"News organizations beg president for income by platforming a criminal traitor to the united states"

Louis Cole (drumming & singing, here, and also half of clownc0re) just dropped another orchestral arrangement:

I gotcha, but can't relate too well, I don't think many of the bands people listened to in high school here were nearly as technical, and cheesy lyrics were mandatory. Maybe not pseudo-profound, though. As someone who's currently writing lyrics, I totally get any tendency toward vagueness, but it sounds like that's not your beef.

btw am I wrong or is the most common answer from Polish peeps upon finding out a non-native/foreigner is trying to learn Polish: "...why?"?

This is some relatively technical Polish bluegrass. lol, a fun string of words. Thanks for sharing.

Yeah, they sound like a tight band. Tight, as in, playing almost perfectly together all the way down to the 16th notes. This is almost assuredly performed in one take with the whole band. I'd kill to know how much editing went into it. Are they this tight live?

I don't think their drummer is playing to a click track, which is pretty cool. That fast bass plucking is probably three fingers, very cool, and there's some pretty snazzy chords on the guitars in there.

Yes, exactly. I still think it's possible, but if the (assumed real) afflictions continued long after public reports, which have obviously been out for many years, I guess that more or less settles the intent question. And if they're doing it elsewhere, not just Cuba... intent.

But also... the intel agencies know what it is. I'm about 99% certain that they're about 99% certain what's doing it. If we can think through it here even somewhat well, and they've got teams of people working on it, even part-time, presumably they can e.g. build a device to detect a microwave source (or lack thereof). Nor would it be hard to detect ultrasound or sub-sonic acoustic stuff.

I think the press release is "we'll pretend we don't know exactly what it is to give you one last chance to fucking stop it". And:

Still, it remains unclear why it took American officials so long to acknowledge the problem, and why they still show no sign of having a plan to solve it.

Nah I don't buy that. I think releasing the amount of info in the article is part of the plan to solve it. I dunno why else intel agencies would go forward with this. You're not gonna hear stuff like

U.S. officials told 60 Minutes that a senior U.S. Department of Defense official was targeted as recently as July 2023 at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania

otherwise.

I agree that suspicion is always warranted when it comes to our intel agencies and Russia's, but I don't know what U.S. national interests would be furthered by lying about this. The idea (mine, just now) that this is a psyop designed to make MAGAs realize that Russia is bad has me giggling though (edit: I mean because you'd basically need to make Putin kill Trump live on camera in Times Square to change their minds, at this point)

We had it mostly nailed down 2000-some-odd days ago:

And:

The only questions are: low-frequency (edit: nope, high-frequency) acoustics or microwaves, and if microwaves, intent, because it could be unintentional (see details in previous threads).

I think Havana syndrome is a real thing, but I understand the suspicion. Were there a place in the world where the Russians would do this, it'd be Cuba. Not just b/c of Cuba's Russia-friendly regime, but because it's like 100 miles from continental U.S. soil. And it's tradition, hah.

I think you're right, from a financial perspective, it's fine, but I wonder how it'll affect the site's content and culture.

How it went

Doesn't sound like the reddit IPO is going well, last I heard.

I'm down for invite-only memberships, but idk about taking the whole site private. There's some really good stuff here that should be public-facing.

I'm working on a Halloween album, Spooker of the House. Can't tell you how much fun I'm having with it. Start from scratch every song. Design my own synths, shape my drum samples custom, lots of chromatic and minor scales for spookiness, sampled my squeaky garage door, etc. The album will be tied together by a guy (me, many people are saying) broadcasting over the radio as he makes his last stand against some unnamed monsters. Yesterday I uploaded a song for a mix check (mono Sonos speaker, car audio, studio stereo monitors, phone and laptop speakers, airpods) and soundcloud suggested a tag for the genre: Moombahton. My song's not really moombahton at all, but it was a genre that I'd never heard of before, which is pretty rare, so I'm gonna spend some time listening to it in the near future. I'll probably steal some Moombahton elements for another track on the album, 'cuz Spooker of the House is a variety of styles, but loosely all electro pop. And my bandmate for a different music project is recently sending me some good stuff to chew on (lol, looks like that guy has a set of electronic tenor drums, which is what I played on drumline back in the day). I bet that guy grew up with this band.

I'm gearing up to code something in a few weeks that'll be pretty engrossing. An expansion and refinement of some code I wrote a few years ago which will make video data products unlike anything else in the world. There's also another blossoming corner of my field that I'm keen to familiarize myself with, so that'll be fun. I already have enough new content for two or three pretty quick papers, so it feels like it's gonna be a year or two that I can really have some fun while still staying productive.

Can't wait for the solar eclipse on April 8th. Got some family coming into town for it. My parents live pretty close by, in the path of totality. My relatives can have the guest bedroom, it should be pretty nice weather for camping in the yard.

I mean... there's no way to not get caught faking superconductivity. But apparently SpinLaunch and Theranos (and so many others) are allowed to swindle investors for long periods of time. Maybe Dias got inspired.

I should also say that obviously a lot of good can come from private industry and profit motives. And occasionally there's public sector flops, like the faster than light neutrinos, for example. Those guys seemed to know they were wrong and just wanted help figuring out why, though. Honestly, I'm having a hard time thinking of why someone would lie if they intend to stay funded by grants.

Nothing.

Can't find it now, but I saw just the other day that someone had got a paper containing the phrase "As a large language model, I can't..." somewhere in the meat of the paper past peer review.

Apparently this here comment is the first on hubski to introduce the concept of enshittification. It's not only affecting online or social media platforms, obviously.

I dunno, man. My comment was mostly a flippant quip, and yeah, of course I'll concede that most fields runs most of the gamut of incentive structures, but the distribution can vary widely between fields. If that makes sense. My discipline's definitely more of an outlier; very little overlap with industry. Ain't nobody but the taxpayer gonna foot the bill, because there's never going to be a product. It's pure research. Pretty sure I could convince people that the $2 billion dollars for the main experiment I work on was well spent, if I'm granted 30 minutes and a whiteboard. But anyway.

The profit incentives that come with for-profit products seem problematic for a lot of people. Especially when the amount of potential profit is billions of dollars, like for a room temp superconductor. It's not like the guy in this article, Dias, thought he had anything worth two shits, but he still decided to ride the hype train for some short-term recognition. I'd be tempted to say "the system works!" if it didn't damage public trust and perception. Maybe his calculus his that he'll still be able to land a gig for a private company, because he's toast in academia.

I know this is childish, oversimplified, and probably at least a bit of something I tell myself to feel better about having very little income compared to private industry salaries, but I still think there's a nobility in academia. At least in the hard sciences. No, the academic system is not as infallible as I once thought, but it's been really nice to realize that my peers aren't doing what they do for the money. Some of them make a very comfortable amount of money, don't get me wrong, but most of them could earn a lot more in industry, and for less work. Fuck tenured professorship though. I'm not sure where the stereotype of the lazy tenured prof comes from (humanities? note: this is not my perception, I'm trying to guess common opinion), but half of the profs I had in physics seemed miserable. Overworked. Health problems.

I can tell you from years of experience that the attitude in academia is "defend this at all costs" and in industry it's "kill this at all costs".

What is "this"? All of the best researchers that I know in the public sector have very little issue with taking an L and moving on if they were wrong. Again, there's probably a major difference inside academia between fields with a lot of industry overlap vs. not.

I'm cool with not a huge income, but I think having kids would change the game. Already made the choice not to ever do that.

It's a shame showing a lack of successful measurement isn't rewarded or even encouraged.

Truth. I got scooped once, by a matter of days, was just about to submit to a journal, and one of my advisors said, basically, "oh well. next time." I was like "well it's kind of a complimentary paper, reconfirming the same physics", and they said "so what? you gotta be first." Same idea, though. Even though the paper would have contributed to the field, I was discouraged from publication. I should've published anyway, in hindsight, just like all the null results and other reconfirmations. But especially so, because the paper was already written and everything.

grad students span gamut from 'wait, why isn't B a constant?' out-of-their-depth beginners to the likes of you, who probably shake their head at visiting professors' inexperience with methodology.

Eh, not common at all. Only once has this very notably happened, I think, when some theorists with no idea how particle spectrometers work were trying to use our data to do something with relativistic gauge invariance. They got shot down pretty badly at a conference. I just went off googling, and I can see they never published. Righteous, the process works! But it's very true that grad students in physics are selected primarily through their skills in mathematics, which is obviously necessary, but I've seen how often some of the students very skilled with maths struggle when they get into research. Creativity, critical thinking, and math skillz rolled into a single person is super rare. There were only one or two people in my class of twenty that had all three, and it sure as hell wasn't me.

By the way, it's funny because I'm still in grad school, hah, for just one more week! Fell off the wagon for a few years. Went to rehab for booze. Doing much better. I should probably write a pretty lengthy post about rehab, though. My god, what a funny experience.

Nobody shoots private industry in the foot like private industry.

And who can forget the LK-99 thing last summer?

That's what I thought your post was about, bfx. But nope, a completely different superconductivity let down. I'm impressed someone laid out this particular saga in longform.

Several other researchers told the news team that the principal investigator does not typically produce all the plots. “That’s weird,” Canfield says.

lol this is so commonly true. So many grad students will run the labs for like 80 hours a week, gather the data sets they were told to, and then have no idea what any of it means. Instead of the advisor telling them, the boss'll just swoop in and publish, and the lab rats will be lucky if they get a coauthorship. It's also a reminder that my advisor was so badass that he can't be stopped from making his own plots. He writes code code, not just toggling image and graph settings.

It's perfect that the story ends with him lying about his work on Twitter. Primo perfecto.