I find it more useful to anchor the concept of "real" in what one has direct access to. Beyond that there are many ways to describe our shared reality and the space of possible realities, including the past and future, some of which are more real than others, and go far beyond what we can imagine. Quantum physics gives us a language to expand what we can describe and imagine.
Some of the most intrusive cookie banners I've seen are on EU institutional websites. If they can't find a way to provide access to information without pages of consent boxes what hope have the rest of us. The law came ten years too late and focused on a narrow technical step rather than the privacy goals directly.
I would gently remind you and others to read the room carefully on this topic. While a lot of people on HN didn’t know Mike, Stephen, or their families personally, a lot of people who knew them personally are on HN.
Boeing is a company, and companies don’t make decisions. People do. So who at Boeing is motivated enough to take on the personal liability of a first degree murder conviction?
> who at Boeing is motivated enough to take on the personal liability of a first degree murder conviction
Say an exec at Boeing paid someone to pay someone to 'handle' the situation. "Will no one rid me of these meddlesome whistleblowers - oops I dropped my huge luggage case of unmarked bills" kind of thing... I'm not saying they did, to be very clear, just answering this hypthetical.
Where would you put the odds of that person ever facing "a first degree murder conviction"? If it's anywhere over 1%, I think you might be naive, and would benefit from looking at actual conviction rates for serious crimes (~2%) [0].
Even if they were incredibly sloppy about it, the motivation to admit in front of the world that Boeing did this to multiple whistleblowers is strongly in the wrong direction.
And as others have pointed out, repeatedly, Boeing is in the business of killing people. Billions of easy dollars are at stake.
So, who at Boeing might be motivated enough to take the <1% chance to keep raking in billions of dollars, protect America's 'reputation' (such as it is), and personally keep cashing in 6 or 7 figures a year? Any of them. Damn near all of them. Easily over 80%. It's not a job for people of conscience.
>and would benefit from looking at actual conviction rates for serious crimes (~2%) [0].
Murders have much better clearance rates than other "serious crimes" (whatever that means), so the chances of getting caught is probably far higher than 2%.
Good thing it’s always suicide via gunshot to the back of the head and drowning in freak storms and accidental slips out of hospital windows that keeps taking out these journalists and whistleblowers and not murder!
If you click the link in the article to the author's paper [0], "serious crimes" are defined in detail...
And you were correct to call that out. Thanks! Happy to be wrong on this one.
True conviction rates for specifically reported murder/manslaughter are generally around 50%. Theft and Burglary indeed skew the numbers a lot, with an extremely low clearance rate and vastly more reports. (All theft/burglary losses combined are only a fraction of wage theft [1], for perspective.)
All that said - if these were murders, they were committed by people with a vastly different set of resources compared to the average 'crime of passion'. I doubt that conviction statistics re professional murder are easy to come by, but I'd bet everything I own that they're significantly lower than 50%.
And how many of these recently-employed and recently-deceased people were whistle-blowers? I mean, I don't know, it's Boeing, it could be a high percentage.
Idk if you think someone owes you 4 billion, maybe you'd start thinking about not letting it slide, and make an example out of him. His co-defendant, did within a few days as well, which is interesting. People die for a lot less, and if you have money on that magnitude, perhaps you can get someone to stage an accident, people die for a lot less.
That assumption is wrong is if you look at the world as whole. A big big old Soviet country comes to mind. High ratio of 5th floor window related accidents.
Do you think those 5th floor murders were out of spite? I don't think so. Probably they had a very clear motive: Preventing the victims from threatening the current government and scaring others to fall back in line.
I don't think it can be reasonably argued HP murdered the people who scammed them to scare people from trying to scam them in the future.
Humans murder humans for all sorts of idiotic reasons. Are you so confident a corporation cannot hold a grudge, or more simply, see value in “sending a message?”
Maybe the net benefit is more cowardly journalists and whistleblowers across the board.
No sarcasm intended, from the details of both incidents they seem unrelated and not meant to send a message. Whatever the motives it seems unlikely anyone could arrange a storm to target the yacht.
Well said, too many people conflate AI and crypto, and dismiss both without understanding either. Crypto has demonstrated very limited benefit compared to its cost, exchanging value has been a solved problem for millenia. We're only beginning to understand what can be done with LLMs but we can see some limits. Although it causes some harm to say it doesn't create any value is ridiculous. We can't yet see if the benefits outweigh the cost but it looks to me like they will.
Why is it so hard to accept that different people can have a different internal experience of our shared reality? Perhaps different people have conscious awareness of different aspects of their own cognition pipelines though the pipeline is similar for most people, or perhaps there is a more fundamental diversity in how different people think.
I find it interesting though how strong an aversion some have to being told what's going on in their own heads.
This is the third formulation I've come across that sounds like this with space and time emerging from particle interactions. The other two are from Stephen Wolfram and Carlo Rovelli. Are the formulations related do you know?
I've struggled to get beyond their popular science descriptions to the actual theories, I find descriptions like the amplituhedron being 'a multidimensional jewel' distracting, if you have any suggestions where to start for a deeper understanding of this one I'd be interested.
Until we get evidence of such a thing, those ideas have little credibility though they are nice thought experiments.
What they're really seeing is that mathematically something can be expressed with less dimensions or degrees of freedom than what you observe in the real world, and then make the conclusion that therefor the dimensions and properties etc. that we observe are some emergent property and not fundamental.
But you can't make this conclusion from the mathematical model.
For example, if I have a finite sized two dimensional plane where each point is associated with some function f(x,y),you can trivially express it as a one dimensional system where all the rows of the plane are sort of unwound onto a single line.
This trick does not work for infinite 2D spaces but there are other ways to remap infinite sized spaces onto finite ones (e.g. via tan).
Yet there's nothing fundamental about this, it's just a mathematical modelling trick.
this trick works for infinite sets of the same cardinality and in fact works continuously for the case you are describing. there is a surjective continuous function fron R to R^n for any n
The biggest clue we have right now is illustrated by last year's nobel prize. Particles in an entangled state can interact instantaneously, disregarding space and time entirely.
It's a common thing to see in theories that try to unify QM with GR because in GR spacetime is dynamic, while in QM it's static. For QM to produce GR, there needs to be some way of generating space and time instead of taking it as an assumption.
You can find quite a few lectures by Nima Arkani-Hamed on YouTube including some on the amplituhedron. But they are mostly not gentle introductions and require some knowledge of physics to follow along. I think this one [1] provides a lot of background and explains the motivation.
I used to follow his lectures, but in the past 3 or 4 years he's become really quiet. I wonder if people stopped inviting him because he always overruns his time limit, or if he's too busy making progress on his theory.
