MartianSands @ MartianSands @sh.itjust.works

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2 yr. ago

Light is a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum

No, it's not. In physics, we call the entire spectrum "light", because it's all fundamentally the same thing.

We can talk about "visible light", but that's a subset of light in general. Microwaves, radio waves, x-rays, gamma radiation, and any other section of the spectrum you can think of are all light

It's certainly not as bad as the problems generative AI tend to have, but it's still difficult to avoid strange and/or subtle biases.

Very promising technology, but likely to be good at diagnosing problems in Californian students and very hit-and-miss with demographics which don't tend to sign up for studies in silicon valley

I think the trick is to make an effort to cover as many possibilities as can be dealt with by a reasonable effort (definition of "reasonable" varies significantly by context) when setting up something which you expect the general public to interact with. Not so much assuming that any given person has some disability you can't see, but that any large group of people will have at least a few.

Interactions with a specific person are another matter entirely, as you point out. There, I think the best you can do is roll with it if someone tells you that they're unable to do something without subjecting them to interrogation or scepticism

Sure, but there are far more things which will kill the entire person at the same dose they'll kill the cancer than things which can be carefully controlled by choosing the right dose.

These studies which claim to kill cancer in a petri dish usually turn out to be the former, because not killing the host is the difficult part

We really don't. Our history curriculum is much more concerned with ancient history. As far as I can remember, we spent a little time on the colonisation of the Americas then didn't mention them again until the world wars.

The empire covered something like 20% of the entire worlds landmass. If they spent time in school for every part of it which went on to become something noteworthy, they'd run out of time for any other history at all.

The foundation of the US really isn't as important to the rest of the world as the US thinks it is

An experimental capability being kicked out of the kernel, so that it has to settle for being a kernel module or custom forks of the kernel, is absolutely a minor matter

This is a non-issue, being over-reported by people looking for clicks. A minor technical matter being handled by the person ultimately responsible for handling such things

Israel and trump appear to be claiming to have defeated the Iranian air defense, and achieve air supremacy over the Iranian capital.

If that's true then Iran is in deep trouble, and inviting them to surrender wouldn't be unreasonable. I very much doubt that it is true, but that's what they seem to believe

It's far harder to achieve mass manipulation of the ballot when it's all being handled by a lot of human hands. If it's managed by computers, then by finding a bug or other vulnerability in the software or database you could alter the whole election.

Meanwhile, to manipulate a paper ballot & hand-counted election in the same way you'd need the cooperation of a huge number of people, and you'd need them all to keep their mouths shut. That's far more difficult than defeating a computerised system

That really isn't how that works. The US has declared that they won't allow the international courts to get involved, but that doesn't necessarily prevent those courts from disagreeing.

"Jurisdiction" is only a thing when a court answers to some higher authority who has limited what that court can do. Since the international courts theoretically don't answer to the US government, they can make any ruling they like.

They're unlikely to bother, since they probably won't be in a position to enforce any ruling against typical foot soldiers, but they absolutely could if it came to that point

It probably wouldn't be cheaper, and certainly not if one of your requirements is that the code actually work.

AI companies are all operating on the idea that they can get the technology to work in the way that they need before they run out of funding and/or customers. In reality ther are virtually no legitimate uses for it as it currently exists, or will exist in the near future, so these companies are trying to keep up appearances by lying. Either they lie about their use of AI, or they lie about how reliable or effective their AI is, and they count on their sales teams and investors to keep the lights on despite that

The point is that people are going to see that the post was edited, because most platforms will tell them, and the poster is saying "yeah, it's edited. Don't worry, the meaning hasn't changed".

Asking how you'd tell if they were lying is really missing the point. It's not evidence being presented in a court of law, it's social etiquette.

Handshakes date from a time when the person you're meeting having a knife they intend to stab you with was a serious concern, so the custom of grasping each others dominant hand to say "look, I'm not holding a knife" became popular. Doesn't stop people from having a weapon in their other hand, but would you say handshakes are pointless?

Sure you can, but there's a lot of etiquette which was originally supposed to signal trustworthiness which liars fake all the time. That doesn't stop it from being considered polite

It's polite to justify and/or summarise an edit, because many platforms label edited posts and it helps reassure everyone that the conversation they're reading really happened.

There's a big difference between "edit to totally change what was said and make everyone responding to me look like fools or racists" and "edit to correct a typo"

That's an implementation detail, not really relevant to my point.

I don't think you appreciate how powerful those magnets are. Any ferromagnetic object would be doing well to avoid binding up completely when held right up to the device

Realistically, the mechanism would jam. I doubt the hammer would fall, being squeezed hard against whatever structure supports it

You're overlooking the fact that this development is a side project for them. While they're designing this rocket, their other rocket is in operational use and has the best success rate of any rocket of its scale in history, and they'd already be considered hugely successful if they never did anything innovative ever again.

They're also trying to do something far more difficult than the Saturn 5, in at least two ways. Nobody has ever tried to land a rocket anywhere near as large as either of the stages of this system, and on top of that they're trying to come up with a design which is cheap to operate, which wasn't remotely on the cards during the Apollo program.

Honestly I think it's misleading to describe it as being "defined" as 1, precisely because it makes it sounds like someone was trying to squeeze the definition into a convenient shape.

I say, rather, that it naturally turns out to be that way because of the nature of the sequence. You can't really choose anything else

X^0 and 0! aren't actually special cases though, you can reach them logically from things which are obvious.

For X0: you can get from X^{(n) to X}(n-1) by dividing by X. That works for all n, so we can say for example that 2³ is 2⁴/2, which is 16/2 which is 8. Similarly, 2¹/2 is 2⁰, but it's also obviously 1.

The argument for 0! is basically the same. 3! is 1x2x3, and to go to 2! you divide it by 3. You can go from 1! to 0! by dividing 1 by 1.

In both cases the only thing which is special about 1 is that any number divided by itself is 1, just like any number subtracted from itself is 0