dotancohen

I think that a huge conceptual leap was the realisation that sex leads to pregnancy. The earliest surviving texts talk of hereditary - implying this was known before writing. This realisation has been the basis of transfer of power and resources, laying the ground for formation of empires and generational blood fueds.

I think that agriculture and textiles are generally among the first recognized technology. I've never seen them overlooked, quite the opposite.

I agree that my usage of the term "now" was incorrect. "Now" really isn't defined well when the concept of simultaneous events is not valid.

I also used reference frame when referring to distant objects, for the simple reason that the conversation is (was at that point) confined to light traveling between those objects - the light being in a different reference frame from the two objects. I agree, now the morning after, that this was poorly phased and can not be generalized to two arbitrary objects no matter how distant.

As I've stated, an answer in the confines of an HN comment on this topic will always be incomplete. We can answer very specific situations, but those answers can not be generalized to other situations.

In fact I personally know two women whose babies were burned to death by Gazans on October 7th.

The fact that you people laugh at that solidifies our resolve to protect ourselves from you.

No, I clearly state that Israel's actions do not constitute a Holocaust because though that term is ill-defined, every one of the definitions either concludes that Israel is not conducting a Holocaust, or that half a dozen Holocausts happen every decade.

No, actually, the photons did not travel over a period of time. Photons travel at C, and thus experience no time in their reference frame.

As for _our_ reference frame, I've explained in other comments but a debate has developed between those few who do understand because they've studied physics, and those who think that their intuition is more correct than Einstein. I decline to elaborate further, HN comments are not long enough to cover it all. In short: you are in fact missing something but that is fine, everybody is. Einstein himself stated that in his day maybe three people on the planet understood, and he was uncertain if he was among those three.

I may have misunderstood Hawking, but my Physics grades suggest that I do understand the principles.

I tried to explain within the confines of an HN comment so that GGP could understand. Any answer that fits in this box will be incomplete. The most complete answer that is correct, would be a simple "No" but I felt that was too dismissive and not informative enough.

You are getting downvotes, but you are correct. People are voting by intuition, not by physics. Relativity is not intuitive.

  > So a hypothetical photon from the big bang (era?) gets observed now means the big bang is happening now?

Yes. More specifically, the big bang would be happening now, at the location from where we perceive that photon. Hey, this stuff is not intuitive.

However the early universe absorbed all the big bang photons. The furthest back we can observe photons from is the CMB. And yes, the phase change is happening now, there... Complicated by the Hubble expansion of course.

  > A dinosaur decays to bones and now gets observed means the dinosaur died just now - not that it died millions of years ago?

No, that is incorrect. But you already knew that. Analogies don't work for light and for time and for relativity - it is too different from our everyday experiences for analogies to hold.

Typo corrected, thank you!

CYA in case of litigation.

Light is not a particle, nor is it a wave. However, under some circumstances it does behave like a particle - we even have a name for that (photon). However for purposes of this type of discussion - how it travels long distances - we need to look at the wave properties of light. The particle properties are more interaction-based.

Light moves at the speed of causality - C - so it does not experience time. Therefore light never changes. However, for distant extra-galactic objects, the space that the light is traveling through is expanding! Thus the wave property of light is stretched out as well. So what was once visible light is now so stretched out (in our reference frame) that our eyes can't detect it (that's why the night sky is black).

So yes, the light is finite. It itself experiences no change. The number of particles heading in our direction only changes when they encounter some types of mass, such as interstellar or intergalactic gad clouds.

If you want to know why light is not a particle (and also not a wave) check out the dual-slit experiments. Fascinating stuff.

  > What blows my mind is that 20 million light years also means that what we're observing something that happened 20 million years ago.

Well... Not really. It took the entirety of the book A Brief History Of Time to even grasp a cusp of this, so I know I won't convince you in a short HN comment, but "now" is the collection of events that currently affect us. Due to causality, events outside our light cone have not occurred yet. They have no more influence than does an egg falling off the counter that has yet to hit the floor. The egg breaks only when it hits the floor - events only occur in our reference frame when they could affect outcomes in our reference frame. C is the propagation of causality, the fact that light travels at that speed in a vacuum doesn't affect that.

The link is just smaller, and I think the text is now something to the effect of "Can't Download App" or similar.

While the conclusions of the observation are interesting, what really stood out to me was the observations themselves. That black hole is 20 million light years away, in another galaxy! And we have multiple high enough resolution observations to conclude how the gas orbits the black hole and gets dragged along behind it. That's nuts.

That's not how things work when you are participating in hostilities in an active war zone. What a ridiculous statement to make.

Parent comment is implying that an ally (Israel) is performing a holocaust. In fact, there have been a good dozen genocides in the past century which I would agree fit the term, but not the conflict that Israel is involved with.

The anti-Israel and anti-US side typically take an argument or incident from Israeli or US history or culture and invert it. A good example is the common Hebrew expression "No other land" - we have culture and songs about that, as well as jokes and it is a common expression in everyday speech. After October 7th, as part of the propaganda campaigns against Israel, that phrase was used as the title of an anti-Israel movie highlighting that another population has "no other land". Inversion of our culture.

Holocaust inversion - accusing Israel of perpetrating a holocaust - is this particular example.

To other readers: Parent is suggesting that the 6000 Gazans who breached the Israeli border on October 7th 2023 and killed 1200 people, mutilated bodies, beheaded humans and dogs alike, raped women, and took over 250 hostages including infants... Parent is suggesting that these people were undercover Israeli agents performing a false flag operation.

Hamas claims that the journalists are Hamas, not Israel. And I'm not declaring any journalist "good" or "bad". I'm stating that a Hamas member is a valid target. Him moonlighting as a journalist does not change that.

Israel never set out to exterminate, Israel set out to get her hostages back - including babies under a year old.

You know who did set out to exterminate? Hamas, who in their very own charter state their intention to eradicate the Jews: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

I suggest reading this article which explains the propaganda campaigns that followed the October 7th attacks on Israel: https://www.adl.org/resources/article/hamas-its-own-words

Only one side is calling for genocide, and it is the Arab side - propaganda and disinformation campaigns aside.

Your Holocaust inversion is not only morally wrong, it is also factually incorrect.

I was waiting to see how long it took for someone to "make this about Palestine" - their strategy is to inundate all discussion with the topic.

Over half the journalists in the Gaza Strip are affiliated with Hamas. Many of them infiltrated Israel in 2023, and some of them held Israeli hostages in their homes, including children hostages.

https://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/abou

Me too. I don't connect my phone to my Google account. I understand that the Play store is enticing, but there are other options. Some of which are actually better.

  > failsafe timers and dead-man switches when testing new things.

Aircraft and spacecraft are more than anything, mass constrained. Such failsafes are welcome in software, but neither the bleeding-edge engineers not even the test pilots would support adding failsafe mass if it would affect the tests.

Details, details. That's mearly an implementation issue.

This is probably one of the most important comments on HN, seriously. A concise summary that once we get the model right, the emergent behaviour matches observations.

Very reminiscent of the Casimir effect experiments.

No, the AI is still our responsibility.

Or he believes that other labs might get there first, and he is working to counter that threat.

This is the Manhattan Project again.

  > Wait until you learn how many other SaaS and web 2.0 and cloud based things are also run by assholes.

Though it's not the real acronym, Larry Ellison himself has stated that Oracle stands for One Real Asshole Called Larry Ellison. He famously prides himself on it.

Why Libreoffice? Does your diary contain advanced formatting, tables, images, or other involved content? Or just for the encryption?

I ask because I also keep a diary and have refined how I store it and secure it, over 25+ years. Only recently did I find something that I like better than paper.