gammarator

Evaporative cooling of the best content, likely, but plenty of social networks with worse ad loads still have plenty of users.

My question is whether Ellison does to it what Elon did to X: revamp the algorithm to support his politics.

This is not very newsworthy, stellar flares are common and known to emit X-rays.

Sounds like Dr. Kirkpatrick should have been a coauthor.

While Pasadena is a relatively wealthy city, historically there has been significant avoidance of its public schools by affluent residents: https://southerneducation.org/in-the-news/new-polling-data-f...

The sentence is accurate, your comment is not. The administration unilaterally canceled existing grants and halted and showed granting of funds appropriated by Congress, so the money was not used as allocated. If Congress allocated $1B for medical research and the administration only releases funds for $500M, it’s ignoring the law.

For example, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01396-2

As to “exercising control,” American science has been great because scientists judge which projects are the strongest. That’s being replaced by judgement by political appointees who are not experts: https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-pares-down-grant...

Your linked article does say Rivian ranked first in satisfaction, which does support the GP’s “rabidly loyal.”

Can’t wait for the brave new world of individuals “match fixing” outcomes on Polymarket.

(American _Astronautical_ Society)

[citation needed]

Emacs and vim have complex interfaces that have been stable for decades. Seems like every new flavor of LLM requires learning its warts and blind spots from scratch.

Lobby groups are private actors rating elected Congressional reps. This is government officials rating private actors (with an implied threat to punish those who don’t comply).

Comments about SLS miss what’s happening. SLS is inefficient and wasteful, but human spaceflight is not what’s getting cut at NASA. Instead, very productive current and future science missions are getting killed, in defiance of Congress [1].

Until this year, NASA was the world leader in space science. We’re pushing out the experts who build and operate astrophysics missions like Hubble, Chandra, JWST, Kepler, TESS, Swift, and many more in planetary and heliophysics. This is a loss of capacity that will set the US back a generation.

The private sector is irrelevant here: SpaceX and friends don’t do scientific research.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/07/trump-administration-m...

Or inherit the Prop 13 rate from your parents.

I’m surprised the author didn’t try to make more at home! Personally I’m a fan of the apps at https://mixologytech.com/, especially “Modern Classics.”

“Arcminutes per second” would be the standard way to express it in astronomy.

This is the obvious consequence of funding agencies pouring money into “AI.”

JD Vance is not banned, he’s just widely blocked, which is something BlueSky users are free to do.

His investing happened as a consequence of having available capital (and, certainty, forward-looking ideas about how to seed startups).

As to the writing, I think its influence (in terms of ideas) makes people overrate its stylistic quality. An enjoyable critique: https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm

Also http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21 (I am a physicist myself)

It seems self-evident to me that epistemic humility _requires_ temporal discounting. We should not be confident we can predict the future well enough to integrate utility centuries forward.

For UW specifically, it is possible that this can be explained by incompetence rather than malice.

[pdf] implies that the link directly downloads a pdf.

I prefer the NASA vision statement from nasa.gov/about:

"NASA explores the unknown in air and space, innovates for the benefit of humanity, and inspires the world through discovery."

to Casey's "defend US interests on the civilian side of space."

SLS is an abject failure, indeed, but one whose faults are ultimately Congress's. I see no reason for human space flight to continue to "eat first" given that record of expensive failure. In contrast, astrophysics and planetary science remain--at least for now--world-leading.

I love Merlin! It's worth noting that some of its early funding was provided by the National Science Foundation: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1010818

If you think scientific discoveries like this are important, _please_ contact your congressperson and indicate that you oppose the catastrophic cuts proposed to NASA astrophysics in the President's Budget Request: https://www.planetary.org/press-releases/the-planetary-socie...

Response by the Planetary Society: https://www.planetary.org/press-releases/the-planetary-socie...

Ironic how “no VC makes all the right picks” becomes “VCs are indispensable.”

In a rational market, LPs would index, but VCs justify their 2 & 20 by controlling access…

> veneer wood furniture

If I were wealthy, I’d be getting solid hardwood…

It _was_ a trainwreck. Now it’s in space making great discoveries.

> But 50% of NASA's science funding is gone.

The proposed cuts to science are catastrophic, but there’s still time to call your Congressperson.

https://aas.org/posts/news/2025/05/week-of-action