> Automatic Digital Calculators follows the Booths' groundbreaking 1947 work, Coding for A.R.C., which proposed an assembly code which could be converted into an executable machine code by an "assembler" utility programme. Between 1947 and 1953 they built three machines utilizing this language: the Automatic Relay Calculator, Simple Electronic Computer, and All-purpose Electric (X) Computer.
Ironically, the same is true of Karl Marx! His father converted to Lutheranism and Karl was baptized as such.
As a young man he wrote a paper on the topical question of the Jews in Prussia[0], regarded in the modern day as antisemitic, though probably tame for the era.
The current system of government in the US under Trump is an instance of fascism
but rather
Trump and his movement have strongly fascist characteristics
The fact that Trump is limited in his executive power (for now) means that the system is robust and has checks and balances. It does not make Trump himself is less of a fascist.
Trump plainly believes that the entirety of government (domestic and foreign), education, industry and media should all support the executive power as he wields it. Not the structure of law in place, nor the cultural norms. Not even the predecessor that wielded less power is spared, despite hypocritical acts. There's nothing more transparently fascist than this administration.
The primary bulwark has been the socialization of the populace to oppose this behavior. The courts are viewed as a shelter, as feckless as they have been over the last 6 months. When moves are made over the next few years, that are more desperate and heavy handed, I would hope for conciliation.
There may be a nutritional reason, but my very personal and subjective reason is that peanuts don't taste that good compared to the other nuts.
And I don't think I am the only one. Generally, when I put a bowl of cashews and a bowl of peanuts on the table as a snack for guests, the bowl of cashews empties first, most people only eat the peanuts when there are no more cashews.
Peanuts are not bad, and they are cheap, but I'd rather have the other nuts.
A relative runs trail ultras, but I'm just guessing here based on our conversations. About food in general, you learn what agrees with you and what doesn't, and this information is also shared informally. Something might be gassy or tie your stomach in knots. Also, interestingly, the ultra-runners tend to favor "real food" rather than packaged jells and liquids.
Lael Wilcox used to drink half and half (easily found at convenience stores, high calorie, high palatability, fast). I tried this trick and found that it made me fart more than I found acceptable.
Lael has since stopped doing the milk thing since apparently it aggravates her asthma.
I like food that softens quickly in the mouth. Lil debbie oatmeal cream pies, brownie bites. Absolutely no sour candy or spiced nuts ever. Real Food(TM) is nice but I save it for when I'm at a resupply. Other athletes vary.
One thing I love about the ultra bike world specifically is how unique everyone's systems are. In other cycle disciplines the gear and methods converge tightly, but in umtb it's all over the place.
Generally, ultra food preferences are really personal. The broad facts are: (1) you need a certain level of calories to keep going and it's more than you'd think (though see below) (2) running long distances is hard on your digestive system. The consequence is that it's a challenge to consume enough calories without causing enough gastric disruption that you then can't consume enough.
Within those broad parameters, you see many different strategies, with some ultrarunners preferring "real food", and others preferring engineered food (gels, sports drinks, etc.) Famously, Courtney Dauwalter is a fan of actual candy. Aid stations at a typical race will often have both of these, and at a longer race you'll often see cooked hot food like quesadillas, bacon, pancakes, etc., especially during the overnight sections where it can get quite cold. In general, people try to experiment and find what works for them, which can change as the race goes on.
Contra the OP, there's not much evidence that you need fat intake in an ultra for energetic reasons. Even someone with quite low body fat is carrying plenty of calories in fat to do an ultra. However, some people find that taking in fat helps keep their stomach in line, especially after hours of consuming mostly simple carbohydrates.
There's a huge amount of food engineering work on trying to design nutrition that doesn't cause gastric distress. For example, Maurten pioneered a sports drink and gels that use hydrogel to encapsulate the carbohydrate, which is supposed to reduce distress. In the past few years there has been a lot of interest in the elite ranks in "super high carbohydrate" fueling. The conventional wisdom was that most people couldn't process more than about 75g (300 calories) of carbohydrate an hour, but recently runners like David Roche have been pushing this to 90g or 100g with success, and you see products designed to let you do this easily.
One thing that the OP doesn't really covers is weight. In a typical ultra, you're never going that long between aid stations, so you can pick up food there. Even if you don't like the nutrition the race is providing you can often give them a "drop bag" containing your preferred products which will be delivered to an aid station where you can pick it up. However on an adventure run, you may well have to carry all of your nutrition all the way. The author of the OP suggests going to stores, but this doesn't really work in the backcountry. I've done 12+ hr runs in the Sierra [0] and the Grand Canyon where you just had to carry everything the whole way, and suddenly you become really conscious of the water content of your gels, which can easily be 50% water by mass.
> The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution and is allowed to survive until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.
I'm curious to know whether he'd still agree with that in the age of "fake news".
The thing is, we don't have a long enough time frame. People are generally sane, on average, but only when looked at on longer time frames. They really want progress.
However, when you're in the middle of a revolution you don't really want to be there.
Basically, probably the next generation will be able to tell how bad things really were and if by their time things are truly better.
There’s been many examples recently. A very public one was that Covid was likely from a lab leak. There were many institutions and government figures that worked to oppress that, but now most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis.
"On average, respondents assigned a 77% probability to a zoonosis, 21% to the lab-leak scenario"
While most scientists generally favor the natural origin theory, an alternative theory with a 21% chance is not something that should be dismissed or suppressed.
Sure, but that's a very different take to "most experts agree it's a likely hypothesis". My impression is that scientists have consistently said it's possible, but quite unlikely, and unsupported by the evidence.
==most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis==
Oddly, I find the lab leak discussion proves the exact opposite point. No truth has been found in the matter, hence even your use of words like "most experts", "likely", and "hypothesis." If anything, the insistence that it is a lab leak is proof that evidence isn't needed for some people to make a grand conclusion.
Just look at the performative (not informative) website [0] the current administration created to spread this theory. It focuses on things like lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates, which obviously have nothing to do with the lab leak theory.
When you view this website, which side does do you think is trying to create a narrative? It even seems to oppress information that doesn't support their view. Seems like pure propaganda to me.
If you think USA is too politically charged, even under the Biden administration and intelligence communities, then you can look to other countries, scientists, and others that have also come to the same conclusion independently.
The amount of circumstantial evidence is overwhelming and there’s clearly motive for cover up in the governments and organizations since they were involved in funding the research in Wuhan which sent three lab workers to the hospital before the outbreak was acknowledged.
A concerted effort to cover it up in China, maybe. But in the west it's not covered up, it's just acknowledged by what it is - a hypothesis. We don't actually know, and might not ever know, if Covid originated in a lab. Insisted it definitely did is, in fact, propaganda.
The US has no motive to cover it up, especially since the likes of Trump have been calling it the "China Virus" since day 1. We just don't know, and we especially didn't know at the start of Covid. Then, it was truly a conspiracy theory, so we shouldn't be surprised it was treated as such.
What trips people up about Covid is that we were, and still are, discovering things about it. It was a novel disease. People take changes in guidelines and popular opinion to mean the elites are lying to us or that there's some grand conspiracy. But no - they're changing their minds because they were wrong before, because their understanding of the virus and how to handle it were constantly evolving. We were throwing shit at the wall and finding out in real time if it worked. That's not how we treat Polio or Measles because we already know how those work.
The is now public evidence that Fauci acknowledge it was likely early on in private emails and then set out to campaign against it. In front of Congress he is criticized of perjury for lying that his agency funded gain of function researching. Fauci tried to argue it was not quite gain of function but similar even though everyone knows it was. He public also show that he moved all related conversations to private emails, in violation of the records act, to avoid scrutiny. He convinced trump to reverse an Obama era rule on funding gain of function research.
In the end, Obama pardoned fauci but he did not let ecohealth alliance nor its leader off the hook. They can no longer receive funding. Its leader was also the one who wrote in the lancet that it was a natural event.
There’s lots more evidence in public record now. But clearly it was an embarrassment for all involved including the USA.
> Covid was likely from a lab leak...government...worked to oppress [sic] that
Controversial opinion scoped solely to this one topic: who gives a shit?
In general I agree that governments shouldn't be in the business of cover-ups or suppressing the truth (and in this case I don't think we'll ever know the "real" truth). But what's the difference here? Covid happened, however it happened, and we all had to deal with it.
Bringing it up now feels politicians trying to distract from more pressing problems that they don't have any answers for.
We're not studying traffic accidents with knowable failure rates and capped losses. This is a once-in-a-generation event. Do literally everything possible to prevent it because the stakes are so high.
We could for sure prevent a re-occurrence by cracking down on biology experiments and markets, going into permanent lockdown, stopping all international trade and transit, and so on. But very few people want that, so we compromise and prioritise.
Truth will still act. It will act in terms of competitive advantage, technology and the like. The manipulation of nature in any way is a source of power. It's just that such a source can sometimes be very small (e.g. there's a lot of math I won't use but I know about it). I suppose truth will act when relevant.
Currently it's acting in a way where you can read this message. There's a lot of stuff that needs to be true in order for you to read what I write (e.g. computers working, internet working, electricity flowing, etc.).
In my view, Mills (and Holmes) did not imagine someone winning in the market place of the ideas, because they found an infinite money glitch.
Your information goods you produce, are losing in the market place of ideas, not because of their quality, but because
1) You are blocked from selling them into a market of customers on the right.
2) they are too expensive compared to the alternatives available.
Take the intelligent design movement and how it was platformed by Fox News, as “schools should teach the controversy about evolution”. Implying that evolution isn’t “solid science”, and that ID was a potential answer for this issue.
Or take how fox platformed cranks and bad science on environmental issues, allowing R senators and congress people to point to it, and stop pro-environment actions and bills.
The posture of science at the time was to not engage with cranks, because “dont feed the trolls”.
Shocked by the outcomes, scientists went on Fox, hoping to engage with the audience and explain their points - only to be peppered with gotchas, rhetorical tricks and arguments that made for good TV.
Crucially, the underlying sentiment was to ridicule experts and destroy faith in the “liberal” institutions that were crushing conservative views and cultural ability.
——
These are examples to illustrate that the people who are playing the market place of ideas have financialized it. They are not in it for democracy, they are not in it, to engage in actual commerce of ideas
They are in it to break it. The job of members on the side of accuracy and science and evidence, is to understand it, realize the errors in their assumption, and to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity that inefficient behavior must create.
The cost of production of your facts and ideas, makes you more expensive and less useful, than the content being produced and subsidized on the right.
Be cheaper, be more useful, break the embargo, be financially viable, and/or institute regulation that prevents the creation of idea monopolists.
Either Participants that do not have to compete on the merits of their ideas, but on their ability to subsidize their media efforts, must be made uncompetitive in the market place of ideas.
OR, we must accept that there is an unavoidable fail state at the intersection of human neurology and Laissez faire information economies, and deal with that.
I think with the linguistic turn the idea of a "correct opinion" feels a bit archaic. Sure, if you can truly glean the semantics and connotations of the language, you can feel confident their view is coherent, that they cohere with your views, etc, perhaps you can call their opinion correct in that agreement tends to be seen as correctness in a posteriori terms. But in practice, establishing that degree of confidence requires a shared linguistic background and skepticism. Especially when you're dealing with floating signifiers, as Locke tended to do (and as many respectable philosophers have done).
Plus, Locke seems to have generally existed outside the concept of being paid for eyeballs. I am not sure much of his philosophy survived the rise of capitalism, which is perhaps why he still remains such a strong voice—we are simply aware on some level of what liberal idealism has lost, and we want it back.
Personally, I think "truth" is actually a pretty weak concept and I have none of the attachments that enlightenment thinkers had to it. Even in good faith confidence about how other folks view concepts that are very real to us can be hard to come by. Am I sure that there the continent of Africa is not a conspiracy theory? Yes, I'm pretty sure. Well, what about the characterization of XYZ conflict? Or about the social value of idk role models with raising children? That's where newsrooms lose me—the terms are just too vague, the connotations too difficult to hold editors accountable for, for "truth" to be a real concern.
Presumably an AI would formalise the proof in a system such as Lean, then you only need to trust the kernel of that proof system.
Rejecting a proof would be more complicated, because while for confirming a proof you only need to check that the main statement in the formalisation matches that of the conjecture, showing that a proof has been rejected requires knowledge of the proof itself (in general).
> requires knowledge of the proof itself (in general)
Why? If a proof is wrong it has to be locally invalid, i.e. draw some inference which is invalid according to rules of logic. Of course the antecedent could have been defined pages earlier, but in and of itself the error must be local, right?
Human-written proofs are not written in Lean to be checked easily and there'll be potentially many formalizations for written prose and only some of them will be what the author intended. You need to pick the right formalization before you can say that this proof has local errors.
If a human reviewer rejects a proof, what do they consider apart from local errors? Formal proofs have formal local errors (which can be checked mechanically), while informal proofs have informal local errors (which require humans and some degree of hermeneutics to check). Am I missing something?
It might be using some nonlocal context e.g. something similar was proved earlier in the proof and the reader is assumed to remember and/or generalize this or there's some assumptions that are stated only in the beginning. There's also probably a bit of skipped proofs of the kind "I'll be able to do this if pressed, but so will the reviewer".
Rejection: an incredibly complex proof can fall for (comparatively) simple reasons. If the AI scans the entire proof and says yep, there's the flaw, page 126 theorem X contradicts <well established known theorem> then a human can verify this without having to understand the whole proof.
This could lead to the proof being rejected entirely, or fixed and strengthened.
Confirmation: if the AI understands it well enough that we're even considering asking it to confirm the proof, then you can do all kinds of things. You can ask it to simplify the entire proof to make it easier for humans to verify. You can ask it questions about parts of the proof you don't understand. You can ask it if there's any interesting corollaries or applications in other fields. Maybe you can even ask it to rewrite the whole thing in LEAN (although, like the author, I know nothing about LEAN and have no idea if this would be useful).
How do you manage (if you have to) more research-heavy/blue-sky tasks that may take a few days or weeks without linear daily progress? Like, some days may just involve doing some sketches and playing around with code in order to internalise some data structure. Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
>Does that person just say "I'm continuing with task X" several days in a row?
Absolutely. If other devs or even a manager or project lead or someone feel they've been doing the "same" task too long, they should be reaching out and checking in. "Hey, running into any problems? How are you doing?"
Absolutely, you can be more specific about the specific aspect if you want, but it's mainly a forcing tool for focus and not an accountability tool. Although everyone thinks it's accountability
> Automatic Digital Calculators follows the Booths' groundbreaking 1947 work, Coding for A.R.C., which proposed an assembly code which could be converted into an executable machine code by an "assembler" utility programme. Between 1947 and 1953 they built three machines utilizing this language: the Automatic Relay Calculator, Simple Electronic Computer, and All-purpose Electric (X) Computer.
https://www.peterharrington.co.uk/automatic-digital-calculat...