This is something I've been watching and thinking about for many years as tangential to a primary interest. It's not all bad as there have been many benefits to these changes too. These aren't occurring in isolation, since many other changes with similar effects pile on top of eachother to amplify the issues.
There are the usual culprits that people talk about and others which people don't seem to think about much. Looking forward to reading the book mentioned in the article to see someone else's in depth thoughts.
"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."
The Department of Energy concluded with low confidence that it was a lab leak.
The FBI concluded with moderate confidence that it was a lab leak.
The CIA's new report also concludes that they have low confidence that it was a lab leak.
It's important to note that low confidence is a positive number, not a negative number.
The wet market theory loses some credibility given some data points, but the lab leak theory remains plausible.
China has had lab leak origins in the past, so this would not have been unprecedented.
China obstructed and delayed the investigation.
Whether it leaked from a lab or not, China covered it up. China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak. If there was any truth to it (which they may not even know), they probably wouldn't want it reflecting poorly on the state. China is big on "social harmony", so you don't have the right to know.
Whatever happened wasn't necessarily intentional. China made some deeply embarrassing and shameful decisions around this time and they won't want to promote them, but they were also not alone in making mistakes.
If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that, there wouldn't have been as much need for the world to speculate, analyze and investigate so much which only hurt China's reputation more.
Coincidences occur, serendipity occurs. Most people have experienced one. As a result, proximity to the lab is not solid proof, but it is not the only datapoint either.
If China was more transparent and cooperative, there could have been more information to make higher confidence conclusions with.
The first large cluster of infections was associated with the Huanan Seafood Market, and retrospective analyses of influenza-like-illness patients and blood donations in Wuhan found no evidence of earlier circulation.
Sampling of many individuals prior to December 2019 showed no positives for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, suggesting that the virus did not spread widely before the market outbreak.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology is not known to have possessed a sufficiently close backbone strain to engineer SARS-CoV-2, and there is no public data indicating they had undisclosed viruses that match it.
Specific genomic features, like the furin cleavage site, appear suboptimal for an engineered virus (e.g. the PRRAR sequence and an out-of-frame insertion), which fits with a virus evolving naturally rather than through targeted gain-of-function work.
Several closely related bat coronaviruses have partial insertions near the S1/S2 region, suggesting that such changes can occur naturally over time and need not be artificially inserted.
A negative binomial pattern of SARS-CoV-2 transmission, with many zero-spreader events and a small number of superspreader events, is consistent with a spillover followed by rapid amplification in a crowded market setting.
Evidence of multiple potential intermediate animal hosts (e.g. wildlife farmed animals) further increases the probability that a bat coronavirus evolved into SARS-CoV-2 through natural spillover events rather than intentional engineering.
Early cases identified at the market and lack of widespread pre-epidemic infection clusters elsewhere in Wuhan align with the idea of a swift zoonotic jump to humans in late 2019.
The closest natural relative origin of SARS-CoV-2 was in Yunnan ~700 miles away from the market.
The Wuhan lab collected samples from that area and the lab is only ~10 miles away from the market.
Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there.
Why that market in Hubei and not first at a market closer to Yunnan? It might be more profitable to transport and sell them there, but it's still a long way to travel and avoid spreading during that time just to end up at a market so close to that lab.
A lot of reasoning around whether a lab leak is more likely doesn't require it to be engineered or modified in any way.
The closest _known_. The second closest was found in Laos, also 700 miles from Wuhan (BANAL-52). Except it's in the other direction.
So we know that close cousins of CoV-2 are pretty wide-spread.
> Those wet markets are huge vectors for a viral spread, so a virus being spread there doesn't necessarily mean it started there
The thing is, does it really matter? We can say with a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was _not_ engineered. So even if the very first jump was in the lab, it was likely a result of insufficient biosecurity measures. But the virus (and its close cousins) are still out there in nature, and it's a matter of time until a new spillover happens.
>We can say with a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was _not_ engineered.
The lab leak hypothesis doesn't depend on GoF research. CoV-2 could have a natural origin, been collected by the WIV, and leaked into the city. This has happened before.
That said, there's no way to evaluate if it was engineered. Some methods of engineering are indistinguishable from natural selection, and fingerprints from detectable methods have a very short half-life in a fast mutating virus.
>So even if the very first jump was in the lab, it was likely a result of insufficient biosecurity measures.
Virtually no one is claiming otherwise. This is a weakman argument.
>and it's a matter of time until a new spillover happens.
At the start of CoV-2, everyone told me that it takes years to develop vaccines. I told them it takes days to develop and weeks to test. Turns out that I was right. If the mortality rate of CoV-2 had been 3%, like early reports suggested, then the mRNA vaccines would have been in production by March.
Yup. This was like finding an alligator virus in Boston and arguing about whether it's nearest relative was in Alabama or Mississippi... they would be in basically the same direction from Boston.
I was curious so I did a quick research on the previous SARS-CoV-1, the one that caused an outbreak back in 2003. Looks like they weren't able to find the natural reservoir for that one either. We did know it came directly from masked palm civets sold at local markets, but we don't know how those civets were infected. They were raised in farms, and no virus was found in those farms.
And the closest natural match? WIV16 at 96.0%, again found on bats in Yunnan, again very far from Guangdong - where that outbreak started.
So I think it must be because Yunnan has a lot of bats? that's why all the closest matches are found there?
Forgive the silly question, but does the lab leak theory entail the virus being engineered in the lab, or simply sampled from nature by researchers then not adequately contained?
I’m not clear on what exactly is being alleged by these agencies?
One of the key parts of the lab leak hypothesis is that, depending on who is advancing it, it ranges from "poor biocontainment of a natural virus" to "engineered and released" with everything in between.
Biocontainment just means that the virus stays in the lab and doesn't move outside it - be that the disposal of lab materials, accidental infections, etc.
Those are both examples of a hypothetical lab leak. The WIV had the largest collection of related viruses in the world sampled from nature. The WIV performed GoF research on some of those viruses. They're both plausible events. I'm not sure how you could ever distinguish between them at this point.
How many times do we need to repeat "lab leak != intentionally lab engineered"? Your most relevant parts are all about the latter. You know this, yet muddy the waters.
Very good summary, but the problem is, like most things, it is impossible to 100% rule out the lab theory. It is always possible to look at one of these evidences and say "yeah, but ...". And given how politicized this question is, people are just going to believe what they want to believe. I am quite pessimistic about this, that people will remain rational.
I have no idea if the report's conclusions are correct, but I doubt a report like that was created in three or four days. Tasking expert analysts, reassigning the manpower necessary and going through legal and secrecy review in 96 hours would be extraordinary for a large bureaucratic agency. Sure, it could happen but that kind of all-hands, crisis urgency is hard to keep quiet. It's something we'd hear about from insider leaks.
I think it's more plausible that the report existed (because we know the CIA did look into it multiple times already) and the previous director had decided not to release it. And now the new director decided differently. Both of those decisions (not release vs release) were probably politically motivated to some extent but we don't have to jump to assuming an entire new report was fabricated with different conclusions practically overnight. After all, most government agencies that looked into it already concluded with low or medium confidence that it was a lab leak. It's not like the CIA report conclusion is an outlier here.
But they also say that there's no new evidence of any kind.
They are just choosing to believe the lab leak hypothesis now, because they spent more time thinking about the conditions of the labs before Covid started.
...
And it's still low confidence... Since there's no evidence.
Sad stuff, really. Any self respecting person would just not express their opinion in such a situation.
Just about the only value of this new report is that it tells Trump what he wants to hear.
> the agency was not bending its views to a new boss
Trump has thrown the China hawks under the bus. To the extent anyone is winning accolades by pushing this hypothesis, it's in giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation. That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.
(Counterfactual: Soviet bureaucrats would notoriously produce reports for every possible conclusion, and then pick the one that would please the boss.)
> That's too marginal to motivate an adverse conclusion at the CIA.
The decision to not release by the previous director and the decision to release by the new director probably were political to some extent. But I agree with you that the report's impact is too marginal to assume its creation or conclusion was politically motivated. But I think that for a different reason: I doubt adding yet another "low confidence" agency report onto the pile of existing ones changes much - either in geo-political super power negotiations or in the mind of the American public.
The issue has been played out and it's not top of mind or relevant anymore. The majority of people have already made up their minds one way or the other - or decided it doesn't matter anymore and they don't care. Pretty much everyone already acknowledges we'll never know for sure.
> ... giving Trump leverage in a trade negotiation.
That is a perfectly valid hypothesis. In the EU there are also doubts as to what Trump's actual goals are. People are preparing for the scenario that first Biden and now Trump are driving a wedge between the EU and China, whereupon Trump will suddenly change course and be China's best friend. (The unspoken second thesis is that the same scheme applies to Russia):
"There’s another scenario that has the Europeans worried: After getting a reluctant EU onside with his anti-Beijing agenda, the famously fickle Trump could U-turn and end up ganging up on the bloc with his “very, very good friend” Xi Jinping, China’s president."
"There’s precedent for that: In 2020, after years of escalating hostility during Trump’s first term in office, Washington and Beijing struck a mini trade deal aiming to increase U.S. exports to China and to ease their trade war."
"Now, Trump has billionaire China dove Elon Musk in his ear — and he needs Washington to retain good ties with Beijing to keep his electric vehicle company Tesla afloat."
My point is nobody at the CIA is winning a promotion for helping on a trade negotiation like this. It's unlikely this was politically motivated in substance. (Timing may be.)
Trump is trying to bully everyone into submission and when that fails, hit them with tariffs and sanctions. It's what he did during his first mandate when he invited his "very good friend" Xi at his Mar-a-Lago estate. When a deal regarding the DPRK nuclear prigram failed to materialize he began threatening China with tariffs. I don't see any reason why it would be different now, only more "ambitious".
The EU should have its own China policy irrespective of the Trump Administration's.
>China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak.
Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.
Cover-ups are a cultural thing in East Asia because reputation is paramount. They'll attempt to cover up anything that makes them look bad as means to protect their reputation. So the second part of your statement is not necessarily true.
China attempted information control on SARS-1, but rolled most of it back by April. They still haven't done this for SARS-2. That's not proof, but is a difference. Enough small differences can add up to a large difference.
"China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis."
this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.
You can only assume from this that whatever was going to be found would have been unfavorable to them. Although that would be the case with both the market theory and the lab leak theory.
Or you understand that there is going to be a viral outbreak and you can choose: save the rest of the world from the pandemic or limit information and allow people to spread the virus globally to ensure that your nation doesn’t suffer disproportionately.
I'm not sure what the Department of Energy's qualifications are (I know they're in charges of nukes so maybe also bioweapons?) but I don't see what relevance the FBI's opinion has.
The National Labs, where a tremendous amount of infectious disease work is done for national-scale questions. I've worked with them in the past, and considered taking a job with them - of the various agencies, they're the ones who have weighed in with probably the most expertise.
>If China concluded it was a lab leak internally and shared that,
This insinuates the only reasonable conclusion is PRC lab leak. The only fact is we don't know where covid originated, only PRC was the first to detect and acknowledge it, and for doing so, US under PRC hawk admin tried to weaponize for propaganda war. PRC can still say covid come out of Fort Detrick, and until US opens up soveriegn US soil to WHO investigation (good luck now), then this is all a US coverup and it would be perfecty cromulant position and as "true" as anything CIA claims.
>If China was more transparent and cooperative
If US under Trump and Pompeo wasn't utterly antagonistic to PRC during time frame, there might have been more cooperation. This new CIA spin is continuation of the same geopolitical games.
There are a few things to consider that I’ll add, which further bolster the idea that China has systematically covered up up a lab leak that caused the COVID-19 pandemic:
1. Coronaviruses are hard to contain, even if you have good practices. For example, the earlier SARS outbreak (from the early 2000s) had several documented lab leaks, including multiple within China (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7096887/).
3. The WHO got completely manipulated by China, either willingly or just due to their incompetence. For example, it is well documented now that the WHO publicly praised the Chinese government but privately was concerned and frustrated by the lack of transparency and sharing of vital information, including blocking visits to Wuhan (https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-china-blocked...).
4. The NIAID (Fauci’s agency, under NIH) conducted gain of function research through a third party, EcoHealth Alliance. The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order. There was evidence that the NIH helped EcoHealth craft their grant language in a way to avoid oversight processes that would have blocked the grant (https://theintercept.com/2021/11/03/coronavirus-research-eco...). Note that the president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, is a listed author on gain of function publications from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. After years of trying to bury this, the Biden administration finally blocked funding to EcoHealth in 2024 (https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/health/us-government-suspends...).
5. China only allowed a WHO visit over a year after they knew of the COVID-19 outbreak, in early 2021. They only allowed specific people to participate in the investigation, and the only person allowed from the US, was the same Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance who participated in the research at Wuhan Institute of Virology (https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/03/asia/wuhan-coronavirus-who-ba...).
> The US government surprised many researchers on 17 October when it announced that it will temporarily stop funding new research that makes certain viruses more deadly or transmissible.
So it's not clear what the actual order entails and how temporary it was. And the whole advisory language ("asked scientists") seems to be kinda distinct from "banned".
> The grants are all public and document gain of function research, which was illegal since President Obama had banned it through an executive order.
In general, these kinds of conspiracy theories just collapse when you start pulling the threads.
>In general, these kinds of conspiracy theories just collapse when you start pulling the threads.
You think it's a conspiracy theory that Obama banned GoF research? OK, it was through an OSTP directive working with the NIH rather than an EO, but that's splitting hairs. It also wasn't banned, but only subject to a higher degree of scrutiny.
Concern about China is not partisan anymore, pretty much everyone is on board now.
Also from the article:
"Officials said the agency was not bending its views to a new boss, and that the new assessment had been in the works for some time."
But we know Trump lies, and that people around him change their story and lie for him, and we know he gets rid of personnel who don't 'kiss the ring'... and this comes at the exact instant that he says he's going to start his import tariffs for Chinese goods and needs media support to convince USA-ians that making all goods coming from China now expensive is a good idea...
I mean you're going to need extraordinary evidence to show this is true; but CIA say there's no new evidence and it's a low confidence conclusion.
Probability that it's just Trump continuing to be deceitful and manipulative approaches certainty.
I don't know anything about the specifics, but a thought that came to mind is:
If you're trying to thin down agencies to reduce costs so the government can significantly reverse or slow its financial trends to buy more time, shaking things a little and seeing who complains could certainly get quick feedback about what to prioritize or what to cut.
If your job is so unimportant that you aren't willing to reach out and make a case to the relevant people for why it is important, maybe the mission won't be deemed strong enough to justify spending tax payer dollars on.
For work that does produce actual value, assistance could be provided in converting that mission to a private company if the entities that depended on it existing will realistically pay for its services. If it's important and nobody would pay, maybe keep or test viability for converting to a non-profit organization that relies on donations. If it's both unimportant and nobody would pay, probably cut.
Existing employees working on it can then be given time/finances to help deal with any transition deemed necessary.
The existing government URLs or resources for it could then redirect to the privatized group, which can carry on its legacy.
It wouldn't surprise me if we see some more agencies facing various kinds of disruption just to see who gets noisy to gather data.
It's worth keeping in mind that government shutdowns are probably far more disruptive and have lasted from 16-35 days.
> If your job is so unimportant that you aren't willing to reach out and make a case to the relevant people for why it is important, maybe the mission won't be deemed strong enough to justify spending tax payer dollars on.
"If you don't complain, maybe your job is not important".
"If you complain, your job is important".
Do these takes sound reasonable to you?
> For work that does produce actual value, assistance could be provided in converting that mission to a private company if the entities that depended on it existing will realistically pay for its services.
If the solution is to privatize anything that produces value (and I think we can agree that cancer research does produce value), why do we need the government again? That scenario doesn't even sound realistic as it assumes the transition would be done seamlessly, but that can't happen when the existing entity is shut down abruptly.
I think it's blatantly obvious that removing funding from NIH is a negative thing for regular people (not only for Americans), but naive people still try to spin actions like this as something that is being done in their best interest. Please think instead in terms of "how can benefit the people that made the decision", and you'll soon find the real reason why it's being done.
If you firmly believe that your job is important and helping people, then it seems reasonable that you would complain and try to get an exception or other people who know of the program would complain. It's not perfect, some people would just be defeatist and assume things are happening at a higher level that they have no control over, even if they think their role is important.
The solution would not be to privatize anything that produces value, the solution would be to assess whether privatization would be a good fit for some of the things that do have value, but don't strictly need to be run by the government.
I'm not assuming anything seamless, but the process would occur before something gets shut down, not after. I didn't get the impression from the article that anything was totally shut down, just some kinds of activities were paused? I'm not really responding specifically to this, so much as just the general critical need to reduce costs.
That said, cutting government costs and people's dependencies on the government down to within a reasonable threshold is in people's best interest.
In China and Russia, so many people work for the government. Keeping people not just employed, but ideologically on the side of the status quo of the government can get out of control. It's convenient in some ways, because you can just create jobs out of thin air if the job market is struggling.
The best interest of the people is definitely not infinite government growth.
Government spends a lot of money too. Spending some money can be in the interests of the people. Spending too much money can flip over to not being in their interest. Spending too much can reduce both the value and the trust (necessarily linked) in the US Dollar, slowly weakening our economic leverage for doing things on behalf of US citizens and our allies.
So just spending infinitely like there's no cost to creating money is also not in people's best interest.
Some projects could fail, some things that were valuable might fall apart, I don't know. Ideally it's done with some finesse and important things are either kept or found a new home. But the logic of compassion significantly favors cutting government spending and government dependency when it gets past some threshold.
Absolutely, governments should work for the people. Sometimes in order to do more for someone, you do less for them. There's a balance. Sometimes what you or the country needs is not what you want.
A lot of people don't necessarily want us spending a lot on military and defense, but we need to. By spending on it, we maintain the private industries even in times of relative peace so that when we do need them they're still there and we don't have to build them up from scratch again. It also becomes an expected necessary cost, so any other initiatives we try to fund have to contend with that part of the budget already being spent. This way we don't accidentally tie up what used to be military funding in all kinds of other programs so that not only do you have to rebuild production, but you have to sort out the financial problems too.
Governments make all kinds of decisions based on calculations from analysts, politicians, geopoliticians and so on. What people want is a factor, but not necessarily the most important one.
With our government shutdowns, congress and the president both have to agree on where to appropriate funds and how much funding to appropriate for the government. This funding has to occur, because there are critical programs that everyone agrees on, so there's actual pressure to get it passed. At the same time, there are other things that different representatives want to get funded or programs they disagree about and they'll leverage the pressure to appropriate funds before a shutdown or to shorten a shutdown in order to squeeze out decisions that are normally delayed/ignored.
That said, there is a critical culture in the US around hassling the government and not treating it as your friend. The government may work for you, but it is not your friend. Governments are bears. Do not feed the bears. Respect them, accepting their co-existence and the value they offer in an ecosystem, sure. Just don't train the bears to come to you when they're hungry, because some day you'll find that it's not a good idea to have a hungry bear in front of you.
Even though this is historically true and deeply wise, people find themselves steadily expanding the government despite the government being in debt. We also get people in congress that will vote no on almost anything, because they believe in small government with limited power and are concerned every time it expands.
So the shutdowns kind of happen as they haggle over these kinds of issues.
People have been talking about this issue for a long time now.
We know it's an important problem and it's not the first time community has sort of collapsed, but it takes time for society to adjust back to a balance. Whether we force a fix or not, after the older generations pass away there will be more opportunity and sense of purpose/meaning in reaching out.
When stability and satisfaction is relatively achievable without others, the required motivational threshold for putting in the effort to make connections gets higher. This compounds when some businesses, events and organizations that rely on strong socializing tendencies to succeed start to decline. Then those have to be rebuilt once people realize the problem.
The worry is that the internet and online socializing could keep us in a groove that limits the effectiveness of any corrective measures, reducing the ROI on initiatives to solve it.
> When stability and satisfaction is relatively achievable without others, the required motivational threshold for putting in the effort to make connections gets higher.
Maybe it's something simple, like: the mind craves words - and expressions made thereof - and social media gives just enough of a fix that the restless mind is not driven to seek out conversations & encounters in the flesh. Shyness becomes self-reinforcing. Awkward wins.
I don't necessarily think it's simple from that angle. It's more like convenience and efficiency often come with encapsulation and reduced friction, which puts us in bubbles that cause us to slip right past eachother. That alone causes so many things to snap into place in the direction of training us to enjoy self-time until it reaches unhealthy saturation.
That may be the unique issue. Maybe a good portion of people never realize the problem and sustain on artificial intimacy. The internet is really good at giving people the facade of such interactions.
Haven't really been following the latest in TTS ML, but I expected this to be better or at least as good-bad as the stuff you hear on YouTube. Somehow it sounds worse. It really is jarring to listen to any of these ML voices and can't really stand it. Nope out of every video that uses them and can't tell if YouTube never recommends them to me for that reason, or just because the recommendations around what I watch are just so rarely going to be from some low reputation channel.
Take a moment here for a second though and think about it. Even if these voices got to be really good, indistinguishable almost... would I want to listen to it even then? If it was an NPC's generated voice and generated dialogue in a game to help enrich the world building, maybe in that context. On YouTube or with newscasters? Probably not. Audio books? Think I would still rather have it be a real person, because it's like they're reading a story to me and it feels better if it's coming from someone. There's also the unknown factor, where if it's ML generated it's so sterile that the unknowns are kind of gone.
Think about it like this, in the movie industry we had practical effects that were charming in a way. You could think about the physical things that had to occur to make that happen. Movie magic. Now, everything is so CG it's like the magic is gone. Even though you know people put serious hard work into it, there's a kind of inauthenticity and just lack of relevance to the real world that takes something away from it.
It's like a real magician has interesting tricks, while an artificial magician is most likely just a liar.
Still, I grant that it makes some cool things possible and there is potential if things are done right. Some positive mixture of real humans and machine generated stuff so it isn't devoid of anything connected to real life effort.
I'm not going to pretend to know everything about Ollama, llama.cpp or llamafile, but my experiences using llama.cpp and llamafile (llama.cpp based) were both negative. Web UI frontends aren't relevant here, this is just purely about whether I can load a model and get it to produce coherent results that are in the realm of what the people who created the model intended.
With llama.cpp or llamafile, I was constantly having to look up a model's paper, documentation or other pages to see what the recommended parameters were, recommended templates were, and so on. My understanding is that GGUFs were supposed to solve that, yet still I was getting poor results.
You know, I don't know all the details or if there's any difference between what Modelfiles are for versus what GGUF metadata is for, but my experiences with Ollama have been that it just worked. It took me a while to even try Ollama, because the expectation is that it would simply be another interface on top of the same issues.
There are things I don't like about Ollama, but mostly they were easy to work around by writing a few scripts. Not using any web UI with it at all.
From my notes. Maybe it's useful to someone. Not comprehensive as there are other brands and other iterations I'm sure. Many dpreview.com sample galleries show original filenames. Some forums list filenames, youtube descriptions can list model names, pdf manuals and manufacturer websites sometimes list the names. There isn't really a good list of these that I know of.
What annoys me is that when a video is split into multiple files (because of sd card limitations etc), it increases the first number, giving you files that sort really weird. So I film GX010001.mp4, then after 8 minutes it starts a new file GX020001.mp4, GX030001.mp4 etc., and then later that day when I make a new clip, it has GX010002.mp4. This breaks sorting by filename. Can sort by creationdate, but for the chaptered videos they often share the same original datetime as well, making it quite confusing when dealing with loads of gopro videos. (I just published some tooling I've written for creating street view content from gopros, so felt all the quirks lately https://github.com/Matsemann/matsemanns-streetview-tools/ the gopro max starts with GS btw)
Yeah it’s infuriating. I’m using this tool mp4-merge them which afaik preserves almost pretty much all metadata / tracks. What I do in a bash script is: Find all groups of mp4 files that share same last 4 digits, pass those to mp4_merge, do a ‘touch -r’ to update timestamp of merged file to first file in batch. Has been working great so far.
In my notes the Sony section was listed Sony / Nikon, but there was non-Nikon pattern in there and I removed the Nikon label to reduce inconsistency. Then I didn't update the Nikon section to include the other pattern. :) Should be fixed now. If you notice anything else, let me know!
DSC_XXXX originates from Sony's "Digital Still Cameras" but has been used by multiple other manufacturers. Besides Nikon, my old Canon DLSR also used this naming scheme by default.
Saying that some law or principle works in one context, so it can probably work here or that some country did X so we can do it too doesn't really account for many of the nuances.
Solar panels aren't equally effective everywhere on Earth and some countries or parts of countries are just in different places on Earth. They're also not equally effective in all kinds of weather and some places just have worse weather.
You would need a huge oversupply to be able to reliably redirect energy to areas that are underproducing through long distance high voltage transfer lines, which are not perfectly efficient and lose energy along the way.
What if night time comes, as it tends to? What if a huge weather event blankets a lot of the country for a day or a few days? What if a volcano erupts somewhere and darkens the sky for a while?
Batteries, you say! Batteries have their limits too, and they were even worse 25 years ago.
Solar panels and batteries weren't simply about reducing costs and increasing supply, they were also about performance, how much land you need, where the land would be, managing adverse events, handling dips, efficiencies, creating jobs, projected innovations (where are we relative to where we can be), etc.
In another context, if you send food to poor countries that can't produce as much of their own food and the population starts increasing far beyond the resources of the land, you have a country that's even more dependent than it was before and risk terrible famine if a supply chain breaks down.
If the government had artificially pushed for the production of massive amounts of solar panels and batteries, it could make too many people dependent on something less reliable. When the government funding dries up for it, much of the demand and jobs can dry up too if the demand isn't naturally coming from the market.
You could also make the argument that if we had pushed so hard for crappy solar panels back then, it could have failed and soured interest in it even a few decades later. This could apply in the political sphere or even among the population who have memories of being stuck with crappy panels and all the problems they experienced. So if you really believe in and want solar panels to succeed, being too extreme about it too early can potentially be worse rather than better regardless of these cost principles.
The question has to be asked if something is truly effective altruism when assessed across the full cycle and span of the problem. I don't even know the full cycle or span of the problem, these are just outside observations. It's probably even more complicated than this.
It is not the truth, it is largely opinion informed by deep cynicism that fails to reflect on the complexities of human behavior and motivation. That does not mean it is completely divorced from any truth, but it is not usefully informative by itself.
Whether a society is capitalist or not does not define whether education is a right or a privilege. Another mistake is defining a country as capitalist and then shutting down any remaining capacity to think about it. Most countries contain a mixture of economic principles at work, so a surface level knowledge of capitalism that seems stuck in the 1800s will only leave you appearing naive and outdated.
Which country is it again that created the internet and has helped expand education not only locally, but globally for all mankind to benefit? Which country is it that created the greatest video platform on Earth, populated with a vast wealth of university lectures and documentaries on top of allowing people casually sitting at home to speak their mind for anyone to see (within reason)?
The U.S. is not without its problems as any country, but we're familiar with many of the problems we have which were already solved once before within the last century. Young people trained on cynical ideologies are highly suggestible, almost encouraged to see certain events as validation for that cynicism. It becomes their organizing principle, no longer looking for what solutions are being produced by a system or what uncorrupt motivations someone might have for any given decision. Only the negatives.
There are the usual culprits that people talk about and others which people don't seem to think about much. Looking forward to reading the book mentioned in the article to see someone else's in depth thoughts.
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