Whenever I want to use the app to interact with an organization, I *never* use the app store. That's because (1) advertising takes top spot, (2) it's hard to distinguish which are the scummy exploitative apps, vs the real ones. Instead I start from the organization's website, search for an "open in app store" link, and follow it, to be sure I'm getting to official proper trustworthy app. This rule change will save me the hassle of indirection.

For instance: search for "seattle center" in the app store to find their app? I get an ad for dating first, followed by irrelevant ones. Search for BA for airline stuff? the app is third place, behind Qatar Airways and Brawl Stars. Search for "seattle metro tickets"? Add for sports betting first, followed by the wrong app, and the correct one is only fourth place.

Getting the wrong app is just an inconvenience, but it's often a 30min inconvenience if I get the wrong app first or have to wade through junk.

A gas plant has been built in 2008. It was uneconomic to run, so they didn't run it, and tore it down, and replaced it with this battery plant. That's the sense in which the gas plant was replaced by the battery plant. I think it's clear and straightforward, and also very well explained in the article. Presumably the battery plant benefits from the existing grid interconnects.

It's right there in the title. A gas plant has been built in 2008 but was uneconomic to run, so they didn't run it. It has been torn down and replaced by the battery system. That's the sense in which the gas plant was replaced by the battery plant. Presumably it was handy to have all the grid connectivity already in place.

You shouldn't care about his opinion because of who he is. You should read and evaluate the strength of his data and arguments. (Unfortunately the link is behind a paywall so I can't...)

He said smarter than a human. 1 Human. So you'll need to pick which codebase gets updated. And then it'll say that it's got better things to do and abandon the task.

For me it's my docked M1 Pro which randomly crashes about once a fortnight. It was hopeless monitor+ethernet on initial third-party docking station so I bought the expensive one listed on the Apple store, CalDigit. This has never been particularly happy with sleep or its external monitor but at least is a bit better. To this day, iMessages on my mac crashes every single time I open one of the chat threads with my kids (which is populated with 100s of screen-time requests which I guess is too hard for iMessage on mac to handle). I honestly had better stability when I developed on Windows.

Q. have you sought to understand? do you have conjectures? what aspects of movies do you imagine appeal to other people that don't appeal to you? You've listed five aspects that appeal to you (pretty, not-being-by-the-numbers, not-being-rehash, novelty-of-visuals, entertaining) but presumably you don't think this is an exhaustive list of aspects that might appeal to others?

It sounds from your quote "I don't understand the level of ongoing interest" that you believe there is ongoing interest (maybe you pick that up from the box office returns) but you haven't yet found yourself able to find reasonable speculations as to why?

The exact opposite.

Aether was an idea about the nature of reality which, as soon as Michelson-Morley got experimental data, was shown false.

Dark energy is experimental data which as yet has no explanation about what it truly is. All we say is "there must exist some underlying reality which will explain these observations, even though we don't yet know what it is".

Clarification: the Tennessee bill explicitly bans *geo-engineering*. It does not mention chemtrails. It was spurred by a government report last year on solar engineering. I think you fell for a clickbait headline from the BBC.

You don't have to be ignorant, backwards, corrupt or inept to be concerned about geo-engineering!

Depending on how you interpret it, it's possible that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change already prohibits geo-engineering. Or possible it mandates it. Hard to tell.

First off, I'd love to pick the algorithm "show only stuff from my friends, in chronological order". I'd hope they'd offer a simplistic no-brainer like this, and it'd be easy to understand.

Second, I'd rely on journalists or academic researchers to study the moderation+recommendation algorithms and I'd go via trusted sources. I'd wait until a review article comes up in Ars Technica and pick there. I think non-technical users would only pick if the question becomes significant enough to filter through to general society discussion. Maybe there'll be some viral videos of TikTok from "influencers" who noticed that they preferred one or another algorithm, and it'll spread through that and word of mouth amongst friends?

Do you have any friends who say "I used to follow instagram but there were too many political articles and I switched to TikTok because it's more fun"? They were switching partly because they discerned a difference in the recommendation algorithm. (which is more or less the secret sauce of TikTok's success).

Third, I wonder why you think end-users are fine at picking up differences between the algorithms used for internet-search (google, bing, altavista), and for map-routing (waze, google maps, apple maps)? How are they basing their choices? Why won't the same kind of end-user choice about subtle and complicated algorithms also apply to feeds?

As for using boron and expecting nuclear things to happen, there is something similar that is already a thing. It's called boron-neutron capture therapy. It involves a chemotherapy medication that is not yet active. It incorporates boron in its structure, but is not actually active until the boron captures a neutron and transmutes into carbon. The idea is to inject the medication then aim a neutron beam at the tumor. The substance is transmuted at the beam and becomes active - but only there.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

So transmuting boron really is a thing. Whether it captures a proton as easily as it captures a neutron is another question.

For me, I don't have any need to monitor my kid. I'm only offering it as a means to let her text a small number of friends if she wants. For the other parents who give their kids a cellphone for tracking but only allow messaging and nothing else, then the Garmin Bounce would save the same need and have the same advantages and disadvantages for their child as a phone. None of our kids in 10th grade have a device with their whole life.

My oldest is 10yo, in 5th grade, so we coordinate closely with parents of her friends to make sure we have a common understanding of mobile device rules. None of her friends have a full-time personal device. Some of them are allowed to message, but only to a small handful of friends and only on a few days a week. One of her friends is given a device for contact-purposes when going out, but she's the exception, and I think they'll reduce that.

Personally, I hope to use a Garmin Bounce to delay cellphone. It allows location-monitoring, and allows texting to a small number of pre-approved friends, but there are no social apps. I'll see how that goes.