It’s important to distinguish between predictive models and explanatory models, and between local models and global models.

The title implies an issue with global explanatory models, but the article describes issues with local predictive models.

Could be that book 7 had to be printed on lighter-weight stock if the page count would have exceeded the capacity for the hard-cover binding. (They may not have anticipated that a later book would get that big when they chose the stock at the start of the series.)

And Iron Man built his in a cave! With a box of scraps!

Conversation logs between the lab and Luna show that the agent had created an attendance policy but later lost track of it, allowing the employee’s lateness to continue for months.

Sounds like Luna should look into firing itself.

A lot of that approach made its way into dynamical systems theory and control theory.

I don’t know which meaning of “cybernetics” you’re referring to, but I’ve often thought the original movement (circa 1950–1980) was a lost goldmine for worldbuilders.

Cybernetics started as an interdisciplinary movement looking at all systems that influenced their environments via feedback mechanisms—from biology to economics, sociology, anthropology, neurology, and robotics. It looked at things like how systems need to model the things they’re trying to influence, how they need to match their degrees of freedom, and how they need to delegate control to their subsystems—all things worldbuilders would do well to consider, even for things like constructing magic systems.

But that version of cybernetics lost favor in the early 80s with the rise of neoliberalism, because it conflicted with the later’s ideology of universal market-based dynamics. The only part that survived was robotics, because the neoliberals never came up with a market-based theory of kinematics.

It’s just a list of their customers.

The discussion could be relevant to more than just the original poster if other people with similar cases find the same thread later. If the OP is forced to state their jurisdiction, the discussion might be more focused, but potentially less useful to others.

He was visited by the ghost of Ted Stevens.

My suspicion is that institutional dysfunction results not so much from the dynamics of the institution itself as from other systems evolving to more effectively exploit it.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

The idea that Trump’s “intel” team was inclined to dismiss the threat is the first thing that makes me think it might have been real after all.

I’m surprised the chip wasn’t sold on the black market before the missile was assembled.

Raspberry PIs.

I’d just call that respiration. Every definition of breathing I can find is particular to lungs.

Edit: Actually, that’s not true—I found a dictionary that lists a broader metaphorical usage that encompasses all respiration (including plants and fish).

The article you linked doesn’t discuss how the DR evolved, but it seems more likely to result from the occasional risk of submersion faced by most land animals, rather than something they all inherited from fish (who neither breathe nor sleep).

That’s an easy hypothesis to test, because all land vertebrates have fish ancestors.

Do you see all land animals washing their faces with cold water to wake up?

The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana in the Colombian Caribbean are so vast that they can be seen from a plane at high altitude.

Is “pre-Hispanic” a general replacement for “pre-Columbian”, or is it just used in Colombia to avoid confusion with the country name?

That assumes that AI companies are negatively impacted by the quality of their product. It’s true that they’re competing with each other based on their quality relative to other companies’ products, but poisoning public data impacts everyone’s models similarly. Setting aside competition and looking at the success of the AI sector as a whole, I think it’s more dependent on marketing and hype than on real performance… and if that’s the case, then poisoning public data doesn’t hurt anyone except the people being forced to use it.

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić.

It’s a novel written in the form of three (Christian, Jewish, and Muslim) interwoven but mutually-contradictory encyclopedias, with events and characters spanning over a thousand years of history.