What I see from this is “don’t try to ‘help’ the poor by creating programs that give them jobs [public workshops]. Help them unconditionally”

Basically, fdr’s new deal policies were still a capitalist approach that could have been replaced more elegantly with free food and housing.

The original paper is called “Excitons in the fractional quantum Hall effect”

If you know what that means, it’s more clear and less misleading than the phys.org headline.

If you don’t know what that means, it’s a novel combination of two known properties of materials—excitons and the fqhe.

The buzz appears to be that it leads to some weird excitations/quasiparticles that have non-bosonic statistics. Namely, anyons and fermionic excitations can appear (the former is a known phenomenon, but the latter has only been theorized—a fact that honestly surprised me). This loosely relates to some types of quantum computers, but in all honesty, I would expect this paper to only be interesting to those in condensed matter physics, and I’m not entirely sure why it was picked up and turned into a thing.

He didn’t pretend Reagan was better?

I didn’t vote to reelect Jimmy Carter. Union friends and Democrats alike pleaded with me. “It’s the most important election of your life! You have to vote for Carter!” Not me. I was already aware by then of the impacts that failed politicians and their politics can have on your life. My one little vote didn’t matter anyway, since after almost four years of the Carter presidency just about everyone I knew — and worked with — was voting for Ronald Reagan, an even worse alternative, anyway. If they were voting at all.

Sounds more like he didn’t vote. Like much of the left (in both of these elections), he gave up entirely on the government and saw it as an other/enemy rather than something that could be reformed through a vote.

It’s not really communication. They ‘know’ because they become part of the same wave function. The wave function of the system is

|psi1 psi2> ± |psi2 psi1>

Note that if the ± is a plus, then exchanging psi1 and psi2 yields the exact same equation. If it’s a minus, you get a negative sign out front. Electron systems have a negative sign because of the spin statistics theorem (I don’t understand that part, so you can look it up if you want—it involves field theory iirc) Now, if electrons are exactly the same (indistinguishable), then exchanging them will yield the exact same wave function, leading to

|psi1 psi2> - |psi2 psi1> = |psi2 psi1> - |psi1 psi2>

The only solution here is |psi1 psi2> - |psi2 psi1> = 0

But recall that |psi1 psi2> - |psi2 psi1> describes the system as a whole. So this system is prohibited by quantum mechanics, and there’s no way for two electrons to have indistinguishable states (be in the same place at the same time).

This is a forum. If you don’t get the joke, you can ask and have it explained to you. Most memes are some form of in-joke regardless, so you often have to do a bit of learning the first time.

What was off about your first comment was recognizing it for what it was before proceeding to miss the joke entirely.

What was off about your replies was trying to compare it to the Scottish coat of arms; if you know the Scottish coa, you probably wouldn’t associate it with piss yellow and white. If you don’t know it, you wouldn’t mix them up anyway.

It’s pretty. By default, even. Floorp is customizable, but many (most) people want a tool that works directly out of the box, and if it looks good while doing it, then it will be more popular.

The dev advertised it on Reddit, then when people complained about issues, you would see a response from them along the lines of “fixed,” which showed responsiveness, and I think that gained loyalty before the product was ready to be released.

This is a pretty difficult question to answer since all phenomena are quantum. A star is powered by nuclear (quantum) fusion. Permanent magnets depend on the quantized angular momentum of electrons. Could these phenomena be allowed by something other than quantum mechanics? Maybe. But a constant goal of science is to find the simplest explanation for all we observe, meaning that whatever alternative explanations you come up with, should they be correct, then taking them all together will constitute a theory that at least looks an awful lot like matter waves (mathematically, at least).

The critics of Ukrainian use of the mines appear to be protestors. In theory, they could also protest the Russian use, but it’d be a bit silly to picket against an invasion regardless (unless your government is the one invading).

The idea is that land mines are indiscriminate and long-lasting, so they should not be used by either side regardless of the other’s stance. They’re a bit like anti-nuclear protests, I think.

Deep learning doesn’t stop at llms. Honestly, language isn’t a great use case for them. They are—by nature—statistics machines, so if you have a fuck load of data to crunch, they can work very quickly to find patterns. The patterns might not always be correct, but if they are easy to check, then it might be faster to use them and modify the result compared to doing it all yourself.

I don’t know what this person does, though, and it will depend on the specifics of the situation for how they are used.

I want more early vaccine data, actually, so that’s good.

There is a significant decrease in cancer rates among vaccinated compared to unvaccinated, but the early/late divide is less clear. If my statistics is up to snuff (no guarantee there), you can expect an error of ~sqrt(n) in discrete data where n is your count. With the late vaccines, this means an error in the cancer rate of about 2 because they saw ~4 cases (3.2 * 124,000/100,000 ≈ 4). If this is actually overestimating, we could see the rate as 2/124000 or 0.64/40000. In this case, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to see any cases in a sample of 40000.

So it’s not clear from this that early is better than late, though it certainly doesn’t suggest that it’s worse.

The total sample sizes aren’t the problem. It’s the number of people who contracted cervical cancer. I should have been more specific originally: I would want more data to show that early vaccinations are more effective than late ones.

40,000 seems like a lot, but just using data from the late-vaccine group would get an average contraction rate of ~1. That’s enough for an outlier or two to be significant. If 2 of those 40,000 had contracted cervical cancer, it would be a hard sell to say early vaccines cause cancer (though some groups would eat that up). In the same way, I’m not fully convinced here that an early vaccine prevents it more effectively than a later one.

This is just from a cursory overview, but…

N = 40,000 where unvaccinated rates are 8.4 / 100000 or 3.36 per 40,000. Later vaccines brought this down to 3.2 / 100000 or 1.28 / 40000.

So… it’s significant, but I would want more data.

Tropospheric so2 is a problem for reasons beyond warming.

Stratospheric so2 might not be a problem, but geoengineering is always risky.

Plus, since so2 is significantly more reactive than co2, it will be removed from the atmosphere more quickly, meaning that it can only act as a temporary mask without constant maintenance. All-in-all, it’s probably best to see how much damage we are doing early on before we find ourselves in the so2 equivalent of credit card debt and slowly poisoning ourselves to death trying to stay cool.

When those weight loss drugs are actually diabetes drugs that have been co-opted by the market in the same way graphics cards are now used for crypto and ai… yes.

Tenure is—and should be—powerful. UPenn is an R1 institute; if her research is good, it will be hard to do anything until it becomes a significant issue. Like now.

The software is free, but it looks like the trademark is not. So WordPress bans WP engine from some WordPress stuff b/c they aren’t technically WordPress. In other words, they’re free to use (and change) the software, but they can’t (or, rather, shouldn’t) use the name—according to WordPress. WP sues for usage anyway after they are barred from some event or something, but now WordPress is suing back, turning an unofficial dispute to a legal one.

1. that’s why we know it’s a dog whistle and not a coincidence
2. 1488 is one of the more well-known ones insofar as it is used as an example of a dog whistle when explaining the concept more in-depth

It would probably have to be updated in each place it is used, and these articles are unlikely to be frequently updated. It’s only had that name for a few years.

Pinpoint the 5 second interval*

It looks like a research group found a security vulnerability that they then used to find a single common key in all of the cards made by this company. The second part here is a reasonable concern, but the article calls the vulnerability a backdoor in the beginning, which I think is fairly misleading.