science4sail

That's actually kind of brilliant - akin to putting "David Mayer" into your documents to poison them for OpenAI [0].

That said, I wonder: what's the motive here? Too many spammy applications from Chinese? Affirmative action to favor native students? Plain old racism?

This also makes me wonder if Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese people have different reputations in Japan given that Taiwan is a former Japanese colony and that the Taiwanese aren't shy about what happened in Tiananmen Square.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certa...

Maybe the white dwarf captures a rogue planet? The planet doesn't need to be from the star's original accretion disk.

How crazy and bureaucratic the Internet has grown!

RFC #1 was basically a one-pager: https://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc?rfc=1#gsc.tab=0

RFC #371 was literally a conference advertisement: https://www.rfc-archive.org/getrfc?rfc=371#gsc.tab=0

Yeah, this sort of thing is unlikely to replace lithium batteries in EVs or portable electronics (unless you want to play with more intensely radioactive materials, which is a can of worms).

The more likely use case would be for extremely long-lived stationary devices - for example, a remote monitoring system that is only accessed once every few years.

"several years" is an understatement - given that carbon-14's half-life is ~5000 years, it's more like several Pluto years, not Earth years.

From an abstract perspective, I guess that makes sense given local cultural norms? I don't think that many Americans would appreciate someone eating horse or dog meat in public even though that is normal in other countries.

On the other hand, I suppose one could see such bans as a symptom of rising Hindu nationalism at the expense of India's minority populations. That's definitely more concerning.

> What's more? Have in mind that an airplane is not a restaurant. It should not even serve food. Although the food industry wants people to believe we need to eat every 3 hours, that's very far from being true.

Have you traveled with friends or a family before? If you go on a 18-hour cross-ocean flight and forgo in-flight meals because eating is food industry propaganda, then you're going to have a lot of hungry/angry travel companions.

I must confess that I have an irrational fondness for the use of weird symbols in math and technical documents, whether it's for a homework assignment in school or a white-paper for work.

My unit tests are literally full of hieroglyphics. My favorite design doc to this day is one where I sprinkled Sumerian cuneiform throughout the text, e.g. 𒀭𒄑𒉋𒂵𒎌 and 𒂗𒆠𒄭 (Gilgamesh and Enkidu) instead of Alice and Bob.

On an ecosystem (not geological) level, one could argue that space colonization is reproduction and that spaceships are the ecosystem's spores.

What does this mean for journalists and historians then? Both are professionally obligated to expose themselves to power brokers (either in person or through textual records), many of whom are pathologically dishonest. Any serious biographer will tell you that self-recollections and memoirs are at best deeply flawed.

I think that it's more important to cultivate media literacy and critically examine "what is the author doing", not just "what is the author saying".

The All-In podcast should not be listened to as a reliable source of news, but rather as a data point providing insight into the perspectives and attitudes of Silicon Valley's leadership class.

If one finds their views to be objectionable/incorrect, then that means that the hosts' peers are likely also holding objectionable/incorrect views of a similar form.

> Lord Harlech—or Jasset David Cody Ormsby-Gore—at 38 is the youngest of the hereditary peers. He said they check the power of political appointees, at least until some better system comes along.

> The House of Lords actually does a good job scrutinizing and reviewing legislation. The unnerving question, he said, is whether this is despite it being undemocratic, or because it’s undemocratic.

The concern here seem to be that elected politicians and political appointees are too short-term focused and beholden to contemporary fashions. Lifetime appointees selected through a parallel process would presumably be resistant to these factors. It's not clear to me why "descendants of medieval nobility" would be a good parallel process though - perhaps some sense of noblesse oblige? It seems like one could get equivalent results by randomly choosing people from the general population.

Annoyance so that bystanders support the protesters' demands or annoyance so that bystanders act against the protesters out of spite? After all, the Westboro Baptist Church's protests don't seem to have been very effective at promoting the cause of homophobia.

I think that protests are a risky move unless the general population is already sympathetic to the protesters' goals.

The problem is that inclusive housing is expensive - if you build a inclusive space with parking or wheelchair accessibility or extra bedrooms, then you're silently excluding those who cannot afford those features. This was basically Hong Kong's government's rationale for why it didn't ban cage homes - doing so would benefit the winners of the public housing lottery but cause the "losers" to become homeless. Feels kind of like a trolley problem to me.

> Universal Design is a concept that proposes the creation of spaces with democratic use, guaranteeing egalitarian conditions in terms of quality of service. The main goal of Universal Design is to allow everyone to use them to the fullest extent possible without the need for adaptations. Considered a concept that applies to architecture and other areas such as product design, Universal Design serves people considering their characteristics, age and individual abilities.

Notably, the design website that you linked doesn't mention anything about making housing cheaper or more affordable.

China itself is probably a good example of what will happen. Slang will have to continuously evolve to stay one step ahead of the censors.

Dead -> unalive -> ?

From the cold blooded business perspective, MSFT is probably doing the right thing for its here. The FTC is currently looking to break up Google; the military industrial complex would have likely discouraged the FTC from this course of action if Google had crushed the Project Maven employee protests a few years ago.

Irreversibly, like all political concepts, is a fiction that humans choose to believe in rather than a law of physics. If social security became insolvent while the US was distracted by some other future national crisis, I'm certain that the people of the future would find a way to cut the pension while staying within the letter of the law (probably via inflation or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRgRz3nSG7o).

Not necessarily. The Roman emperor Diocletian's response to labor shortages was to revoke civil rights: tie peasants to the land and make many urban jobs hereditary.

As long as they think that they're getting fixed, then that's recurring revenue! You can blame any regressions on the EM emissions of the outside world.

I wonder if it's similar to the deaf community's outcry against cochlear implants? People love their subcultures; seeing new medical technology wipe out their culture probably feels like genocide[0] to them (even if the majority population perceives it as a good thing).

[0] One of the UN-recognized forms is "preventing births within a population"

I think that they meant the monthly mortgage payments, not the total price of the house.

> Given all this history, to me it is utterly bizarre that Trudeau cares to defend this dubious group of alleged terrorists more than maintaining diplomatic and economic ties with India

Setting aside the morality of who is right or wrong: my understanding is that just like in the USA, domestic politics are far more important to Canadian politicians than geopolitical concerns. Trudeau likely feels that he and his political coalition cannot afford to alienate Khalistani supporters - if they do so, then they will lose political power until a new coalition can be formed.

> Is that a commonly reasonable goal for folks?

Why not? Humans have been pursuing immortality for time immemorial. "The Epic of Gilgamesh", one of the first known stories, features such a pursuit.

This reminds me of a Soviet joke.

An American and a Russian were discussing their two countries.

The American said: "In my country, we have free speech. I can go to the White House, stand in front of the president, yell 'Down with Eisenhower', and no one will arrest me".

The Russian said: "In my country, we have free speech too! I can go to the Kremlin, stand in front of Stalin, yell 'Down with Eisenhower', and no one will arrest me".

This reminds me of Futurama's coin operated self-termination booths. Maybe that'll be a profitable way to repurpose phone booths made obsolete by cell phones.

That said, if you want to leave this world, then why not go out in style? I'd want to skydive into Mount Erebus's lava lake without a parachute. It would be great for social media and you would have plenty of time to rethink your decision on the way there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Erebus?wprov=sfla1

Maybe if you live in an Anglophone country. In East Asian countries, anime-style corporate mascots are everywhere!

I sure hope that this modern-day Habsburg isn't promoting royal incest, otherwise you end up with fine specimens like this guy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain