as a researcher in NLP slash computational linguistics, this is what I tend to think :) (maybe a less strong version, though, there are other kinds of thinking and learning).

so I'm always surprised when some linguists decry LLMs, and cling to old linguistics paradigms instead of reclaiming the important role of language as (a) vehicle of intelligence.

Interestingly, one advantage SignWriting may have over IPA is that while you cannot easily represent sounds in a visual medium (thus letters are mostly arbitrary) movement and hand depictions in SW are highly iconic.

Also, just as you can drop many IPA symbols and just get the basic set needed to represent a particular language, I guess you could use "simplified" SW ignoring the fine differences.

Though a sign-writing still has to contend with lack of a third dimension, it's still a projection like IPA from one medium to another. Certainly an easier to visualize projection, but still a bit like a map projection not entirely capturing the globe.

It's a way to write sign languages. Think of like the alphabet, but for hands, movements etc instead of sounds.

Now, it may not be obvious that there is a necessity for a writing system for a minority language embedded in a larger community (spoken language), but there are many uses: preservation, digital use, teaching, linguistic study...

Since an organism characteristics depend a lot on its evolutionary history, classifying organisms like that helps us make predictions and assumptions based on our knowledge of related organisms, so it's quite beneficial to humans. Also, the other classifications like tree, shrub, fruit, whatever, are also valid and used in biology, just not the main classification system. The other feature of phylogenetically classifying organisms is that it's valid for all life, which is a nice property.

I use both (neovim instead of vim, i3 as wm) and you got me thinking. I think the point of both is actually not having to use the mouse. But the mouse is not the problem per se, probably is the spatial/visual interaction paradigm. I don't care where the window exactly goes, I just want it right/on top/minimized. I don't want to search visually for a button that does what I want, I know what I want, I can just "tell" the computer. It's not about keybindings as shortcuts to do something, it's talking to the computer via keyboard using my language center without the intermediary of the gesture/spatial metaphor. Maybe? I just thought of this sorry.

It's this. I make the analogy to playing a game with a controller. At some point you stop thinking what combination of physical button presses and holds you need to have your character go from a running start to a crouch-jump, you just think in terms of goals for you want your character to accomplish. vim motions put you in the same sort of connection with the text you're editing.

I don't think democracy is about having the "best" government, that'd be technocracy, I guess. Democracy is about sharing the power, and having the most legitimate government based on the principle that everyone's voice is equal.

Also, it's not a zero sum game at all. First, even if the long stretches of good and bad governments equalized over the long term, it's much worse to live all your life under a bad government than have one half the time. Also,thinking as an engineer, think about the stability implications of a wildly swinging signal vs a smoothly swinging one, even if both are centered.

In any case, coming from a country which had a long dictatorship until not so long ago, it's fairly clear it's not a zero sum game.

Maturity of a voter is over-estimated. If they are like kids, giving them candy is all that is required to get votes. If they hate the other community, hitting hard at the other community is all that is needed. Sharing of power? Coalition governments can't agree on almost anything. Heck, they take months to even form a government, after the elections are over.

Sometimes a move to democracy only resulted in the same aristocratic families grabbing the power quite easily and keeping it for decades.

Getting votes is entirely a different skill from running a country to its prosperity. Unfortunately it is seen as qualification to become a leader.

> I don't think democracy is about having the "best" government, that'd be technocracy, I guess.

That’s not the definition of technocracy. It’s more of a value judgement.

“aristocracy” etymologically means rule-by-the-best for what it’s worth.

> much of the available energy was being used to pump water from low lying river basins into reservoirs – the only practical way to store energy on a large scale. However, this capacity has a limit and, with the reservoirs almost full, it cannot continue to be stored indefinitely.

There has been unusually heavy rain in Spain for an unusual length of time now, and reservoirs are well beyond average capacity.[1]

I wonder if this anomalous situation has anything to do with the blackout. Maybe the inability to continue pumping water led to the shutdown of the solar, maybe for economic reasons as is suggested in some other comment?

[1] https://www.embalses.net/

Can the excess water be dumped out to waste generating just enough power for grid stability?

Nintendo at least has a good history with this, at least in my experience. Both 3ds and WiiU e-stores were closed, but I can still play all my digital games on both. I can even make backup copies of the game on external media and everything works as you would expect (save online multiplayer, which is a shame but that's a different story)

Sign language researcher here! I would recommend you look a bit at the scientific literature on the topic. I know it can be a bit overwhelming and hard to know to separate the actual info from the garbage, so I can try and select for you a few hand picked papers. IMO, trying to understand sign language oneself, or at least getting basic notions, is fundamental to understand where the real problems lie.

Unfortunately there's no getting away from that. While the scarcity of data indeed is an issue, and your idea is nice (congratulations!) the actual problem is the scarcity of useful data. Since sign language doesn't correspond to the oral language, there are many problems with alignment and just what to translate to. Glosses (oral language words used as representation for signs) are not enough at all, since they don't capture the morphology and grammar of the language, which among other things heavily relies on space and movement. Video + audio/audio captions is nearly useless.

Good luck with your efforts, this is a fascinating area where we get to combine the best of CS, AI, linguistics... but it's hard! As I said, let me know if you want some literature, by PM/email if you want, and I'll get back to you later.

disclaimer: I'm a university professor, though in a european country and not in health-rrlated area

The article is excessively negative in tone, and very dramatic and aggressive. I have found many people adjacent to academia, drop outs, or even some inside, very disenchanted and angry at how it works. And it's true, the sets of incentives, structures and political organisation in academia don't relate at all to academic excellence, and are something we have to "suffer". I wish we could come up with a better set of incentives, but it's very hard to do in a mostly vocational and passion-based activity. So what people have come up is structure the incentives along the chores (eg teaching) and easily measurable results (eg publications). And whenever you come up with an incentive structure, some people will game it. And the current state of publication stress (publish or perish) is extreme and counterproductive. But please note that these measurement requirements and incentives are imposed from outside academia. Of course, I'm not saying leave us to our devices, academia is nepotistic and political enough. But the system sure could use some overhaul. Suggestions welcome.

On the other hand, this "fraud" is incentive fraud, but not "truth" fraud. The way science Truth works is by accumulation of imperfect, even erroneous results, leading to an ever more refined understanding of the world. Scientists don't just blindly trust others, even if they cite each other (nowadays, citations are a political and incentive-gaming tool more than actual references). So these massive scale frauds don't bother us so much because they don't make understanding necessarily go backwards. Of course the payer feels it's a waste of money, but in academia we see money as support for research, which is mostly failed anyways because you only make discoveries by failing and failing again.

And progress in knowledge is nowadays still going on, even in the medical fields. And academia still works, much as healthcare and compulsory education, becausemany people feel a calling to do these professions properly, even if it doesn't seem so from outside. So let's be optimistic, even while trying to come up with improvements to the current model.

PS: So sorry for the wall of text

Also a professor (of two varieties at different times).

I have mixed feelings about this article. I agree with the sense of ignored crisis it points to, but also think it doesn't understand the problems with the solutions it recommends, or maybe misunderstands the sources of the problems, like you're saying.

Academics is different from finance maybe in that outside of outright fraud, things are murky. What one person considers "unscientific" another might consider perfectly reasonable or even rigorous, and vice versa. I've seen debates like this, where the two sides both consider the other unscientific and theoretically and methodologically unrigorous. I don't see the outright fraud as the core of the problems either, it's an extreme version of something that exists because of rotten incentive structures. Getting rid of it is akin to replacing the roof on a house that has rotten foundations: important, but not solving the problem.

The problems in academics can't be easily reduced to one thing. There's lots of extremely competent people working under a broken model of reality, one that assumes that such competence is rare rather than common, that progress is due to single individuals rather than collaborative groups, administrations looking for money from research rather than money for research, fame rather than truth, and so forth and so on. Then there's the other side of the coin, employers using degrees to avoid competent training and hiring, reducing people to specific degrees etc.

Increasingly I see the problems with academics as pervasive to society (at least US society), something deeper, just incentivized and maybe manifest more clearly because it's so broken when applied to academics. I don't think it's a coincidence that health care and academics have both seen huge inflation in the last several decades, for example, and are both huge sources of controversy in US society. I think the average people working in those fields are doing so in good faith, but I also think there's systemic pressures that create huge problems and bad actors in both, and there's enormous reluctance in both to change things because of power structures and poor understandings from the rest of society about what's going on.

It's not the academic culture in my experience. It's the most competitive subset of the academia. Things tend to be worse if there is top-anything involved, if the field of study is supposed to be important, or if the field receives a lot of funding. These factors all attract the kind of people who respond strongly to incentives and often try to game the system.

I have two home communities in the academia. One is string algorithms, compressed data structures, and things like that. It's a small community where people enjoy what they are doing and have somehow found a way to make a living out of it. The groups tend to be small, the atmosphere is friendly and honest, and the results rarely appear in top conferences.

Then there is a subset of bioinformatics and genomics, which often uses results from the other community. This is supposed to be important, so there are a lot of big well-funded labs from top universities involved. Stuff sometimes gets published in prestige journals, administrators from funding agencies (particularly NIH) are trying to direct the research, and even the Big Tech is trying to grab their share of something. I haven't seen fraud, but everything is so serious and competitive and there is a constant pressure to get things done before someone else manages to publish something similar.

I don't know how things are further downstream, and I'm not interested in finding out.

academia was meant to protect researchers from profit incentives that bias their work in private companies, if you replace those with other corrupt incentives then what's the point? you could just do that shoddy, useless research in industry and not publish it.