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Do you think there is a tradeoff in this case? If so, what is the best counterargument against making PACER records free? I think it's important to note, as the article does, that these records are already "public" (that's what the "P" stands for) what's at issue is whether you should be charged a fee to access them.

I recently saw an interesting criticism of this paper: That by the end stages of the disassembly of Mercury, the amount of heat generated would be so much as to melt the surface, calling into question whether the mass driver system could work at such a high rate.

The title of this post seems wrong: seems they are claiming five thousand kilograms of gold per year in a Gigawatt scale plant.

> power plants can generate five thousand kilograms of gold per year, per gigawatt of electricity generation

Very funny to me that lecture 21 is one of the only lecture titles that doesn't reference the name of the originator.

I am looking at the last image in the article, captioned "The encrypted message instructs the viewer to appease the gods with offerings". The picture shows ... a person kneeling in front of a throned figure, offering something with both hands. Is something about this message supposed to be hidden?

Not sure I agree with the comment you're responding to. But the article discusses some of their funding troubles, and the main mage of arxiv.org itself has a donate link. So I think perhaps the media presence might be motivated by a desire to fundraise (and IMO they absolutely deserve funding because of the important work they do).

> If there was enough evidence to demonstrate that he attempted to murder someone, why wasn't he charged and convicted of it?

Wikipedia suggests this was because he was already sentenced to double life imprisonment. Clearly prosecutors should not waste time pursuing charges that won't really impact a criminal's status, do you disagree?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Ulbricht#Trial

I don't think this is right. From the Wikipedia page:

> In August 2022, the U.S. Department of the Treasury blacklisted the service, making it illegal for US citizens, residents and companies to use.

A lot of thoughts in this thread on what academic papers are or should be, let me give my own opinion as a person who tries to write papers.

Papers should be structured like fractals - that is, they should be "self-similar". The main text of the paper after the introduction should go into all the necessary details demonstrating the origins of the idea and proving that it has value. Then the introduction section should summarize all this, and take a less rigorous tone. The abstract should be a summary of the introduction. And then the title should summarize the abstract. If you really have a lot of technical work to do, maybe you can write a super long appendix and have the main body summarize that.

I myself probably spend as much time reading paper introductions as I do reading paper bodies, which means that probably 90% of the papers I read, I only read the introduction. I do this because I enjoy it more - I like new ideas, and the intros are a great way to get a lot of them. This blog post reads like a great paper introduction to me. It's easy to trick yourself into believing something is easy though, so an academic paper would have to back this up with an experiment.

He says in the very first paragraph:

> I lost a series of pitched battles against Pytorch and biblatex, so I figured I’d just write a blog post instead.

So I think your accusation of his burying the lede on the lack of experiment is unwarranted.

What rubs me the wrong way about the mhils Github response is that it fails to answer the question that the commenter asked: Is there or is there not a target date for the next release (and if so, what is it)? It's fine to charge money to move the date up, but it seems like if you are going to make that offer, you should try to tell the person how much time they would actually be buying.

You can hardly say that they switched to a private channel because they knew "that they would get blasted for such a response in a public forum" when the comment they were responding to was the one that suggested the switch to email.

I disagree that this would have been the right thing to do. There's nothing wrong with explaining why something could be useful in an open source project - if the reason seems like something important that a lot of other users of the software would also need, the maintainers of the software might want to know about it so that they can add the feature or fix the bug sooner. It can also help if there's some way of working around the problem.

Calling the developer extortionate was unreasonable, but I don't think there's anything wrong with the first message.

Fun how you can hear the diffraction spikes.

For searching using search terms for theorems in mathlib, there is the mathlib documentation page (for Lean 3 https://leanprover-community.github.io/mathlib_docs/ and Lean 4 https://leanprover-community.github.io/mathlib4_docs/). To find theorems by type, I find the best way is to use the `library_search` tactic from inside Lean itself.

They address this at the end of the article

> Our calculations account for air drag and the effects of gravity.

> While the return velocity is dependent upon a number of factors, firing angle is extremely important. Bullets fired at an angle maintain their angular ballistic trajectory and are less likely to tumble, allowing them to pick up more speed on the way down.

You make a good point about the infographic showing a cartridge being fired, but as far as I can tell there is only one infographic on the page that actually shows this. These factors make me suspect that you didn't actually read the article to the end before criticizing it. "Intellectual rigor" indeed.

This is why I think network fees are a good metric. As long as anyone can become a block creator, you can’t pump it without losing money.

Anyone can see what amount of money one address has put into Tornado Cash, so it’s no surprise that we can estimate how much money North Korea has put in. The whole reason they do put that money in, though, is so that they can have a different account take that money out, and have it not be clear where the money came from. For a sanctioned country, that output seems much more spendable.

> In fact, someone would appear to be trolling the authorities by sending small amounts from prohibited Tornado Cash addresses to prominent people; those transactions cannot be declined, but receiving such a "gift" is technically in violation of the sanctions.

How can I be violating sanctions as a result of someone else’s actions? I’m not a lawyer, but I imagine one could just argue that receiving an output from a transaction that touches Tornado is considered different from interacting with Tornado oneself.

Whoever made the first animation on the webpage seems to have been a bit confused. Looks like they were trying to show the Ruy Lopez but the positions of the king and queen were switched.

I would personally recommend Susskind’s videos on cosmology. Seems like the main ideas are surprisingly simple and I walked away feeling like I had learned something.

Not sure I would describe Scott Aaronson as "social justice-y". He's had plenty of other quibbles with "equity types", for example, over the use of the term "quantum supremacy [1].

[1]: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=5843

Not sure how the second example of buying a shiny new wallet is different from the first example of buying a shiny new cup. Seems like a better example for “wabi-sabi” would be continuing to use a wallet even after one of the flaps breaks, as long as the other flaps hold what you need them to.

The two things I really want from a SSG for my blog are the ability to avoid indexing posts by dates and the ability to link from md files to other md or image files in the same directory. I’ve tried maybe 8 or so of the most popular options and haven’t found this.

Whether or not there's an opportunity cost does matter, but why should this mean that the mining algorithm "paying off anyway" mean it can't be used? If the mining algorithm has an independent payoff whether or not you mine on the main chain, then there's still the same opportunity cost of the mining rewards.

They are slightly different in meaning. Cease = Stop doing it. Desist = Don’t do it again.

For what it’s worth I think that if people were downvoting you because of your position, they would be downvoting the parent as well. They’re downvoting you because saying “I was going to say the same thing” doesn’t contribute to the conversation.

What if you met someone carrying their phone in their breast pocket, with the camera facing outward? Would you ask to see their phone to see if they were recording you?

Your comment was literally "#America", certainly this implies you think it's different in other countries, otherwise, why would you highlight the Americanness?

> If you ask a Python developer about [private instance variables], they’ll respond with: “don’t access the instance variables of another class, lol”.

> only in Python will the difference between tabs and spaces cause the interpreter to have a heart attack.

> The question of making a variable constant came up on Stack Overflow and a Python developer’s advice was “just don’t change it”.

All of these critiques seem to amount to: If I do something dumb, then Python will break on me. While I respect that other languages have protections, it's sort of like asking "why doesn't Python have static types?".