Difficult to imagine why it would be declined. Did they perhaps insist on unreasonable conditions for doing so, such as fully indemnifying them in the matter? (Just wild speculation on my part since for whatever reason neither party seems interested in providing a full, clear, objective telling of events.)
The apt comparison would be wage theft. It's one thing to advertise a job at a particular hourly rate, entirely another to breach the contract and lose public trust for a paltry gain. If you're going to commit what people will interpret as theft at least make sure it's worth your while.
Amusingly the nature paper is also an incredibly dense wall of hype terms but actually appears to have substance. It's like a weird alternate reality where a scam artist attempting to fleece gullible investors took things too far and performed rigorous science.
I'm maybe 10% of the way in but I find I'm increasingly skeptical. If the basic building block dates back to the 1970s haven't other people tried this by now? If not, isn't the first order of business to throw together a prototype that solves MINST or one of the many other small datasets floating around out there as a proof of concept?
So unfortunately I'm inclined to assume this is empty conjecture shat out by an LLM. Because who would write something up in this much detail rather than typing `import numpy as ...` and going to town?
I'll also note that the document has all the usual crank signs. Lots of grand visions, hypotheses, and expounding at an overly high level on how various things work with hardly anything concrete.
I didn't used to but I do now that the searches go straight to an LLM. I almost always find the model output to be much more useful than the list of search results.
I don't. I was recently doing some searching for information I thought AI would be good for: fuzzy natural language search with some conditions. And it was, but ...
Gemini at least is not great at citing and picking sources. Or providing multiple sources for the same thing.
It tends to stop at threes. So if you want more, you have to prompt it uselessly, like: "any more?"
The idea isn't that they manufacture it from scratch but rather that they contrive a convenient explanation for the physical reality that already exists. In that scenario the evidence isn't planted but rather misattributed.
A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.
Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you? There are some very empty places in this country. Not quite on the level of Canada or Russia but still.
> A small plot of forested rural land without utility service doesn't cost much at all. Go car camping at your new private getaway for a few days. This isn't rocket science.
Once someone is under investigation for something like this, they will look at everything.
If the person suddenly bought a small plot of rural land with no utility service that’s going to raise red flags.
As a secondary problem, once the investigators start asking you about it you have to lie to them, which opens you to more charges.
> once the investigators start asking you about it you have to lie to them
You literally don't, that's what the fifth amendment is for
there's a large lack of creativity in these comments. pay for a deer lease, go hunting, don't bring phone, bury gold somewhere random in thousands of acres of land deep enough metal detectors won't find it, kill deer, go home. repeat 3x a year and it's both not suspicious at all but also basically impossible for others to find the gold at that point even if they suspect.
> A small plot of forested rural land without utility service...
True. OTOH, (1) it's both unusual and public record that you own it, (2) it's seriously unsecured, and (3) the locals both know the turf far better than you and may feel little respect for the undeveloped land of an "outsider".
Bigger picture - Mr. Rush's obsession with collecting very tangible wealth seems to have completely overridden his abilities for rational thought and long-term planning.
EDIT:
> Also if you drive out to a remote part of the US who is going to see you?
The post-Snowden Surveillance State. Between license plate readers, the cell modem in your car, your cell phone, and the difficulty of faking your usual activity patterns "back home" while driving to/from some remote location radio silent (which itself is probably a red flag)...yeah, NO.
They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it? We haven't (yet) made it to the level of flock cameras on gravel logging roads.
If there are deer or elk in the region, it is reasonable to believe that there will be "trail cameras" in the region. Many of them are camouflaged to look exactly like tree bark. In the event that you are considering burying treasure in that plot of land, it would behoove you to carefully inspect:
1. the fences to see where people have been cutting them or splicing them to allow for easier access.
2. All the trees within eyesight of your proposed Pirate Loot site for camo'd trail cameras. Install some of your own to ensure no one is a frequent flier in your turf. Ginseng poachers are a problem in wooded lands in the Eastern part of the US. With legal weed (in many states), growing pot on someone else's land has died down a lot (the owner of the land ends up in legal trouble).
In the end, it might be easier to dig up part of your basement to bury it there. And to obtain a large gun safe to appear to be where valuables are stored. If someone wonders why the cement floor has cut/repair marks, just shudder and mumble plumbing work on the main drain line due to tree roots.
> They would see you driving out into the sticks to go camping for a few days. That's entirely normal isn't it?
If someone has a history of taking a lot of solo camping trips it might not raise suspicions.
A common way criminals get caught is by suddenly doing something out of the ordinary. If the 50 year old guy who sits behind a desk and spends weekends at home with his family suddenly takes up a hobby of camping alone in one specific remote location and his trips coincide with each a acquisition of gold bars, the investigators monitoring him are going to be all over that.
I think everyone in this sub thread is imagining that he got all of the gold bars at once and could have made a single move to hide them all. He gathered these over many requests. Taking a solo camping trip every time you acquire something new is red flags all over the place.
All of the comments in this thread assume he was being investigated for his acquisition of comically large amounts of cash and commodities that he presumably left the building with in big bags with a dollar sign on them. They ignore the open secret that the CIA is cartoonishly out of control has been little more than a massive organised crime syndicate that happens to be on the government payroll for 20 years.
In all likelihood, his taking more than forty million dollars wasn't the suspicious behaviour that set him to being investigated. It's right there in the charge sheet. He was being investigated because payroll noticed he was fraudulently claiming leave that he wasn't entitled to. There's no routine oversight on who they're bribing with actual gold. There's still routine oversight on their payroll and HR practices. That led to them actually checking his resume properly, and when that was shown to be bullshit, only then did they actually look at what this guy was doing.
As horrifying as that image first appears, it turns out that's actually located adjacent to a road between two subdivisions in Mission Viejo CA. The picture conveniently had all of that cropped out though. It would appear that someone rotated the camera so it no longer faces the road.
An often repeated talking point that's broadly false without further context. Mechanical output on its own can't be copyrighted, that hasn't changed. However it can be if sufficient (as determined by the courts) human creativity went into causing it to be output.
Approximately 3 times during the course of your life assuming you receive them when you're born and live for 100 years. They're roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof.
How long would you say a properly installed panel from 2000 made it in practice? How long would the modern equivalent installed in 2025 be expected to make it? And how many replacement events does each of those make for over the course of your life?
Do you contest my earlier claim that solar is roughly equivalent to wood siding or an asphalt shingle roof?
Using 30 years as a lifetime for solar panels is risky as there are no solar panels running for 30 years, not even close. Never mind the lifetime of the power wall battery and the inverters.
I bought a 40 year "premium" asphalt roof. It barely made it to 20. A regular asphalt roof, perhaps 10 years. Now I have a metal roof.
All the results I've seen indicate that solar panels will keep producing electricity long after those 30 years, just at a reduced rate (but seemingly still >50%).
I'm not sure what kind of answer you expect here. Your initial objection further up was:
> By the time the "free" electricity has paid for the installation, you'll need to replace it.
Since you won't need to replace it, I'd say that this whole thing couldn't work out better: the panels are literally just generating electricity for free! And that's not even taking into account that 30yo panels generate more than "only half the power" (the study I linked measured ~80%).
Imagine someone offered to give you their 30 year old panels and install them on your property for free. Unless every eligible surface is already taken up by more efficient solar panels, who would say no?
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