I have never met anyone who has read Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space series. It’s one of my favourite sci-fi’s and I can’t even get someone I know to read it, everyone thinks it’s boring :)

Of course they do, better than ever actually. Google OpenType ligatures, for example. You can even use those on the web using CSS.

Some fonts have hundreds of different ligatures.

Both are broken as far as I know. First one hasn’t updated for years, and recent reviews for the second one claim it crashes on startup.

Are there any good iOS Tor browsers? All that I’ve seen are either shit or require some insane subscription.

I don’t understand how Chinese room is a valuable argument. To me, while the person inside the room doesn’t understand Chinese, the system room-person-instructions does. You don’t argue that you don’t understand your language because none of your individual neurons understand it.

I don’t claim that chatGPT “understands” the language, I just don’t think that this argument applies in general.

Idk, that’s more of a “not yet finished” thing rather than “failed” imo

Why do you feel like matrix has failed? I joined it recently and to me it looks like it’s kinda growing.

“I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution,” Sam Altman, Worldcoin’s cofounder

Holy crap it’s Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. After that recent article about his $2 Kenyan workers it’s much harder to believe in benevolent intentions.

Yeah, it’s definitely very rare. I can’t seem to find that article right now, but I remember reading that these events account for something like 0.1–0.3% of all wildfires. So while insignificant as an actual cause in general, with 100k+ wildfires happening each year it means that a couple of hundreds per year should still be caused by those. Which is still like one every 1-2 days on average.

Not enough to be a noticeable threat, but enough to cause a pedantic comment mentioning those as existing :)

This is just demonstrably false.

While these are more prevalent, they’re not the only causes. For example, sparks from rock falls also cause natural wildfires, as well as spontaneous combustion. The latter is caused by oxidation, bacterial fermentation and other natural processes.

Manure piles can spontaneously combust during conditions of extreme heat. Cotton and linen can ignite when they come into contact with polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Hay is quite prone to spontaneous combustion when specific moisture/heat levels are reached.

So while near densely populated areas idiots are way more likely causes, sometimes forests do self-ignite. And the rate of those events increases during heatwaves.

No one is going to post news/articles here and then discuss them as they would in a regular post. It won’t get bumped up on the subscribed page if something interesting happens. Most of the comments here are going be about the megathread itself.

So this is effectively banning all the discussion concerning all of his companies. Which might be something you want to do, every community can decide for itself what kind of stuff they want to forbid after all. But I feel like it should be said directly, not via making a catch-all megathread.

I googled it and it looks like ~80% of their water comes from within the state, and the rest mostly comes from Colorado, and I guess those guys wouldn’t object to a water deal even in case of secession. Not sure if secession is even possible in US though.

Thanks. So I guess it doesn’t really measure anything in that field. Looks more like a strategy guideline and a set of techniques.

Interesting, haven’t heard about that. Can you give an example of how it’s used in business? What is actually measured?

As was mentioned in another comment, it’s a statistical term that measures the standard deviation. It basically tells you how “far” from the center of the bell curve you are with your data points. The higher the sigma, the less likely it is that an observed event was a fluke.

For example, 1-sigma event has a ~37% chance of being a “coincidence”, and 2-sigma has a chance of about 4.5%.

In science, 3-sigma (0.135%) is the first publishable certainty, it’s when something becomes significant enough to start a discussion.

And 5-sigma is the most common threshold for claiming discovery. 5-sigma events have a 0.0000287% chance of being a coincidence or some random happenstance. Or one in 3.5 million.

Higgs boson discovery was announced after 5-sigma certainty was reached. It means that if that particle didn’t actually exist, the chance of the experiments producing observed results would be 1 in 3.5 mln.

Right? I’m funging on a token right now.

I read the article and I still don’t really understand how exactly it’s supposed to work. I guess it can detect some deformation within the cable, but is this deformation guaranteed when a leak has occurred?

Does it give false positives or false negatives, and how often? Would different placement along the pipe matter? And is there some measurement besides “the cable has slightly deformed somewhere”? Like, is there a way to find the location of the leak, for example, or should the pipe be checked along the whole length of the cable between detectors?

Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs for short are shaking up the virtual universe, transforming how we vibe with digital assets.

Oh hello fellow humans. Let’s vibe with our digital assets for a bit since it’s something we do so often in our virtual universe. What assets do you especially enjoy vibing with?

I recently read a pretty interesting take that a lot of this started because Silicon Valley Bank failed, and now all these companies have to do something they haven’t really had a necessity to do before — to make profit.

And all of them aren’t run by business geniuses as previously believed, on the contrary, most of the leaders are so disconnected from reality that they genuinely have no idea what people want in a service, they can’t take feedback or advice because “they know better”, and all the other stuff that comes with that.

So they do what they think is right, while missing the whole point of the product they are so desperately trying to make profitable.

Look at spez’s “we’ll stay profit-focused until profits arrive” and Musk’s rush to get at least some ROI on his $44 bn middle age crisis toy.