Age + years of service >= 70.

61 + 51 in your example.

I'm dumb—somehow I got it in my head it was your age when you started.

> I think it is important to distinguish talk intended to appease the public, that currently is very anti-US, from real policies.

It's pretty clear that governments engage in such two-sided talk at their peril going forward. This is exactly how you get populism - usually of the far-right variety, with its specific blend of parochialism, jingoism and nihilism.

Everything is written in the voice of a terminally online Twitter troll. Every single communication from the U.S. federal government should be assumed to be a lie until proven otherwise.

I wonder how long it takes (it took?) before Americans think this is how it all should be, and that this is how it is in every country.

From the article:

> You're part of a team, you're contributing, you're also (measurably) pulling less hard than you would if the rope were yours alone

There’s a perfectly rational reason for this. Success is collective, but failure is individual.

Rewards for the success accrue to the person who represents it to the right people (usually those with the shortest path to the organization root).

For all intents and purposes, the person who gives the presentation did the work.

As someone who once spent two months reworking a system because a 4GB Oracle instance was okay, but 8GB was verboten, I agree.

This is the most insightful comment in the thread.

> That doesn't make sense for America to care about this much, given that Iran has no way to deliver nuclear weapons to it.

A nuclear armed Iran could hold oil and gas shipments in the Straight of Hormuz hostage indefinitely. It could also threaten U.S. bases and warships in the area. It could threaten regional allies with a nuclear attack.

> Are we really back in "trust me they have WMDs" territory?

Irrespective of everything else going on, it’s well established that Iran has a nuclear program in the advanced stages of development. There was a whole UN program around inspecting it.

> A nuclear armed Iran could hold oil and gas shipments in the Straight of Hormuz hostage indefinitely. It could threaten regional allies with a nuclear attack.

Personally, I don't care about the profit margins of oil and gas companies, and I will vote against any politician that partakes in sending my fellow citizens to die for the profit margins of oil and gas companies.

I also don't particularly care about the plight of regional allies, particularly ones that have a bizarre tendency to constantly poke the bears around them.

> If anyone does it'll be China giving them missiles to hit a US boat.

> That would make the US turn tail. Not start a war with China.

The right kind of missiles hitting the right kind of boat could lead to a very grave escalation.

Short of hitting the US mainland.

I doubt there is anything Iran can do that make the US put boots on the ground.

There is no appetite for boots on the ground in the US. And no coalition behind the US.

“Represented in the training data” does not mean “represented as a whole in the training data”. If A and B are separately in the training data, the model can provide a result when A and B occur in the input because the model has made a connection between A and B in the latent space.

Yes. I’m saying that “it’s just in the training data” is a cognitive containment of these models which is incomplete. You can insist that’s what’s happening, but you’ll be left unable to explain what’s going on beyond truisms.

It's called "generalization":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalization_(learning)

>"If A and B are separately in the training data, the model can provide a result when A and B occur in the input because the model has made a connection between A and B in the latent space."

This statement (The one I was replying to) is fundamentally unbounded. There's nothing that can't be explained as a combination of "A" and "B" in "training data" because practically speaking we can express anything as such where the combination only needs to be convex along some high-dimensional semantic surface. Add on to that my scare quotes around "training data" because very few people have any practical idea of what is or isn't in there, so we can just make claims strategically. Do we need to explain a success? It was in the training data. A failure, probably not in the training data. Will anyone call us on this transparent farce? Not usually, no.

If a statement can--at will--explain everything and nothing, what's it worth?

Energy use goes up as civilization advances, and Jevon’s paradox suggests that we’ll use more energy as its cost goes down. Couple that with the need to replace some portion of the installed base of solar capacity over time and I think solar will be a growth industry for the foreseeable future.

I can't believe it's taken this long for someone to mention this. Even just phasing out fossil fuels (if we're still serious about that) plus ordinary growth means today's demand is a fraction of what could potentially be fulfilled by additional solar buildout.