OK, but isn’t the key take-away from the Challenger disaster all about the consequence of organizational dysfunction and fear of speaking up?
It wasn’t really a “design flaw” or “weak link” as much as it was management disregarding the warnings of engineering staff. The cold temperature limitation was known in advance by the Morton Thiokol engineers but their management refused to relay the warnings of engineering to NASA and NASA was under pressure to fly. IMHO this was a failure of multiple, mostly organizational, systems rather than “one weak link”.
Likely yes, because NASA and other agencies were able to portray the incident as an O-ring failure. It was in fact just that management was indifferent to the risk to the astronauts on board. The only individual who accurately reported on the disaster was Feynman.
> ...it’s a tool for him and his cronies to make dodgy money?
It's a vehicle to sell "access". The greed is only half of it.
The worst part is that they're selling access to foreign interests who pay them off. These people can't exactly show up with bags of gold to bribe King Sh*t Gibbon (yet), crypto is the next best thing.
It is ironic that the essay comes from UPenn in Philadelphia.
Many of you may find it shocking or unbelievable, but literacy is slipping in many parts of the US (like Philadelphia). The number of functionally illiterate people is increasing, schools are failing to educate students for a constellation of reasons.
The reality is that we instead suffer from a "tyranny" of illiteracy. I think those folks in their ivory towers, like upenn, should help to address that before starting the pearl-clutching about what has been lost because of widespread literacy.
Basically, people in Philadelphia are not allowed to write about topics that interest them, in this case literacy, oral tradition and history unless they all peraonally become elementary school teachers?
No talking about Homer or territorial expansion of 1880 for them anymore.
They mention a "quantum noise limit", that must be the ultimate precision that is physically possible, right?
What is this ultimate precision? I imagine that at some point, even the most modest relative motion at ordinary velocities would introduce measurable time dilation at fine enough clock precision.
Yes, there is a limit called "quantum projection noise" that determines how much frequency stability one can achieve with a single-atom clock [1]. With N independent atoms, this limit gets smaller by 1/sqrt(N), but with N entangled atoms one can achieve a 1/N scaling. This is the ultimate limit (Heisenberg limit).
Honestly, even TrueNAS is way more in depth than 99% of users in the wider world want. They want Dropbox at most, and very possibly they don't even want that much involvement. They want backups to just happen without having to put any thought in.
There are other motivations besides money for cranks.
In the case of Weinstein, I think his motivation has been getting attention and grievances he has with other people and institutions. I think it's OK to recognize grifting for attention as grifting. Having been a longtime employee of Peter Theil in some finance job, I expect he has f-u money by now and can thus attempt whatever he desires.
I don't know what the end-game is, but on the Decoding the Guru's podcast, the thinking has been that he is keen to be appointed to some important government role. That would be, of course, ridiculous for such an obscurantist to get an important public job, but that's ENTIRELY possible with this administration and the support of Theil.
The motivation of getting attention about the problems he believes exists in institutions (eg lack of heterodox thinking) doesn't seem like a grift to me (how broad does that definition get to be before it's just "they're doing stuff I don't like"). It seems more like he wants heterodox thinking to be able to flourish within the academics and is fighting for that, nothing grift-y about that.
> obscurantist
Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading, I never get the people who make this critique (other than try harder to decipher it, he's just using a lot of extra words/high vocabulary to be very clear about what he's saying in a compact way in order to not be misinterpreted).
>Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading
Have you listened to the Piers Morgan interview with Weinstein and Sean Carroll? In it, Weinstein appears to be using as many obscure terms as possible, in an attempt to appear clever.
I have, and that's definitely not my impression. Again to my ears that's just his natural way of expressing himself in a way that tries to express detailed ideas in a compact way. Nothing he says I find that difficult to understand with some effort (other than the hard physics). Personally I don't believe at all he's purposefully obfuscating what he's saying.
> Nothing he says sounds obscure or hard to decipher in my reading,
My dude, the guy shows up on Joe Rogan and Lex (multiple times) and talks a fire-hose of jargon to a general public audience. Indecipherable even to physicists. And what do you mean "compact"? The Rogan/Lex interviews are like 2-3 hours in length.
THAT ALONE is a clear signal he is some kind of fraud.
Capable scientists who insert themselves into public discourse are able to discuss their work at any level of detail, without jargon, and actually explain what they getting at. EW uses "Gish Gallop" tactics, I guess, to make himself seem smart. Aside from that he goes on bizarre detours where he mixes in his "geometric unity" theory with grievances about higher-ed, side-bars about Jeffery Epstein, his insane brother, and "DISC" (an acronym he coined and uses like it's now common knowledge).
Again I disagree. I've listened to many many of his interviews and it never comes across as indecipherable. If one person can understand it with some effort but some people find him hard to follow perhaps it's not that he's purposefully being hard to understand but that the audience not following isn't putting in enough effort or just giving up and calling him 'jargon filled' when there's actually a real clear understanding to be had behind what he's saying, to put it bluntly and at a risk of an angry response.
... and in the cases where one does manage to put in the effort to understand what EW is actually saying, the ROI has been trite and uninteresting and could have been said with simpler words and gotten to the point in far fewer words.
Example: See the conclusion of Nguyen's teardown response paper to "Economics as Gauge Theory": https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03460
Basically... 1) Tautology, 2) Inconclusive, 3) Not usable
Yeah, that would be nice, but it is SO RARE, I've not even heard of that being possible, let alone how to get at the metadata with godforsaken readers like Acrobat. I mean, I've used pdf's since literally the beginning. Never knew that was a feature.
I think this is all the consequence of the failure of XML and it's promise of its related formatting and transformation tooling. The 90's vision was beautiful: semantic documents with separate presentation and transformation tools/languages, all machine readable, versioned, importable, extensible. But no. Here we are in the year 2025. And what do we got? pdf, html, markdown, json, yaml, and csv.
There are solid reasons why XML failed, but the reasons were human and organizational, and NOT because of the well-thought-out tech.
I am sure there exist people who live and breath media/codecs and they're reasonably fluent at getting ffmpeg to do what they want because of a tremendous amount of practice.
But for the vast majority of folks who only occasionally use ffmpeg to do something, the complexity of it is so outrageous it feels like a parody. Literally (I mean literally) THOUSANDS of options/flags. It's just too much for a human to navigate. Of course we're going to "cheat" or just google up something similar to what we want. If an LLM can handle it, even better.
I sympathise with the overwhelming sensation of the ffmpeg command line arguments.
But the more you familiarize yourself with a/v streaming and transcoding, you soon realize why you need such amount of control.
I mean, with ffmpeg I can easily combine 3 audio clips, 5 subtitles and a separate video, cut away first 25 seconds and the last 5 minutes of the resulting clip, resize it and change the aspect ratio, reduce audio to mono and specify output codecs for audio and video.
And this is still a pretty simple example of what one could want to do.
Ffmpeg has countless other amazing features, demanding more arguments.
How about for example camera stabilization? (-vf deshake)
How would one even start to explain all of this to an app without thousands of command line arguments?
The whole subject is incredibly complex and ffmpeg is by far the most amazing project in this space.
Without ffmpeg, there would be no youtube in 2005, no plex at all and really the whole of modern social web would probably have happened later if not Fabrice was such a fantastic guy :-)
And still I cannot create .ts files (with mp4 inside) using FFmpeg that will be accepted by my dad's TV media player. I have to put them through Avidemux, because somehow it uses a better TS muxer. More compatible with the TV.
Varoufakis uses the word “techno-feudal” because it reflects the fundamental character of where things are headed. Moreover, even the author pointed out why the case is strong for the analogy.
I don’t think it’s fair to expect 100% consistency with “feudalism” to rightfully use the word “techno-feudalism”. But if one is compelled to point out the inconsistencies anyway, the ones the author pointed out are not particularly convincing.
The first three basically boil down to the idea that citizens are free to “opt-out” or find/create alternatives. Are they? I guess in theory, but in reality that’s a far more complicated problem.
Sure, in medieval days, kings could force their will and crush opposition without concern of law, morality, or anything other than who has more power. Today we have surveillance capitalism, and the comprehensive manipulation of truth and attention. Originally this was employed to merely sell toothpaste, but the same tools more lately can and have been used for far more sinister and greedy motivations.
If you don’t agree with that, fine, but but if you must quibble about “inconsistencies” with the usage of the word “techno-feudal”, then at least provide a better alternative word.
Moreover, the point of the analogy is to point out that the purported freedom from these restraints, such as the purported freedom to "opt-out", are in practical terms a mirage for an increasing proportion of the population.
Whether you agree with him or not, this should be no surprise from Varoufakis, given his familiarity with Marx, as it has been a central thesis of socialist thought from the beginning that de jure freedoms means nothing without the means to exercise them, and as such, the belief that the freedoms of a capitalist society are freedoms mediated by wealth or limited by lack of it, and by extension the belief that the working classes aren't substantially more free than serfs.
It wasn’t really a “design flaw” or “weak link” as much as it was management disregarding the warnings of engineering staff. The cold temperature limitation was known in advance by the Morton Thiokol engineers but their management refused to relay the warnings of engineering to NASA and NASA was under pressure to fly. IMHO this was a failure of multiple, mostly organizational, systems rather than “one weak link”.
Did the economists mis-name their own theory?
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