How we use them isn't.

Humans are all different. For some the levels of distinction and discrimination achievable with mathematical operations performed on four bit floats is sufficient. For others less than 16 bits will not do.

Not really in the popular science. Over the years there have been some doozies in the public square. Hawking surveys a few in his works. His final paper featured a smooth exit from cosmic inflation resulting in heat death in a long tail.

One problem with Big Crunch/string of pearls theories is that gravity propagates at the speed of light. As any fool kno, our light cone is on a massive diet as mass exits relevance by being on the far side of so much expanding space that it can never come back or influence us - the event horizon. As the rate of crunch exceeds the speed of light we remain islanded from the rest of that irrelevant greater Universe as you would still have to exceed light speed to get from there to here. There's still a spot between where the taffy breaks. Another is that since the visible universe is obviously a tiny, perhaps an infinitesimal, portion of the whole of what is/was, naturally we recently were in a condition where if there was enough mass and density to cause a crunch, why didn't it do so when our visible universe was (pick an order of magnitude) more dense? Also, crunch theory involves time travel which is heresy all by itself. Violation of causality is not a state of grace.

Economy being what it is, I'll tail this with my contribution. I did previously speculate about aging of stellar formation media playing hob with the distance ladder. This is I think the second major paper on the matter. It's good to see the notion pencil whipped. Observation is coming fast and furious and the astronomers say "we took the picture. It is what it is. Explaining it is your job." With such a rising bounty of observed fact theories will come and go like salesmen at a Las Vegas convention so it's best not to marry one.

They're going to launch it in tranches by popularity. Probably by genre and artist too. Unless you have bizarre eclectic tastes they will likely have all the music you might want and all the adjacent stuff, in a reasonable package.

Cutting out 99.9% leaves the most popular 210,000 songs in about 300GB. Metadata is the big prize I think. It's not like you can't just open Spotify and hear what you want.

More about the analysis of the metadata in https://annas-archive.org/blog... /Heavy chart analysis, and they talk about how the bulk has less than 1,000 listens total.

Why pay for two when one gets the job done?

SpaceX can probably accelerate their flight schedule to accommodate Russian crew needs. There's the question of if Russia is able/willing to pay nearly $100m per seat. Their flights on Crew Dragon are currently paid through NASA in a seat exchange program where they provide flights from this site on Soyuz for US astronauts. They don't actually pony up the cash.

This launch site is also essential to attitude control of ISS. To refuel the ISS stabilizer thrusters and hold it steady while the gyroscopes are relieved periodically requires Progress modules launched from there. There isn't currently a backup plan for those services.

Ok, it's only because I assume people skim rather than bother reading whole paragraphs. I can paragraphs, honest.

I think one of the greatest advances of the Western Enlightenment was a kind of realization that it's really, really difficult to know something.

It's not just about personal biases, and it's not just about cultural biases. It goes way beyond that -- it's the systems we live in and depend upon.

When we were living in tribal times, you could probably find out through direct experience most of everything you needed to know. And anything beyond that was just magic. How to find food, how to make relationships, and the consequences of various strategies. The tribe was local and could learn and retain that direct tribal experience.

Today we live in an incredibly complex global system which is not only 8 billion people, but they are all agents who are part of systems, of systems, of systems.

We're all dependent on and using systems which we have no idea how they're actually made or how they're connected or what they even do.

We have this problem when you listen to what your doctor thinks is wrong with you, what legal advice you might be given, which foods are being promoted as healthy, which morals and ethical views are being enforced, which laws are being made, which things are taught in education, as well as the wider opinions around which side are the good guys in any particular conflict.

And so on and so on.

We seem to be living in a system that is far more complex than we can understand.

If the internet and now AI are to save us from this bizarre place of being both incredibly interdependent and nobody really understanding what the heck is going on, that tech has to give us exquisitely transparent and clear feedback loops.

When someone in some position of authority or influence, like a politician or a company manager, makes a decision, we have no idea what's really going on and why they really made that decision. Yet it can affect many and in unanticipated ways.

And that's even before we get into the fact that 99% of the brain is unconscious.

We are in the kinda Forbidden Planet scenario where we built an incredibly powerful system yet none of us understand the implications, and by the time the feedback loop completes, it'll be too late.

New math isn't the problem -- new math was never the problem. Standards are the problem.

You do realize the young people aren't choosing their own education, right? Its the previous generations making those changes.

You're likely falling into the logical thinking word problem portion of those students.

Generally agree, I mean, companies don't need to make their own steel beams, cars, and teacups, Cloud gives the lower parts of the stack over to the specialists, who can industrialise their skill with a massive production line.

But what's kinda interesting is that there's still industries where lots of small players are needed, like housing construction and maintenance. We don't all live in an IKEA like mass produced kit house. There's huge variety of small custom house designs and arrangements, ad-hoc pieces, as every house is different.

I guess the question is whether an org's IT is going to fit and benefit more from the mass production line model or the custom local one.

Holy cow!

Was there no agency you could have tipped off about it?

But does it have a Yoda mode?

Are you sure about that? I heard MBS through a Canadian wealth management firm.

Cool :) I must try to reread that again one day.