MrEldritch

This kinda sucks, but what else are they supposed to do? It's already been established that any wildfires caused by their equipment will be their fault; cutting off power in case of potential wildfires would seem to be the only logical way to respond to that reality.

Then why the high-voltage warning stickers?

"Han unification" (deciding that Chinese and Japanese characters were 'basically the same' and could be represented with the same set of codepoints) was a terrible idea, yes, mainly brought from the Unicode foundation not being run by people who spoke or wrote either language, and not wanting to "waste" their limited code points in the BMP on languages using an inconvenient number of characters.

This is, in fact, the same principle behind how Vantablack works!

Sounds kind of like what's described in Neural Networks, Types, and Functional Programming: http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/

And exactly why does America speak English, when a few centuries ago it was filled with native speakers of many other languages that are now very rare today?

Because the British Empire (and the Spanish and French empires) killed a great many of them, and forcibly imported their own cultures, people, and languages.

Which is unquestionably imperialism, and undoubtedly cultural. Hence: cultural imperialism.

If it weren't for cultural imperalism, the only native English speakers would be the population of the UK, which is about on par with Germany.

;-)

I gotta say, I do hope Blue Apron survives. After all, if it goes under, who will sponsor the entire podcast ecosystem?

Dominos has an online order tracker, so it ought to be possible to have this plugin recognize when an order is in fact complete.

> lead poisoning

Uh... leaded gasoline has been phased out since the '70s, despite being demonstrably better for car engines (no anti-knock agent as good as tetraethyl lead has yet been invented), precisely because the American motorist is not unassailable!

My father used to work for Intel, back in the '80s and '90s - he's mentioned this proposal before. Apparently this is not even remotely a new idea, and even back in the late 90s, they were expecting to have to move to this model eventually.

People having naughty opinions, mostly.

I had to immediately turn off emoji conversion on Discord, because not only was it annoying, it was wrong - :) was invariably replaced with something that was very definitely the emoji equivalent of :D, and :D turned into what was unmistakably XD. These are very different!!

In informal online writing, using full stops has become an optional choice, which means that using full stops requires that you choose to do so, which means that presumably you have something to communicate by that choice.

Generally speaking, using full stops is a sign that one is Very Serious; it's the textual equivalent of how, when someone is angry, they will close doors harder.

The reason we don't get "ripped apart" during these ripple events is simply that spacetime is so stiff that even absolutely monstrous amounts of gravitational energy lead to only the tiniest distortions in spacetime geometry. A black-hole collision may put out more power in gravitational waves than the entire optical luminosity of the visible universe, and the result when it reaches us will result in a distortion of less than the diameter of a proton.

>the most anyone could aspire to was making adventure games or flash stick figure games/movies back then.

As a counterexample, I present: Homestar Runner. Also, Homestuck.

It was also hugely loved among amateur artists and animators, which led to the creation of most of the vast array of creative works I enjoyed as a kid.

I don't think I've ever quite gotten over my resentment at the tech community for killing Flash in the name of "security".

Here's a closer analogy: We're on the Titanic. It's sinking, probably, but it's still mostly possible to ignore it. Some very smart people have calculated that the lifeboats cannot possibly hold the weight of everyone aboard; if we are going to save ourselves, either we have to start throwing some people overboard, or we all have to cut off a limb to meet the weight allowance.

Nobody is especially eager to do either of those things - the people who would have to be thrown overboard are especially not enthusiastic about it, and nobody's exactly enthused about the alternative solution of choosing our least favorite arms. So as long as it's possible to pretend that everything's going to be fine and we're not sinking and the hole isn't that big anyway and even if it was, we could always patch it eventually, and even if we can't, maybe rescue will get here in time ... we're not going to resort to that. Not until we absolutely, really have to.

By the time we're desperate enough to resort to such things, it will be too late and there will no longer be time to select who to throw overboard or conduct the necessary amputations.

>I hope not, because I have been able to control the muscle voluntarily and it is still works after almost four decades.

Oh, is that how the brain rumblies thingy works? Huh, I never realized most people couldn't do that.

>that are nothing worth fighting for to begin with

Frankly, air conditioning alone is worth fighting for. The wealth and comfort generated by our carbon-spewing economy is the greatest achievement in mankind's history - and developing nations reaching towards it would be right to fight for it.

Having to make the kind of far-reaching sacrifices needed to prevent climate change at this late stage would (if we actually did it) be among the greatest tragedies in human history, second only to the tragedy of what will happen if we don't.

Really? So three abstract concepts actually had a footrace?

Or is it merely analogous to the concept of a footrace, as might be indicated by a word such as 'like'?

Would you say they're considered harmful?

Yeah, but that's completely politically infeasible. There's no way to get people to just stop using existing resources to improve their quality of life - or even to keep their quality of life at current levels - without any immediate tangible consequences. And of course, by the time the disaster arrives, it'll be too late to change.

Or, correction, there's one way to get them to do that: Point guns at them.

(Un?)fortunately, the vast majority of the developed world lives under democratic government, and the same people who would rather not massively and suddenly reduce their wealth and quality of life in response to future predictions also would rather not have martial law imposed to convince them to do so.

So the "tiny ineffectual reductions from current emission levels" is the only possible framework under which any kind of preemptive climate action can actually happen. You're correct that there's no way this can solve the problem; the correct response is to understand that we're just basically fucked and the only ways out include things like "establish, by force, oppressive totalitarian global state oriented around climate management" which would damage the future world we live in just as much as climate change would, but in a different way.

We're just fucked. And there's a certain liberty in that! You don't have to worry about whether or not we'll fix the problem; we won't, so there's no troublesome uncertainty. Just go see the sights around the world you'd like to see before they're destroyed.

Among Tumblr users, the basic incompetence of @staff in constructing a functional website is legendary. I would not be surprised if the backend were far worse than you're supposing.

The funny thing is, the incompetence of @staff is the value proposition for Tumblr, as a user - because Tumblr's backend is a rickety tower of matchsticks and paste and the devs couldn't program themselves out of a wet paper bag, it means that they haven't been able to implement - for instance - algorithmic non-chronological timeline ordering, or competent data harvesting / robomarketing. And the comically broken search tools actually give a reasonable approximation of privacy for discussions. The user experience is firmly stuck in the mid-2000s, when social sites were for communities and discussions instead of data farming.

Don't get me wrong, Tumblr's user experience is also awful - search sucks, tags suck, moderation EXTRA sucks, the website's still overrun by pornographic spambots even after the Great Titty Purge - but any development team competent enough to make real improvements would also be one competent enough to squeeze out what makes Tumblr work.

(I want you to know that I'm not downvoting you because this is a bad post, but rather, because I think this being greyed out would add excellently to the joke)

They took a useful thing that was providing value to people, and broke it for no other reason than to see how people reacted.

I mean, it's not that unethical; that's a big word to be throwing around. It's just kind of a dick move.

As long as humans continue to exist in the physical world, take up physical space, and consume physical goods for food, shelter, and comfort, then manufacturing will be a critically relevant part of the economy.

Gil Kalai has been beating this particular drum/dead horse for decades at this point. Having read the paper, it seems pretty consistent with his previous work ... it all crucially hinges on the postulate that, somehow, noise will prevent this from working, but he has yet to actually come up with a solid explanation for how.

(Even this paper, ultimately, relies on Conjecture 4, which essentially comes down to saying that "Well, we've proven this one particular system runs into noise issues, so we're just going to assume that some grand physical principle will cause this to extend to every possible small noisy quantum system.")

No, they aren't. (That said, they're completely uninformative and I have no idea what the heck these tiny unlabeled ASCII graphs are trying to convey. The ability to draw a lot of | characters quickly, perhaps?)

When you open a container, you can see inside of it.

When you open source, you can see the source.

Chuck Moore has always struck me as some kind of alien, not unlike the way stories about Von Neumann do - that this is a person who is, in his specialized field, capable of thinking in ways that I just can't, and achieving things that seem practically magical with it.