ticulatedspline

Seems a lot of work for an intuitive result. If a wall uses only 50% of the material per linear foot and is less than 200% length, well duh it's going to save bricks.

Though depending on the wall the precise savings may be different, in a flemmish bond some bricks are laid header out (spanning the two bricks) where it looks like the model is just 2 offset walls side by side

I also think the strength test is missing the point. any focused damage is likely to be more severe on a thinner wall, period. But I believe you can make a crinkle wall of relatively arbitrary length with decent height whereas an buttressed straight wall of sufficient length might be something you could practically push over with your hands.

I think Monsanto is an evil company, like in a very real cartoonish-evil sense. I have no doubt they put their thumb on the scale of research leaning it towards safe.

That said I suspect glyphosate is probably not that bad, and among herbicides it may actually be the lesser of many evils. As in most things the truth is likely somewhere in the middle. Glyphosate may have carcinogenic properties but also may not be particularly dangerous in the quantities that a normal person may encounter either in food or spraying the weeds around their house a couple times in the summer.

Probably the most convincing thing I can casually dig up is that despite massive increases in use[1] the per-capita rate of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma has been pretty steady since 1990[2]. Now suspiciously it did rise between 1975 (roundup introduced in '74) and 1990 but seems to have plateaued since then.

If it were substantially linked via casual exposure I would expect a stronger correlation with its use. I wouldn't go drinking the stuff but it's possible it's no better or worse than the myriad of other "safe but not really" chemicals we douse our lives with.

[1] Table 1: https://alanplewis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Benbrook-T...

[2] https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/nhl.html

those levels weren't what I was expecting.

https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...

I'm curious as to how I would score, I would definitely count myself as "literate" but I wonder how well I'd do on the level 4/5 tasks and if they cross over into more general memory, intelligence, and study habit metrics that even a normally "literate" person would not do well at.

Though given those descriptions I can't help thinking those would be great tests for AI. I'd love to see the proficiency scores for various models.

EDIT: Ok I just needed to scroll further, they have sample items in the last section up to level 4 and even at level 4 the question seemed trivial.

The most wordy one is the Q Drum article (which by the way Q drum is a real thing, kinda neat idea) and there's literally only two basic criticisms (flat land and expense) and if you had any idea what the life straw is you can probably construe what the similar criticism in the email is going to be without even looking.

Based on the scores and the proficiency description I assumed they were actually targeting some sort of normal distribution and levels 4/5 would be genuinely difficult explaining the scores. I'm now much more sad that the scores are so low.

At least I got a laugh at how they refer to each test item as "the stimulus" which has such a sterile/clinical flavor to it.

to be pedantic you'd need to think a lot about how you power your human. Did you fuel up your human with beef or beans? local or shipped? were they operating a day in climate control? have to commute? did they need equipment like a large monitor? etc .

in reality basically all those concerns come out in the wash when you factor pay. energy inputs throughout the chain tend to materialize as expense. if the human was paid less then likely they used less energy.

wow, very interesting I can't say I've really ever heard of anyone financing research themselves, hope things work out and maybe a treatment arrives in time for you.

As an aside if you end up cryogenically freezing yourself for a future treatment don't forget to actually cure your boneitis when they thaw you out.

For anyone else out there that looked at the picture and their first thought was "are those tanks open to the rain?" thinking they were just open cylinders

seems it's called a floating roof tank :

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

And it prevents vapor loss or needing vapor overhead as the roof floats directly on the surface. Rain/snow water is pumped out off the top of the roof as needed.

Gonna play a little devil's advocate here.

Setting aside whether I think data centers or good or bad and just focusing on the sale of the land (for whatever purpose).

The land was donated back in 99 and looks like they never followed through on making it anything. Which is pretty shitty to Mr Bland's vision.

Though that donation itself is a bit weird because literally on the just the other side of the neighborhood is. a park!

https://maps.app.goo.gl/jwcANZ59bW17sTmm7

according to the town site the park was dedicated in 1955 https://www.taylortx.gov/244/Fannie-Robinson-Park

I suspect It just sat fallow for 25 years because there was already a park nearby and nobody bothered to press them on using the land for it's donated purpose. It switched hands a few times. Likely someone turned it up in some meeting and realized at this point they were never going to do anything with it and might as well sell it.

Edit: In considering the protracted timeline, I revise the assumption to "nobody at the office knew why they had the land or any stipulations attached to it". it's even possible that the buyers in 08 didn't know the terms of the original deed from nearly a decade before. Not that it makes it right to sell it but the intent wasn't likely malicious, the land wasn't donated just last year or anything.

pretty sure the red is the bulk of parcel R130425000A0001 52.42 acres.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1601-Martin-Luther-King-J...

> We plan to open IOCCC30 towards the end of 2026 and have the contest run for a similar amount of time, closing sometime towards the end of Q1 2027.

Based on that it Looks like the contest starts late and runs into the next year. the 2025 rules were finalized in December.

If the only interesting thing about a work is it's provenance is that work actually valuable?

actually in all honesty human works are predominantly crap, and a bit passé. If I'm going to visit a site whose whole shtick is provenance I'd rather see some really, objectively good, ai stuff. that would be way more interesting.

> The executive branch cannot just legally not spend that money.

Time and time again this proves to be rather irrelevant to this administration. There's literally no consequences for illegal actions and even if they're called out on it all that is reactionary. The system will be well broken before a ruling.

Kicking myself for not getting the other 2 sticks when I built my computer. I didn't really need them and had them in the cart, just never pulled the trigger.

Now they're worth over half as much as the whole machine.

Not sure that's isolated to the EU, all these companies seem to snub everyone when it comes to banning.

Seems unless you have enough followers to make the news cycle you're SOL when it comes to fighting those bans.

Yep, this is the same thing they did with the video streaming.

The video thing actually made me cancel prime. The shipping isn't a big deal anymore and I was able to justify the prime as a bonus to the streaming service.

“Listen,” said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, “they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.”

“GPP feature?” said Arthur. “What's that?”

“Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “sounds ghastly.”

A voice behind them said, “It is.” The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.

“What?” they said.

“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. “All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.

Good bit of survivor bias in the retired population. If you can put in 30-40 years of full time work and then afford to retire you probably don't have a propensity for substance abuse.

It's not really clear they can pinpoint any actual discrimination, just that this platform isn't statistically recommending certain ethnic groups at the same rate as distributed interviews. though seems there could be tons of conflating factors there.

though I did turn up this from the paper

>pymetrics. pymetrics builds 16 online games to measure applicants’ cognitive traits, including propensity to take risks, processing speed, trust, altruism, and planning ability. For each client, pymetrics trains a binary classifier: positive training examples correspond to the gameplay features of at least 50 current employees in that role and negative training examples correspond to the gameplay features of random profiles in the pymetrics database [46].4 Choosing which employees will serve as the positive examples is the primary way that the employer influences the classifier

https://algorithmichiring.github.io/paper.pdf

Seems possible that this could create bias towards the existing ethic makeup of a position. if the existing employees are predominantly white males the games may subtly bias against any out-group

fun stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraquat

> China also banned the domestic use of Paraquat in 2017;

> Paraquat is widely used as a suicide agent in developing countries because it is widely available at low cost. Further, the toxic dose is low (10 mL or 2 teaspoons is enough to kill).

Someday (assuming humanity makes it that long) people will look back on this era the way we look back on the Romans and their lead pipes.

You experience more than 100% of all of these costs as a renter, while you have none of the up-front costs and less liability you also have no agency and no equity. It can be a trap though, as selling isn't free and if you didn't have enough equity built up you can end up losing money to move. Some housing ends up as rentals because of this, makes more sense to not sell and to rent it.

Renting is definitely the better option for certain people, if you intend to move often, or want to live in an apartment your overall costs are likely to be lower. If you want a single-family home and don't want to move often (or be moved out) Buying is worth it. Even setting aside the satisfaction of home ownership if you can mange to pay off your property you pretty much can't live cheaper at the same scale.

that said I've rented, I've owned, and I've been a landlord and I'd take home ownership in a heartbeat. It's not all rosy, and being responsible for maintenance is no joke but not being subject to the affairs or whimsy of someone else's finances along with the pride and sense of actual ownership is is wonderful.

I don't play any IRL magic but I know it can be hard to "fix" and maybe isn't broken. Casually those rules would probably be good house rules to balance play, though even small changes like this could change balance and lean all decks towards exploiting the rule

to point, your land for draw is kinda implemented with trade routes https://gatherer.wizards.com/9ED/en-us/108/trade-routes

And that has an additional mana cost to balance it (though it does have additional bonus). So you could kinda say "everyone gets trade-routes already in play" but like any "free card" fix does it simply skew deckbuilding into a new "broken" ?

Admittedly I didn't go over the whole article just watched the video. around the 90 second mark they mention that the spin sate can drop into a superposition called a spin singlet.

then they show heating the material to break a spin singlet and demonstrate the broken singlet atoms moving around the liquid (~2:00 mark). I'm referring to that breaking as a "collapse"

I would expect that a singlet in superposition could not coexist with an adjacent "non-collapsed" atom because it's defined magnetic field would need to interact with it's neighbors breaking the superposition.

Morphogenesis data compression is pretty impressive, the human genome is only ~700Mb of data.

As a lefty I never had any problems adapting to a right hand mouse and actually find the keyboard to be better suited as a "left hand" activity and would have a hard time switching it up.

Seems probable that's simply because it isn't tolerated as a choice.

Though the best evidence to refute "There are no left-handed in China" is that it didn't take long to find a left handed Chinese baseball player

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Hao_(baseball)

The animation is great though I don't understand how the collapsed singlet can exist in proximity to the superimposed ones. I would expect the presence of the defined spin to create an "observation" of a neighbor and immediately collapse the entire material.

seems like a good move. If the lame rebranding, platform enshittificaiton, or Musk's dubious political alignment and all around repulsiveness didn't turn them off yet, and they're actually posting that much that's pretty much a captive audience. Might as well squeeze some cash outta them.

Aww, makes me sad. I was really enjoying having these on PC, they even released some of them on GOG no less. Guess I should try to snag Forbidden West before they yank it from steam.

Lotta speculation about it's value but seems cloudflare does legitimately use this source.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-in-production-the-nitty...

They even mention it's origins in Lavarand (and LavaRand) the former which has an actual patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5732138A/en

Yes there's a bit of theater here, and they admit to using the sensor noise as well, it's also not their only source of physical entropy. While you could do just as much with less interesting sources the wall of lava lamps is a perfectly cromulent source of randomness, also is kinda fun.

I think you mean morally consistent. though even then humans don't have any real qualms about that. Dogs and livestock are conscious, we use those as tools.

forgot 5. Covid was exactly the right amount of deadly, 0.5-1% which made it easy to "roll the dice" on making containment harder.