For something like a browser, you don’t even need to “install” at all. You only need to acquire the standalone/portable executable from the browser developer’s official website. For example you get Waterfox from https://www.waterfox.net/download/. If you read the PKGBUILD, even if you can’t see through all the potential malicious tricks you’ll at least find that that’s basically all it claims to do: download a binary from official website and put it somewhere. In this case “installing” means using root permissions to stick it in /usr/bin, so all users on the computer can run it. But since almost all home computers only have a single user, you can skip having to give it (temporary) root access by saving it in your home directory instead. I also run the binary inside its own Firejail so it doesn’t even have access to my personal files. You are always trusting someone, be it the Arch maintainers, the AUR contributors, or the independent browser developers, but this way the least number of parties get the least number of permissions.

windy.com with a VPN in a private browser window. They can’t track you if they don’t know where you are!

Yeah, I concede that small caps are more likely to be carried away by rainwater than whole bottles :D. What I meant was that for every loose cap on the ground there is a bottle lying around somewhere, and also there are bottles with caps on. No one is tossing their cap into the bushes and then taking the bottle to the recycling center.

Can you explain please, where I made a mistake?

Your mistake is thinking Earth is 6km in radius! :D 6km is how far you walk in an hour. Either you think Earth 1000 times too small or kilometer 1000 times too big.

For an object heavier than the Earth, 1g radius will be greater than the radius of Earth. For 56 Earth masses that’s sqrt(56) times bigger = 48000km.

A 56 Earth mass black hole will take 5.5e55 years to evaporate according to this calculator. A 100kg black hole (more close to what Richard used to be) is much smaller than the nucleus of an atom and will evaporate in 0.05 nanoseconds.

Curiously there was a paper recently that calculated that even if there was a small black hole in the center of the Sun, it would take millions of years for it to grow, because the aperture is so small not much can fit through, and the infalling gas heats up so much as to repel the rest, creating an internal hot bubble.

I pick up street litter, and having picked up thousands of pounds, I have never felt that loose caps are a problem, let alone one that requires such a solution. The number of littered bottles, with or without a cap, is greater than the number of loose caps, and the amount of plastic in every bottle dwarfs the plastic in a cap. Fixing the cap to the bottle will do nothing to improve the recycling rate of plastic if entire bottles are already tossed anyway.

I consider the idea of cap tethers as adversarial memetic warfare thrust upon us for some unknown ulterior purpose, possibly to make us hate the very idea of environmental consciousness. Same as paper straws. I like plastic bag bans though.

As far as picking litter is concerned, I personally prefer finding bottles without a cap. At least those are empty, all liquid having evaporated after the bottle has spent several months in the bushes. The capped bottles are often half-full and are just nasty. (Who even pays for a bottle of drink and not drinks half of it anyway?)

It is important to remember that, unless accompanied by convincing evidence for selective advantage, any single inheritable trait is more likely to have arisen from genetic drift, not from natural selection! There is, in my opinion, too much focus on conversation about superficial phenotypic traits like “shape of the nose” this and “angle of the eye” that, all the arguments about how one is better than another. Could the asiatic epicanthic fold give advantage against icy winds? Maaaybe… But it doesn’t even have to. What about the asiatic dry earwax gene? You’d struggle to even come up with a story of how dry earwax or wet earwax is actually better under certain conditions, or you could just say “it’s a single nucleotide polymorphism that could have spread by genetic drift” and be done.

Very few human traits have definitely been naturally selected for: light skin in non-sunny climates for better vitamin D production, sickle cell gene for malaria resistance, lactase persistence for animal milk consumption. Even there, the estimated selective advantage is actually much smaller than you’d expect: lactose tolerance confers only something like 1% advantage! There are many more possible neutral mutations than advantageous ones, and each one has a chance to be fixed in the entire population by genetic drift, meaning that any widespread human trait that is less clearly advantageous than lactose tolerance is more likely to be neutral than advantageous at all.

Even mildly disadvantageous mutations can be fixed by genetic drift, especially in humans since we have had many bottlenecks and founder effects. There was an area in Appalachia populated by blue-skinned people due to founder effect. No one is going to try to argue how having blue skin was actually advantageous for them to blend into their environment! There is an area in Dominican Republic with a very high rate of children born intersex, again due to a founder effect mutation. They are not considered exceptional and live normal lives as their culture has adapted to treat them as routine, as a kind of third gender. But they are not some kind of new level of human evolution, an adaptation for an intersectional era!

The only mutations that definitely cannot spread by genetic drift are those that definitely kill you.

I knew that motion sickness is triggered by frequent starts and stops and frequent turns, but even I was not aware of how big a contribution the engine vibration makes until I got to experience a ride without it.

I was apprehensive about EVs but the first time I rode in one I immediately fell in love with it. I get carsick easily, and the super-smooth ride without the chug-chug-chug of an internal combustion engine made the experience surprisingly much more pleasant for me. I do not use a car, but if I had to buy one, I don’t think I could ever stomach an ICE again knowing that this alternative is available.

My guess is that no to the first, since I have a 1/3 chance of being in the forked path, vs 1/15 of being in the straight path and my lever being connected.

Suppose you live in a kingdom where everyone is as selfish as you, and you’ve seen on TV many situations exactly like this one where people were tied to the tracks - usually one at a time and occasionally 10 at a time. (The villain has been prolific.) You’ve seen them all follow this logic and choose not to flip their switch, yet out of ~1500 people you have seen in peril this way, ~1000 of them have died. If only their logic had convinced them (and you) otherwise, 1000 of them could have selfishly survived! Doesn’t seem very logical to follow a course of action that kills you more often than its opposite.

(If you don’t want to imagine a kingdom where everyone is selfish, you can imagine one where x% are selfish and (100-x)% are altruistic, or some other mixture maybe with y% of people who flip the lever randomly back and forth and z% who cannot even understand the question. The point is that the paradox still exists.)

Edit: I can see now how in a 100% altruistic kingdom, where you are the only selfish one and you know for sure that everyone else will logically altruistically pull the lever, it makes sense for you to not pull the lever. Presumably there is some population x% split (44% selfish/56% altruistic?) where your selfish decision will have to reverse. Weird to think that your estimate of the selfishness of the rest of the population has a relevance on your decision!

Half the fun of trolley problems is adapting them to puzzles for which they are utterly unsuitable:

Oh! They don’t mean that black holes must come in perfect pairs! The headline makes it sound like it’s about wormholes across vast distances. No! What they’ve found is a stable “orbit” solution for the two-body problem. Normally when you place two bodies anywhere in an empty universe, they will gravitate towards each other until they collide. But in a universe with dark energy, there is some perfect distance between them, where the accelerating expansion perfectly counterbalances the accelerating attraction. They’ve used general relativity math to actually calculate such an arrangement.

The “stable” orbit in this case is the same kind of stable as a pencil balanced on its sharp tip - if it tilts even slightly one way it will fall out of control. Although they tantalize the idea that they might be able to make it truly stable against small perturbations once they finish their spinning black hole solution.

I would like to have known some specific numbers examples! Like if you have as much dark energy as our universe, and two 10-solar-masses stellar black holes, how far apart would that be? Is it like 1Ly or 1MLy? How far for two 10-million-solar masses supermassive black holes? The formulas they created should give the exact answer but I am not skilled enough to substitute the correct numbers for the letters.

The poster is just submitting the article as titled, and the scientists are just making cool observations not bothering anyone. The fault for clickbait lies solely with the journalists/editors. I wish instead of continuing the practice from that other site of “submission title must match article title”, we normalize the culture of writing our own plain language de-clickbait-ified titles, the way HackerNews does it.

What a disgusting clickbait title 🤮. The comet is not “racing towards Earth” any more than say Mars is (and Mars comes closer to Earth than this comet will). Maybe some day we’ll live in a world where journalists do not sensationalize headlines with a mix of Deep Impact and The Ninth Gate, but today is not that day.

Echoes of the Eye expansion to Outer Wilds. I managed to avoid all the spoilers, watched some playthroughs but thankfully didn’t study them too closely. Importantly, the streamers never looked “up” during the parts of the gameplay that I’ve seen, so to me it appeared just like another normal environment (well, normal at least by Outer Wilds standards). I already loved the original game, and decided I must play this for myself.

So when I entered through that doorway for the first time I was genuinely stunned. “You fuckers, you really did it this time. You actually went ahead and did it!” I mean…

Yup yup! In a just world, if you have 100,000 workers at a factory, and then they get replaced by robots maintained by 1000 robot technicians, you should have ended up with a Star Trek utopia where 99,000 people now don’t have to work and can pursue culture and passions. In the real world, the factory product price gets halved, the technicians get paid 10x what a worker used to get (20% of total revenue), and the factory owner gets 80% of total. The former workers are now jobless, homeless, and penniless and can’t afford the product they used to make.

They tell us “Replacing jobs is OK! We’ll invent more new kinds of jobs, as old obsolete jobs free up labor. Everyone will be better off!” but the new jobs are mostly “telemarketer”, and “tech support scammer”, and “ornamental hermit” at factory owner’s mansion.

But all that still doesn’t convince me we should be smashing the robots as a job protection scheme. I wish there was a way to keep the automation and have the Star Trek utopia instead!

Wow, you can even see the graffiti in that exact spot in the street view! Right on the rail, you know, where the side wheels go. Never thought I’d need to add “concrete rails create a flat surface attractive nuisance for graffiti” in the monorail “con” list.

This is correct. FTL communication using any form of quantum entanglement is provably mathematically impossible by the no-communication theorem. Most common sci-fi trope though.

If the black hole specifically disappeared, it would have no effect on us. The solar system would not even be launched on a 100 million year trajectory out of the galaxy, as galactic rotation is dependent on the masses of stellar and interstellar matter in the disk and dark matter in the halo. The supermassive galactic black holes, despite being supermassive, still only make up a tiny percentage of total galactic mass.

If you want to wow your friends, tell them about false vacuum decay. We could have bubbles of true vacuum expanding out in space from multiple directions towards us at lightspeed, and no way of knowing about them, stopping them, or outrunning them. Any point in space could nucleate a new true vacuum bubble at any time, just like a given uranium atom could decay now or in 5 billion years or never. Even spookier, by principle of quantum immortality, the Earth could have been engulfed by vacuum bubbles many times before, and we are just the one tiny sliver of probability space where by luck alone we survived long enough to talk about it here and now.

Thankfully false vacuum is just an idea and there is currently no evidence that it is real.

The year is 2025. A massive geomagnetic storm has fried all forms of technology, wiping out hard drives and solid-state drives alike, and scrambled all backup tapes. Coincidentally, a new plastic-eating bacterium has munched on all the compact discs without anyone noticing.

Humanity will rebuild…

The computer chip manufacturing pipeline has been restored, but there is no software to run them. In a dusty office previously owned by a lawyer from a long-defunct dotcom, a treasure trove is discovered. Five metal cabinets filled with paper: the printed Linux kernel source code, in 5-pt comic sans font. One brave soul will enter to transcribe. Mistakes are not an option. We all thank you for your sacrifice.