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ars

27,535 karma · joined July 8, 2008

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ars··on Scientists observe Einstein's gravity in the quantum world
Before you figure that out, you will be surprised to discover that it's impossible to tell if the speed of light is the same in both directions, with only the average of a round trip being the speed of light.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-way_speed_of_light

Anyway, reading that should help you answer your own question, or at least give you a lot more questions to ask.

ars··on The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
I think that depends on if they distribute it with the install package, or if they download it once installed.
ars··on Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
Doctors make mistakes pretty much non-stop, and they are rarely held accountable because the system as a whole works OK. AI makes less mistakes than the doctors do (I read a lot of medical notes).
ars··on Israel creates fake think tank in likely attempt to dupe AI chatbots
He specified "terrorists", See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49340403 for actual sources, including in Hebrew (although it was flagged to death for reasons unknown).

That message a reply to YOU, but that didn't stop you from posting the same false info multiple times in this thread.

ars··on The weekend is 100 years old
In Hebrew Sunday doesn't have a name, it's simply called "Day one", this is also true in Portuguese, Arabic, Greek, Chinese, Vietnamese, and others.

So no, the week does not start on Monday, it starts on Sunday.

The name "Weekend" came long long long after Sunday was considered the first day of the week.

ars··on The weekend is 100 years old
> The 7 day week is completely artificial.

Actually it's 1/4 of a month, which is defined by the moon.

ars··on The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)
This article does not make its case. He shows a graph of "random" data, and then just kind of keeps going. But that random data is the meat of the whole thing.

Cut out 60% of the useless text, and focus on explaining why random data should look like that.

ars··on Long presumed dead, a thriving coral reef is discovered in West Africa
Beauty does not exist for its own sake, it only exists in the mind of someone else.
ars··on Firefox Containers Preview
A profile is a full new browser, these containers are just tabs. So they mix into the current browser window.

They are much more lightweight, and the workflow is better, just switch tabs.

ars··on Firefox Containers Preview
I have containers on Firefox, and I do NOT have this extension installed.
ars··on Firefox Containers Preview
I'm a little confused here, I've been using the containers feature already for years now on Firefox. And I have no add-on installed for it, it just works.

So what is it that they're adding?

ars··on Long presumed dead, a thriving coral reef is discovered in West Africa
What's the point in it existing then? Just for a couple of the chosen few?

I'm aware that lots of people can be destructive, but there's a balance.

ars··on Sensing warm and cool: how the body detects temperature changes
We still don't know how, like from a physics point of view, thermoreceptors detect temperature.
ars··on Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended
I would do something that isn't *.me, since it was them that suspended it.
ars··on Telegram's t.me domain has been suspended
That's not likely to help, it was the .me people that suspended it, they will likely do the same with telegram.me
ars··on Unicode's transliteration rules are Turing-complete
Perhaps I've misunderstood, but I think it's not the text that is unicode complete, it's the transliteration rules that are.

Unless you install special rules you won't be doing extra computation.

ars··on The family keeping watch over a 52-year-old pot of soup
Resetting it will kill bacteria, certainly. But there are a number of heat-stable toxins that once created will not be destroyed that way.

I guess you've been doing this for a while, and presumably it's been working, plus I know that historically this is how people lived. But be aware it's not risk free.

A suggestion: A pressure cooker - not for the pressure, but because they can be sealed. Heat the food, then let it cool without opening it. Kind of a less secure form of canning.

ars··on Farmer, marketer at odds over sales of white nectarines
You are perfectly free to keep selling what we've been eating. No one is forcing people to plant the new stuff.

If you make patents illegal, no one will breed new stuff. How does that help?

All that will do is cause people to grow the old stuff, which they still can, even if the patent exists.

Do you get what I mean? Adding a patent does not reduce anything, it only adds a new option.

ars··on We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works
I recently had a run-in with security restrictions at work that only blocked the abstraction layer at the top, and were utterly surprised to discover that if you go down one level none of their restrictions did anything.

They eventually decided to keep their head in the sand and pretend like their restriction was useful.

The issue was a complete lack of knowledge of how the system actually worked one layer down.

ars··on EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on
The EU caused the deaths, not the heat. People have been dying from heat in the EU for decades now, and the EU has done ........ nothing (well other than declare superiority to the US).

More people die from heat each year in the EU than from guns in the US. Which topic gets more attention?

ars··on EU commissioners shut down air conditioning for employees, leave theirs on
Thousands of people died in the EU over this heat, and you think it's American that isn't doing well?

"more than 1300 excess deaths have been recorded since 21 June linked to the extreme heat in Europe"

"There were approximately 489,000 heat-related deaths annually between 2000 and 2019, according to modeled estimates."

https://wmo.int/media/news/record-breaking-heat-spreads-thro...

ars··on The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
We are in different circles, because everyone in my circle is desperate for a solution to unrestricted phone use by kids.

> I'm a parent. Nobody has been blocked from parenting by tech companies.

What age? Because they absolutely have. Wait till your kid has instragram and snapchat and WhatsApp and they can talk to random adults, or get bullied and you have no way to know. Wait till they lock their phone, and you have no way to check it. Wait till they get addicted to content that basically blocks them from doing any part of normal life and all they want to do all day is sit and watch a phone.

It's really bad out there. This is the first generation to test as less intelligent than their parents. Read some of the articles on how kids are cheating with AI, and it's not just that AI is available, I think the kids simply can't do the work, and that's because they spend most of their time on the phone.

This doesn't bode well for the future, and something to restrict kids from phone is desperately needed. What it should look like, I'm not sure. I don't care about proving a specific ID for anything, just an age range is enough: Either your above 18, or what's your age when under 18, nothing more is needed.

Then apps can tailor themselves accordingly.

ars··on The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
That's an argument you made, I was simply responding to this idea that parents don't want to parent. It's not true, they do, they just can't.

A solution is needed, and I think age verification is a good start - divide apps into kid apps, and adult apps. Kid apps will be made such that parents have full access to them, and they are blocked from social networks, only individual messages, and pre-planned groups.

Other solutions might also work - I'm not stuck on any particular one. But they all start by making it impossible for kids to access the adult internet (and I don't mean porn, I mean unrestricted communication).

Do you have a solution? And again, don't say "just parent the kid", because we've established that as impossible with modern devices.

ars··on The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
In places where WhatsApp is highly used you basically can't function without it, school events are posted there, friends organize activities on it, teachers communicate to both parents and kids on it.

Giving a highschool kid a phone is basically mandatory or they will be cut off from activities, and/or rely on a friend to relay messages. In some places even middleschoolers need it.

There are definitely downsides (not to mention WhatsApp is a really badly engineering program), but the network effect is too strong to fight.

ars··on U.S. science is in chaos
Your 1/3 number is complete nonsense. The actual number is Zero of those people are homeless because of medical debt.

People do not become homeless because of medical debt, that's simply not a thing that happens. Nor do people "lose everything" because of medical debt, that also doesn't happen.

If the medical debt is that bad they just don't pay it, or they file for bankruptcy. Absolutely nothing happens in the US if you don't pay medical debt. Nothing. It doesn't even hurt your credit score.

That study you linked should be held up as a case study in lying with statistics. But as hard as they tried to lie if you actually read it closely you will discover that medical debt does not cause homelessness.

ars··on The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
That's just not true. If you give your kid WhatsApp access because that's how 95% of their peers text each other, then your kid has access to a hidden chat that can only be revealed by typing a secret code in the search bar.

Tell me how a parent is supposed to parent their kid when they can do that? Locking down WhatsApp is no solution because then they can't talk to anyone. (Other countries do not use SMS as much as the US does, it's mostly WhatsApp.)

Say you are sure your kid is being bullied or abused and you want to check their phone. You can't. From the password to encrypted apps kids can hide their communications in ways that are impossible for a parent to check.

Apps do not have "child modes" that disable all the secret stuff, although that would be nice.

ars··on The KIDS Act would require age checks to get online
Why is it weird? Social media has existed for around the same amount of time for all western countries, and people have noticed the harm at around the same time everywhere.

Why do you require some special interest? Ordinary people are seeing the harm and demanding help. Tech companies did themselves no favors by locking down phones and accounts to the point that it's impossible for parents to police and/or check their kids phones.

So now that parents have been blocked from parenting, who else is going to do it?

ars··on Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
The solution is nuclear fuel reprocessing + breeder reactors.

You end up burning all of the uranium, leaving being only short lived isotopes.

ars··on U.S. science is in chaos
> But what about "free healthcare". Don't americans want socialized healthcare over their despised privatized system?

Not really. The internet bubble might make you think that, but actually ordinary people aren't interested.

People with good jobs have health insurance, people without get government subsidized insurance. Either way most people are fine with what they have.

And the issues with healthcare in the US will not be solved by the government being the one to pay. Billing is too complex (i.e. costly), and Dr salaries are too high (compare them to other countries). Neither of those issues are solved by the government paying.

And don't forget how Americans hear stories from other countries about huge waits for care, and they want none of that.

There are zero proposals to make all Dr's employees of the government, on salary, who just take care of whoever shows up. But that might actually work to reduce costs.

ars··on EU-banned pesticides found in rice, tea and spices
I checked the list of pesticides in the article, and almost all of them were banned because of the effect on pollinators, not because of human health.

So using these pesticides only on products for export makes utterly no sense!

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