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.

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.

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.

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.

It (along with Stokes’ theorem (they’re actually the same theorem in different dimensions)) helps yield Maxwell’s equations; specifically, if you want to change the flux of the electric field through a surface (right hand side), you need to change the amount of charge it contains (the source of the divergence on the left hand side). In other words, if you have the same charge contained by a surface, it will have the same flux going through it, which means you can change the surface however you wish and the math will still be the same. Physicists use this to reduce some complex problems into problems on a sphere or a box—objects with nice, easily calculable symmetries.

“Humans are a cancer…” is a statement of fact. It is the solution that determines if someone is an ecofascist:

… so we should kill off humans and cure the world

is an ecofascist statement and is a problem.

… and we are going to kill our host

is still in the declarative form. Is is apparently defeatist/fatalist and may or may not be a problem depending on the other views of the person

… so we should stop being cancerous.

is more optimistic of human determinism. I think it is the most hopeful and helpful to our situation, but it is not inherently good, and not coming to this conclusion is not inherently bad.

Maxwell’s equations have already been rewritten into the Dirac equation. Magnetic monopoles are quantum weird and would not show up in undergrad textbooks regardless

Personally, I want FDA approval to mean it is as provably safe and effective as possible. They said they wanted more evidence before approval, and I think that’s okay. Good, even.

The way the US treats recreational drug use and self-medication is horrific, but it’s not really the domain of the FDA.

I would rather have not-yet-FDA-approved legal-for-personal-use mdma than what we have now or an unproven drug approved by the FDA.

Or is it exactly like saturns rings but we see the whole ring bent round the top because a black hole bends the light around so we can see it?

Hit the nail pretty hard on the head there

I’ve been to this site hundreds of times, but this is the first time I’ve noticed

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Jewish is also an ethnicity. That’s why they can be ‘secular’ while still being half Jewish.

70-100 years ago, so not really

Was the aurora once-in-a-lifetime? It seemed like typical-ish solar maximum stuff, which happens every 20 or so years. Was there something special about those specifically?

Once El Niño is done. This year is likely anomalous compared to average, but is likely the new normal for El Niño years. I’d say wait until the next ‘normal’ year ( not El Niño nor La Niña) to declare anything. That being said, you could claim that it is certainly going to die with low risk of being wrong.