OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)

"Woke" simply means "I'm conservative, and the thing I'm calling 'Woke' is something that I hate". It has no well-defined meaning beyond that. I've heard things as diverse as "the concept of the Metaverse" and "removing copyrighted content so you don't get sued" described as "woke".

No call by push value or P vs NP or complexity theory etc.

So a different set of things that are also useless to the vast majority of people?

Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

Agreed - but that said, there are space elevator alternatives, like the Lofstrom Loop / Launch Loop, which at least theoretically can be built with modern materials (and have far better properties anyway - not latitude-constrained, provides dV, vastly higher throughput, far more efficient, stores energy / can add cheap energy at off-peak times, etc). One could always "waste" money on them trying something new :)

Alternative enforcement mechanism (which would rule out Musk as an investor) would be to hardwire the editing so that any breeding results with "wild type" humans would be both female and profoundly haemophiliac. (Or that all male offspring have some lethal failure of oxygen metabolism. Whether that would be acceptable to Musk ... who cares?)

If the universe is said to be expanding, that means that the universe has a boundary.

Go and revise your non-Euclidian geometry. You clearly failed that exam.

It is possible for the universe to be finite in 3-dimensional extent, and unbounded.

But the demand for petrochemicals as chemical feedstocks will continue.

We might not burn the stuff, but we'll continue to want to put it into chemical plants because it's cheaper than making long hydrocarbon chains ourselves.

Until someone manages to commercialise algae-catalysed CO2 -> long chains reactions. Which without the fuel market, is not so attractive an investment.

Have you stopped believing in the Expanding Earth?

When did you accept the reality of tectonic subduction? Before or after you became a FLERFer? And have you stopped hitting your wife with your dog yet?

I don't think there's anything that absolutely precludes an "observer".

But there is something that absolutely precludes any observer from communicating to anywhere outside the black hole's event horizon. That is what "event horizon" means : events the other side of it cannot be observed.

Which is why there are occasional fusses over rotating (+/- small, primordial) black holes - some arguments on general relativistic frame dragging get used to "expose" the black hole's central singularity without a masking event horizon. And (TTBOMK) every time someone has come up with such an argument, after a few months someone else has shot a hole in it. Successfully. So far.

Space-time.

Dark Matter is [...] the necessary matter throughout the galaxy for it to orbit the way it does.

It's not just throughout *this* galaxy, but throughout almost every galaxy for which a rotation speed (profile) can be measured, and also individual galaxies orbiting in galactic clusters. It's not just the one case, but many observations.