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Yup, these kinds of things are definitely on the agenda as we integrate the core ideas here into Hazel. We kept things minimal in Tylr to focus on the core ideas with minimal "magic".

Indeed, that problem (ambiguity about where to put matching delimiters) is what motivated tylr. The solution is: when the location of the closing parentheses isn't unique, as in your example, tylr puts it in the "backpack" above the cursor and enters "restructuring mode", letting you select where it should go (within the valid region).

Yup, tylr is a minimal prototype, ala Hazelnut, intended to be adapted and integrated into Hazel (happening now!)

Certainly a relevant comparison, but if sexual orientation is, like race and gender, a protected characteristic, then it may make sense from a balancing perspective to not allow that to be a valid reason, even if "affiliation with a terrorist group" remains a valid reason to choose to deny service.

The dominant cost here isn't the cost of the employee that has to update their database, it is the cost of lost advertising or customers angry that your company is providing services to terrorists.

To be clear, you're referring to "the right, led by the President, organizes and executes a violent attack on the Capitol, so companies refuse to continue providing services to those people" as a "tit for tat".

You can still say whatever you want, you just can't compel others (including businesses) to assist you in conveying your speech. This is really basic stuff, it is surprising how difficult many otherwise smart people are finding it.

Sure. There is no way to eliminate whacko conspiracy theorists and fringe forums. They existed before social media too. The idea is that interpersonal dynamics can help manage these things: if your uncle Frank posts about chemtrails, then hopefully someone he trusts can point him in a different direction in the comments, and if not, at least the people reading it will see the comments. If Facebook just surfaces this information, you get none of this: click and boom you're in an alternative reality full of lizard people and humans in cosmic battle.

Make sure you write down the name of who you spoke to, and see if they'll give you their email address. Then you have way to follow up, either directly or by calling the office and saying you had spoken to so-and-so and wanted to follow up. Obviously the people you speak to can't promise much of anything, but if you bring up something that sounds important to them, they will do what they can to move it through the bureaucracy. Follow-ups can help keep it on the radar or make it more urgent. Obviously there are no fool-proof methods here (and congress is full of fools). And people don't like to say no, so you may need to read between the lines sometimes to figure out that they decided your requests were inconsistent with whatever political school of thought that representative subscribes to.

There were people with zip tie handcuffs and guns in the chamber, fortunately after it had been evacuated. I don't know what they planned to do, but I imagine best case would be a hostage situation where they demand that the electoral count be stopped until their conspiracy theories about electoral fraud were considered. Worst case they execute democratic leadership, which is far from an implausible scenario given reports that they were looking for Pelosi and Schumer's offices (and found them, and looted them). Keep in mind that their media sphere is full of conspiracy theories that accuse politicians of child abuse. Minimizing what happened here would be a big mistake.

We might consider more or less eliminating automated recommendation systems on social media and return to, as you put it, "just showing photos of puppies", i.e. just showing posts from entities that you have explicitly friended or followed. This won't entirely solve the problem of people coalescing into radical groups, but it might help if learning about the group required someone posting it to their feed for everyone to see.

You can walk into the office, but you won't get a meeting with Wyden if you aren't on the schedule. Instead, if you are a resident of the state, they'll have staff that will meet with you in a small conference room, take notes, maybe ask a few questions. These are typically fairly young intern types, so don't expect too much depth from them (in my experience, you're going to get some very naive questions if you bring up anything related to science/tech policy). They'll then tell you that you are being heard, thank you, and send you on your way. This is occasionally a useful thing to do, e.g. to bring attention to a niche issue, cause, or special interest that their office might not be aware of at all.

Andrew is actually joining our group, FP Lab, as a PhD student this fall and will be contributing to Hazel amongst other things. :-)

Reminds me of a math blog I set up in grad school called "Nothing Left to Prove". No posts.

I've tried to get my head around the limited information out there on how much turbulence there is at various altitudes but I don't know enough about that area of physics to get a good sense of it. Do you have a citation for the "roaring convection currents" claim? Fast winds aren't necessarily a problem, its the derivatives that cause problems...

I think you could imagine building city-sized habitats with enough raw materials, so you could certainly have industrial equipment operating. But yeah, having a source for raw materials would be essential in the long term. For smaller science missions though it would be totally feasible to just bring all the heavy stuff with you, just like we're going to do for early Mars missions.

Good points! I'm not sure how interesting the clouds would look. There is definitely some dynamic behavior there, including electrical storms, and you'd have a day-night cycle spanning 4 days total, not due to the rotation of Venus but rather the atmospheric dynamics.

Also keep in mind that due to the dangers of radiation, the denizens of a lunar or Martian colony would not be outside that often. The most realistic plans I've seen actually have the habitats completely underground (e.g. in lava tubes on the moon [1]). Certainly a few of the colonists will leave on science missions with some frequency, but the vast majority of the time people will be inside and underground, albeit probably tele-operating mining equipment and things like that in many cases.

I think if you think big enough, in both cases the problem isn't that bad: being in an underground habitat / cloud habitat the size of a small town will feel like you're on solid ground, not like you're in an airplane in the clouds / in a cave. Artists and architects can design artificial landscape to keep things from being boring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_lava_tube#Sites_for_huma...

The upper atmosphere of Venus is an extremely under-appreciated location in the solar system!

- Closer than Mars

- 90% of Earth gravity (compared to 30% for Mars)

- Atmospheric shielding mass equivalent to Earth's (protected from solar radiation, unlike Mars)

- Large amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, with some other trace gasses. You can make fuel, extract water and grow plants from that.

- At 50km altitude, you have ~1atm of pressure, and breathable air is a lifting gas, so you can put a balloon full of air up there and it will float and support a good amount of extra weight. If it punctures then it will just slowly leak, not explosively decompress.

- Temperature ranges from 27-75C, so thermal issues are pretty easy.

- Ample solar influx for power.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonization_of_Venus

Obviously you're floating in the air, so you'd have to bring in metals and minerals externally, e.g. from earth or via asteroid mining, or maybe in the future we could build machinery capable of mining the surface despite its brutal conditions. Or, you know, forests in balloons that you gather timber from.

So yeah, "build a cloud city on Venus" is definitely a crazy idea, but not nearly as infeasible as "terraform Mars" I think! Furthermore, as this paper demonstrates, there are some incredibly interesting and unresolved scientific questions that justify going (as if the sheer beauty of "cloud cities on Venus" is not reason enough!)

Instead of "gender", you should make it "preferred pronoun".

In OCaml's expression syntax, "begin" is a synonym for left parenthesis, and "end" is a synonym for right parenthesis. So I've taken to just using "begin match e with ... end" in every situation to avoid this problem.

No, it's better to enforce the norms of a free and antagonistic press.

I mean, the product itself is named Slack...

You're aware that iPhones and iPads run software I assume.

I suspect it is you that doesn't understand the security implications -- if all it takes is $99/year to gain the ability to sign arbitrary code, then there is no security benefit whatsoever. Pure security theater.

Obviously, the $99/year isn't making Apple a lot of money. But what it is doing is creating a culture of acceptance around Apple-as-gatekeeper. The iOS app store is most certainly making Apple a non-trivial amount of money (yes I know its a small percentage of their total at the moment.)

An Apple developer account costs $99/year.

The ethical problem on macOS is that Apple is imposing artificial technical barriers to push people to pay Apple what amounts to "protection" money.

On iOS, there is no reasonable way to bypass the app store for the vast majority of users.

No, then _the internet_ came along, offering EVERYONE the ability to publish apps, at an actually very reasonable cost.

First off, I didn't say that Apple was blocking apps on MacOS. I mentioned it because the OP was disparaging Lenovo as a whole because of unethical behavior in one product line. As such, it's only fair to do the same for Apple.

Second, Apple most definitely does "impede" the installation of apps downloaded independently by requiring you to perform an obscure dance to execute them.

Lenovo's malware scandal should certainly give you pause, but do note that it was only installed on its consumer laptops. Thinkpads were unaffected.

Moreover, Apple is far from the cleanly ethical choice you seem to think it is. It blocks or impedes the installation of software that it has unilaterally decided is against its interests + takes a ludicrous percentage of revenue via the App Store.

They showed Safari using the bar for various general browser functionality, e.g. back button and tab switcher, so that would require adding a toggle to switch from that UI to the one the webpage has defined.

I think Apple is going to use this to differentiate its native app offerings from competing web apps, particularly Google's web apps, so I doubt they put much effort into that.

Unless the OS is rendering the bar off-screen even when there isn't a hardware bar, you could trivially determine whether there is a bar by having the code that controls the bar set a flag / send a message.