The Dead Sea Scrolls don't contain Greek or Roman texts so I'm not sure why you are mentioning that at all. The House of Wisdom ceased to exist in the 1200s, and in general the evidence there is that the focus was on what we would call scientific rather than literary works. It is true that many of the texts that we have from Christianity came to us through Muslim lands but they did at the end of the day come from Christian sources. As for your point about Oxyrhynchus and other middens, that's certainly a correct one, and my language was definitely overbroad, although even then the major texts came to us from Christian preservation. Moreover, many of the texts at Oxyrhynchus and in similar finds are day to day documents. But in so far as there are some texts at middens that fall into that category that we don't have from other sources, in that regard your criticism does have some validity. I should have said something like "largely" rather than "purely".
That seems unfair to Okian Warrior. While I do disagree with their position (and I do agree that I did show my work), I don't think their response is unreasonable, and I don't think jumping to conclusions about whether Okian agrees with the AC is warranted based on their post.
At a certain point, some classes of comments are transparently not serious attempts to have discussion or are people who are so divorced from reality that it really isn't in general worth the time or resources to spend that much time on them. Yes, I suppose one could point out to the person who is making comments about Christianity that in fact Christianity was responsible for the preservation of many texts from other religions and cultures and that of what we have of classical Greek and Roman literature is due purely to the preservation by monks, but why bother? Anyone who didn't sleep through high school history should know that. Similarly, one could respond to the people making anti-Islamic comments by pointing out that during much of the Middle Ages it was far easier to be a Jew or Christian in an Islamic area than it was to be a Jew or Muslim in a Christian area, but none of these people are seriously interested in those discussions.
Because there's a difference between burning books at some points in time (which Christianity certainly did, as did many other religious and ideologies) and burning books being such a complete default that one should be "surprised" by it. In that context, just like some of the other Islam related comments in this thread, it is classic trolling, and if sincere says more about the people making the statements than it does about the groups they are making comments about.
These are languages where we have some pre-existing examples and vocab. It isn't like these are languages which were until now completely unknown. From TFA:
But perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago. Two of the erased texts, for instance, were inked in Caucasian Albanian, a language spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan. According to Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura, Caucasian Albanian only exists today in a few stone inscriptions. Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”
Other hidden texts were written in a defunct dialect known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a mix of Syriac and Greek, which was discontinued in the 13th century only to be rediscovered by scholars in the 18th century.
Of course, with sea related words discovered, the obvious line of jokes is to connect this with the Deep Ones, Dagon and Cthulhu. No doubt, the true horror in the more obscure texts is being kept quiet, possibly known only to the Laundry and the Black Chamber.
Not exactly. Palimpsets are on parchment not paper, and the method works in part because classical methods of writing used thick ink that was there for a long time which was then scraped away. Doing this with modern ink on a piece of paper is a very different story.
http://jair.org/papers/paper5512.html has the actual paper. What they have proven is that determining whether one can on an n-n chess board, given a starting set of queens in certain locations solve the n-queens problem on that board is NP-complete, and that counting the number of solutions is P#-complete (which is a little more technical and I don't want to get into). Here's the basic idea (if you want more, I recommend reading an intro complexity book like "The Nature of Computation" by Moore and Mertens):
A a class of yes or no questions is in P if there is an algorithm which in time which is bounded by a polynomial of the length of the problem instance can answer the question. Easy examples of classes in P are "Is the number k have an even number of digits?", and "Does a divide b with remainder c?".
A class of problems is in NP if when it is a set of yes or no questions where when the answer is yes, there is an algorithm to which one can supply a proof that can be checked to be valid in polynomial time. An example of a problem class in NP is "Is the number n composite?" since if the answer is yes, the proof given is to just give the divisor and someone can check that. Note that this problem turns out to actually be in P, but this is a deep result https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test. Also, note that any problem class in P is trivially in NP because the proof one then uses is simply the empty string, and the algorithm is simply one's P-algorithm.
It turns out that certain problem classes are NP-complete. A class of problems is NP-complete essentially if the problem class is in NP, and if one had a magic device which could solve the problem instantly then one could use it to solve all NP problems. It turns out that many, many problems are NP-complete, to the point where many computer science journals will no longer accept papers proving something is NP complete unless there's something noteworthy about it (such as proving it for a historically significant problem like in this case, or proving it for a problem that people have previously not succeeded at proving to be NP complete).
It also isn't even the only chess related problem which is NP-complete. For example, the retrograde chess problem is NP-complete. That problem is whether given an arbitrary chess board with some set of pieces, can you reach a given other configuration? It is very easy to make NP-complete or NP-hard problems involving chess, and this has to do with the fact that generic chess (who would win with a given configuration and a given set of pieces) is either PSPACE complete or EXP complete depending on how exactly one generalizes certain aspects of chess (such as the 50-move stalemate move). Curiously, Go is actually worse under some versions of the ko rule, extending even to being NEXP-complete (NEXP is conjectured to be larger than EXP or PSPACE and is provably bigger than NP).
Actually, Musk's interest in neuralink is in part to help make sure that we do end up with safe general AI and that we don't have substantial problems with unfriendly AGI. See https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html which gives a detailed breakdown of the goals and likely obstacles.
By the end of his term it will be clear that Trump is the biggest mistake America has ever made.
Bigger than allowing slavery? Bigger than Vietnam? Bigger than leaded gasoline?
I think it is already clear that Trump is the worst President in my lifetime, and probably the worst President we've ever had. But I'm not convinced he is the worst mistake for the US has ever made. Of course, there is still time, so you may turn out to be right. I sincerely hope not.
I agree that public transit is part of the problem. Of course, the two US cities I used as examples, Boston and NYC have some of the best public transit systems in the country. This is not a coincidence.
Boston, New York, Tokyo, and London are all very large cities with big tech sectors without these problems being nearly as severe. The greater Boston area includes Sommervile is literally the densest area by population in New England and is much denser than the Bay Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville,_Massachusetts but the rental cost is literally more than order of magnitude than it is for the same thing in the Bay. And the amount of housing construction in the Bay Area is literally almost zero https://www.curbed.com/2016/2/24/11102278/bay-area-housing-crisis-bubble. The problem really here is a lack of construction that is coming almost completely from overly strict zoning and building codes. Centralization doesn't enter into it.
The solution to the problems is really simple: build more housing. How do you get more housing built? Well, for starts not having some of the most restrictive zoning laws in the country, and having people fight back at any housing that is less than ideal would be a major aspect. Unfortunately, there are people who are advocates for the poor who don't get this and have gone out of their way to block housing that doesn't have affordable housing built into it, which just results in total fewer housing.
Hollywood is interested in making money. As long as people prefer to see a certain type of person movies will have more of those people because people will then buy more movie tickets. Most movie stars of both genders are people who are considered to be very good looking for the same reason. Unless you can change the culture, you need to threaten the bottom line. And the Fat Positive movement is still small enough that they are unlikely to be successful in that regard.
You are unfortunately correct. The term originally was used in specific academic contexts to describe certain types of behavior in religious communities where people would publicly engage in more stringent than theologically necessary behavior. But people are abusing the term to essentially mean something like "course of action that I don't think is justified under my value system and therefore I'll assume they have an ulterior motive." This is a very unfortunate abuse of language.
"Claims of a pending AI apocalypse come almost exclusively from the ranks of individuals such as Musk, Hawking, and Bostrom who possess no formal training in the field" is at best not true, and at worst a serious logical fallacy. Many people who are in the AI field have expressed concern. It is true that Musk, Hawking and Bostrom are some of the most vocal people and noticeable, but that's because they are famous people who are paid attention to already. For actual survey data of experts see for example https://nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf.
The energy levels available at brown dwarfs makes life unlikely to evolve there or do much. Note that even if we're wrong and life is common on brown dwarfs, that would still leave all the other locations where we actually have reason to expect there to be life.
And there are lots of things that one wants to do that just require a lot of energy, including some megastructures such as large-scale computing systems. And it requires that every single species out there decides not to. Every single one making the same decision.
I'm not sure why you are commenting about communication since I explicitly said that isn't part of the serious problem.
The problem with the idea that spreading is not something they'd bother with is that also it would require every single species to make that decision, and for every individual large group for each one to do so. Every single one is a very strong restriction.
Weird ideas about philosophy, politics and religion aren't going to be universal to all species.
We know about how long planets like Earth have been around, and given that there's no specific reason we can tell why intelligent life could not have evolved 50 or 100 or 200 millions years ago on a planet that had an Earth-like history, or a billion years ago on a slightly older planet, it seems highly unlikely that we are first. The universe is already pretty old.
It is possible that some sort of strange hypothesis that applies to the vast majority of species but not to us is accurate. But we don't beat the Great Filter by coming up with fun explanations that make for good scifi stories. If there is a genuine Filter in our future we will run into it whether or not we have come up with lots of clever alternate hypotheses.
Because we have direct limits on how much you can do with efficiency. Unless we are wildly wrong about the basic laws of physics, then there are substantial limits to what we can do in a small volume. For example, there are substantial limits on how much computation one can do in a given volume and how much information one can contain in a given volume. See the excellent explanation by Scott Aaronson here http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327. So at a certain point, expansion is your only option. Moreover, expansion is evolutionarily favored: once a small fraction of a species expands a bit, they'll be the ones who like expanding more and will go to more planets and so on.
The problem though isn't deliberate communication, but rather twofold:
First, a complete lack of evidence on a large scale of anything we'd expect to see. We have some pretty concrete ideas about construction of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres, the more plausible Dyson swarms, stellar engines (where the Class A version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine#Class_A_.28Shkadov_thruster.29 is essentially doable if one has enough material and doesn't require any exotically strong materials or the like), and many more. But we don't see any signs of any of those. And most of those will *last* for very long times once constructed. And we have searched for them both here http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm and in other galaxies. In a similar context, we've looked for signs of K3 civilizations in about 100,000 galaxies and found essentially no signs of them https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03418.
The second problem is that if a species does survive even a relatively small amount of time, it should be able to spread throughout a galaxy. Yes, galaxies are really big, but the space is not as big as the time available. For example the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. That means that if a species starts on one end and travels spreading throughout planets at around 1% of light speed (which certainly looks doable) then it takes around a 10 million years for them to spread throughout. That's a tiny amount of time. But we don't see any signs of anything like that.
So there really does seem to be some sort of Great Filter or series of Filters, and the question is whether it is early (e.g. life is hard to arise or intelligence arises rarely) or late (civilizations wipe themselves out). And if it is the second, then we need to figure out what is going on since we don't get a do-over.
This doesn't follow. The larger the drone the more likely it is that the drone will be noticed either by a person who sees it directly or by a technological system (e.g. radar). That said, it is true that if he can the Phantom it is highly likely that he could land a slightly larger drone with a payload. Moreover, 2 kilo payload is already enough to include a small explosive or a chemical or biological weapons package. So while your statement isn't completely accurate, the basic thrust is correct.
The line between magic and advanced technology is very much not a clear-cut one, and it is probably a bad idea to insist that something is a completely separate genre simply based on how something is labeled (or in the case of Dune, not explicitly labeled at all). This is made all the more clear given that elsewhere in this thread people have argued that "psionics" is ok for scifi even as "magic" is not, which really means it is purely about the labels used.
. A conference in Vegas becomes a showdown between Owen Pitt and the staff of Monster Hunter International with an ancient god, one that could turn Sin City into a literal hell on earth.
“I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.”
Moreover, the idea that the Hugos classically focused on science fiction that was less fantasy is simply not true. "The Graveyard Book" won in 2009, Bujold's "Paladin of Souls" won in 2004, "American Gods" won in 2002, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" won in 2001, and if one looks at nominations rather than winners, fantasy novels have frequently been nominated, going back at least to "Too Many Magicians" in 1967 and Dragonquest in 1972, and Book of Skulls in 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel. And that's just in the Best Novel category. Similar remarks apply to the other categories.
What is your objection precisely? Are you arguing that the Vorkosigan Saga is not sci-fi? Are you are arguing that The Obelisk Gate is not scifi? Are you arguing that The Expanse is not scifi? No? So what is your argument other than that things won which you didn't want to win, or possible being uncomfortable with the fact that many woman won?
The open source movement includes not just programming but a general dedication to open content and the ability to share and modify that content. A classic example is Wikipedia. Bassel was particularly involved in things related to Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/2017/08/01/bassel/. This is all the same ethos. It is true that this sort of approach started with a focus on source code and programs but the movement is far larger than that.
Slashdot Mirror
The Dead Sea Scrolls don't contain Greek or Roman texts so I'm not sure why you are mentioning that at all. The House of Wisdom ceased to exist in the 1200s, and in general the evidence there is that the focus was on what we would call scientific rather than literary works. It is true that many of the texts that we have from Christianity came to us through Muslim lands but they did at the end of the day come from Christian sources. As for your point about Oxyrhynchus and other middens, that's certainly a correct one, and my language was definitely overbroad, although even then the major texts came to us from Christian preservation. Moreover, many of the texts at Oxyrhynchus and in similar finds are day to day documents. But in so far as there are some texts at middens that fall into that category that we don't have from other sources, in that regard your criticism does have some validity. I should have said something like "largely" rather than "purely".
That seems unfair to Okian Warrior. While I do disagree with their position (and I do agree that I did show my work), I don't think their response is unreasonable, and I don't think jumping to conclusions about whether Okian agrees with the AC is warranted based on their post.
At a certain point, some classes of comments are transparently not serious attempts to have discussion or are people who are so divorced from reality that it really isn't in general worth the time or resources to spend that much time on them. Yes, I suppose one could point out to the person who is making comments about Christianity that in fact Christianity was responsible for the preservation of many texts from other religions and cultures and that of what we have of classical Greek and Roman literature is due purely to the preservation by monks, but why bother? Anyone who didn't sleep through high school history should know that. Similarly, one could respond to the people making anti-Islamic comments by pointing out that during much of the Middle Ages it was far easier to be a Jew or Christian in an Islamic area than it was to be a Jew or Muslim in a Christian area, but none of these people are seriously interested in those discussions.
Because there's a difference between burning books at some points in time (which Christianity certainly did, as did many other religious and ideologies) and burning books being such a complete default that one should be "surprised" by it. In that context, just like some of the other Islam related comments in this thread, it is classic trolling, and if sincere says more about the people making the statements than it does about the groups they are making comments about.
But perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago. Two of the erased texts, for instance, were inked in Caucasian Albanian, a language spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan. According to Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura, Caucasian Albanian only exists today in a few stone inscriptions. Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”
Other hidden texts were written in a defunct dialect known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a mix of Syriac and Greek, which was discontinued in the 13th century only to be rediscovered by scholars in the 18th century.
Of course, with sea related words discovered, the obvious line of jokes is to connect this with the Deep Ones, Dagon and Cthulhu. No doubt, the true horror in the more obscure texts is being kept quiet, possibly known only to the Laundry and the Black Chamber.
Not exactly. Palimpsets are on parchment not paper, and the method works in part because classical methods of writing used thick ink that was there for a long time which was then scraped away. Doing this with modern ink on a piece of paper is a very different story.
A a class of yes or no questions is in P if there is an algorithm which in time which is bounded by a polynomial of the length of the problem instance can answer the question. Easy examples of classes in P are "Is the number k have an even number of digits?", and "Does a divide b with remainder c?".
A class of problems is in NP if when it is a set of yes or no questions where when the answer is yes, there is an algorithm to which one can supply a proof that can be checked to be valid in polynomial time. An example of a problem class in NP is "Is the number n composite?" since if the answer is yes, the proof given is to just give the divisor and someone can check that. Note that this problem turns out to actually be in P, but this is a deep result https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test. Also, note that any problem class in P is trivially in NP because the proof one then uses is simply the empty string, and the algorithm is simply one's P-algorithm.
It turns out that certain problem classes are NP-complete. A class of problems is NP-complete essentially if the problem class is in NP, and if one had a magic device which could solve the problem instantly then one could use it to solve all NP problems. It turns out that many, many problems are NP-complete, to the point where many computer science journals will no longer accept papers proving something is NP complete unless there's something noteworthy about it (such as proving it for a historically significant problem like in this case, or proving it for a problem that people have previously not succeeded at proving to be NP complete).
It also isn't even the only chess related problem which is NP-complete. For example, the retrograde chess problem is NP-complete. That problem is whether given an arbitrary chess board with some set of pieces, can you reach a given other configuration? It is very easy to make NP-complete or NP-hard problems involving chess, and this has to do with the fact that generic chess (who would win with a given configuration and a given set of pieces) is either PSPACE complete or EXP complete depending on how exactly one generalizes certain aspects of chess (such as the 50-move stalemate move). Curiously, Go is actually worse under some versions of the ko rule, extending even to being NEXP-complete (NEXP is conjectured to be larger than EXP or PSPACE and is provably bigger than NP).
Actually, Musk's interest in neuralink is in part to help make sure that we do end up with safe general AI and that we don't have substantial problems with unfriendly AGI. See https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html which gives a detailed breakdown of the goals and likely obstacles.
By the end of his term it will be clear that Trump is the biggest mistake America has ever made.
Bigger than allowing slavery? Bigger than Vietnam? Bigger than leaded gasoline?
I think it is already clear that Trump is the worst President in my lifetime, and probably the worst President we've ever had. But I'm not convinced he is the worst mistake for the US has ever made. Of course, there is still time, so you may turn out to be right. I sincerely hope not.
Rent control is in general a terrible idea which results in more economic problems rather than less. It destroys most incentives to make new housing. https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2015/08/economist-explains-19 and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ed-miliband/10802231/Low-rent-Labour-is-positioning-itself-as-the-Ukip-of-the-Left.html are both detailed discussions of the many problems.
I agree that public transit is part of the problem. Of course, the two US cities I used as examples, Boston and NYC have some of the best public transit systems in the country. This is not a coincidence.
Boston, New York, Tokyo, and London are all very large cities with big tech sectors without these problems being nearly as severe. The greater Boston area includes Sommervile is literally the densest area by population in New England and is much denser than the Bay Area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somerville,_Massachusetts but the rental cost is literally more than order of magnitude than it is for the same thing in the Bay. And the amount of housing construction in the Bay Area is literally almost zero https://www.curbed.com/2016/2/24/11102278/bay-area-housing-crisis-bubble. The problem really here is a lack of construction that is coming almost completely from overly strict zoning and building codes. Centralization doesn't enter into it.
The solution to the problems is really simple: build more housing. How do you get more housing built? Well, for starts not having some of the most restrictive zoning laws in the country, and having people fight back at any housing that is less than ideal would be a major aspect. Unfortunately, there are people who are advocates for the poor who don't get this and have gone out of their way to block housing that doesn't have affordable housing built into it, which just results in total fewer housing.
Hollywood is interested in making money. As long as people prefer to see a certain type of person movies will have more of those people because people will then buy more movie tickets. Most movie stars of both genders are people who are considered to be very good looking for the same reason. Unless you can change the culture, you need to threaten the bottom line. And the Fat Positive movement is still small enough that they are unlikely to be successful in that regard.
You are unfortunately correct. The term originally was used in specific academic contexts to describe certain types of behavior in religious communities where people would publicly engage in more stringent than theologically necessary behavior. But people are abusing the term to essentially mean something like "course of action that I don't think is justified under my value system and therefore I'll assume they have an ulterior motive." This is a very unfortunate abuse of language.
"Claims of a pending AI apocalypse come almost exclusively from the ranks of individuals such as Musk, Hawking, and Bostrom who possess no formal training in the field" is at best not true, and at worst a serious logical fallacy. Many people who are in the AI field have expressed concern. It is true that Musk, Hawking and Bostrom are some of the most vocal people and noticeable, but that's because they are famous people who are paid attention to already. For actual survey data of experts see for example https://nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf.
And there are lots of things that one wants to do that just require a lot of energy, including some megastructures such as large-scale computing systems. And it requires that every single species out there decides not to. Every single one making the same decision.
I'm not sure why you are commenting about communication since I explicitly said that isn't part of the serious problem.
The problem with the idea that spreading is not something they'd bother with is that also it would require every single species to make that decision, and for every individual large group for each one to do so. Every single one is a very strong restriction.
Weird ideas about philosophy, politics and religion aren't going to be universal to all species.
We know about how long planets like Earth have been around, and given that there's no specific reason we can tell why intelligent life could not have evolved 50 or 100 or 200 millions years ago on a planet that had an Earth-like history, or a billion years ago on a slightly older planet, it seems highly unlikely that we are first. The universe is already pretty old.
It is possible that some sort of strange hypothesis that applies to the vast majority of species but not to us is accurate. But we don't beat the Great Filter by coming up with fun explanations that make for good scifi stories. If there is a genuine Filter in our future we will run into it whether or not we have come up with lots of clever alternate hypotheses.
Because we have direct limits on how much you can do with efficiency. Unless we are wildly wrong about the basic laws of physics, then there are substantial limits to what we can do in a small volume. For example, there are substantial limits on how much computation one can do in a given volume and how much information one can contain in a given volume. See the excellent explanation by Scott Aaronson here http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3327. So at a certain point, expansion is your only option. Moreover, expansion is evolutionarily favored: once a small fraction of a species expands a bit, they'll be the ones who like expanding more and will go to more planets and so on.
First, a complete lack of evidence on a large scale of anything we'd expect to see. We have some pretty concrete ideas about construction of megastructures, such as Dyson spheres, the more plausible Dyson swarms, stellar engines (where the Class A version https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_engine#Class_A_.28Shkadov_thruster.29 is essentially doable if one has enough material and doesn't require any exotically strong materials or the like), and many more. But we don't see any signs of any of those. And most of those will *last* for very long times once constructed. And we have searched for them both here http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm and in other galaxies. In a similar context, we've looked for signs of K3 civilizations in about 100,000 galaxies and found essentially no signs of them https://arxiv.org/abs/1504.03418.
The second problem is that if a species does survive even a relatively small amount of time, it should be able to spread throughout a galaxy. Yes, galaxies are really big, but the space is not as big as the time available. For example the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across. That means that if a species starts on one end and travels spreading throughout planets at around 1% of light speed (which certainly looks doable) then it takes around a 10 million years for them to spread throughout. That's a tiny amount of time. But we don't see any signs of anything like that.
So there really does seem to be some sort of Great Filter or series of Filters, and the question is whether it is early (e.g. life is hard to arise or intelligence arises rarely) or late (civilizations wipe themselves out). And if it is the second, then we need to figure out what is going on since we don't get a do-over.
This doesn't follow. The larger the drone the more likely it is that the drone will be noticed either by a person who sees it directly or by a technological system (e.g. radar). That said, it is true that if he can the Phantom it is highly likely that he could land a slightly larger drone with a payload. Moreover, 2 kilo payload is already enough to include a small explosive or a chemical or biological weapons package. So while your statement isn't completely accurate, the basic thrust is correct.
The line between magic and advanced technology is very much not a clear-cut one, and it is probably a bad idea to insist that something is a completely separate genre simply based on how something is labeled (or in the case of Dune, not explicitly labeled at all). This is made all the more clear given that elsewhere in this thread people have argued that "psionics" is ok for scifi even as "magic" is not, which really means it is purely about the labels used.
. A conference in Vegas becomes a showdown between Owen Pitt and the staff of Monster Hunter International with an ancient god, one that could turn Sin City into a literal hell on earth.
Yeah, ancient gods are so so sci-fi. Moving on, when Torgensen ran the Sad Puppies he explicitly said that it was because "popular" works were being passed over in favor of "literary" works or works with political messages http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-hugo-awards-were-always-political-now-theyre-only-1695721604. Note that that doesn't say anything about whether it is fantasy or scifi. The Rabid Puppies meanwhile explicitly tried to be more extreme and to deliberately nominate "right-wing" sci-fi or simply ruin the Hugos. As Vox Day https://www.wired.com/2015/08/won-science-fictions-hugo-awards-matters/ said:
“I wanted to leave a big smoking hole where the Hugo Awards were,” he told me before the winners were announced. “All this has ever been is a giant Fuck You—one massive gesture of contempt.”
Moreover, the idea that the Hugos classically focused on science fiction that was less fantasy is simply not true. "The Graveyard Book" won in 2009, Bujold's "Paladin of Souls" won in 2004, "American Gods" won in 2002, "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" won in 2001, and if one looks at nominations rather than winners, fantasy novels have frequently been nominated, going back at least to "Too Many Magicians" in 1967 and Dragonquest in 1972, and Book of Skulls in 1973. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel. And that's just in the Best Novel category. Similar remarks apply to the other categories.
What is your objection precisely? Are you arguing that the Vorkosigan Saga is not sci-fi? Are you are arguing that The Obelisk Gate is not scifi? Are you arguing that The Expanse is not scifi? No? So what is your argument other than that things won which you didn't want to win, or possible being uncomfortable with the fact that many woman won?
The open source movement includes not just programming but a general dedication to open content and the ability to share and modify that content. A classic example is Wikipedia. Bassel was particularly involved in things related to Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/2017/08/01/bassel/. This is all the same ethos. It is true that this sort of approach started with a focus on source code and programs but the movement is far larger than that.