I'm not so sure of that opinion on reproducibility. The last peer review I did was for a small journal that explicitly does not evaluate for high scientific significance, merely for correctness, which generally means straightforward acceptance. The other two reviews were positive, as was mine, except I said that the methods need to be described more and ideally the code placed somewhere. That was enough for a complete rejection of the paper, without asking for the simple revisions I requested. It was a very serious action taken merely because I requested better reproducibility!
(Personally I think the lack of reproducibility comes back mostly to peer reviewers that haven't thought through enough about the steps they'd need to take to reproduce, and instead focus on the results...)
Eh, I'm not so sure about the funding side there, researchers are not really caught at all and are fully responsible, IMHO. Peer reviewers exist to enforce community standards, and are not influenced to avoid reproducibility concerns by funding sources. The results are always more interesting than reproducibility, of course, and I think that's why the get the attention! Also, there needs to be greater involvement of grad students (who do most of the actual work) in peer review, IMHO, because most PIs spend their day in meetings reviewing results, setting directions, writing grants, and have little time for actual lab work, and are thus disconnected from it.
There needs to be more public naming and shaming in science social media and in conference talks, but especially when there are social gatherings at conferences and people are able to gossip. There was a bit of this with Google's various papers, as they got away with figurative murder on lack of reproducibility for commercial purposes. But eventually Google did share more.
Most journals have standards for depositing expensive datasets, but that's a clear yes/no answer. Reproducibility is a very subjective question in comparison to data deposition, and must be subjectively evaluated by peer reviewers. I'd like to see more peer review guidelines with explicit check boxes for various aspects of reproducibility.
> Reproducibility is a very subjective question in comparison to data deposition
Yeah I can definitely see why this is the case because it isn’t real until someone actually tries to reproduce the results. At that point it leaves the realm of subjectivity and becomes a question of cost.
The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians for the last election, and the media environment is not getting better, and in fact seems to be getting much worse.
However there is revolt amongst a good chunk of the fractured coalition that barely brought Trump into office.
Trump's Epstein coverup and sheltering of Ghislaine Maxwell took off the shine with a large number of people. The ghastly behavior around the deaths of major figures takes off more. Exempting producers of the pesticide glyphosate has taken off most of the MAHA coalition. And then, of course the wars, when he promised not to launch any and accused his opponent of doing exactly what he's currently doing...
It remains to be seen just how permanent this is, and whether the post-Trump US can be reattached to reality instead of reality TV, but I use hope.
Unfortunately that leaves us with the Democrats who have shown time and again that they are unwilling or unable to confront this movement for what it is.
I'm frankly far more concerned that the Republicans lose next election, and we get Democrats in power who then prioritize "getting back to normal" and once again utterly failing to hold accountable the utter BUFFET of mediocre wannabe dictators who brought us to the brink already.
I also hope. But I'd be lying if I said I thought it was rational.
The real fear is that they don't solve any of the problems that caused this in the first place... it's not about some vindictive punishment, it's about solving the problem.
I beg to differ, as I see it, it's both. Solving the problem necessarily entails punishing the malicious actors attempting to subvert and demolish our governance, justice system, society and way of life. Allowing Jan 6th to go unpunished at the highest levels was a key factor in what brought us here.
> demolish our governance, justice system, society and way of life
"Our" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There were many "ours" whose ways of life, governance, and society were destroyed on the road to making the Jan 6th thing possible..
>The people of the US were converted into functional Putin-subservient Russians
It's crazy that you continue to push this narrative despite the entire "Russia-Gate" thing turning out to total bullshit oppo followed by Trump being currently at war with one of Putin's allies and having jailed another.
The evidence supporting this claim is what, he wasn't nice to Zelenskyy that one time (despite still financially supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia)?
Well they'd have to lose a huge percentage of people for this not to be profitable quarter over quarter. But it likely cuts in to future growth substantially.
And with what seems to now be an unavoidable economic storm as in-transit tankers dock and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz starts to be felt, there might be a larger than normal amount of people looking to cut costs in the coming year.
Or maybe not, people seem to have stopped responding to economic pressure by cutting costs in the US! When vacations got super expensive, people still spent, and increased their complaining. We will see what happens in 2026.
Netflix, cable, etc. and other at home subscriptions tend to be the last things cut because people generally stay home more when the economy is bad so they want their in-home entertainment.
Netflix is more resilient to economic downturns than you'd think. For many people it's a higher ROI for entertainment when compared to a lot of other alternatives. e.g going to bars / restaurants / movie theaters.
Attacking and occupying a distant island in this age is getting more difficult, not easier. Look at the Black Sea, where Russia's remaining ships cower in fear in port, as they try to avoid super cheap marine drones. Massive missile attacks on a country can only do so much damage, and they harden the population against the aggressor.
If Taiwan has been paying attention, and I don't doubt they are in an age when it's becoming clear the US is a paper tiger that will never protect them, they are well prepared to handle a good chunk of their own defense, using the brain trust they have inside their nation. They have everything they need for their own defense now.
Tiawan politics is interesting. from what I can tell those in power a an alliance of those who want China to take over with those who don't think China will try because they are friends.
The president is worried but his party doesn't have power.
I think it's led to a huge advantage for defenders. Nuclear weapons favor attackers, or deterrence. But massive drone waves allow defense of large areas with a very small number of people. It's not a race to build bigger missiles that go longer distances and are harder to shoot down, it's largely a coordination, communication, logistics, and information management problem.
I don't quite follow, can you explain a little bit about how drone waves allow for defense of large areas? I can see how they help in offensive attacks, but as far as I can tell they don't seem to have helped defend Iran from the US and Israel; they're just helping Iran lash out after taking a beating.
(Not trying to be smarmy, just genuinely curious.)
well two things: 1) Iran doesn't have much in terms of drones, but they are not using them nearly as much as even Russia, much less Ukraine. Look at US bases in the area: there's been a few flyovers by drones but no serious attacks, but US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked. 2) Iran still hasn't lost any territory, that's the defense I'm talking about. The US and Israel can expend all their bombs, but that doesn't bring down Iran's government or lose them any land. At most it loses them economic power. So I don't think Iran demonstrates much at all about the modern use of drones.
> US bases haven't even put up nets or anything to protect resources, they still have radar and high value targets just sitting out in the open unattacked
New attack today, with ~10 casualties, and a freaking E-3 AWACS taken out, which is the very definition of high value target sitting out in the open being vulnerable
I don't think "slingshot" is the right analogy here. There is a big change towards intelligent, small, and cheap drones. If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
The drone manufacturing has gone so exponential that they now have a shortage of drone operators. It's completely changed the war in the past few months, with Russia now losing ground, at basically zero additional Ukrainian casualties, and with Russia continuing to have massive ground casualties from sending poorly trained troops to die while hiding in a 30 mile wide kill zone ruled by drones.
The quantity of drones allows new tactics, reminiscent of rolling wave artillery. And deployment of a wide variety of types of drones has led to the depletion of Russian anti-air defense in both occupied Ukraine and in Russia itself, allowing the destruction of much of Russia's oil infrastructure. The recent Baltic port hit will be felt for a long long time, and nearly completely neutralizes the lifting of sanctions on Russia. All from novel weapons, which are decidedly more sophisticated than slingshots both in their construction and application. And the US is way behind, and too proud to let Ukraine share their knowledge and capabilities.
You're talking about the hardware. That is critical.
But what's evolving even faster is the software. And in real world use cases.
They arent paying for tank models and people to run around and try to chase to "test". They are very literally doing it live, with live fire testing day in and day out.
Furthermore they are rewarding results on both ends. Successful operators get to buy gear for kills in an amazon like store (talk about gamification). And there are paths for "innovation" to make its way to the front quickly: see https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/how-a-ukrainian-gam... for an example.
Ukrainian society is also very bottom up, and individual units are empowered to procure what they want, based on price or quality, from online systems that operate like Amazon. No general issue, just customization all the way to soldiers getting to choose from a wide variety of drone models from many manufacturers, and the manufacturers are competing to supply to the needs of individual units:
US military leadership is all about empowering units to solve problems on their own, at least whenever I read their books that's the message I get. Ukraine seems to have taken it even further.
Note that it is wrong to think that David was at a disadvantage. I know that is not how the story is taught today, but slingshot troops of that age we the snipers of their age: very deadly (not at the range of a modern sniper, but...).
If the fight between them was started at some distance, the David should have been the expected winner by pretty much everyone on the field. Think "bright a club to a gun fight" sort of vibes.
David had a sling, not a slingshot. They are very different tools. slings need more skill, but are easy for a shepard to learn. (I suspect more powerful as well but I'm not an expert)
> If it were just a slingshot, other countries could pick up what Ukraine is doing in no time, but they can't. Instead, there's an absolutely massive industry behind Ukraine's drone manufacturing, growing at 2x per year, which no other nation can currently match, including Russia.
I'm all for good guys winning, but what are your sources? And why do you think Russia can't match Ukraine in this regard?
In terms of russias strategic goals Russia lost in month one when they pulled out of kyiv and admitted regime change wasn't going to happen. Everything since then has just been a very expensive face saving exercise and a hope thay somehow Ukraine would collapse.
It's been getting worse and worse lately, they have huge losses, hard to even think about it. With oil output dropped by 40% in the latest Ukrainian attacks on oil infra, it looks like they will probably miss out on the sanctions relief Trump handed them. Yeah, Ukraine is also quite well bruised up but somehow they are more competent to fight. But by the time the war ends, even if they won it'd only be their symbolic liberation victory because economically it won't look to good, also bad for EU, possibly a global crisis.
There's no single source, it's basically all the war reporting. My claims are not contentious. Even Russia's war bloggers are repeating the same now.
Russia could, in theory, use it's greater number of people towards producing drones. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, train its new recruits properly before throwing them into hopeless situations. But it hasn't. Russia could, in theory, operate by rewarding production contracts to the most capable teams rather than the ones with the best connections. But it hasn't. And even if Russia does, they'll have to catch up. They could!
Even the US could, in theory, start learning from Ukraine or even following in its footsteps, independently, but it hasn't.
Ukraine is fighting for its life, it's on Death Ground, in the terms of Sun Tzu. In Russia, perhaps only Putin is on Death Ground, and even then, there's many ways Putin could give up on the war and still stay in power. That produces far different results in people. And the cultures of Ukraine and Russia are fundamentally incompatible, which also produces very different results from people.
You can even keep that Office365 subscription going on Linux via the web apps these days. They are buggy as hell, but no more buggy than the Mac versions in my experience (haven't used the Windows versions enough to compare...)
I used to do a lot of document and Office work. If you had told me that 20 years in the future MS would still be around, automagic piracy enabled coding bots were a thing, and people were having problems because the buttons in Office don’t work, I would’ve flagged the third as unbelievable.
I find it impossible to use the current diff view for most codebases, and spend tons of time clicking open all available sections...
They have somehow found the worst possible amount of context for doing review. I tend to pull everything down to VS Code if I want to have any confidence these days.
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