BE AWARE! Dictatorship exists in all countries but with different tactics! They only care for
personal short term profits & do anything to reach their goals even by fooling simple-minded people,
hiding the truth, manipulating science & everything, putting public mental & physical health at risk,
abusing non-human animals, polluting environment, destroying family values, promoting materialism &
sexual degeneration in the name of freedom,..... & turning people into programmed robots!
"Make the lie big, Make it simple, Keep saying it, And eventually they will believe it" Adolf
Hitler... There is no free speech in real world & you will be suppressed for telling the truth that is not
supported by the system. Videos of targeted users are filtered & merely relegated, so that people can
hardly see their videos!
Yeah I think you’re onto something. I’m also sure that pictures of animals a lot of people in Youtube’s major markets see as pets being mutilated, generated scads of complaints. When you’re dealing with many millions of people, it is not unusual to respond to large concentrations of complaints. We should probably talk more about how thst works, and how it sometimes allows for careless or bad actors to silence people. Still, it’s understandable in a context other than attempting to be a censor, and just acting like a business. She comes across as angry and rigid in her views, but that describes quite a lot of people. Still, if someone “knows” something and is very angry, it can be hard to reach them.
You know the old saw, “quantity has a quality all of its own.” I’d add that these guys could have done both. They could have high follower count identities, medium, and low. They can have highly active accounts, and “sleepers” and everything in between. It would be unwise to make too many assumptions based on limited press releases from Facebook. It’s more sensible to think about what they could have done, and then move on from there.
They could have had tiers of accounts, all for different purposes. They could have used a ton of low accounts to simulate a grassroots response, to openly troll and be banned, and all kinds of things. They’d have cultivated more and less popular, and obvious accounts as well. If they were smart they’d have a whole layer of accounts designed just to be caught, and give a misleading impression of their competence and methodology.
You expressed my thoughts better than I could. I'm looking forward to more analysis being done on the actions of IRA - I just hope FB/Twitter/others don't sweep what was done beyond these big accounts under the rug, because we're only going to see more of this sort of "information warfare."
People can exert a lot of influence with just one account, and in this case it’s about 270 so far. You’d be surprised at how effective Sybil attacks are with far fewer than a dozen accounts, never mind hundreds. When those accounts build reputation, often assisted by more accounts, it’s even more powerful. Still, the biggest advantage is that you get to probe your audience multiple ways, then just go with what gains traction. The reputation of any one account doesn’t matter, it’s a “team” effort.
So while you or I might care about what we say, try to build a reputation, and in general say things in accordance with what we believe, they don’t have to. It’s a radically different proposition, and devastating when done well. Even being discovered can be its own kind of “win” if it creates distrust and instability within the network itself. You can undermine faith in said network by exposing it as essentially corrupted, albeit by you.
Oh good, I was worried that an ongoing tragedy wouldn’t turn into a predictable political discussion quickly enough. It’s important that we speculate wildly and inject our own politics into this right away. There are internet points on the line after all!
This whole thread shouldn’t be on HN in the first place, there’s no solid information, and the trolls are already sharpening their fangs.
To be honest, someone saying "I would make a better salary as a programmer in the US, but I won't go because of X" is topical to HN (Even if X is a false statement, heck, even if 'I won't go because' is a false statement, because in all cases it's being said, and that's relevant in a country that is simultaneously debating a programmer shortage, H1-B visas, and how these impact our industry.
I have plenty to say on the gun debate, but HN isn't the place to bring most of that it up. Where the gun culture (note, OP said 'culture', so it has nothing to do with the legality per se) DOES intersect the HN topics, however, seems like something that shouldn't be ignored just because it's a political issue. Ideally your political issues are important issues - outright avoiding discussion of them is not helpful, even if discussion requires more effort towards civility and open-mindedness on everyone's parts.
There’s a significant difference between a discussion on this event when we know the facts, and discussion while it’s ongoing and multiple versions of events are being offered by dozens of sources. The phrase, “Ongoing tragedy” was sort of the key to my post.
While the article raises some valid and disturbing points, I feel like it’s missing the fact that kids have always been subjected to psychological warfare. “Be good and do what you’re told, or He’ll awaits!” The problem now is that the war is automated and online, but I feel like the solution is the same! Teach critical thinking skills. Prepare young people for the complexity of the world, the ads, the religion, the appeals to emotion. We’re not getting rid of phones and the internet, so prepare them for it.
Limit screen time, limit access as best you can, but think in terms of what you can add and not just take away. Give them the tools to fight the war. Yes, it means they’re going to be less likely to believe in your brand of god or political ideology just on your say-so, and that’s probably hard for some to swallow. It also means that some manicured and coiffed shill can’t do the same through a screen.
As you can see from some here, people just want to believe. Fusion is the power source of sci-fi, and they’re scared of fission. As with self-driving cars, people just imagine what it could be like and that’s enough for them. Never mind that decades of R&D on fission has yielded breakthroughs in safety and efficiency, and by the time a workable fusion design is possible far more advanced fission will be possible. People want the future to be now, so they believe their way into it. Scientists want funding for research, so they sex it up for the media and mass consumption.
The truth is that politics aside, we could be using fission today to solve the problems people want fusion to solve decades from now. Granted, if aneutronic fusion becomes possible (no time soon, even experimentally with a surplus of energy) that will be a miracle. DT fusion though, is only useful for research purposes.
Most people, including most people here don’t have a working understanding of nuclear physics or the requisite engineering of a power plant. When you don’t understand the hurdles, fusion seems kind of magical. If you’re desperate for advanced space flight, fusion seems kind of magical. Even more, no one has any negative experiences with fusion, while we’ve been literally burned by fission.
It’s hard to argue against a fantasy, and hoping for fusion also let’s people ignore the hard work of using fission. The politics feel intractable in the US, the waste is manageable, but scary. Fusion isn’t real yet in that sense, so like an online romance people can project a fantasy onto it.
"Granted, if aneutronic fusion becomes possible (no time soon, even experimentally with a surplus of energy) that will be a miracle."
A group at Princeton has a concept for a FRC-based reactor burning D-3He that, through a combination of quite interesting tricks, reduces the fraction of power output in neutrons to as little as 0.5%. The design is also very small, with a power output of 1 MW. At this level of neutron output the reactor structure are lifetime components, with no replacement needed due to neutron damage. Power density is still a struggle, although the small size of the reactor helps there.
The downside (assuming the aggressive plasma physics doesn't disappoint) is where do you get the 3He.
At this point, my default vision of the future is neither fission nor fusion, but rather renewables and storage. The engineering and economic issues of these appear much more tractable. Simply extrapolating solar down its demonstrated experience curve puts the cost of PV electricity at $0.01/kWh or less when fully scaled out.
Sam Cohen’s Rotating Magnetic Field experiments have shown higher temperature and reasonably long-lived FRCs. His vision is steady operating, 3He systems, atleast at first targeting propulsion. As you dial up the Helium percentages, the neutron output goes down, though the required ion temperature goes up. Princeton Satellite Systems has several NASA programs looking at the propulsion applications.
The scheme involves significantly non-maxwellian ion distributions, so "temperature" isn't really appropriate. In particular, 3He ions get pumped to higher energy than D ions, which helps suppress DD fusion. They claim the scheme is consistent with Rider's limits on energy circulation in non-maxwellian plasmas.
To be fair some reponsabilites also come from poor performances of fission industrie leaders. In France the next generation fission power plant EPR was so much delayed that a lot of people are getting skeptical about this tech if not totally opposed for environmental reasons (trues or romanticized).
This is a shame as I globally agree with you that fission might have a transitional role to play in the mix needed to reduce our global warming impact. Consuming less non-renewables ressources being the first line of action anyway.
The title is the worst kind of deceptive, clickbaity, untrue crap. As usual, MIT is the hub of both exciting science/engineering, and horrid press releases.
The first paragraph and the sub header is an outright lie:
“Carbon-free fusion power could be ‘on the grid in 15 years’”
And then later:
“Prof Wilson was also cautious about the timeframe, saying that while the project was exciting he couldn’t see how it would achieve its goal of putting energy on the grid within 15 years.”
