MartianSands

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 hours ago (2 children)

Light is a subset of the electromagnetic spectrum

No, it's not. In physics, we call the entire spectrum "light", because it's all fundamentally the same thing.

We can talk about "visible light", but that's a subset of light in general. Microwaves, radio waves, x-rays, gamma radiation, and any other section of the spectrum you can think of are all light

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 days ago

It's certainly not as bad as the problems generative AI tend to have, but it's still difficult to avoid strange and/or subtle biases.

Very promising technology, but likely to be good at diagnosing problems in Californian students and very hit-and-miss with demographics which don't tend to sign up for studies in silicon valley

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think the trick is to make an effort to cover as many possibilities as can be dealt with by a reasonable effort (definition of "reasonable" varies significantly by context) when setting up something which you expect the general public to interact with. Not so much assuming that any given person has some disability you can't see, but that any large group of people will have at least a few.

Interactions with a specific person are another matter entirely, as you point out. There, I think the best you can do is roll with it if someone tells you that they're unable to do something without subjecting them to interrogation or scepticism

[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Sure, but there are far more things which will kill the entire person at the same dose they'll kill the cancer than things which can be carefully controlled by choosing the right dose.

These studies which claim to kill cancer in a petri dish usually turn out to be the former, because not killing the host is the difficult part

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

We really don't. Our history curriculum is much more concerned with ancient history. As far as I can remember, we spent a little time on the colonisation of the Americas then didn't mention them again until the world wars.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago

The empire covered something like 20% of the entire worlds landmass. If they spent time in school for every part of it which went on to become something noteworthy, they'd run out of time for any other history at all.

The foundation of the US really isn't as important to the rest of the world as the US thinks it is

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 weeks ago (13 children)

Israel and trump appear to be claiming to have defeated the Iranian air defense, and achieve air supremacy over the Iranian capital.

If that's true then Iran is in deep trouble, and inviting them to surrender wouldn't be unreasonable. I very much doubt that it is true, but that's what they seem to believe

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's far harder to achieve mass manipulation of the ballot when it's all being handled by a lot of human hands. If it's managed by computers, then by finding a bug or other vulnerability in the software or database you could alter the whole election.

Meanwhile, to manipulate a paper ballot & hand-counted election in the same way you'd need the cooperation of a huge number of people, and you'd need them all to keep their mouths shut. That's far more difficult than defeating a computerised system

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That really isn't how that works. The US has declared that they won't allow the international courts to get involved, but that doesn't necessarily prevent those courts from disagreeing.

"Jurisdiction" is only a thing when a court answers to some higher authority who has limited what that court can do. Since the international courts theoretically don't answer to the US government, they can make any ruling they like.

They're unlikely to bother, since they probably won't be in a position to enforce any ruling against typical foot soldiers, but they absolutely could if it came to that point

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's an implementation detail, not really relevant to my point.

I don't think you appreciate how powerful those magnets are. Any ferromagnetic object would be doing well to avoid binding up completely when held right up to the device

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Realistically, the mechanism would jam. I doubt the hammer would fall, being squeezed hard against whatever structure supports it

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (8 children)

You're overlooking the fact that this development is a side project for them. While they're designing this rocket, their other rocket is in operational use and has the best success rate of any rocket of its scale in history, and they'd already be considered hugely successful if they never did anything innovative ever again.

They're also trying to do something far more difficult than the Saturn 5, in at least two ways. Nobody has ever tried to land a rocket anywhere near as large as either of the stages of this system, and on top of that they're trying to come up with a design which is cheap to operate, which wasn't remotely on the cards during the Apollo program.

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