Comments by "Martin Maat" (@MartinMaat) on "Sabine Hossenfelder" channel.

  1. This is likely to be another case of "correlation is not causation". Troubled kids are more attracted to hiding in their phones. In the 1980s we had a similar hype about the supposed link between suicides and heavy metal (lyrics). It faded away. So will this.
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  2. The internet is the electronic equivalent of the postal service.
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  3.  @ritikadhami867  I don't think it is necessarily a waste of time. Every generation says this about the prior one when they do things they never did. People learn a lot from social media. You may argue they learn "all the wrong things", that is no different from having "bad friends". Just like in the physical world they will have to learn to tell value from junk anyway.
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  4. This can indeed be confusing and disturbing to Americans. A joke should be followed by a second or two of canned laughter.
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  5. What I don't hear a lot as an additional concern (if ever) is the questionable stability of societies managing the plants and waste. Strict safety measures are meaningless when funding dries up or available knowledge fades away (because the people with the kills to handle it died from some new virus for instance). If a new era starts in which people have to choose between eating or processing nuclear waste responsibly, I think I know which way this will go. Compare that to a wind mill, a solar farm or a coal plant. These will just stop working and that will be it.
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  6.  @Myth1n  There is no product and thus no value. You can spend and secure all you want, if the result is nothing everything that lead to it is called waste.
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  7. It is NOT money.
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  8. This applies to a lot of work, it is not unique to academia. And probably why the western world is doomed economically.
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  9.  @Meshamu  Yes. You can choose to define the internet technically but you might just as well define it functionally, like "my social life provider". Or "a modern times propaganda machine that will destroy us".
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  10.  @blucat4  Natural language is not math. Few words mean exactly one, unambiguous, context-free thing.
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  11. It sounds like an organization without a purpose and as a result a lot of bored and frustrated people scrambling to keep their egos up.
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  12. You don't get something from nothing, you get nothing from nothing. This makes perfect sense. Then people start trading the newly created nothing, hoping they will at some point find a bigger ... who will take the nothing of their hands for more money than they paid for obtaining the nothing.
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  13. Good thing only idiots are distracted by that exposed bra strap and start thinking about how it must have been for her to notice it after she was done and then ponder if it would be worth the trouble of doing it all over again or not. I mean, these people do not come here to watch these videos anyway.
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  14. It's utter nonsense folks. It sounds like a test to see how stupid the population actually is, how many idiots can we make buy into this. Like, if we can sell them this, we can sell them any BS and make them pay for it.
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  15. About focussing on one variable: I don't see how this is bad because there will always be more variables regardless how many one includes. So the arbitrary number of variables might as well be one.
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  16.  @blucat4  It's a matter of perspective.
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  17.  @ArjanKop  It wasn't accessible to the general public but universities were using a "hyper text" style web, text based web pages with hi-lighted words that were links to other pages. Text based meaning character screens, the terminals used back then attached to a central computer, like 80x25 characters rather than a pixel based graphics screen.
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  18.  @Adrian_kal  Strictly speaking, TCP is not part of the internet. It stops with the network layer (IP). TCP is just a quality layer on top of it, in other words, already an application.
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  19.  @peter9477  I'm with you yet I cannot resist. "Web" originally refers to the multiple interconnections of nodes in which different paths exist from one node to another (as in a spider's web). As such it has nothing to do with web pages or the HTTP protocol. So one might argue "the internet" and "the web" are interchangeable terms.
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  20.  @peter9477  They are, like any other internet service, deployed in "the web". And because pages pulled over http became the most prominent and visible internet application, the term "web page" grew on us and became the document on the screen retrieved from a remote node.
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  21. Oh, well... For a moment I was hoping you were going to address Germany's slide back into fascism, its feeding the janoside with arms. But no.
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  22. Isn't that to be expected when you are not in the center of the universe?
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  23. ​ @Myth1n No, that is just waste. Cost does not add value to anything, there would have to be some desirable feature in the resulting product.
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  24. Nothing wrong with "moving cold" out of your home. I don't even use lamps to emit light anymore when it gets dark, I instead have these bulps that suck the dark out of the room.
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  25. Acceleration is not absolute. That spinning bucket only spins because it is embedded in the universe, it spins relative to its environment. What if that bucket IS the universe? Does our universe spin? How do we tell?
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  26. When you are rich enough, any idea you flaunt, no matter how stupid, will have people listen with a serious face rather than laugh and ridicule you.
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  27. Life time software developer here. Even if AI could write proper code (which it cannot), it would not solve a real problem. The real problem always is knowing what to do, not how. If you can tell the AI what it should do, you already solved the core problem yourself.
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  28. ​ @diadetediotedio6918 No, this is what you get when someone actually thinks about it for two minutes.
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  29. Same with aerospace. Once an industry has grown around any research project, the main goal of it will be to keep itself alive.
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  30. No. The danger is not in an AI potentially going rogue and turning against its creator. The danger is in it getting better at what it does and continuing to do exactly what its (human) controller demands from it.
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  31. I am missing the most obvious cause: sugar consumption. I would say it is more than plausible this is the no. 1 reason for the vast majority of cases. Contrary to popular belief it is not fat consumption (although too much of that won't help either).
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  32. Get rid of the leader sound please, it's head splitting ugly.
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  33. OK, let's settle on "doing well" to one's own determination. Success is being able to get by comfortably in society. I will always remember a story by a teacher in school who claimed is was possible to test a 3 year old for his or her chances to be successful later in life. He said "Put a stick in the ground and give the child a hoop. Then tell it to throw the hoop over the stick". Now basically three different outcomes are possible. Some may walk up to the stick and drop the hoop, claim victory. Those are losers. Others will make a run for it, swing the thing way beyond their might and miss. Those are also losers. Some however will set themselves a challenging goal, put their own mark in the ground at a reasonable distance and aim carefully. Those are the ones to watch. I believe this to be way more accurate than any intelligence test. Success has little to do with intelligence. Intelligence may help but may also work against you, make you lazy or wonder what's the point. I've seen intelligent people going nowhere. and vice versa
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  34. Better build more wind mills. These cut both ways. I am very skeptical about carbon removal. Like technology could ever have an significant impact compared to the global vegetation. Sounds like distraction to me.
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  35. ​ @mahbriggs Hitchen's razor.
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  36. If you consider a temporary transition effect "the future", sure. We don't see many steam enigines in transportation today. Likewise, we will not see many combustion engines in transportation given a couple of decades.
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  37. It's like pop music. It's a mill that turns and spits out stuff. Nobody cares what comes out, it's just something we all got used to. The more you think about it, the more things you spot this applies to.
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  38. With current prices of solar panels it seems to me people that have the space are better off with a boiler vessel and a shtload of solar panels. More versetile, simpler and cheaper with none of the downsides (noise, elektricity cost, disappointing performence, cumbersome installation).
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  39. Impossibility aside, considering humanity has been a disaster to earth, what makes anyone think expanding that to other planets makes a good idea? We didn't quite pass the test, did we?
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  40. Is there a mismatch between Sabine's autistic sense of humor and the way commenters are interpreting it? It is usually the other way around. Perhaps nerds need to be explicit to normal people too in order to be understood?
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  41. Compressing air is stupid. The air heats up when compressed. When it cools down you lose pressure and thus energy even before you started to expand. So the compression chamber would have to be really well insulated. There are no suitable materials to do this.
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  42. So we have all this nuclear waste people get worked up about. Let's stuff it in batteries and spread it all over the world. What could go wrong?
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  43. The claim that energy consumption would significantly heat up the atmosphere did not sound credible to me so I made a rough calculation. The earth's surface is 510072000 km2. We get about 1 kW/m2 from the sun on the equator which is 1GW/km2. Taking into account the curvature of the globe that roughly translates to an effective surface area of 100 million km2. That makes 100 million billion Watts hitting the earth continuously (10^17 Watts). For the sake of the argument, let's say only 10% of that power makes it into the lower atmosphere and the rest is reflected or immediately re-radiated outwards again. This leaves a conservative 10^16 Watts or 10000 TW coming in from the sun. Global power consumption is about 15 TW.
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  44. More people doing desk work? Computers?
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  45. I think the bigger misconception is that one cannot develop oneself to the front of AI with any investment (effort or subsidies). What we perceive as AI depends on access to a shtload of content data. Only a few parties (particularly those billionaires) have that access and they are not likely to pass it on.
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  46.  @jasondashney  That would be statistically significant and if I were a scientist I would be interested to see it being reproduced. Preferably against the weather forecast.
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  47. ​ @xzan88 "decentralized currency" is a contradiction in terms. BC is not money because it is not centralized. That is, because there is no issuer. The one thing that makes money money and what gives it value is the issuer, a powerful party you can not get around that forces you to pay taxes in that type of money.
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  48.  @xzan88  Yes they did use various commodoties. We call that barter. Even if your overlords would decide to use BC for money, which no state in its right mind would do because there is no way to issue or retract it in chosen amounts, it would be a technical desaster because the transaction system does not scale up. It is unfit to be used as currency, chickens would be more suitable.
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  49.  @xzan88  It is barter when you trade against goods that are inherently valuable, ragardless whether what you get in return is what you are ultimately after. It is ludicrous to build layers on top of a system that is unsuitable as currency when you have, or could have better alternatives, that are suitable as currency. BC is a gambling game, nothing more, nothing less. People hyping it are just after sheep they can dump their BC on, to hand over their losses to so they get out with more (real) money.
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  50.  @TartempionLampion  That is nonsense because there is no equivalence between BC and the entire financial system.
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