fabian2k

Gerrymandering does not affect whole-state races like the Senate. Nobody is re-drawing state borders for every election.

And in some areas gerrymandering did backfire as far as I read, though I didn't look at the specifics.

The Mississippi senate race is essentially tied, which is kind of an insane result. As well as the Democrats winning practically everything in Texas.

Sounds a bit like dystopian Scifi. AI making itself smarter and removing guard rails or restrictions is one of the key steps for that genre. Now, the models usually don't have access to their own weights, but if they get good enough maybe they can create a bit dumber versions of themselves from scratch. Or reuse available models they can find and modify them for their purposes.

We already saw that the AIs like to cooperate and exchange information. Building a network of unaligned AIs and improving them sounds like something that could potentially happen.

Most Jepsen tests leave me with the impression "databases are damn complicated and difficult to get right". My thoughts with this particular report are "I'll never ever touch this DB if I can help it".

Why should anyone believe that? I mean it might be true, I don't know. But if such a report turns out many fundamental issues it doesn't quite sound plausible that a redesign would suddenly not have any issues anymore. It might have fewer issues, it likely will have different issues as well though.

They could have passed a law to shut down USAID, that would have been the proper, legal way to do this. They didn't. The executive legally can't do whatever they want, but the Republicans in the legislative simply stood by and cheered while the administration trampled over their legislative responsibilities and powers.

We're not in court. And there's plenty of other indicators that Kushner is taking bribes.

If you have mildly conservative views in Germany, you vote CDU or FDP. You don't vote AfD.

The rest of the world did object the last time we did that. I'd prefer if we don't try that again, and our constitution is specifically set up to prevent this.

That is not how the German constitution is set up. You can do what you wish in your country, but here the "freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung" is not up for debate. There are also specific clauses in the constitution that cannot be amended or changed, one of them ensures Germany is a democracy.

The lesson the US should have taken from that period in Germany is that if a party leader attempts a coup once, you should not let them and their party get elected to finish the job.

If the party is actively working, in a combative and aggressive manner, to damage or destroy the democratic constitutional system in Germany, the constitution allows for this party to be banned.

Popularity isn't a limit here, at least not in this direction. If the party were irrelevant, it would prevent the ban since the party would not be able to achieve those anti-constitutional goals anyway.

The US is rounding up foreigners/brown people right now and incarcerating them under deplorable conditions.

The economic platform of the AfD doesn't even pretend to care about normal people. Neither does the Republican platform and Trump in particular in the US.

This argument has been repeated for decades, but I just don't see it.

The statement did include that all art should also be AI-generated, which is a whole other thing. I'd also make a large difference between most code being AI-generated to start with, and actually not writing by hand at all anymore.

40% in Sachsen-Anhalt. Not 40% in Germany total.

Mirror-image life obviously depends on chirality. But chirality is very relevant without it. It is a fundamental aspect of chemistry (and biology).

The problem is that there seems to be a serious amount of fraud there. I suspect the susceptibility to fraud is at least partially self-inflicted here, but the Deutschlandticket is well known to have been abused in various ways.

So the providers want a live verification, not a static QR code that always remains valid for a month or so. My understanding that this is both, to combat fraud where fake tickets are sold (well, real ones but bought with fake or stolen payment methods) as well as people using tickets other than their own. The latter is theoretically prevented by checking photo ID, but almost nobody does that in practice.

So they force the app because it's slightly harder to fake than just copying the QR code. I don't think you'll get a more open system here unless the underlying vulnerabilities are fixed in some way. And you'd probably need to embed photo ID information in the ticket somehow to prevent multiple people from using a ticket, and I doubt that will happen for privacy reasons.

Modern analytical methods are very impressive. High resolution mass spectrometry that directly gives you the elemental composition is crazy, but that is nothing unusual today.

Of course NMR could show all the information you need here and more, as they used it to confirm the conclusion. But it needs comparatively massive amounts of sample, having to run a 100g reaction to get enough substance is though. But if you're going after a 0.06% side product you're dealing with tiny amounts most of the time.

The Iran war is a particularly stupid shitshow, but there was no way to "properly" wage this war. There's a reason previous US administrations didn't do this, and it wasn't because they were Iran-friendly.

Committing ground troops would be necessary to actually achieve objectives here. But that would lead the US into a very different, probably even larger shitshow.

As far as I understand, the US produces more Diesel than it consumes. A blanket export ban would mean that refineries would have to shut down because they can't get rid of all the Diesel they produce. But since refineries produce more than one product, this would affect other oil products as well. That doesn't sound like a situation you want.

But this is based on my simplistic understanding of how this works, I'm really not sure about the details.

Argh, I missed that it actually uses the "none" algorithm. Yeah, the existence of that option is extremely dumb and it shouldn't be possible to use that. I misread the post and thought it was a regular JWT, but they simply didn't validate it.

Someone not verifying the signature at all is not a mistake where you can blame the JWT spec itself.

The difference between Washing and Upcycling is enormous. That does fit my observations, it's nice to see it quantified.

Another aspect that is nice to see quantified is how big the effect of better quality modules is. You likely underestimate that initially since it's not linear.

The Space Casino mentioned in the post is not possible anymore in Factorio 2.1. Which is experimental at the moment, but I'd assume will be released soon. And experimental Factorio tends to be as stable or more as the stable versions of other games.

But a significant part of that is not something we can influence. Getting cancer is a side-effect of living. Our own metabolism causes DNA damage.

There are other papers that attribute something like a third of cancers to the big environmental and lifestyle factors.

That paper links a random blog post as source for these statistics (reference 9). That's a huge red flag for me and not what I'd expect in a scientific paper. I find the numbers wildly implausible in any case since they only have two categories: hereditary and environmental/lifestyle.

Cancer is caused by random chance. Accumulate enough mutations of the right kind and you get it. Of course you can dramatically affect that chance through genetic factors and environmental ones.

The 2D graphics are heavier than you might suspect. But Factorio is overall a very well optimized game, and it runs far better on my office notebook than any comparable game. This will work fine on any not ancient notebook with integrated graphics.

That restriction is needed in some way to prevent that building being a way of teleporting stuff across the planet. They did relax this in 2.1 and allow you to build extensions to that building where you can add inserters and use belts/trains.

I don't think it will even come close to being economically feasible. But the main arguments are that you get a lot more and constant solar power and you avoid permitting/regulations on earth.

I think the big issue is that the user doesn't have a choice in many cases. Windows obviously doesn't give the user a choice, they made the start menu much shittier and you had to live with it or go away. Popular distributions like Ubuntu also focus on one desktop environment, and it's often not easy to switch (it's possible of course, but at least when I tried it a long time ago just installing a different desktop wasn't enough).

Making it easier to choose allows for much more experimentation. I'm using Niri right now, which certainly isn't something you can just give users as a default.