I spend my time reading /. where we run stories such as that estimations of microplastics may be incorrectly overreported. Maybe the problem isn't the media but rather what you choose to commit to memory from it?

Yeah but The Guardian is alarmist trash right? They wouldn't ever run stories like this that say science is overreporting something https://www.theguardian.com/en... No sirree.

ED: "But it doesn't work for gravity with linear curvature"

Relativity = gravity is represented by the curvature of spacetime. Curvature is linear, R. The formula treats curvature linearly. As things get closer and curvature spikes, the math just scales at a 1:1 rate

Quadratic gravity = Squares the curvature. Doesn't really change things much when everything is far apart, but heavily changes things when everything is close together.

Pros: prevents infinities and other problems when trying to reconcile quantum theory with relativity ("makes the theory renormalizable"). E.g. you don't want to calculate "if I add up the probabilities of all of these possible routes to some specific event, what are the odds that it happens?" -> "Infinity percent odds". That's... a problem. Renormalization is a trick for electromagnetism that prevents this by letting the infinities cancel out. But it doesn't work with linear curvature - gravitons carry energy, which creates gravity, which carries more energy... it explodes, and renormalization attempts just create new infinities. But it does work with quadratic curvature - it weakens high-energy interactions and allows for convergence.

Cons: Creates "ghosts" (particles with negative energies or negative probabilities, which create their own problems). There's various proposed solutions, but none that's really a "eureka!" moment. Generally along the lines of "they exist but are purely virtual and don't interact", "they exist but they're so massive that they decay before they can interact with the universe", "they don't exist, we're just using the math out of bounds and need a different representation of the same", "If we don't stop at R^2 but also add in R^3, R^4, ... on to infinity, then they go away". Etc.

The theory isn't new, BTW. The idea is from 1918 (just a few years after Einstein's theory of General Relativity was published), and the work that led to the "Pros" above is from 1977.

A bit more about the latter. Beyond organophosphates, the main other alternative is pyrethroids. These are highly toxic to aquatic life, and they're contact poisons to pollinators just landing on the surface (some anti-insect clothing is soaked in pyrethrin for its effect). Also, neonicotinoids are often applied as seed coatings (which are taken up and spread through the plant), which primarily just affect the plant itself. Alternatives are commonly foliar sprays. This means drift to non-target impacts as well, such as in your shelterbelts, private gardens, neighbors' homes, etc. You also have to use far higher total pesticide quantities with foliar sprays instead of systematics, which not only drift, but also wash off, etc. Neonicotinoids can impact floral visitors, with adverse sublethal impacts but e.g. large pyrethroid sprayings can cause massive immediate fatal knockdown events of whole populations of pollinators.

Regrettable substitution is a real thing. We need to factor it in better. And that applies to nanoplastics as well.

Except Notepad is already a native app. The two concepts are unrelated. The outage was related to a license check (a stupid one), which literally any app could suffer from regardless of whether it is native or written in shitty web frameworks.

Did that, tried to run one of those EXE and got an error. What do I do now?

WhatsApp clearly needs to learn from Discord here and have a one line code that causes it to simply close and restart itself when the Electron framework finally has shat enough over your system resources that you're out of memory.

I'm obviously being sarcastic here, but I am unfortunately not joking about Discord: https://www.remio.ai/post/disc...

The thing about free as in beer is that you're fundamentally within your right to give that beer to someone else. There's a difference between charging for a product and gatekeeping its use. Any attempt to gatekeep fundamentally corrects itself and often comes close to sinking the original project.

Just look to examples like Elasticsearch. Put up a paygate and find your project forked (it was free as in beer after all) and watch yourself slowly slip into irrelevance.
It's just one example of many which have followed this path.

How? Fundamentally big projects like this aren't starved for finance. Wayland was the brainchild of Kristian Høgsberg who was given scope and time to do so while being paid a full time wage for another employer (Intel for much of the time).

So, when we say microplastics, we really mainly mean nanoplastics - the stuff made from, say, drinking hot liquids from low-melting-point plastic containers. And yeah, they very much look like a problem. The strongest evidence is for cardiovascular disease. The 2024 NEJM study for example found that for patients with above-threshold levels of nanoplastics in cartoid artery plaque were 4,5x more likely to suffer from a heart attack. Neurologically, they cross the brain-blood barrier (and quite quickly). A 2023 study found that they cause alpha-synuclein to misfold and clump together, a halmark of Parkinsons and various kinds of dementia. broadly, they're associated with oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, protein aggregation, and neurotransmitter alterations. Oxidative stress is due to cells struggling to break down nanoplastics in them. They're also associated with immunotoxicity, inflammatory bowel disease, and reproductive dysfunction, including elevating inflammatory markers, impairing sperm quality, and modulating the tumor microenvironment. With respect to reproduction, they're also associated with epigenetic dysregulation, which can lead to heritable changes.

And here's one of the things that get me - and let me briefly switch to a different topic before looping back. All over, there's a rush to ban polycarbonate due to concerns over a degradation product (bisphenol-A), because it's (very weakly) estrogenic. But typical effective estrogenic activity from typical levels of bisphenol-A are orders of magnitude lower than that of phytoestrogens in food and supplements; bisphenol-A is just too rare to exert much impact. Phytoestrogens have way better PR than bisphenol-A, and people spend money buying products specifically to consume more of them. Some arguments against bisphenol-A focus on what type of estrogenic activity it can promote (more proliferative activity), but that falls apart given that different phytoestrogens span the whole gamut of types of activation. Earlier research arguing for an association with estrogen-linked cancer seems to have fallen apart in more recent studies. It does seem associated with PCOS, but it's hard to describe it as a causal association, because PCOS is associated with all sorts of things, including diet (which could change the exposure rate vs. non-PCOS populations) and significant hormonal changes (which could change the clearance rate of bisphenol-A vs. non-PCOS populations). In short, bisphenol-A from polycarbonate is not without concern, but the concern level seems like it should be much lower than with nanoplastics.

Why bring this up? Because polycarbonate is a low-nanoplastic-emitting material. It is a quite resilient, heat tolerant plastic, and thus - being much further from its glass transition temperature - is not particularly prone to shedding nanoplastics. By contrast, its replacements - polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthate, etc - are highly associated with nanoplastic release, particularly with hot liquids. So by banning polycarbonate, we increase our exposure to nanoplastics, which are much better associated with actual harms. And unlike bisphenol-A, which is rapidly eliminated from the body, nanoplastics persist. You can't get rid of them. If some big harm is discovered with bisphenol-A that suddenly makes the risk picture seem much bigger than with nanoplastics, we can then just stop using it, and any further harm is gone. But we can't do that with nanoplastics.

People seriously need to think more about substitution risks when banning products. The EU in particular is bad about not considering it. Like, banning neonicotinoids and causing their replacement by organophosphates, etc isn't exactly some giant win. Whether it's a benefit to pollinators at all is very much up in the air, while it's almost certain that the substitution is more harmful for mammals such as ourselves (neonicotinoids have very low mammalian toxicity, unlike e.g. organophosphates, which are closely related to nerve agents).

The problem is still captivity. It's not a consumer choice. Literally no consumer has ever said "I would like to use an app to pay at just this station", yet the vendors forced this on people anyway. Why? Because it benefits *them* and because consumers have no alternative. The precise mechanism that made this a problem in the first place it the mechanism that prevents it from being solved through consumers. This was always about corporate control.

Customers can't vote with wallets. That's a fundmental problem of understanding. You need conditions of a perfect market with equal power for consumers to have choice. Charging isn't that.

Think of it as the difference between a supermarket: Customer has the power not to shop, and a midnight convenience store, people who use that do so out of necessity and don't have the power not to shop.

I gave an example in my other post. I drive to another State in the USA. My car pings me that I have less than 10% battery (35mile range) so I select a charging station on the side of the highway. Detour. Get out. Walk to the post and ... it needs an app. Now what do I do?
a) spend 2min installing the app? - company wins
b) get back in the car having wasted 2 min at this stop, drive down to the next (and possibly final) option for charging and try my luck again knowing that I may need to install an app anyway?
c) plan ahead in a way that further perpetuates the range concern of electric cars and stop to fill up when I still have 30% left potentially requiring another stop to my destination (which costs way more than 2minutes).

The sensible option is a) and it's the one most consumers will pick because of this market captivity. There's no real choice to vote with your wallet, not without incurring a personal cost in terms of time.

It depends on location in the world, but even in places where chargers are frequent there's a question of how often / early you want to charge. My car for example will give a notification to stop at a charger when the battery is below 10%. At that point you're looking at only 50km remaining charge (not too different from the point where the low fuel light used to come on my previous car). Now realistically going down a highway that gives me the option of 1 or 2 chargers only. If I am willing to move off the highway then I probably have the option of 4 chargers.

But then the question: How low do I go? Do I pull off at one point, swear and then get back into my car and drive off again to the next place? Luckily I don't live in a situation where that's an issue (thanks to that EU law I mentioned), but realistically am I going to go to a different charger and try my luck again knowing I may need to install an app anyway and need to make a second stop, or will I capitulate and simply install an app? Most consumers will do the latter.

The issue is the charging industry does not make a lot of money. It's a significant cost outlay for very little return and a small market share. Petrol stations actually also make very little money, they rely a lot on incredible volumes and sales of overpriced convenience items to make a profit. Charging companies don't have that luxury, in fact most of the time you will plug in your car and then go spend money at a petrol station or starbucks or something while you wait for it to charge.

No, it's not what is happening, the analogy breaks down because it expects a voluntary contribution from someone outside of the organisation. Nothing about a waitress tipping at any point involves someone doing voluntary work with an expectation of variable income. A waitress is an employee of an organisation, the fact that organisation pays them incorrectly is not analogous to someone not paying for open source software.

If you insist on staying with food and not liking the cake approach, consider maybe someone who volunteers at a foodbank. Open source work prepared for anything other than contracted / full time employment is volunteering. That has nothing to do with tipping a waitress.

Awww don't like it when you are proven wrong and don't have a comeback and someone refuses to let you have the last word? I'm playing the world's smallest violin in honour of your tiny penis.

Yes I absolutely am not smart enough to ask someone to send me their complete project so I can self host it just to do a PR request and then package it up and send it back to them so they can import it - incidentally this process (which would achieve what you want) would lock a project so that only one person can make a single change at any single point in time. This would be very stupid.

Now you have two choices: Either admit that you asked something incredibly stupid, or admit you didn't understand the original problem, and also didn't understand my very simple reply to you.

Either way you look very stupid.