing such distributed power storage on a very large scale around the grid that you'd have to account for? Perhaps issues with synchronization, power flow or the possibility of large scale drops in avaialble stored power at times?
Outside of the grid level, maintenance, security, and safety of batteries is important. Many Americans have a garage to securely store their $30k+ car, bike/etc - similar security may be necessary (literally or for the feels) for expensive batteries.
Since the brain is optimized for low energy environments, and we have now reached a high energy availability era, it makes you wonder if there's a way to get around the mental fatigue problem somehow. Fatigue is incredibly intellectually debilitating and if we could find a way to be fully on all of the time if we so wish, that should come with a great increase in quality of life.
Now available energy is almost certainly not the only reason we have fatigue, so maybe there's other barriers to overcome, but I'm shocked at how little attention this topic gets. In hackernews spirit, if someone could sell a real cure for mental fatigue, you'd change the world
At the risk of asking a dumb question, what really is mental fatigue and do all people experience it the same way?
On one hand, I understand -- and feel very directly -- physical fatigue, and the metabolic limitations if I try to say run slowly versus push hard up to my lactate threshold. I am currently training for a marathon, and know to train by following progressively heavier loads of long distance runs, interval training, stretches and rest periods to develop my speed and endurance.
But mental fatigue really just isn't a phenomenon that I personally relate to. I know some people say they can perhaps work 4-6 focused hours in a work day, and that's it. Whereas my brain seems to be able to work at essentially the same intensity for as long as I want it to, up to 18 hours a day, and then I need a bit of sleep to recover. So I don't quite comprehend mental fatigue, or what a cure for it would be. I don't even know how I would increase my ability to avoid mental fatigue other than minimising distractions (like HN!) and just keep thinking more for longer.
How do other people here experience mental fatigue (or not)?
Mental fatigue is something that can manifest in different ways.
To keep it short, for me, It is like I can think down a path, but slowly, it is like I have this plodding speed, if I try to think 'quicker' (or more reactive/agile) it feels like a lot of effort, like I have to focus and push myself. The more effort I apply the more energy I use. The more energy I use the longer this state lasts for. The longer this state lasts for the more chance I develop physical issues. When I am in this state, I can't mentally fit pieces together. It is like I am wearing oven mits and trying to build lego. It just doesn't fit together. oh and I get really clumsy, my movement becomes really uncoordinated.
So it is like I have a smaller pool of energy, and I can spend it slowly over a longer period. Or faster over a shorter period. When I go over my limits, then see above.
The only cure, is rest, and that is usually about 3 days of not pushing myself mentally too hard, to get back to a reasonable baseline. It is improving, if we had had this conversation three years ago...
I have seen this in other devs, a friend of mine has MS and she needs to meter her energy levels like this. My neighbour came out of hospital after a serious illness and she has some of these symptoms. It is more common than you would think.
For me the mental fatigue is mostly related to context switching, being disturbed (slacks, meetings etc but also side quests to the original problem), and working on a fuzzy problem.
Working a few hours in such environment is very fatiguing.
On the other hand, when I work on a single thing, no disturbance, clear problem definition, having all necessary skills to do the thing, I can work 10h and it's not fatiguing.
It depends on the kind of work. If it's routine stuff, past seven hours or so, I can keep going and not feel tired, but I increasingly don't want to, and the feeling that I'd rather be doing something else becomes very distracting. If the work is technical and intellectually rewarding, I might feel inspired to continue, but I start making mistakes and past a certain point, it becomes counterproductive. If the work requires conceptual or creative insights, my brain stops delivering them for free and my backup methods for squeezing them out start failing too. If I'm speaking or writing, I lose the thread and my words lose their punch and personality.
My occasional bouts of insomnia bring a different kind of all-encompassing fatigue. I become overemotional. At my most sleep-deprived, I struggle to operate a kettle. Things were different when I was younger. Writing up my PhD, I essentially slept every other night for months, yet stayed sharp, productive.
> Whereas my brain seems to be able to work at essentially the same intensity for as long as I want it to, up to 18 hours a day, and then I need a bit of sleep to recover.
Potential variable explaining this - what's your age? I could do this too in teens/twenties.
> How do other people here experience mental fatigue (or not)?
Just normal tiredness / distraction. Two days of actual full-on active pairing on something tricky and I just want to go to sleep after work.
Perhaps fatigue is not limited by energy but by the byproducts of energy usage to do work. It becomes much more complex to tackle if that's the case, instead of finding ways to allow the brain to use more energy when available we would have to mess around with the cleanup processes which are much less well understood.
I don't think we will have a way to "cure" mental fatigue until we more completely understand both the mechanisms behind thinking, as well as resting, and at the moment we barely scratched the surface of them.
One theory about the needfulness of sleep is that the brain uses the period to literally pump toxins out, on a very slow rhythm - minutes of contraction "squeezing" the byproducts out of the sealed environs of the brain to the general body system, where they can be filtered and removed.
>if we could find a way to be fully on all of the time if we so wish, that should come with a great increase in quality of life
In fact what would happen is that it would become the new normal and everyone would be expected to pop the "pep pills" and work 20 hour days. Source: the military.
Perhaps the real increase in quality of life is not feeling the pressure to be "on all the time"?
My layman observation from tons of pop sci consumption is that the rate of metabolism seems to correlate greatly with life expectancy. Running at 100% all the time would likely wear the system out much sooner, e.g. due to higher oxidation and increased cancer risk.
Even if you are correct, the article discusses more efficient thinking as a goal.
If you have to floor the gas to make it out of your driveway, versus owning a well-tuned highly efficient modern car, those are two very different sorts of "metabolism".
Actual answer: He crosses the river and takes all of the animals and the cabbage with him in one go. why not?
Alternative Answer: He just crosses the river. Why would he care who eats what?
Another Alternative Answer: He actually can't cross the river since he doesn't have a boat and neither the cabbage nor the animals serve as appropriate floatation aids
Yup, for your first one, no LLM has ever realized that I don't actually specify that he can only take one thing at a time. I think that's natural that it would assume that (as would most humans) because it would be so heavily primed to fill that in from every other version of the puzzle it's seen.
I will trust LLMs the day they suggest making a raft out of the lion's skin and propel it across the river by eating the cabbage and farting away. Goats are cool, keep the goat.
If you spend some time working on Voynich yourself you'll find that it's actually fairly doable to come up with some translation where you can find a few words that seem to agree with each other. And when you allow yourself some permissions like unorthodox spellings or characters that can mean different things in different places, then it's not so hard to even be able to 'translate' a few seemingly reasonable sentences. This gives a lot of hope to the translator and any who follow them
So far none of these ideas have been shown to be applicable to the full text though. What you would expect with a real translation is that the further you get with your translation, the easier it becomes to translate more. But with the attempts so far is that we keep seeing that it becomes more and more difficult to pretend that other pages are just as translatable using the same scheme you came up initially. It eventually just dies a quiet death
I don't think that's likely possible. How would you determine the score? Where would you get your corpus of medieval words? How would you deal with the insane computational complexity?
Pecularities in Voynich also suggest that one to one word mappings are very unlikely to result in well described languages. For instance there's cases of repeated word sequences you don't really see in regular text. There's a lack of extremely common words that you would expect would be neccessary for a word based structured grammar, there's signs that there's at least two 'languages', character distributions within words don't match any known language, etc.
If there still is a real unencoded language in here, it's likely to be entirely different from any known language.
What do the jamming locations within Russia correspond to? You would think these are important places that require drone protection, but I could not quickly discover what is so important in these places.
For instance, the bright spot to the north west of Moscow seems to fall somewhere in or close to Zavidovo National Park. Is there something important there? There's nearby air bases Migalovo and Klin, but both seem too far from the center.
GPS jam uses data from aircraft ads-b GPS accuracy data reported, so they should have global air traffic route coverage. Would be interesting to fuse that data with this data (sensor fusion).
I am quite skeptical at least with the low interference. My entire country, NZ, the whole of Europe, India, USA and most of inhabited Australia and Canada are reported having low Interference. Is this likely to be true?
Yes, because jamming GNSS in those countries incurs penalties from RF regulators (broadly speaking). Consider the power output required in order to impact gps accuracy at airliner cruising altitude (~9-10km above ground level). Your RF emissions will not go unnoticed by those responsible for ensuring RF hygiene within their jurisdiction.
Russians will place out jammers close to anything of importance. For example, in the Kola peninsula - which is close / bordering both Norway and Finland, they're jamming and spoofing. To such a degree that it affects civil air traffic in the area.
But why? Because they have a bunch of major strategic airfields there.
In (and close) to Ukraine it could be anything. Airfields, base, ammo storage, radio towers, etc.
Before 2022 they'd mostly conduct jamming operations as part of their military exercises, but after they've started jamming and spoofing much more - as a security measure against drone operations. Ukrainian drone operations have taken place as long north as Murmansk, which is roughly 90 miles / 145 km from the closest Norwegian airport (Kirkenes).
EDIT: 5 days ago they shot down Ukrainian drones there
Both military and civil GPS signals are L-band. Any jamming that runs across the L-band will hit both of them. And since the frequencies are publicly available (and it is possible to confirm that they are correct with your own detecting equipment) it is not any harder to jam the purely military frequency versus the civil and military frequency. The only thing is having more frequencies to jam should mean less power on any given frequency for a given amount of power, especially since you would probably want to jam BeiDou and Galileo signals as well (all also on the L-band). I mean, since Ukraine and Russia can buy things on the open market, they could buy BeiDou receivers just like GPS, so I would expect them to target all of those frequencies.
Block III GPS satellites added a new feature, designed to help the military signals defeat jamming. They added a "spot beam" - a high gain directional antenna capable of covering an area about 200km wide with 20db extra power, to try and burn through jamming. This spot beam is only used for military signals, and it requires extra processing on the receiver to use (since the satellite still has the earth-wide antenna broadcasting the military signals, a military receiver inside the spot-beam area would see two different signals from the same satellite, absent jamming).
During the Biden administration, at least, USAF ISR assets spent a lot of time running race-tracks just at the edge of Ukrainian airspace, monitoring events in the country, and I would expect that would be something that would be a good use case for the spot beams, though I don't know about Ukraine ever getting any of those receivers, and I would not expect coordination with the USSF on pointing the high gain antenna to support UAF operations even under Biden, but all of that is my speculation, I haven't seen anything on where these high gains are pointing.
They shut down the western steel work radar because of power cost increases after Chernobyl blew, combined with the improved value provided by surveillance satellites.
