hbrav

Well you seem to feel very strongly about it, so I assume you'd be a good person to tell us about these leaks. Do you have data / links you want to provide?

Yeh I also found this comment helpful. I ride a motorcycle so I'm comfortable with a vehicle where there's an added risk, but it's definitely something I'd want to know before buying something car-shaped.

Let me offer an alternative motivation. Suppose that the universe is ultimately discrete at its smallest scales, bounded by some finite length, and everything advances in discrete 'ticks' of time. There would be no physical realisation of the real numbers.

But they would still be _useful_ as a computational device. Calculus seems intimidating and hard at first glance, but it's often easier than working with the discrete problem. If you've ever taken a probability course you may have encountered this: the binomial distribution for a large number of trials can be approximate by a Gaussian (at least, if I'm not looking too far into its tails). At a more advanced level, quants model the price process of securities as stochastic differential equations. Of course, this is nonsense - prices are in discrete number of pennies, for instance. But the error of this approximation is tolerable to produce an analytic result (the Black-Scholes formula), just so long as one remembers it isn't an exact result.

If you want a more physical example, consider the fact that we treat fluids as continua, modelled by the Navier-Stokes equations. Of course they actually consist of discrete particles, but so long as our scales of interest are greater than the mean-free-path-length, a continuous approximation is far more practical for calculations than modelling a huge number of discrete particles.

There's more locations you can refuel a Saab Gripen than a Tesla.

The recursive design allows you to go the "wrong" way around the "big" roundabout.If you want to take the exit immediately to your right, the "single huge roundabout" design would require you to go almost all the way around to reach your exit. The recursive design allows you to take the third exit from the first two mini roundabout. Sorry if that's unclear, it's a bit tricky to explain in words.

Another advantage of the recursive design over a big roundabout is that it keeps traffic speeds slow, so collisions are much less deadly.

The phenomenon of viewing public transit as somewhere that you'll be assaulted or robbed is an incredible indictment of the US. I don't know how true it is though.

I don't think it has a 'power' switch that you can flip to cut power. In fact I'm not sure many ICE vehicles will do that these days. If I press the 'engine start / stop' button in my car while I'm not stopped, I don't think it will stop the engine.

Two things that came to mind:

1. Would the Coriolis force tend to set up a big overturning cell in that swimming pool? i.e. there would be circulation along the top, down one end, back along the bottom, and up the other side?

2. Is this some kind of suicide cruise? They just seem to head out into interstellar space at the end. The delta-V to return to Earth would be incredible. And no more gravity assists once you're past the major planets.

That's a shockingly low number. Where do you live?

This is the sort of thing that is solid gold for a well-motivated hobbyist. Lots of content together in one place that takes a (I hope) coherent journey through the "what's important" of a subject.

If anyone knows of something similar for mechanical engineering I would be very interested. (Thanks in advance from a physicist who should probably have been an engineer instead :-) )

What's the project?

Very true. This is one of those situations where having a friend who is a lawyer, and willing to write such a letter, is very helpful. It would not be legal to mis-represent yourself as a lawyer. But it's fine to have a lawyer write such a letter, which make the recipient think that you might sue, while having no intention of doing so. This is, of course, completely unfair because the poor, who are more likely to be disabled, are also less likely to have a friend who is a lawyer.

I agree.

It's kinda disappointing that handling someone being unable to call hadn't occurred to these companies previously. But what's pretty terrible is the attitude of customer service being "you just have to call, sorry".

This all reminds me of the advice is Patrick McKenzie's blog post "Identity, Credit Reports and You." Specifically: you never want to deal with customer service, they are the Department of Fobbing People Off. You want to be communicating in writing with a lawyer, since lawyers have the power to tell other people in the business "you're creating liability, make this problem go away".

In this case I think you don't have the same structure as in the credit report case (an act that says they must investigate and respond within X days), so for credibility you probably do need a lawyer writing a letter for you. But I strongly suspect that something like the following will generate a response: "Dear Sir/Madam,

I represent [user]. My client is a customer of your business but is unable to access your services due to [disability]. He has communicated with your customer services (see attached screenshots) and requested they provide a means for him to access these services. Unfortunately they have declined to do so. [Relevant legislation] requires reasonable adjustments to be made in serving disabled customers, and my client and I believe that [adjustment] could easily be made by your business to allow customers with [disability] to access these services. Please advise us within [x days] what adjustments you plan to make to allow my client to access these services.

Yours,

[Lawyer]"

> I've been meaning to learn how to set it up on my home network.

Well I don't think you can get the weights to ChatGPT itself (or the training dataset and compute needed to reproduce them). Unless I've misunderstood what you're planning to set up?

This chart is much more interesting, since you can see the total assets involved this year are close to that of the 2008 crisis: https://www.fdic.gov/bank/historical/bank/index.html

(Assuming I'm reading this correctly - please correct me if I'm misunderstanding the y-axis!)

Wait, you mean like the big 'aggressive' looking hoods on newer SUVs and pickups? I thought they were widely agreed to be dangerous to pedestrians, but drivers like them so car manufacturers make them.

If you have something claiming they're safer I'd really be interested to see it. Can you link?

I've been to EDM acts where there were a few people chilling on the stage with the performer. They didn't really detract much.

There's definitely things on this list I find more obnoxious. And also just odd. The personal chef one I don't really get. Does no one else enjoy a kind of meditative pleasure in cooking?

Wait, wait, wait - we might be just using the word differently, but I would definitely not say that Newtonian mechanics is no longer "relevant". Sure, there are more accurate theories - even in the absence of gravitational fields, and at scales where you can ignore any quantum effects, special relativity is more correct, in the sense that Newtonian mechanics will give you misleading results at very high velocities.

But that doesn't mean it's not longer relevant. Suppose you want to model a fluid mechanics problem where the speeds are all well below the speed of light (so any fluids problem outside of a few astrophysics scenarios). You will be able to get far further using Newtonian mechanics, and derive far more results, because of the relative simplicity of Newtonian mechanics. Trying to derive everything using special relativity would get very messy, and would impede your understanding of what matters at slow speeds.

This was a very enlightening comment, thank you!

I suppose the UK government could choose to use this line of argument combined with the 2016 Psychoactive Substances act to ban spicy curries: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/psychoactive-subs...

That sounds a bit like the SQuAD 2.0 challenge, but simpler.

In SQuAD 2.0 a model is given a question, and a passage of information. It has to select the start and end points of where the answer is contained in the passage.

Your problem is simpler in that there is no question - you just have to have a model that can identify the start and end positions that _you_ will select.

"For science, James?"

"No, for budgetary reasons."

Adding one more: https://www.untether.ai/

Hang on, I don't think it's true that this had to have provincial agreement for this to happen. The federal government makes criminal law in Canada, not the provinces.

But if you're looking to trial this and you have a province that is asking to be allowed to try it, then using the province as the experiment ground is the obvious choice.

I think there's some confusion on your part about what the image purports to show.

I shall put aside the parent comments concern about the signal analysis techniques. Those may be valid concerns, and I don't know enough to assess them.

> I'm not sure it's physically possible to take a visible light picture of a "naked" event horizon The event horizon telescope isn't purporting the image emission from the event horizon itself. While the theory of those emissions (Hawking radiation) is very persuasive, they would be incredibly weak for a black hole of even stellar mass, and even weaker for a supermassive black hole. What is being imaged here is hot around the black hole, which is heated due fluid dynamic effect (compression or viscosity, I'm not sure which dominates) as it spiral in to the black hole. The 'image' of the event horizon is the 'shadow' where the black hole blocks our view of the hot gas on the far side.

The fact that this shadow is compatible with the expected size given the mass of this black hole is a scientifically interesting result.

JWST would be unable to resolve the black hole at all.

> expectation of the courts that those funds won’t be used to settle company debts

I'm not sure if this is really the case, but I was under the impression that brokerages held the customers securities in trust. i.e. there is not merely a norm that they will not be used to settle debt, but it would be illegal for them to be used to do so.

If anyone knows more about brokerages and whether this really is the case, I would be very interested to know.

Probably because lots of people here know there's a good reason not to delete it.

I'd love to see a source for this. I'm very surprised by any claim of coal having a CO2 emissions per GW hr.