devindotcom

The classic cartoon for this:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/05/80/42/058042c06780bbc0fa3a...

I too love the effort put into solving this problem. It's a totally different mindset from my own and clearly they get a lot of satisfaction from it. I myself would be satisfied with understanding that it is possible but non-trivial to do this, and immediately propose a trivial alternative like choosing from a deck of playing cards. Society needs both kinds of people! (and everyone in between)

There's an experiment going to the ISS on Monday seeing if they have any epigenetic, cross-generational adaptations to microgravity. I fully expect orbital varieties of various fruits and veggies soon!

Coral Vita is an interesting company working on this, accelerating coral culturing so there's more stock to seed depleted or potential locations with:

https://www.coralvita.co/

Placing the blame on "the media" over the last five years is not really correct. People have been undermining basic election rights and processes for quite a while and while both parties engage in it the right is far more active and devious in gerrymandering, eroding legal protections, etc. Trust in government in general is low but elections have been quite fairly run and provably so to a reasonable doubter. But doubters have been given free rein to be unreasonable, hence they doubt the auditors, and the auditors of the auditors, all the way up. Losing fair and square is no longer something many people think is possible for their party.

The media has covered this with varying effect but we hardly conjured it into existence. In fact the media can barely keep the lights on, let alone fund the lawsuits, "grassroots" redistricting efforts, organized disinfo campaigns, etc that have shaped politics at the state level — including anti-media campaigns that paint the elite mainstream media as the authors of the present electoral crisis.

Wouldn't be the first time this happened, but it's hard to verify this without any hard data. Follow up with Meta via your business account and ask them to explain or you'll go the FTC and press (me).

Nice list. I would second Ryuichi Sakamoto, Loscil, Julianna Barwick, Mary Lattimore, and Grouper for sure and there are lots of other good ones on there.

I'd add Windy & Carl, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Yui Odonera (lots from the Serein label actually), Max Richter, and most of all Stars of the Lid.

Report says over 100, as late as 2020.

The interesting thing I learned about this is that the big names in chess all agree that they don't need to be told what move to make. In a recent interview Magnus Carlsen said:

> The people who get caught are those who cheat in a really obvious and stupid manner. The problem was that he [i.e., a player caught in 2016] was not good enough to see what would’ve made sense.

> Had I started cheating in a clever manner, I am convinced no one would notice. I would’ve just needed to cheat one or two times during the match, and I would not even need to be given moves, just the answer on which move was way better. Or, here there is a possibility of winning, and here you need to be more careful. That is all I would need in order to be almost invincible, which does frighten me.

So all you need is a buzz or maybe two - "caution" and "opportunity," "defense" and "offense" or whatever.

The difficult part is getting the game state to the device. In streamed games this can be done with a medium amount of trouble but in non-streamed OTB games you'd need the player or a confederate to be silently inputting moves for the engine to respond to. Not impossible but... difficult. Nevertheless, when the prizes are in the hundreds of thousands, people may try to find a way.

FYI the Kobo Libra 2 is just this if you don't need the Amazon ecosystem. If you do, you're out of luck for now though.

The most prescient fiction work of the century, in my opinion.

Good stuff, Max. Wish I had time to fiddle with local SD but I'm not worried about it, it just keeps getting better and more accessible. The leading edge will always be experimenters but the trailing edge will be creative people using the tools to further their art.

This seems kind of odd to me, the idea that using 50 plastic bags is environmentally equivalent to one plastic-based reusable bag.

The "environmental impact" is defined pretty broadly, but intuitively it feels like I'd rather have the one bag go to the dump when it wears out than have 50 flimsy plastic ones blowing about or getting into every nook and cranny.

As always of course, while it's good to be aware of your own wasteful habits, they're probably a rounding error compared with industrial and commercial waste, things like enormous fishing nets and lines being cut off in the ocean, or pallets of packages being wrapped by hundreds of feet of plastic wrap for transport.

Very true. I can't stand the screen door effect you see on a lot of digital projections. It's horribly distracting. I saw Dune in digital IMAX and spent the whole time thinking there was something wrong with the projector. I think they need some kind of final analog optical step that mitigates the pixelated look many have.

Plus with digital you never have the film getting stuck and melting - always a treat to witness!

RIP.

Some may see the Drake Equation as reductive, and that's kind of the point. Its simplicity makes it compelling: presenting the enormousness and diversity of the universe as a near infinitude that seems incapable of supporting only one planet full of life. It's also easily understood by anybody who can do basic math, with a 30-second explanation. You can make anyone think and make an informed guess on one of the most profound questions of all.

Here's hoping we prove his intuition right one day, I'm glad he lived to see so many advances in astronomy and physics, it must surely have felt like an unfolding of possibility to him.

This article is about people being jailed or killed for criticising their government

I liked when it was appearing randomly in reddit threads but ultimately the story kinda fizzled out. Creepypasta type fiction tends to do that, big concept, scope expansion, then a rushed ending. Actually it's kind of a hallmark of SF/F in general...

PgDn also does this... strange. Scroll wheel works fine.

Accommodating the doppler effect is non-trivial, Lynk has demonstrated it with its own satellite but doesn't exactly have the orbital presence of Starlink:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/lynk-demos-global-satellit...

This will definitely be a common thing from multiple providers in a few years though.

It really, really isn't a change in policy, and that's why there's no need for examples that were "previously allowed" but now aren't.

This is a distillation and synthesis of existing policies in place at hundreds of major institutions and organizations with their own ethics policies for qualitatively and quantitatively estimating the harms and benefits of proposed research.

An anthropologist disturbing a culture to document it is a trade-off maybe not worth making. A summary of behaviors found in autism spectrum disorders that is insufficiently inclusive of their lived experience is a bad idea. This is the kind of evaluation researchers need to perform sufficiently to justify their work (and their funding), and they do it all the time.

Increasingly they also need to evaluate whether they themselves are fit to perform that evaluation, and the guidelines here suggest situations where researchers may want to look outside themselves, situations which hitherto were not as frequently considered as, for example, race, religion, or income level. Being more inclusive on what matters should be thought of as potential sources of bias or inadvertent harm is not a change in policy, it is an acknowledgement that the existing policy was not sufficiently well delineated.

The point is not to satisfy the empty criticism of "this is invalid because I can't think of an situation where it would apply." It is an elementary example of how the scientific community polices itself and prunes its methods in line with the evolution of norms and ethics.

Unit 731 is extreme but consider the many invasive and painful experiments still done on chimpanzees. At what point does the suffering of the animals outweigh the benefits of the study? Showing that the balance is on the side of the benefits is a basic part of getting any work approved at universities and research institutions. Nature is simply aggregating some of the ethical guidelines already present in many of these processes and proposing them as a broader and more inclusive structure.

Oh yes, I was using this for a while to read an old serial, it's really great but I found I simply don't like reading on my phone, even small bits at a time. If they could pop a new chapter into my e-reader every once in a while that would be phenomenal.

I question the premise that we are overcautious. Media has only increased in intensity and violence and the breadth of suffering it depicts. That's not a bad thing in itself, but people are perfectly right to want to know when media exceeds their personal limits, be they merely preferences or something more serious like trauma. People are not pampered, they are wary, and for good reason.

I don't think this is correct. The FCC announcement notes that $5B of the original RDOF auction has been authorized already. It gave out $23M today in a separate announcement.

Have you had a lot of miscarriages?

That's interesting, I hadn't seen this version of "perilous" before but I like it.

I've also tracked a lot of words I have needed to look up, but made little posts out of the interesting ones. Of course, I immediately forget all these definitions, but that just makes it fun to go back through them.

https://coldewey.cc/tag/vocabulary/

I suppose you feel this way about net neutrality as well, since it was established and then reverted as a partisan issue, also part of the so-called "culture wars"? Don't forget, they make everything part of the culture war so people will vote based on their "culture."

Right now people who want to get abortions are a group of major concern in the privacy debate. Others also need these protections, but people getting abortions and abortion-adjacent care are in immediate, real danger and their privacy is suddenly much more important than a few weeks or months ago.

The FTC is expressing that it intends to protect the privacy expectations of all Americans in mind, regardless of state rules limiting certain medical procedures, medications, or even sexual orientations. The current data economy provides numerous opportunities to get around those expectations and protections. That's something that should change - though it will need legislation, probably, not just an agency rolling up its sleeves.

It's 100% real and 100% serious. That's why it is so well known in the design world.

I wonder if your comment exemplifies some corollary to Poe's Law - that someone mistaking real for parody or vice versa will confidently assert their view as obviously correct and challenge others (even if they constitute a seemingly informed majority) to justify their own.

Yikes. I'd recommend talking with and listening to some real people, especially women, to get a sense of how out of touch the views you espouse here are. Calling widespread outrage over bodily autonomy a temper tantrum and the consequences of removing a decades-old right to abortion FUD is scary stuff.