I just read a little bit and I am interested: Is this actually useful for activists? The last groups that used a "science based" approach I know of were/are not that successful
For visibility, one common trick is to involve the news media. A small group of protesters converge and just stand around and chit chat. Someone calls the press. The press shows up with their cameras and the protesters snap into action.. chanting, shouting, flying flags. They make a show for the camera. The press wants to sensationalize, so they are onboard with this. The camera chooses a distance and angle that tries to make the protest look larger than it is, taking care to ensure that the frame cuts off some people so you don’t get the impression that you’re viewing the whole crowd. They film for a couple minutes or so, interview someone, and leave. As soon as they leave, the protesters go back to hanging out, or they disburse. Because it’s all about reaching the press; not about reaching a few bypassers.
Some protests are actually by hired people. Students are sometimes compensated to show up and act, for the camera. I assume they would agree with the cause but just need a little extra motivation to give up some of their time.
Politicians are likely wise to these tactics of making a protest look bigger than it is but I think it’s a good way to start, to reach the public who might later bring the crowd needed (which apparently is 3.5% of the population according to the article).
The last bullet is interesting for sure. From the article:
‘1960s civil-rights activists “did things like pick cities to protest where they knew the police would be maximally repressive”, he says.’
So it’s a game of being non-violent yourself (so you don’t encourage people to vote for the shitty party of law and order), but at the same time you need the police to act their worst, presumably to get more press. I wonder if it would be sensible to do non-destructive tasks that only appear destructive, to provoke cops. Like give protesters a spray can of something that the rain will remove (not paint, obviously).
I am thinking of XR and connected groups that really focused on those principles when organizing.
It would be really interesting to me if there is a difference between movements that "organically" (via trial and error or through their own analysis) come to that strategy and movements that use this and similar research and try to build their movements from the ground up based on this strategy.
The OSI just published a resultnof some of the discussions around their upcoming Open Source AI Definition. It seems like a good idea to read it and see some of the issues they're trying to work around...
I think (and I'm by far no particle physicists) that generally the larger the collider, the better the results can be. Also allows for more energetic collisions with potential discovery of new particles.
Particle physicists had their chance on trying prove the existence of any new particles with CERN and their newest project but ultimately they failed to discover any. First, it's too costly. Second, their theory on bridging the major two theories (relativity and quantum physics) with the assumably new particles is simply too complicated that involves a lot of constants compared to other theory models. There are better way to advance the progress of academic physics, but building a new collider would not help.
I would like to understand how the size/capability of this proposed facility compares to both CERN and also the never completed Superconducting Supercollider. I will never get over the fact that, as Americans, we could have had a huge lead in this research. We started to build it, then decided to stop.
You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.
While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can't have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.
“Almost unbreakable keys” - I’m not up to speed on what this race entails, relative to the current state of affairs. Does “almost” mean “any gov agency w/ a budget and quantum computers” can break it, it is it an actual step forward from the status quo?
A question worth asking, in context of article.
There’s not a ton of stuff I demand to be secure, full stop, but SSH and comms w/ my wife are among them. I need to dive deeper, and understand the actual risks.
TL/DW: A big misconception here has to do with Quantum entanglement. Quantum Entanglement in Quantum Internet doesn't mean that you can transfer data at speeds faster than light.
It's true that this connection would be "ultra secure" but this would be very inefficient (slow) and it wouldn't be reliable in a noisy environment. It would probably be most useful for some sort of authentication protocol/key sharing.
Ah, finally. Now we will stop talking about, hearing about, and shoving "AI" in everything and the next new thing will be "quantum internet enabled" things.
It pisses me off that they're calling quantum data transmission quantum entanglement, it's not the same thing and it's misleading as fuck.
Quantum entanglement is about two quantum particles sharing the same state which if implemented somehow would allow for universal communication with no time lag. Sending quantum state communication through fiber optic, while an achievement for distributed quantum computing, is not quantum entanglement!!
Quantum entanglement communications also have fundamental problems that will likely render them effectively unusable. You need a key to decrypt anything you send, and the key has to travel no faster than c. It's impossible to tell the data from the noise without the key. Attempting to read the data or to change the data being sent also collapses the effect, which can only be fixed by bringing the two systems together. In short, you can only send a single packet of data and you can't use it without a key transmitted using traditional methods.
The limit is c because you have to use cables, radio, or other traditional methods to send the key. The data in the entangled pair would also have to be set at the time the two devices are constructed, so that's not super useful. It might be useful for single use authentication, but that's about it.
Don't think of entanglement as being like one object in two spots. Think of it like identical twins. One twin getting a hair cut does nothing to the other twin's hair. Similarly, altering a property of one entangled particle does nothing to the other and actually means they are no longer entangled or identical.
No problem. I was pretty disappointed when I learned all the sci-fi writers were getting it wrong. Though, to be fair, it really should be called something else.
The article isn't about automatic proofs, but it'd be interesting to see a LLM that can write formal proofs in Coq/Lean/whatever and call external computer algebra systems like SageMath or Mathematica.
I was thinking something similar: If you have the computer write in a formal language, designed in such a way that it is impossible to make an incorrect statement, I guess it could be possible to get somewhere with this
nature.com
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