kergonath

No, that’s the new status quo. Even if democrats get in power next time:

1) it’s fairly unlikely that they give up on more powers voluntarily (exactly how much of the patriot act and the post-9/11 rules were given up by Obama and Biden?)

2) there is always the possibility of a future switch to another populist nutcase (or hell, any nutcase really). We are not going to trust American voters to be sensible anymore. We’ll need a couple of sane administrations and long-term polling data for that.

Microsoft thought it was easier/better to rewrite minecraft in C++ than port the jvm to the xbox.

I don’t think that’s quite right. IIRC, the mobile iOS version was released before the Xbox one and neither were developed by Microsoft. I think eventually it’s the mobile version that became Bedrock and replaced the older console version, which became a dead end.

The mobile version (released in 2011) could not be in Java, otherwise it could not have been sold on iOS. So at least initially it was more a business decision about which platforms to target than a technical decision to do away with Java.

All this happened years before Microsoft bought Mojang.

It's absolutely crazy that a game so popular - let alone any game - was originally written in Java.

It did not start being popular :)

Seriously though, I think Java helped it get so much traction initially. Writing mods was tedious but not that difficult, and it was multi-platform for free. Nowadays I assume the vast majority are playing bedrock on consoles or PC, but at the beginning it was rather nerdy and being playable on Linux and Mac was nice for some tech-minded people.

That’s a bit over-selling it. The Panthéon and the Invalides are not really touristic attractions. The Louvre, Versailles, and the Eiffel Tower are much more effective for that purpose. They are used for culture building, not to make money.

Besides, only ashes remain of Napoleon and even the bodies that are there are entombed. They are necropoles, not shows. There isn’t much to see there.

Why would we think that? The people in them (for the very few tombs that haven’t been visited or looted already) don’t care; they’ve been dead for millennia.

Even if they aren’t doing it for free. It completely depends on the situation, and the pressure the employers apply to get people to accept. In an ideal wonderland, management would offer enough money so the workers find it worthwhile. In reality they often offer the bare minimum and apply as much hierarchical pressure as they can to get away with not offering anything at all. I’ve seen it countless times, and it goes something like: "You know I’ve been thinking about that promotion for you… You know what could really help? What about you give us some help next Wednesday night?"

They are. But it’s a rhetorical question anyway. You will always find people willing to work at any time if you offer them enough money or if they are desperate enough.

1. You are intending to ask about tension (which the rebar helps with), not traction (the force your tires exert against a road).

I don’t know if it is the case here, but it is a common mistake for some non-native English speakers. In some languages traction is a false friend.

What changes? How has civilisation meaningfully changed in a way and scale it didn't before?

It’s not that it did not happen before, civilisations rose up and disappeared several times in the past. It’s just that it is happening now, largely driven by climate issues.

What we are seeing now is regions becoming uninhabitable, crises sending waves of refugees, a dramatic shift towards nationalism in the West, which is terribly ill-equipped to solve global problem and is leading to a progressive crumbling of the international rules-based order. The US gave up on any pretense of sanity and went on a shooting match with Iran, throwing a wrench in the economies of a whole bunch of countries in Asia. Iran itself is in a terrible situation, with a lot of the country running dry. Trump of course is not a direct consequence of global warming, but it helps with the civilisation altering bits and adds to instability.

Europe is under its third heat wave of the year, all of them having been comparable to the historic ones from 1976 and 2003. This is also having a destabilising effect on several governments that are completely feckless, having spent 20 years trying to convince themselves that it was not happening, and was no big deal anyway.

These weather phenomena, along things like tropical storms in the Atlantic, are of course not new, but their frequency and magnitude is increased by global warming. They are currently costing billions and dealing with their consequences is not going to get cheaper.

Can you come up with examples of those changes that don't have an equivalent in form and scale 200 years back?

I can. For example, the French Revolution was fueled by crop failures in the couple of years before due to particularly bad weather, related to a volcanic eruption in Iceland. The revolutions of 1848 came after about 4 years of crop failures due to bad weather again.

The point is not that it never happened before. The Earth used to be much hotter (and also much colder). The environment used to not have humans around and it was fine. Revolutions and wars, and societal collapse are not new. Look at the late Bronze Age collapse if you want to have an idea of how bad it can realistically get. It’s not the end of the world, not even of humanity, but still a thoroughly unpleasant period to live in.

The point is that this is going to happen not because we rolled a bad dice, but because we’re bloody idiots and are doing it to ourselves.

There isn't much evidence at all that inference is "subsidised" (and by whom?)

None of the big providers are profitable. It’s subsidised by overly enthusiastic VCs.

In any case, you can go buy a MacBook Pro M5 48GB or an AMD R9700 and run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (a very capable model) and the only "subsidy" is you plugging it in

Right, people could. But they won’t, because that’s a bloody expensive computer and they don’t need that to ask ChatGPT. That war is lost already.

Subscription to the big players’ services would need to increase massively for that to happen. And the computational cost is only part of the problem; these models also eat a lot of storage and RAM, which is not exactly getting cheaper.

More than on the cards, it is already happening.

The left wing version of climate conspiracy is that climate change will end humanity itself.

That is unrealistic, but also not what a conspiracy is. It’s also a red herring, as nobody serious is claiming that. They are talking about civilisation changes, which we are already seeing.

At some point you have to engage with the arguments besides shouting "no, it’s you".

In general, yes. Spin-orbit coupling and relativistic effects in heavier elements is not new. A rather... significant elements where this was studied was uranium (and plutonium, of course). Even napkin maths show that for heavy elements, some of the electrons have relativistic velocities.

This discovery is about a (seemingly, I haven't been keeping up too much) new case of one specific bond in one specific ion. Do not read the university's breathless press release, go straight to the article. The third sentence of the editor's summary is "It’s long been clear that this model starts to fray when the atoms get heavy enough for relativity to come into play".

THE MATERIALS OF THE FUTURE ALREADY EXIST IN THE LAB

Do they? There’s plenty of stuff in our labs, most of them are completely useless, some that were bought to be useless become fashionable again, and we get new and exciting ones every day. There are a lot of issues in going from concept to useable material, and "scaling up" is only one of them.

FRONTIER INTELLIGENCE WILL BRING THEM TO THE WORLD.

It will probably help, but I doubt it will do it by itself.

Put simply, materials innovation has a scale-up problem, not a discovery problem.

I just don’t think that’s true. It’s also a scale-up problem, but discovery itself is not solved.

The problem spaces keep getting larger (composites! nanostructures! High-entropy!). High-throughput thermodynamic and electronic structure calculations, automated characterisation and testing, and things like that are being developed because we just don’t know what materials could exist and what could be their properties. The problem is that while there is room for AI there, particularly in automation, even cutting edge models are very dodgy to extrapolate materials properties outside their training sets, which are utterly negligible compared to the size of the search space.

The bottleneck has never been a shortage of promising candidate materials. It is the decades of trial and error it takes to manufacture even one of them reliably.

It’s worse than that. The first sentence is true (ideas are cheap), but the main bottleneck is to try to figure out the properties of the damn thing and whether some of them are deal breakers or not. The vast majority of materials we come up with never see any application, not because we don’t have processes at the right scale, but because they just have terrible properties.

It is well documented in France as well. It was seen as a revenge for 1870. There was quite a bit of enthusiasm. At least initially, before the killing started in earnest and people got stuck in the trenches.

Isn't he on record that his documentation was listening to techies talking shop in bars?

Yeah. I don’t think he was a technophile himself. Which might have helped him because he was not trying to be realistic. But at the same time there are things he understood deeply.

That’s nice in principle, but it really is not the same budget around here, even though the shops are here. Small neighbourhood supermarkets and corner shops are significantly more expensive than the big supermarket that’s a 10-minute drive away.

We’re doing both: buying what we need in large quantities or with a long shelf life once a week from a supermarket and things like some meat, fruits and vegetables from the corner shop but that takes a bit of work and planning. Still, there’s money to be saved taking advantage of economies of scale.

Besieging a city is difficult and expensive. And it fixes a significant attacking army that has to monitor the whole city’s surroundings. They do fall every now and then, but the whole point is that it takes a disproportionate amount of power to do it.

The Maginot line gets ridiculed often enough, but it did its job: it forced the Germans to find another way. It’s too bad the Ardennes were much more porous than expected and the fortifications did not extend all the way to Dukirk, but without fortifications at all it’s pretty much certain that the Wehrmacht should have gone straight through the plains of Lorraine and Champagne.

There is plenty of "high performance work" that still requires CPUs.

The word is "fucking". We’re grown-ups, we can use grown-up words.

When that’s the case, the preprints would be just as short. We don’t really like unnecessary pain so we write short manuscripts from the beginning, if we plan to submit in such a journal. Usually, the longer versions get published somewhere else anyway.

There’s a lot of stuff on Researchgate. And with the evolution of European grants, there are a few publicly-available repositories, like hal.science (funded by the French government and the default repository for public research in France, I think you have to be with some kind of research institution so it’s not quite as open as arxiv but there are plenty of good articles there).

No, it’s not everywhere. Reporting is fair and accurate.

They are social democrats and firmly left of centre. You won’t find anything remotely radical in the Grauniad.

The American ambassadors to almost anywhere are complete clowns these days. Obnoxious, unfunny, despicable clowns.

I am still suspicious that this has something to do with the relationship between Springer-Verlag and the Max Plank Digital Library (MPDL) which supports open access.

Why? Max Plank (the dead Physicist) has nothing to do with whatever the Institute is doing these days. Or the library. Or anything that was named after him.

If I am not mistaken, Bull's warm water cooling requires water at ~30°C, so 45°C is still an improvement.

Does the EU not want to spy on its citizens?

You do not seem to understand what the EU is. It is not a country, it does not have a police or anything like the NSA.

I can't read French, but having evaluated many of these plagiarism cases in the past, a lot of them truly are witch hunts.

It’s not the case here.

The plagiarism will be something like "Einstein presented a new theory: ___" and the ___ and several sections of the next few pages will be barely modified Einstein quotes.

Again, that’s not the case here. There was no attribution, no reference, and no quotes, for entire paragraphs. About a third of the thesis overall.

As an academic, I really would not care much if someone did this to my work so long as they mention and cite me generally.

Which is fine, but again not very relevant to this case.