It's because the first vowel in 'about' is an unstressed schwa. It sounds unnatural in English to stress or lengthen a schwa.
(The only exception I can think of is 'evennn'. e.g. Bob and Sue are at a dinner party with friends. Bob tells everyone that he likes all vegetables. Sue knows he doesn't like broccoli, so she nudges Bob and says "evennn...?". This makes sense if 'even' in fact contains a syllabic nasal consonant rather than schwa: /'ivn=/.)
At work we have an interactive guided process/wizard that is currently implemented with an unwieldy low-code engine. I've been replacing this with a Node API that uses XState to encode process states. The API endpoints wait for XState to enter a 'ready' state (calling out to external services in the process), then pass meta properties of the current state back to the client.
One nice thing about this is that I can translate the existing low-code model into XState more or less directly. And the state machine can be rendered as a process flow diagram using viz tools in the Xstate ecosystem or some straightforward custom tooling.
I love that use-case. We have plenty of developers & companies using XState on the backend, and one of our main goals for XState v5 was to enable more backend use-cases, with custom & composable actor logic, deep persistence, inspection APIs, and actor-first statechart features for modeling more complex actor-actor interaction.
Ultimately, we'd love to be an open-source alternative to AWS Step Functions.
Matter does not exist. It is simply an abstraction to describe the relative progress of time. Every way we measure "matter" involves the progress of time: microscope, telescope, ruler, calipers, vibrations of photons hitting the eye.
When you say that the earth has rotated 15°, it simply means an hour has elapsed. When you move 60 miles while the earth rotates 15°, you have gone 60 mph.
The past is the way things were before they moved. Our memory is an image of the way things were arranged before. Matter is a creation of the mind.
EARTH HAS 4 CORNER
SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY
TIME CUBE
WITHIN SINGLE ROTATION.
4 CORNER DAYS PROVES 1
DAY 1 GOD IS TAUGHT EVIL.
IGNORANCE OF TIMECUBE4
SIMPLE MATH IS RETARDATION
AND EVIL EDUCATION DAMNATION.
CUBELESS AMERICANS DESERVE -
AND SHALL BE EXTERMINATED.
We now know that exoplanets and the conditions for life abound in the universe. Where the conditions for life abound, the null hypothesis ought to be that life abounds. In discussions of alien life and intelligence, we are often biased by earlier states of knowledge about the universe and our position in it. When we first started digging up dinosaur bones, we came up with fantastical notions of creatures to explain these artifacts that were mysterious to us. Notions that fit into our existing worldview, drawn from folk knowledge and cultural history. Once archeologists started studying the bones carefully, they gave us stories more fantastical than we could have ever imagined in the framework of our folk knowledge. I suspect the same will turn out to be true of UAPs.
For example, UAP stories are often ridiculed on the premise that intelligent alien life would not bother to come all this way just to hide out in the ocean. That's our folk knowledge of aliens: they like to travel, are eager to make contact with other life forms and are capable of doing so. But the elusive behaviour of UAPs is exactly what we would expect from an "unmanned" scientific probe. The home planet would be dozens or hundreds of light years away, so the craft would need to be completely autonomous in the absence of any communication system. Where does an autonomous probe go to look for signs of life? Oceans.
Very very big and very very old. Take the probability of an intelligent being evolving, multiply that by the probability of it being on a planet that had vast amounts of practically free energy stored from the last great extinction and figured out how to use it, multiply that by the probability of them not running out of that energy until they can develop new sources (without destroying each other in the process), then multiply that by the probability of them figuring out space travel, multiply that by the probability that they are within reach of us with that technology, multiply that by the probability that they care enough to come over here, and finally multiply that by the probability that this occurs within the 2000 years or so when we aren't too ignorant to appreciate it.
With vastness comes separation. The more vast it is the more likely there is life elsewhere, and the less likely its in travel rangeor would be able to identify life on earth.
The possible shapes of life are much bigger than the universe.
The chances of intelligent life existing outside Earth are lower than the chance of that same intelligent life speaking flawless Swedish. We might as well send some Europop records to space as signals to aliens.
"Intelligence" is a human invention created by humans to describe humanity. It only applies to humans and human-like beings.
Trees and crabs and birds appeared very recently in the timeline of life on Earth and will probably get extinct eons before shrimp or tardigrades know what happened.
Life is likely plentiful in the Universe. Earth-like life is almost certainly unique.
Intelligent life might happen on every 10,000th planet or it might only happen in every 10,000th universe.
As long as we know of only one occurrence of intelligent life we have no clue of the probability. And human intuition on what's right doesn't help us here.
We still have only one data point for life and one data point for intelligence.
It's absurd to claim intelligent life doesn't exist, as we know it does on Earth. And it's absurd to claim any level of probability for other intelligent life until we have one more data point.
> We still have only one data point for life and one data point for intelligence.
Don't we have many points for both? There are ~8.7 million species on the planet. What we only have one data point for is a planet that contains life and intelligence.
Regarding oceans, I want to add that the overwhelming majority of our land is in the northern hemisphere. Add the speed of light time lag, and anyone starting with a southern perspective will see a water-world with no technosignature whatsoever.
If one were to send a probe, one could wisely plan on purpose to land it in the ocean, deploy submersibles with flight technology and have them just go around and lay low.
They would hide, lay low and their aerodynamic performance might simply be their idea of a modest, basic platform. They would otherwise be wholly unprepared to make contact or perform in air to air combat.
After training my physics simulator on thousands of hours of video footage of trees moving in the wind, arborists tell me the trees are much more realistic (they are getting worried that I might put them out of business). But the physicists are still not satisfied. How many more videos do I need to generate the laws of motion?
ChatGPT-style AI should be called AC - Artificial Communication. It is trained on an extremely limited selection of utterances - most of our thinking is never written down. But no matter how many utterances are plugged in, the system will never be able to learn how to think. Its capabilities are stochastic and generalising, not systematic and generative.
An utterance is the expression or outcome of an internal thought process. A machine learning model is trained on the outcome, but not the process. Utterances look like thoughts to us; like pareidolia, we can't help but find thoughts in utterances. This is what makes ChatGPT so compelling.
People don't learn how to think either - it's a capability that grows from a genetic endowment. After the next AI winter, when we get over the spectacle of Artificial Communication, we may begin to examine our own generative capacities for thought. We'll know we're on the right track when AI is slow, uncooperative and childish, fails to thrive when exposed to nonsense training data, and requires very little of the right kind of training data to acquire its language.
Our internal thought process is an emergent property of a bunch of thoughtless chemical reactions. You're making a big assumption that LLM will never produce similar internal thought process as an emergent property.
My thoughts on the incident, organised as a series of nested propositions.
0. The Nord Stream pipeline incident was not an accident.
1. The pipeline was sabotaged by a state actor.
a. Only a state had the capability to carry it out undetected.
b. The sabotage was in violation of international law.
c. Evidence of the sabotage would cause a diplomatic scandal.
d? Either Russia or the United States sabotaged the pipeline.
e? The sabotage was authorised at the highest levels.
3. Russia did not sabotage the pipeline.
a? Russia had no motivation to destroy it.
b. Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off.
c. No state has presented evidence that Russia was involved in the sabotage.
d. The area is highly monitored by US and US-aligned countries.
4. The US sabotaged the pipeline.
a. The US had strategic and economic motivations to prevent the pipeline from operating.
b. The US govt made public statements prior to the sabotage that, had they been made by the Kremlin, would have uncontroversially implicated Russia in the eyes of the American public.
c. The US has the means to destroy it.
d? The US has the means to hide their involvement in the sabotage from European allies and the US public.
e. The Western public have no appetite for stories which portray Russia as a victim, or US/EU as villains. Hiding their involvement is therefore trivial, since media outlets have no motivation to investigate the truth.
f. Conversely, Russian state and media have no incentive to investigate, since the Russian audience takes it for granted that NATO was responsible.
Russia wanted to cause panic and meltdown on EUs energy markets, but to no avail. Russia tried to sabotage gas supply by fiddling with turbines for months, but was in the end out of options, and EU gas prices were still too far from panic and collapse. Blowing up underwater gas pipes the same day that a gas pipe from Norway started to work - too good to be coincidence.
> Russia controls the pipeline, and could choose to turn it off
No, Russia cannot just turn off the gas without a force majeure cause (and even declaring the war to Ukraine, which will never be an option, is not a force majeure enough). Otherwise there are contractual obligations to fulfill, and enormous penalties in case of breaching contract.
> enormous penalties in case of breaching contract.
penalties they could simply just ignore if they choose to. After all, they forced the sale in rubles, despite this not being part of the initial agreement of gas sales.
blowing it up seems just too much of shooting-self-in-the-foot for russia, unless russia can confidently lay the blame onto the west (particularly, the US) as the culprit.
One cannot ignore penalties if one is on the supply side. Gazprom pumps the gas, Germany says "thank you, we will not pay for it because you owe us penalties". All they can do is stop pumping.
And Russia immediately laid the blame onto the West, and never stopped. Maybe we are now looking at the part of that continuous effort.
Yea this pretty much sums it up. Although it seems clear to me that the nordic states were either in the loop or involved in the operation. As for the rest of NATO and the media, it took them a few days to assess the situation and shut up.
Thanks for standing by your principles on this one dang.
I was hoping there would be some discussion of the SONAR buoy remote detonation story - is it plausible (from a technical perspective)? Has it been done before?
* Blocking, stacking and pulling creep camps in DOTA. Unintended behaviours that became core game mechanics.
* Comments in the tag section of Tumblr posts, to avoid the comments appearing in a reblog ("Why do people use tags on tumblr instead of comments?" [1])
* The appropriation of switching MOSFETs such as the IRF510, designed for low frequencies, in homebrew amateur radio QRP power amplifiers. "In talking to International Rectifier, they were floored to find out QRPers were using them at 7MHz or higher." [2]
I remember early twitter thinking RT was some guys initials and was so impressed at how popular and cool he was. Everyone was tweeting him and he seemed to be everywhere
I found that a really interesting development, and they embraced it. Probably the best example of "go with where your users are going" I can think of.
And it's silly as well, because anyone with a few weeks of software development knowledge could probably hack a Twitter-like together. Not that at that scale, admittedly, but still, prototype-twitter was nothing fancy.
Distortion, overdrive, and the 808 are all examples off the top of my head of folk analog audio.
The former two tend to use the imperfection of diodes leaking to create varying degrees of fuzz (really clipping) based on placement. It fakes pushing an amp past it’s thresholds.
The latter abused chips that failed QA as the source of noise. They can’t make “real” ones anymore, since the chip is out of production. This one’s from my memory and the description may be flawed.
In both cases, abusing electronics’ imperfections is the goal.
Now with pedals, you get magical beliefs about “original” parts, but that’s another story.
So many guitar effects are based on accidents and replication/reduction of them. It’s both technically and historically fascinating to me. “This sucks, but sounds cool. How can I make a smaller box that does it?”
I believe another term related to these phenomena is Elephant Paths. Named after the trails that pedestrians leave behind when they choose a shorter path over grass in favor of the official paved paths.
Since we're talking about DOTA. Defense of the Ancients was a custom map game in Warcraft III. I don't know if this is still a thing, but custom map games on Starcraft and Warcraft III absolutely ruled. There was freeze tag, capture the flag, tower defense, a zombie defense like game based on Starship Troopers. Absolute golden age of gaming for me as a kid.
It goes further back, actually—IIRC there was a DoTA custom map on StarCraft: Brood Wars. It has no resemblance to the DoTA of today, or even the one on Warcraft, but the lineage of that game goes back further than a lot of people are aware of. :)
(The only exception I can think of is 'evennn'. e.g. Bob and Sue are at a dinner party with friends. Bob tells everyone that he likes all vegetables. Sue knows he doesn't like broccoli, so she nudges Bob and says "evennn...?". This makes sense if 'even' in fact contains a syllabic nasal consonant rather than schwa: /'ivn=/.)
That said, I don't think it's a big deal!