Transposed to a very different time and place, the "bravado" here really reminded me of the "repeated dives in a carbon-fiber sub to crushing depths" -- with such setups, it's just a matter of when, not if.
Those people died before they knew they were fucked. At some point acute radiation exposure makes it so they can’t even dose you with morphine properly. Same thing happened at Chernobyl if I recall.
That's something that seems to be missing from how people perceive the threat of nuclear weapons. It's pleasant and convenient to believe you'll instantaneously combust in a fireball as hot as the sun, but actually only very few people will be so lucky. Mostly it'll take days, weeks, months, and years. Not seconds or fractions of seconds.
This is Soviet propaganda. The real number from Nagasaki and Hiroshima was about half of the casualties were instant. Furthermore fallout is much more understood: after a few short days of hiding inside, the radiation levels will have fallen to where normal life can largely resume without fear, reducing the number of slow casualties.
Do you have any sources to back these claims? Also, what specifically do you mean by "half the casualties were instant"--is it that "of those who died, half of them died instantly" or "of those killed and injured, half of them received their injuries instantly". Or is it some other thing?
I think you're falling into exactly the sort of trap I was talking about, that the enormity of the devastation is so unimaginably great that it's difficult to imagine what it would actually be like, and to (somewhat lazily) conclude "well, it'd probably be instantaneous". But, for example, this analysis doesn't support that idea at all: https://thebulletin.org/2020/08/counting-the-dead-at-hiroshi...
In Scandinavia we're still sending samples of hunted wild boars to check for cesium. Large parts of Belarus are quite contaminated and the local tyrant is the reason we know very little about how it affects the population in those regions.
Same with accidents involving nuclear power generators (and their waste). Most people on HN won't have the chance to engage in Slotin's flavor of bravado... But the kind involved in recklessly, breathlessly advocating for nuclear power? Quite common, here.
I have operated a nuclear reactor. There is nothing in common with this tragic experiment. We have strict procedures that are rigidly followed, and are at all times far, far away from fissile material. We don’t suffer bravado.
And when we build dozens more, to cover the capacity nuclear pushers assure us that actual green energy can't? Chernobyl happened. Fukushima happened. Three Mile Island (almost) happened. That's an incident on almost every continent with more than one large reactor. You absolutely suffer bravado, and it's not isolated by culture or geography; it's bravado that's baked into the widespread use of the technology itself. To lack bravado would be to accept that human civilization, in this stage of development, is incapable of responsibly utilizing nuclear power generation at-scale.
It looks like they were copying out the contents of an online test/exam, and the "listen" could've been a recording that's played back (to make the test accessible to deaf/HoH folks).
The student might've included that button/link text when selecting, before doing their copy+pasta.
IME, LinkedIn suffers from a different problem: on there, "everything is awesome", and the toxic positivity embedded in its DNA always snuffs out any authentic rancor.
So yes, it's free of bad behavior -- but it's also free of "normal" conversations. It's just full of "thought leaders", "visionaries", and "visionary thought leaders".
Kagi itself runs on top of Google. It's certainly worth paying for (IMO), but let's not kid ourselves -- it is *not* a competitor (as in, can replace Google). Without Google, there is no Kagi.
Google isn't the only search engine they use (they have a small selfmade index, Brave, Marginalia, and others which they don't disclose, and "vertical information" like Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, etc..), but probably most of the results are from Google. Without Google there would still be Kagi, but maybe not as good as today.
I was hoping Kagi got some media coverage and this was an article covering how it's so much better than Google.
My problem is with companies who start by declaring they are going to take on Google. These kind of companies are nowhere to be found a few years later.
In TFA, "EdTech" refers to things like grade-school subjects: e.g. learning to do fractions. In this respect, replacing human teachers with software/apps is what's being debated. The consequence of this replacement is a sharp drop in face-to-face engagement, and the substitution thereof with 1:1 screen time.
You provided some examples of auto-didacts teaching themselves useful life skills via YT. I think these are good resources for such folks -- I know I've benefited from them myself -- but it's hardly in the same ballpark.
Would you be willing to share any (anonymized) anecdote(s) that helped you see this reality?
I'll share that I saw how much EdTech was infested by folks trying to leverage "gamification", and I read Kentaro Toyama's "Geek Heresy". That, and other events like Sebastian Thrun admitting "We have a lousy product" (on MOOCs) was enough to disabuse me of any notion that our generation's EdTech hype would prove any different than its predecessors (education over TV, or via Radio).
I worked leading the digital product of an education company with a whole methodology, books, teacher coaching program, etc.
The education guru of that company talked a lot about Estonia, Finland, and Singapore as models of the best education in the world (pre college). These countries get consistently good PISA scores. And guess what? Close to zero tech in education in these countries.
Some papers were released that showed fine motor control (eg pen and paper writing) has deep implications in cognitive development.
And then slowly we've started to see all the consequences of phones, tablets, social media etc on gen z and alpha. I don't think it's controversial to say kids should not be using these devices and there's plenty of research to prove it. Obviously schools in many countries are now banning them.
You should Google "marc prensky digital natives". You'll see this hype is over two decades old now.
> Unfortunately for our Digital Immigrant teachers, the people sitting in their classes grew up on the “twitch speed” of video games and MTV.
> They are used to the instantaneity of hypertext, downloaded music, phones in their pockets, a library on their laptops, beamed messages and instant messaging.
> They've been networked most or all of their lives.
> They have little patience for lectures, step-by-step logic, and “tell-test” instruction.
There's a lot more cheerful predictions:
> My own preference for teaching Digital Natives is to invent computer games to do the job, even for the most serious content.
> After all, it's an idiom with which most of them are totally familiar.
I think the core fact that learning is fundamentally about curiosity and motivation, not "engagement", was (and continues to be) glossed over, or intentionally ignored by a lot of tech-pushers.
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