But it hasn't! This is just another step in the BS storm coming out of the latest AI hype. The language model has reproduced something that has existed before and was likely part of its training data. That's cool, but it's far from what's being claimed here.
We really need to get better at fact checking this stuff. And with "this stuff" I mean the output of LLMs and other AI frameworks as well as the claims about it. And with "we" I mean society as a whole and our industry in particular. Let's keep the hype in the drawer. The general population can be hyped up about sth, but we should know better, so instead of joining the hype, let's keep a cool head and educate people about what this is and what it isn't.
Part of the problem is that there are many people in the field of security with overly strong opinions. This is not healthy. The field is full of know-it-all people, with if-only-people-were-not-as-dumb kind of attitudes. This is not helping anybody. Any not-as-strongly-opinionated bystander looks at this and has no clue whom to listen to, since so many people are strongly expressing 100% opposing views. Calling everybody else "dumb". This is not helpful to bring the field as a whole forward.
> a concrete helmet is literally worse than useless.
Is it? It would still absorb energy upon impact. Which, in contrast to popular belief about bike helmets, is its main function. Yes, ordinary bike helmets will also just break. But in doing so, they absorb energy which then won't be absorbed by your skull.
There is no point in a perfectly stiff helmet. It would just transfer the energy right through and you'd crash your skull into the helmet, which doesn't help.
It may not be as much of a factor at bicycle speeds, but I've read that heavy helmets can dramatically increase whiplash in things like motorsport. The increased mass on your head means higher forces trying to rip it off. Obviously the other benefits of real helmets outweigh that issue, but I'd imagine a concrete helmet with very poor shock absorption and very high mass would not fair so well.
Concrete is pretty stiff.
But mostly, wearing such a helmet will make it much harder to move your head around to scan your surroundings, increasing the chance of accidents.
Transport them? What are you talking about? The Soviets had bases all over the place in Eastern Europe.
The case being discussed here, Eastern Germany, was just behind the iron curtain, remember? Soviet troops were at ~300 locations on the GDR territory, ~50 airfields, over 300,000 soldiers, over 4,000 tanks.
The stationed troops and machines were not nearly enough to handle the situation, see my sibling comments. You can't suppress protests of several millions with 300k not-so-willing troops and 5000 not-so-good tanks (the Czechoslovaks manufactured their own tanks because of how bad the Soviet manufacturing was).
For one thing, the problem is your tanks and troops have to be ready all around the country - the protesting people are moving across the state quickly. One day there's a protest in Prague, second day it's in Brno - but you can't move your 300k troops and 5000 tanks from Prague to Brno in a day. And then the next day it's Ostrava and you have to do it again. Then an incident happens and that provokes a 10x bigger protest in Prague, Brno and Ostrava at the same time. That's impossible. You need much, much more troops and tanks to handle this scale of rebellion - and the requested air support that never came. And your tanks will never make people go back to work, anyways.
> The stationed troops and machines were not nearly enough to handle the situation, see my sibling comments. You can't suppress protests of several millions with 300k not-so-willing troops and 5000 not-so-good tanks
I don't know how old you are or where you were at the time. I was there. In the GDR, in East Berlin. On the streets. And I can tell you, a few tanks and troops getting their guns out would have made major impressions on people.
It's not just a numbers game. You are greatly oversimplifying history here. Quite naively so, I might add.
It's a great achievement of history that Gorbachev made the Soviets keep their feet still and among many eastern Germans it's regarded as quite the miracle that this whole episode went down non-violently. Look around in the world in the last decades. This was the major exception, and Gorbachev was central to that.
Also, let's get the picture of the situation straight. He didn't just passively sit bunkered in in Moscow, letting things happen. He actively went out to meet leaders of other involved powers, including the German chancellor and foreign minister, Kohl and Genscher, which he outlived by a few years.
Well, OK - I accept your opinion about GDR. But there are still the other states, and Gorbachev somehow forgot to save these too. I don't understand what makes him so good in light of the events in these other places. Isn't it interesting that only Germans are protective of him? You never hear such opinion in former Czechoslovakia. I never heard someone from Poland or Hungary talk about Gorbachev positively - neutral at best, and very unusually.
But Poland, Hungary, etc - they were not divided at least. It was a much bigger deal for Germany than for them. Also, the echo of WWII plays some role here I guess. Germany and other East European countries are in different positions here.
To expand, it seems to me like he worked to be friendly with the largest European economy while continuing to stomp on the smaller ones who didn't have their West part to look after them. Manipulative and calculating, definitely not good. Thank your West German friends, not Gorbachev.
Playing devil's advocate .. it will also get the kids more disconnected from the natural environment that we're embedded in, after all. You know those statistics of so-and-so-many kids out of 100 don't know where beefsteak comes from, where milk comes from or how potatoes grow? Since all they see is the result in the store? This gets worse when the kids change from lack of knowledge to thinking plants grow in glass pots without soil.
Hydroponics may be fun for hackers. But it's a bastardized form of growing plants, that happens to work, but it's a terrible way to convey science (if not taught very carefully and embedded in a much larger picture with actual nature).
I'm not seeing a binary here. My first impression of growing a plant was in a small styrofoam cup in a classroom. This impression in no way tainted by understanding of the science or reduced my appreciation for nature. In fact the experience did the exact opposite. We should all think less in 1s and 0s. Why not take kids out into nature and also introduce them to hydroponics? Can it not be both?
Visiting farms is nice to get an impression of how the real system works, but IMO it does little to help You understand the principles. You have to know those ahead to be able to grasp what the farmer actually does and why.
Seeing a growing a plant in a glass from a seed over multiple weeks does just that.
Once You understand / see for yourself why plants need water, air and nutrition, You'll see that farm in a completely different way.
Schools should drop children in a forest and let them fight bears for berries. If it was good enough for 40,000 generations of hominids it's good enough for me.
While I appreciate the hacking potential here .. I fail to see the point beyond it. You won't save any money over buying the salad at an expensive organic store. You won't help the environment (all the plastic and heating and electricity for artificial lighting won't ever be compensated by you saving on pesticides). You won't scale this up to become self-sufficient.
Just get a garden and put the plants in soil. Sure, they may not be as "perfect". But you can have more of them to compensate. Sunlight and rain will do most of the work, use some home-made compost for nutrition, done.
So, what's all the fuzz? Feels like hydroponics, especially with all those 3D-printing gadgetry, is bringing you further away from nature, not closer.
Hydroponics can be set up in my apartment. Not to mention that it can work all year: Lighting is important, since I'm pretty far north in an attic apartment with bad lighting.
Theoretically, I might be able to rent a plot 1.2km away, but I would have to carry my tools and things and honestly, it makes it all that much more inconvenient.
I'll also mention that I do not have an expensive organic store around, though most stores sell a bit of it. All of my produce is expensive anyway: I*m in Norway and a lot is shipped in. Varieties grown at home aren't attractive because of these things, though. You get different tastes growing at home. Tomatoes, for example, are generally better.
Also: Folks use these methods to grow pot, and I completely understand not growing it where others can steal it... if you are even lucky enough to live where growing outside will not land you in jail.
On the topic of growing vs buying plants, well of course buying plants is going to be cheaper. There are economies of scale at the very least. You're probably not going to be growing your own plants because it's cheaper to do so.
On the topic of hydroponics; limited space is one factor. Hydroponics can be bent to fit your space in a way that soil based often can't. Once you start trying to make like vertical planters or something you're probably spending as much money on frames or shelves as you would on a hydroponics setup and you've still got to haul water to your shelf of planters and water them all individually.
For hydroponics I just have a bucket on the floor that I can fill with water, and it will automatically water the plants that are well above my head. There's just a lot less physical labor involved in filling up a bucked once a month than in trying to water a bunch of individual plants.
You've got to remember that for the most part these are happening indoors, in people's living spaces. If those same people had a large yard they might be using raised beds and irrigation. It also frankly take a lot less thinking, I don't have to worry about pest control or if the sun dried out the soil earlier than I expected so I need to water more, or pretty much anything related to climate.
Personally I have one of those 3D printed hydroponics towers, an automatically irrigated soil planter, and regular house plants that I have to water manually. Of the three the ones I have to water manually tend to have the most issues, issues with root rot or under-watering, issues with nutrient unavailability (I've gotten better at recognizing when they need some artificial fertilizer but it is a skill), etc.
The best is probably the automatically irrigated soil planter box.
Other than that I'm looking into this cause I'm frequently away for 4-5-7 days with no one to water my plants and also live in a small apartment(in the EU) so don't really have a nearby garden as an option.
> bringing you further away from nature, not closer
Yep, I agree, however, I also feel soil is more perfect/magical than hydroponics and less fun if you want to hack around on a small scale.
I still prefer a garden but it's just not viable at the moment.
But it hasn't! This is just another step in the BS storm coming out of the latest AI hype. The language model has reproduced something that has existed before and was likely part of its training data. That's cool, but it's far from what's being claimed here.
We really need to get better at fact checking this stuff. And with "this stuff" I mean the output of LLMs and other AI frameworks as well as the claims about it. And with "we" I mean society as a whole and our industry in particular. Let's keep the hype in the drawer. The general population can be hyped up about sth, but we should know better, so instead of joining the hype, let's keep a cool head and educate people about what this is and what it isn't.