Nope. I only learned to use computers as an adult, and only learned programming incidentally as a tool for other work.

The truth is that it’s actually much faster to learn as an adult, you just have more momentum if you start as a child.

Ada particularly the SPARK subset. It’s approach is quite different than most languages, focusing on minimising errors and correctness. It’s fairly difficult but I like to use it to teach people to actually understand the problem and how to solve it before they ever write the code.

This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.

This blog covers a lot of topics, but very superficially.

California HSR has been a zombie project for a while. Even before Musk was a factor, there were annual plans but nothing ever got done, year after year. It’s probably going to take intercity projects to become popular and economical for something as ambitious as long-range passenger rail to actually receive serious attention.

Splitting individual atoms isn’t that difficult, you just need a neutron supply and some material (paraffin wax works) to slow them down and it will eventually happen at least with uranium. Doing it reliably and efficiently is a much harder problem.

“From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly”

This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.

I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.

“So many papers are extremely hard to read because the formulas are obfuscated like that”

This isn’t really an issue though, of you don’t have enough foundational knowledge to understand what the formula means or how it could be conceivably derived, does knowing how it’s calculated matter?

Mathematicians are good at writing algorithms, but not at the development aspect, which is basically building for different systems, packaging software and documentation.

I would disagree on the performance part, the vast majority of software developers aren’t writing high performance software and the ones that are tend to be computational mathematicians or physicists.

“no experts”

I never said that, I said that you are cherry-picking the handful of related people who agree with you, most of whom are not experts in anything relevant.

Clearly there are going to be a handful of subject matter experts that believe claims with extraordinarily weak evidence (see Nobel disease), the game of science is not played by fishing for individuals with degrees that support your beliefs. It’s by looking at the evidence, engaging in a fair amount of epistemic and abductive reasoning and arriving at the most useful conclusion. In the case of people like you who don’t have the skillset to do so, you can defer to the consensus of relevant experts. (Eyewitnesses are not subject matter experts, and I certainly wouldn’t cite my vision as an instrument in a paper).

“Some scientists and even Harvard”

You realise you are talking to a physicist right? All your appeal to crackpots and generic “find more information” statements aren’t going to convince me unless you rigorously explain why you think the data is better explained by theories that you can’t formulate (nobody seems to be able to, because the theory is just “it’s beyond our understanding”, the most epistemically worthless statement ever) versus very well known sensory and psychological phenomenon.

“An overwhelming body of government documents”

Which you don’t understand.

“You’re a random internet stranger”

You’re a random internet stranger as well (actually neither of us are, both of us have public works that is easily findable, and let’s say mine are far more topically relevant). Why on earth are you supposed to treated credibly? Especially when you cite your expertise in QM to explain data, like every single crackpot.

“I am a skeptic after all”

How? If you were a skeptic you would have already been aware of my criticism that the data observed does not match any physical theories, AND that we have no reason to believe that these physical theories are wrong. You are confused by the fact that “diagnostics” merely shows that the software/equipment is working as designed not that it is interpreting the data correctly. (We also don’t know what “diagnostics” were performed, in actual physics we don’t say “we checked for errors” we give explicit descriptions of what errors we conjecture and how we accounted for to them, so saying “diagnostics were performed” is scientifically worthless).

I’ve already given several reasons to doubt the results: unreliability of eye witnesses, faulty interpretation of information, and failure to correspond with existing extremely well established theories. All of these are well-established facts and I gave an example of each one, some of which are so common they are open problems in remote sensing, and regularly exploited. The fact that you are so unfamiliar that you just deny them as being irrelevant, is entirely on you.

“Project Blue Book …”

Sure, there is something of interest in recording UAP, just like any other data. This does not produce any credible theories about them corresponding to the data. In fact essentially every report I’ve read can be summarised as “we can’t determine why we have this data”, that’s it.

“All of the experts”

You mean the people that agree with you and have decided are “all of the” experts?

So can you explain to me why “Q” is NOT the expert on internal politics, but the handful of organisations and witnesses are the experts even though you admit that their views aren’t mainstream in science and can’t refute any argument.

It’s quite hilarious that you complain about this brother, when you are engaging in the same faulty reasoning to defend a conspiracy theory that you want to believe.

On a similar note, you don’t seem to grant parapsychology the same level of credibility even though all the same arguments would lead to conclusions like telepathy actually being real.

Second-hand Dell Latitude 5285. Not sure if it’s a hardware failure issue from age, or if kernels actually had problems supporting it.

It’s probably unrelated, but your comment reminded me of this since it’s the only time I’ve encountered it.

The first sentence was sarcasm. How does a company mass produce something that makes no money?

Financially illiterate people seem to be under the impression that rare treatments with high markup are the fiscal bedrock of pharmaceuticals when the reality is that smaller profit but mass produced medicines comprise far greater total income.

Easy, get a physics degree. I already pointed out how the data was clearly incorrect. If UAP are really as credible as you claim (convincing military pilots and Congress critters) how come it doesn’t convince the actual subject matter experts? Physicists.

If this was even remotely plausible, you wouldn’t be having a handful of people looking into it, it would be a core focus of the field.

“I would not consider my article legitimate research”

Then why did you link it as an example? Nobody cares about what style of essay you like to write, this was clearly you trying to flex.

I write actual research papers and I wouldn’t be so arrogant as to cite my own work (which actually does meet standards of research) as an example; you must just be really proud of that BS in psychology.

“Know more than our greatest pilots and military personnel”

Because they built the sensors and study atmospheric physics? You realise pilots, are pilots, not aeronautical or electrical engineers? Why on earth is their opinion magically more credible? Especially when the claim is completely contradictory to very well established physics. I fact I even gave a reason why their information is overwhelmingly likely to be faulty, due to atmospheric heating.

Before anyone tries to engage in explaining complex physical phenomenon, they should try to have some knowledge about it. I would personally recommend reading a textbook on radar engineering and another in atmospheric physics which pretty much explains nearly every single illusion and sensory error possible.

Since you clearly don’t have the intelligence to follow my recommendation, a simpler circumstance is investigating the second Gulf of Tonkin attack, where “the greatest pilots and military personnel” reported seeing attacking boats (including on sonar, a clearly infallible sensor) and bombed and torpedoed empty ocean. We know it was empty now, because the NVA records show that no ships were their.

This isn’t to denigrate the people involved, it’s simply an notable example that sensors can fail, data can be misinterpreted and people can perceive objects that aren’t there especially if they have been told something’s there beforehand.

FYI, fooling sensors into providing false data is a core part of military strategy, it’s the motivation behind ECM, low-altitude interdiction, etc.

If you even remotely understood the topic you would realise that even the definition of UAP means absolutely nothing. If you have 10s of thousands of hours of sensor data over decades of course you’re going to have inputs you can’t map to physical objects, the fact that you can’t conclusively identify the source of the input doesn’t mean that it’s a magical object, or even a real one.

There’s a reason why physicists and the military aren’t dedicating extraordinary amounts of time on these, because we all know it’s nothing.

“seeing the differences in the result”

This just means that you are testing against a very narrow output. It’s actually pretty common to run across tests that don’t even check for the likely failure cases, because the developer(s) don’t actually understand the algorithm.

A common example is prime factorisation, most nontrivial factorisation algorithms (Pollard rho, elliptic curves), don’t guarantee producing a prime factor they simply tend to produce them because they prioritize small factors. Programmers see that their function produces primes for the one or 2 test cases (out of say 2^64) and assume that it works. It generally does, but when it doesn’t you get incorrect results (often undetectably) which poisons all the rest of your calculations.

I actually have the same trackpad problem on a Windows 10 2-in-1. Seems it’s not unique to Linux.

Antibiotics one of the most prescribed and mass produced medicines in the world (short of possibly NSAIDs), doesn’t make any one money. There is absolutely no market incentive whatsoever.

You know it’s not necessary to lie about basic facts, if you don’t like capitalism there is much better points to criticise that don’t need to be fabricated.

Weird that you would showcase a vacuous article as an example of “research”.

Have a bit too high of an opinion of yourself don’t you?

Edit: Your UAP article is hilarious. You have a BS in bs, I mean psychology, and yet you are voicing an opinion on how QM totally corroborates with the data. You don’t even know how radar and infrared sensors work (and their inherent and potential flaws), and completely fail to consider that displacement of air at the velocity claimed would heat it several thousand degrees, not “quantum cooling”. The only way this wouldn’t happen would be if the object somehow didn’t interact with matter while simultaneously emitting electromagnetic radiation, or it was sensor errors.

You’re a complete fraud.

I’m sorry what was I supposed to say?

Your comment literally criticised by my argument on the basis that “It was just like Putin’s” which is not only false but completely irrelevant, who else shares my argument has no relevance to it’s accuracy.

So how am I supposed to respond to such a viciously anti-intellectual claim? Is it really so unacceptable to request that you actually produce reasoning for your argument? At the very least to demonstrate that you are mentally capable of holding this conversation?

FYI I never claimed that I was more knowledgeable than IR scholars, I said somewhat cheekily that you need to be educated (which you clearly aren’t) to effectively challenge my statement.

It’s really sad when one has to explain the insult when the recipient party is too stupid to understand.

“Can’t form a coherent thought”

Again I’m going to need some evidence of this, the fact that you failed to understand a statement, does not make it incoherent.

Unlike most people I actually do provide empirical and rational evidence for my core arguments, even the irrelevant insults. My intellectual standards are through the roof compared to you losers (losers because you are willingly too stupid and lazy, to actually learn empirical facts and provide arguments. See I just met a standard that you have still failed to meet).