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Strange, I walked in different regions of Tokyo, and I found it to be very clean. This is in part because in Japan it is not done to eat while walking in the street.

I remember that in Osaka on Saturday night there were young people kicking trash around, that was the only time I found Japan dirty.

IME, when words like this become common, it allows people to identify them more easily, so it's a good thing to introduce such words.

If you're allowed to change the speed of light, you can also change the gravitational constant G to compensate since the Schwarzschild radius is r = 2GM/c^2, where M is the mass of the object.

I think that light coming from different parts of the lamp arrives at different times. So if the lamp turns off, you see the part closest to you go black first.

I think you're confusing DNA sequencing with DNA synthesis. DNA synthesis is much more expensive, around $0.07 per base pair [1], and bacteria have more than a million, so it's over $70.000. Then you just have the DNA, turning that into the bacteria is very complex, I'm not even sure whether it can be done.

Using CRISPR to modify existing bacteria is probably cheaper, but still complex.

[1] https://briefglance.com/articles/elegen-slashes-dna-synthesi...

Good point about the AI that might find ways that humans didn't think of. But that would mean that Moore's law of Mad Science only now becomes true, and the drop would be steeper.

Still I think that even a super smart AI can't find a way to destroy the world without physical resources that are not easy to get, unless it can hack many systems (like in the movie Eagle Eye), maybe then yes. So let's use AI now to tighten security :-).

I wonder why C and C++ are usually regarded as equally insecure. In C you need to carefully check that you free allocated memory, and that you don't use it after you free it. In C++ this is automated by using classes like std::string and std::vector, once they go out of scope their memory is freed and you can't use it anymore. It is still possible, e.g. by using a for loop that iterates over a vector, and removing or adding stuff to that same vector in that loop. But my rough estimate is that such errors are at least ten times less likely in C++.

I develop in C++ for a job, and when I need to use a library written in C I always have a bad feeling about it.

That law is not based on thorough data. Even a person with a sky high IQ can't destroy the world easily. You need access to stuff that is not easy to get. My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people. Or hacking into systems that control nuclear missiles, but I think these have "air gaps".

Another proof of how much our data is worth. But I think they make a loss on me, I can remember only a handful occasions that I bought something based on an ad I saw, which were more informative than seductive, like a monthly bike rental service.

But I guess they still sell my data. I wish they would flag the data of rational people like me as "worthless", and not sell my data.

The reals can be ordered, just use x < y. I think you mean that if ZFC is true, we could enumerate unnameable reals (choose one with the axiom of choice, remove it, choose another one, etc.), but you could not enumerate them all. But it is true that you could get a "first" unnameable real.

The title says that the US government /intervened/. As the article explains that happened, but also that that intervention wasn't the only reason why TRON didn't succeed.

The title should have been "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, the US intervened although it quickly changed its mind, but a Japanese Windows PC seller used that intervention to boycott it". Or maybe just "Japan tried to build an operating system for the world, here's why it failed".

Amazing! I was proud that my OnePlus smartwatch needs recharging only once every 5 days, but 2 years is unbelievable. The difference is partly due to the LED screen of my smartwatch, LCD is much more energy efficient.

On AliExpress I see things like 64 TB (no, not GB!) USB flash drives for less than 10 euro, obviously a scam. I also see less spectacular products but still good looking deals, but without a brand name so you can't search the web for reviews.

On Amazon I never see products like that. That's why I prefer Amazon (and Coolblue and bol.com in Belgium).

There are people advocating for a new social network that is distributed and not owned by a single company. Turns out it already existed before the modern social networks!

True. But the article mentions that the amplitude of their circadian rhythm is higher (which tells you how much a relevant measure like the amount of melatonin or body temperature varies in a 24 hour cycle), so that is an indication of better sleep. A low amplitude means less difference between sleeping and being awake.

But the article discussed here also points in that direction when it mentions the importance of people on the lookout at night. The article also mentions primitive tribes partying all night, so that is yet another direction.

> Most importantly, when we measured their circadian function directly, small-scale communities had much higher amplitude circadian rhythms than global north populations, which I think is why they report being happy with their sleep even though it’s more fragmented.

This could explain why I feel more rested when I wake up if I take glycine before going to bed, even though I don't sleep more.

Indeed: https://www.doi.gov/pressreleases/interior-announces-energy-...

> “A big problem is AI is being used a lot by people who aren’t mathematicians, who don’t have a huge mathematical background and are not capable of verifying the output,” Bloom said. “They like to move fast, ask their AI to check it, it grows and grows. We’re seeing a lot more of these 100- to 200-page papers that people are posting. ‘I solved this theorem; I got AI to generate the proof and check the proof and write the paper.’ But no human has read it, and no human is going to read it. It’s a huge challenge now.”

Mathematics has the same problem as open source projects that are overwhelmed with AI slop!

Over compression is horrible, but unrelated to this.

I grew up with cassettes, but was happy to switch to CDs when I was around 18. The better the recording and playback, the closer it is to what the artist intended, and to how it would sound if the artist was playing right in front of you (if they don't use autotune or compression).

It's a fact that people get accustomed to the distortions in music playback, in the old days it was the noise of vinyl, which got better later, then cassettes, then heavily compressed MP3s. People should aim for the best possible audio quality and get rid of their preference for distortion.

Thanks. The first article has more info, e.g. that those beetles are flightless.

But that makes me suspect that they spend a lot of time on one tree, only pollinating that tree, which would be pointless because there is no exchange of genes.

I ripped music from both CDs and Internet radio (not Spotify). I remember there were definitely em dashes in those from Internet radio, but I'm not sure whether they also occurred in those from CDs — those filenames probably came from an online DB. Of course the Internet radios might have ripped the music in the same way.

I used to have ripped music that had em dashes in the filenames. But several music players displayed a question mark for it. So I replaced them all with a hyphen.

I don't think that the author has ADHD, because they used to be more attentive in the past. In the case of ADHD, it was also the case as a child.

I also got the diagnosis of ADHD (inattentive type) a few months ago, in the interviews they asked whether I also had these symptoms as a child. Not easy to figure out because as a child things like finishing things on time are not so important yet, and my high IQ compensated for a lack of focus. Only in secondary school it became a problem, and my grades dropped.

As a hobby mathematician, I agree. I know quite a bit about rings and ideals, but I don't understand much from the article on Rees algebras. Wikipedia has a lot of articles on mathematics that are explained badly, I prefer to find information elsewhere, typically I ask an AI for a good introduction on a subject (and usually that links to PDFs with over 100 pages that keep me going for hours).

If engine A uses the results of engine B, and engine B uses the results of engine A, there is a problem :-).

Indeed, Perplexity is so much more useful to me, because I usually have a question, that I can just enter and get an answer that usually is correct. And it also gives sources so I can check the answer and find more info. Try e.g. typing "what does defer do in Zig" into a search engine, one of the last questions I asked. Perplexity immediately gave a clear answer.

I only use a search engine to find a specific website if I know the website should exist but don't know its URL, e.g. the website of a festival.

I was more lucky, I bought a book about C64 assembler in a second hand book store with my pocket money (must have been in 1989 or 1990).

I started a little later with the Commodore 128. I must have spent thousands of hours programming in Basic and assembler. I remember wanting an assembler instead of putting bytes in memory, and saw one in a supermarket when my mom took me shopping, that's how popular computing was then.

It was fun, but primitive, when I learned Pascal at university I was impressed by the functions with a name to which you can pass arguments!

It doesn't even work for most instruments, nearly every instrument can sound differently depending on how you play it. A violin sounds different depending on how close the bow is to the bridge, a piano sounds different depending on which pedals are pressed and whether the lid is open, a trumpet sounds different depending on whether there is a cup in front of it and where. Experienced musicians know how to use these effects to create the right feeling.

And that's only based on how little I know about this.