Schulze is great, but good luck explaining how it works to my mother.

Schulze is good for elections at STEM organizations. For the general public, something like approval voting or STAR are better.

If you’re rigging an election, it can be better politically to give yourself 65% of the vote than 97% of the vote.

97% is obviously fake. 65% is easier to make people beleive in.

To be fair, the dramatic nosedive in quality of GoT happened when they ran out of source material and had to wing it.

3-body problem is a finished trilogy, so it could all have the quality of the first seasons of GoT.

A dozen cosmere novels is what, four years of writing for him?

There’s a story in the Talmud about Hillel the elder, a rabbi who died in 10 CE:

There was another incident involving one gentile who came before Shammai and said to Shammai: Convert me on condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing on one foot. Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit in his hand. This was a common measuring stick and Shammai was a builder by trade. The same gentile came before Hillel. He converted him and said to him: That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

I mean, it’s kinda like judging America based on Pat Robertson, the Westboro Baptist Church, Steve Bannon, Steve Miller, and Trump.

Yes, we should beleive people like Trump when they say how awful they are. The fact that he was elected and is the presumptive Republican nominee says a lot about the American right, right now. But it definitely doesn’t mean that Americans in general are awful people.

No?

Proportional representation is where parties get a number of seats proportional to the percent of votes they get.

Proportional voting methods are often nation-wide, although there’s also e.g. mixed member proportional and local 3-5 member districts elected via STV like they do in Ireland.

According to the UN

In the context of the coordinated attack by Hamas and others of 7 October, the UN mission team found that there are reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred in multiple locations, including rape and gang rape in at least three locations in southern Israel.

The team also found a pattern of victims - mostly women - found fully or partially naked, bound and shot across multiple locations which “may be indicative of some forms of sexual violence”.

In some locations the mission said it could not verify reported incidents of rape.

Or is the UN an Israeli propaganda machine, now?

Yeah, it doesn’t really belong in the ‘no’ column. It’s not an appropriate cat food because it’s not nutritionally complete.

So it’s rather like how just eating bread or cornmeal that don’t have added vitamins will give you scurvy or pellagra. But obviously they’re not poisonous or anything and most of the world eats them without a problem.

I mean, this is mostly about treats, so…

Cats being obligate carnivores means most of their calories must come from meat because they e.g. can’t synthesize taurine like a human or dog can. But eating a bit of cat grass isn’t gonna kill them.

Yeah. Power plants are nowhere near 90% efficient.

It’s worth emphasizing, though, that they’re still way, way more efficient than car engines are.

Also, regenerative breaking saves a lot of energy. Basically, instead of using the motor to increase the cars speed, you use it as a generator to recharge the battery.

Although it’s been used for a fairly wide array of algorithms for decades. Everything from alpha-beta tree search to k-nearest-neighbors to decision forests to neural nets are considered AI.

Edit: The paper is called

Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Reinforcement learning and deep neural nets are buzzwordy these days, but neural nets have been an AI thing for decades and decades.

So everyone who retires transitions from the working class to the owner class?

I’m not sure it’s that useful to say that a 70 year old retired engineer is owner class because they’re living off of the stock market returns of their 401k.

Suppose one year you spend $60k, but only earned $50k. You lost $10k.

The next year, you spend $57k, and earned $53k. You lost $4k, and your losses narrowed by $6k.

Disney+ lost 1.3 million subscribers in the final quarter of 2023 amid a hefty price hike that went into effect last fall, but managed to narrow its streaming business’ losses by $300 million during the October-December period.

That doesn’t really sound like it backfired to me. They lost subscribers but made more money.

The US and Jordan have been allies for decades, and the US has military bases in allies around the world.

This particular base is located near Syria, so it might be because of the Syrian civil war.

Also, fun fact - the king of Jordan appeared as an extra on American TV. Specifically, on Star Trek Voyager.

The idea of a Pokémon clone isn’t protectable, but existing Pokémon are.

You can make a Pokémon clone with entirely novel monsters, but if a judge thinks they look too much like an existing Pokémon they’re gonna have a problem.

Yeah, projects also exist in the real world and practical considerations matter.

The legacy C/C++ code base might slowly and strategically have components refactored into rust, or you might leave it.

The C/C++ team might be interested in trying Rust, but have to code urgent projects in C/C++.

In the same way that if you have a perfectly good felling axe and someone just invented the chain saw, you’re better off felling that tree with your axe than going into town, buying a chainsaw and figuring out how to use it. The axe isn’t really the right tool for the job anymore, but it still works.

C is not how a computer truly works.

If you want to know how computers work, learn assembly and circuit design. You can learn C without ever thinking about registers, register allocation, the program counter, etc.

Although you can learn assembly without ever learning about e.g. branch prediction. There’s tons of levels of abstraction in computers, and many of the lower level ones try to pretend you’ve still got a computer from the 80s even though CPUs are a lot more complex than they used to be.

As an aside, I’ve anecdotally heard of some schools teaching Rust instead of C as a systems language in courses. Rust has a different model than C, but will still teach you about static memory vs the stack vs the heap, pointers, etc.

Honestly, if I had to write some systems software, I’d be way more confident in any Rust code I wrote than C/C++ code. Nasal demons scare me.

Oh, yeah.

If your point is that ICE car batteries have problems in the cold, so cold batteries is a problem for everyone and worse for ICE cars, that’s fair.

If your point is that ICE car batteries suck therefore EVs suck, that’s not really valid logic.