If someone else posts a better comment that renders mine superfluous, I’ll often delete mine. But if someone else has already replied to mine, I’ll leave it for the sake of context but downvote it so the better one gets more visibility.

Yeah, but this poll was from Gallup—who trusts them?

See the Silurian hypothesis:

The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment, which assesses modern science’s ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago.

I wouldn’t be surprised if forces on the ground deliberately downplayed the damage when reporting to Trump so he wouldn’t endanger them all with further escalations.

Yeah—I just don’t understand how they disentangle the two if they’re both happening simultaneously.

I would have thought the volume of water retained on land by dams would be more than offset by the volume lost to melting glaciers.

Predicting with 64% accuracy how voters will respond to a potential campaign strategy would be enough to comfortably win an election.

I never used it in person, but the LFP (light field picture) format used by Lytro cameras was an interesting concept—you could change the focus, depth of field, and perspective after the image was captured.

Fluid construction grammar
Unscented transform
Heteroglossia
Lorenz system
Relict (biology)
Yuezhi

In order: 8 (sans sauerkraut & pickled veggies), 1, 7, 3, 5, 4, 6, 2.

It’s what happens when a very naughty function tries to divide by zero.

I think it does accurately model the part of the brain that forms predictions from observations—including predictions about what a speaker is going to say next, which lets human listeners focus on the surprising/informative parts. But with LLMs they just keep feeding it its own output as if it were a third party whose next words it’s trying to predict.

It’s like a child describing an imaginary friend, if you keep repeating “And what would your friend say after that?”

The Russian equivalent of “you can’t fire me—I quit!”

Sure, it looks like foul play—but it’s also a perfectly natural reaction to driving a Tesla.

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

Fish.

My apartment building turns 100 this year.

There are three factors that might prevent you from using an online platform to share your opinion:

• The government might impose content restrictions on the platform

• The owners (or delegated moderators) of the platform might impose restrictions on its users

• The users of the platform might use its tools to police the opinions of other users.

“Freedom of speech” normally just applies to the first. Is that what you mean when you say you’re not “allowed” to speak freely?

So if I understand that right, the “per 100,000” figures aren’t for the exact populations, but for what the populations would be if the age groups were re-weighted to keep the age demographics constant?

Some thoughts:

• Florida had a striking increase between 2003 and 2008 that isn’t reflected by California or Texas. Did something specific happen in Florida in that timeframe?

• Texas seems to have been on a long-term downward trend until 2013 (while Florida was spiking). The subsequent upward trend is mirrored by Florida, but not California.

• What does “age-adjusted” mean?

• Does “per 100,000” refer to the entire population, or the population under 25? If the former, could some of the differences be accounted for by changing demographics?