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No kidding Twitter has spam/fake accounts, isn't that part of why Musk wanted to buy Twitter in the first place?

He publicly stated that he wanted to buy Twitter to clear up the fake account issue, he knew about the issue before entering the deal, when signing he waived due diligence that could have given him the opportunity to investigate the issue before signing...

Musk's own tweets will work against him if he tries to use the fake accounts issue to back out.

On the other hand, existence of this conspiracy has been used to shut down perfectly reasonable discussion around a less outlandish lab leak for months.

Even in this post opponents of the lab leak theory are still bringing up this bioweapons conspiracy - but I can't see a single lab leak proponent suggesting it's an engineered bioweapon.

The issue is the existence of this outlandish fringe theory was used to censor all reasonable discussion on the lab leak.

The immediate result of this is that publishers who don't want to play by Apple's privacy laws will only host their apps on alternative app stores. Want Facebook on your iphone? It'll only be available on the app store that has less strict privacy protections.

It's not seeking out and customizing my experience if the only choice is "have my privacy violated, or don't use the service. That's the experience that already exists on platforms with less strict privacy protections.

The game actually streams in much of its contents also. They still stream in the satellite ground textures, but they don't use these to texture models in the same way as Google/Apple maps.

The thing I find strange about MSFS is that the 3D visualisation is in many cases much worse than the Google/Apple maps. It seems to replace many buildings with generic models - they have the same shape, but the textures and style is obviously just a generic sculpted to fit. Apple/Google maps use the actual textures of the buildings themselves.

For my home city for example Apple maps has full 3d for every single building and it looks amazaing, but in MSFS most of the buildings are replaced with generic copy paste American suburbia style structures.

Learning all the shortcuts isn't really the challenging part of learning DF, the underlying mechanics are often just as baffling.

For example the distinction between "Rooms", "Zones", "Stockpiles" and "Locations" which are all just variations on "area marked for some purpose" but that all exist as their own independent concepts and are specified in different ways.

In a way that's part of what makes it so interesting. It's not merely bad, the UX is completely alien. It feels like software designed by another species. There is loads of software with terrible UX, but most of it is bad in the same boring ways.

I see Dwarf Fortress as outsider art:

"Outsider art is art made by self-taught or supposedly naïve artists with typically little or no contact with the conventions of the art worlds. In many cases, their work is discovered only after their deaths. Often, outsider art illustrates extreme mental states, unconventional ideas, or elaborate fantasy worlds."

Other than the fact that the game was not discovered after his death, every other element of Wikipedia's outsider art intro paragraph fits to a T.

Mental health checks sound like a good idea, but there is a risk that it prevents people from actually seeking help.

See the way mental illness is treated in aviation - mental health care is inaccessible to pilots because seeking help for serious issues will put a black mark on your record and end your career. So pilots with serious mental health issues intentionally avoid getting help.

Not that it's a bad idea just that it's not as easy as it seems. Penalties for seeking medical care push people away from seeking care and in turn make the health issues worse.

The actual UST blockchain was halted for a time.

There are quick release water cooling designs for the data center. But water cooling has many issues: the loop needs to be perfectly sealed as water is conductive and will instantly destroy your very expensive servers in the case of a fault. Pumps are a moving part and are prone to failure. Everything needs to be manufactured to precise tolerances.

Meanwhile immersion cooling is the opposite - Just build a tank and drop your stuff in it. Modern immersion cooling fluids aren't like mineral oil so you don't end up with components permanently coated in oil.

Volcanologists cannot exactly predict when a volcano will erupt. Seismologists cannot exactly predict when an earthquake will happen. Both can only offer uncertain probabilities. But these are definitely both sciences.

Economists cannot predict exactly when market crashes will occur. Is volcanology not a real science because volcanologists cannot predict the moment a volcano will erupt?

In both cases scientific study can help us determine when the risk is higher or lower, and can tell us definitively when one does occur. But no field that studies stochastic processes like markets or volcanic activity can make 100% certainty predictions years in advance.

These fields are all dealing with probabilities, asking for a yes or no answer is missing the point.

Modern volume normalization isn't done based on the highest peak of the track. Instead they normalize based on the average perceived loudness of the whole track (to a level below 0 so there is headroom for peaks). It's intentionally designed to avoid the exact issue you describe.

If this was not done users of streaming services would have to be constantly adjusting the volume to deal with perceived volume differences between tracks due to different levels of dynamic range compression.

Streaming services don't compress dynamic range, rather the opposite - because every streaming service employs loudness normalization the loudness wars have largely ended. Compressing your track to hell in an effort to get it to sound louder doesn't work anymore because every streaming service will just normalize it anyway.

Spotify at least uses 320kbps vorbis for their "high quality" setting which is at the point where I don't believe it's humanly possible to distinguish from a lossless encoding.

The ad would have been originally printed across two pages in a magazine.

Is it definitely backed? As far as I know there has never been satisfactory proof that USDT has ever been backed by anything.

Yes fractional reserve banking is a real thing, but real banks must publish audited financial statements so that outside observers can asses the banks financial position. From small local banks to national reserve banks, the financial statements are out in the open for depositors and borrowers to scrutinize. This isn't possible with Tether because the fiat side of their books are closed.

If everything is above board at Tether why not release the books? It's such an obvious PR win and would increase adoption of their currency.

They haven't done so because they know the books are cooked.

In this case the Oracle is a consensus protocol where community nodes report the LUNA/UST rate.

But of course to make running such a node easy for users Terraform Labs distributes node software that reports a value chosen by Terraform. So in spite of the distributed consensus design the Oracle is just Terraform.

It's an intrinsically flawed concept even without the 20% interest rate.

The algorithmic balancing between UST/LUNA doesn't help at all with maintaining a LUNA/USD market. UST is pegged to USD indirectly through LUNA, and LUNA itself isn't pegged to anything. Nor is there a big market maker willing to buy/sell LUNA at any price.

A stablecoin that isn't pegged to USD by a 1:1 cash backing by the issuer just can't work. Putting an extra cryptocurrency and an algorithm in between the stablecoin and USD makes the system seem more legitimate to users but doesn't solve the fundamental issue with an unbacked stablecoin.

It's absolutely true of other algorithmic stablecoins.

When it comes to "backed" stablecoins like USDT the scam is even simpler: you just say it's backed by cash when it's not.

Currently it's literally impossible to get rid of for any price, given that Terra have officially halted the blockchain at block 7607789 https://twitter.com/terra_money/status/1524935730308456448

You can't even pay people to take your LUNA - it simply cannot be transferred.

Price of LUNA/USD doesn't matter so much - the issue is liquidity. Without a market maker offering sufficient liquidity to the LUNA/USD market the peg will break down.

Yes there is still a price on the LUNA/USD pair, and this price has not collapsed completely. But there just aren't enough buyers on the USD side of the trade. The market isn't big enough to handle the demand to exit LUNA to USD. And so the UST peg breaks down.

In this case the algorithm pegs the coin to another cryptocurrency, LUNA. You can algorithmically exchange 1 USD worth of LUNA for 1 UST at any time.

But note that this algo doesn't help you cash out your LUNA! Is 1 USD worth of LUNA really worth 1 USD if there is nobody who will buy it from you?

If there isn't a healthy USD-LUNA market, the fact that the UST-LUNA market is algorithmically enforced doesn't help you that much.

Algorithm won't help you make a healthy LUNA-USD market, only way is to have a market maker putting up USD and LUNA reserves to offer liquidity to buyers/sellers.

It also relies an a healthy USD-LUNA market. If there aren't any buyers on the LUNA side it doesn't matter how man LUNA you can mint from your UST because you can't exit the LUNA side anyway.

It's the same problem for basically any stablecoin: they exist because the paths between traditional finance and crypto are narrow and tricky. But this in turn limits the ability of a stablecoin to actually peg to a value from traditional finance. If there are mass net outflows from the cryptocurrency ecosystem back into traditional finance it will be impossible for these stablecoins to maintain their value. They are essentially a bet on the downside of crypto (if everything goes to custard you won't be able to exit) with none of the upside of crazy returns found in non-stablecoin cryptocurrencies.

There are more requirements than just making the source available. GPLv3 has an anti-Tivoization clause that forbids using GPLv3 code in a product in a way that the GPLv3 code is not able to be replaced by the end user.

And there are also requirements that you distribute additionaal "Installation Information" alongside the code itself. If you have to release your code under GPL, you must make it possible for end users to build & run your code. Can't hide behind proprietary in-house compilers, build systems, or build time dependencies on proprietary data to prevent end users making use of the GPL'd source.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#InstInfo

"GPLv3 explicitly requires redistribution to include the full necessary “Installation Information.” GPLv2 doesn't use that term, but it does require redistribution to include scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable with the complete and corresponding source code. This covers part, but not all, of what GPLv3 calls “Installation Information.” Thus, GPLv3's requirement about installation information is stronger."

MX Master 3 has inbuilt mouse acceleration, even if you can set acceleration to zero in software it's still there in the hardware.

Cyclic references are an issue for ref counting as the cycle prevents the count ever reaching 0. Not an issue for mark & sweep where if an allocation isn't accessible from the GC root it's safe to free.

I'm curious, is there a reason why GC'd languages don't use some form of escape analysis so that only allocations that can possibly live beyond the current scope need to be heap allocated?

Lot's of better paid gigs with better working conditions where you aren't personally legally liable if you write a bug. I don't especially care about what job title some board thinks I'm allowed to use.

Why would any sane consumer purchase those games when Nintendo has no track record of honoring purchases? Nintendo aggressively cuts off access to consumers past purchases in the hopes that they buy the same retro games again on the new system. Not just by not sharing retro game purchases between systems, but also not even letting consumers still download their purchases on older systems.

It's like buying a book that's set to self-destruct a decade from now - no sane consumer would buy such a product.

I really dislike the "fire in a crowded theatre" analogy - it was originally used in a court judgement where the accused had spoken out publicly against the draft.

It's honestly madness that this "fire in a crowded theatre" still comes up given where it originated - a court case where exactly the kind of speech that people worry about being restricted was in fact restricted.