TFS and TFA omit the link to The Conversationâ(TM)s article that mentions "smearing" by the big tech companies. That in turn links here.

They avoid the catastrophe of repeating the last second of the day (which has time run backwards briefly) by instead extending the duration of each "second" by a few microseconds during the 24-hour period that includes the leap second. I assume thatâ(TM)s short enough that the network time service on individual computers just says "oh, my local clock is running a little fast" and fixes it, instead of seeing a bigger adjustment which registers as an error or messes with the logs.

Most Canadians live south of 45.7Â N.

Or how about we switch to standard time for the winter but use DST for the summer? That way we get light in the morning in winter (which you want), plus light in the evening in summer (which other people want).

(Sorry if this is a goofy answer. It just seems like we already have the solution that works best for people's natural clocks and when the sun is available.)

As I understand it, there are a couple of main claims here:

(1) OpenAI heard Buckmaster and AlpÃge were making major progress on the Navier-Stokes problem with AI methods (and maybe had some inkling of their path from prior published work), then rushed to scoop them on it, using about $23M of compute time in 88 hours. This seems to be true (and unethical/shady), but I donâ(TM)t know if it would be considered academic malpractice.

(2) Buckmaster speculates that OpenAIâ(TM)s model may have been trained on his unpublished work (completed in August and September) because he processed drafts of his paper with OpenAI tools. As far as I know, OpenAI hasnâ(TM)t publicly refuted this claim, but oddly enough, there is breaking news on it in an episode of the Odd Lots podcast, where OpenAI Greg Brockman said the latest training data for their model was from July. If true, that seems to foreclose this claim.

I don't buy it. They've made it to massive scale without anyone going bankrupt; clearly no one is paying 0.3% of every transaction ($100 billion/year) to keep the current system afloat. The internet itself is evidence that you can have billions of secure, complex transactions where each party just pays a minimal amount for access to the network and no third party needs to be paid for every transaction (roughly $0.06 for a couple hundred bytes in this case).

This is just banks trying to muscle in on some nice-looking transactions.

Yeah, but you have to regard this as a probabilistic effort: when you spend the $2,000, do you have a greater than 0.2% chance of solving the problem? If not, you're throwing your money away. And chances are, you donâ(TM)t know your odds when you start, so then things become really speculative.

This line is really chilling. The fact that it passes without comment shows that we've now gotten used to living in an authoritarian state instead of a democracy. In a country that actually supported free enterprise, a company wouldn't have to worry what the president thinks of their perfectly legal business decisions. Nor would they need to be on the president's good side to run their business as they see fit in the future. âoePolitical ramificationsâ of this sort have no place in a free, non-corrupt society.

These reports always assume a 6 oz. serving of coffee, which isn't how people have drunk it in the U.S. for a long time. A 12 oz. serving of brewed coffee contains 140-240 mg caffeine, so 400 mg/day is actually roughly 1.5 to 3 servings.

Also, as usual, this looks like an observational study, so they can't actually say whether people are healthy because they drink coffee or people drink coffee because they are healthy or some third factor drives both.

Well, there is one, but it's been a long time since I needed it. If you get your vehicle semi-stuck in a deeply rutted road (or off-road), with a manual transmission you can often "rock" it free: let out the clutch to start moving forward, push it in to roll back and up the other side, repeat to go forward again, increasing the travel each time until you get up and out of the rut. This can work well when you're stuck in a gravity well without enough friction to pull yourself out or even to build the momentum at the bottom to get yourself to the top. But it's not common to need this, and careful drivers can usually avoid it.

The name is actually âoemolten saltâ and it is generally something more exotic like LiF-BeF2, LiF-NaF-KF or NaCl-MgCl2, not simple table salt (NaCl).

You can say "we replaced human computers with electronic computers". "Computer" used to be a job title.

If you think the Pope should refrain from offering moral advice because some people may not follow it, I think you may have misunderstood how the Catholic Church works.

Who wants to get up two hours before dawn in the winter? Not me! Who wants to get up two hours after dawn in the summer? Not me!

This is just like the people who stop taking their meds because they feel healthy. Get over it!

I really don't understand all the moaning and groaning about daylight saving time. People naturally wake up earlier in the summer and later in the winter, and DST is the most straightforward way to adapt our work schedule to that. We get 6 months of better sleep/work alignment in exchange for adjusting our sleep schedule by an hour twice a year. It's a big reward for not much effort, especially considering most of us adjust our sleep schedule ant the start and end of every weekend anyway, i.e., around 100 times a year.

I think the answer is no if you don't have clean access to the proprietary software, e.g., if you decompile or reverse engineer it in violation of a license agreement that you agreed to. That taints the spec, which taints the clean room reimplementation. I think this also applies to leaked software - if you know it's someone's trade secret, but you use it anyway to create a competing product, you can be sued.