April 2017 Media Thread

Hi! I'm an electrical engineering student close to finishing my MsC. These days I feel really, really tired and disenchanted with my work, in spite of it leading to one of my childhood dreams of working on green energies and/or electric transportation.

The same happened when I went to see a couple of museums involving Norway's naval history, Amudsen's arctic expeditions, and the epic journies of the Kon Tiki and the Ra. Despite all the pain and hardship those stories portrayed, I left full of energy and determination.

Over the most recent years, most of my media consumption, both fiction and non-fiction, involved delving deep into the complexities and flaws of human nature, both on an individual and societal level. While that has helped me become somewhat more socially functional, it has also sapped my optimism and energy to the point that I'm not sure why I get away in the morning, or why bother making any kind of effort beyond ensuring survival when everything is absurd and pointless, and everyone, myself included, is irredeemably stupid and evil in ways that cannot be fixed, only mitigated.

I want to feel hopeful, optimistic, interested, engaged, and growing. I want to learn shit that makes me want to strive and thrive.

The F35 fighter program is shaping up much worse than even the detractors thought. Many, many problems here, not least:

"Whenever a squadron deploys, it must establish an ALIS hub wherever the F-35 is deployed. Crews set up an ALIS Standard Operating Unit (SOU), which consists of several cases of computer equipment. Technicians will use these to set up a small mainframe which must then be plugged into the world-wide ALIS network. It took several days for the crews to get ALIS working on the local base network. After extensive troubleshooting, IT personnel figured out they had to change several settings on Internet Explorer so ALIS users could log into the system. This included lowering security settings, which DOT&E noted with commendable understatement was “an action that may not be compatible with required cybersecurity and network protection standards.”

The ALIS data must go wherever a squadron goes. Crews must transfer the data from the squadron’s main ALIS computers at the home station to the deployed ALIS SOU before the aircraft are permitted to fly missions. This process took three days during the Mountain Home deployment. This was faster than in earlier demonstrations, but Lockheed Martin provided eight extra ALIS administrators for the exercise. It is unclear if the contractor or the Air Force will include this level of support in future deployments. When the squadron redeployed back to Edwards at the end of the exercise, it took administrators four days to transfer all the data back to the main ALIS computer. Delays of this kind will limit the F-35’s ability to rapidly deploy in times of crisis. Even if the jets can be positioned in enough time to respond to a crisis, problems like lengthy uploading times could keep them on the ground when they are needed in the sky. An aircraft immobilized on the ground is a target, not an asset.

Another time-consuming process involves adding new aircraft to each ALIS standard operating unit. Every time an F-35 is moved from one base to another where ALIS is already up, it must be inducted into that system. It takes 24 hours. Thus, when an F-35 deploys to a new base, an entire day is lost as the data is processed. And only one plane at a time can upload. If an entire squadron, typically 12 aircraft, needed to be inducted, the entire process would take nearly two weeks, forcing a commander to slowly roll out his F-35 aircraft into combat."

www.pogo.org/straus/issues/weapons/2017/f35-continues-to-stumble.html

Some short SF story's, mostly time travel this issue

http://compellingsciencefiction.com/issue6.html

"All This Time", by Jonathan Coulton. Video for the first song from his new future-themed album, placed in this category because the text-adventure video adds to the story. (Song name-checks Kurzweil and is about our future robot overlords.)

Our Face from Fish to Man (pdf warning) a book that will soon be a century old, but still 1) well-illustrated, 2) inspiring (at least, inspiring wonder). I would love to read a modern anatomist's reflection on it.

My podcast on the dangers of AI.

For your amusement, People for the ethical treatment of re-reinforcement learners,,,

http://petrl.org/

https://www.gwern.net/newsletter/2017/03