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Nifty, but the article should have elaborated on the use cases. It suggested that training is the biggest one, but are these really a substitute for actually feeling real-world things? Seems like they’d have to be almost magically precise to, say, simulate the difference between quality and unacceptable fabric.

Thanks. The original description made this seem like far-future technological magic. A system that can somehow analyze a random pane of glass and derive all the transformations needed to use it as a high-precision waveguide? I actually had a manager ask me to develop such a thing, and I asked him how many dozen optics PhDs I could hire to accomplish this feat.

That's an interesting question. The Economist attempted to answer it with their series "The Prince" (https://www.economist.com/theprincepod), and I believe their conclusion is that Xi has indeed consolidated power around himself and is nearly an autocrat at this point. Two provisos on this, however:

- The author, Sue-Lin Wong, is something of an outsider, and outsider reporting on China typically misses some subtleties of the real situation in the country.

- Given the nature of China, there will never be a fully autocratic leader there, though it may appear that way to some, and the would-be autocrat might be deluded into thinking they are.

The closest I’ve gotten to local debugging is having the Python scripts that are launched by NextFlow steps connect to a remote debugger process (“remote” but running on the same workstation). PyCharm makes this fairly painless to orchestrate. I’ve never been able to debug thr Groovy script in a Nextflow pipeline itself; I think you’d need a debug build of the nextflow executable for that.

The video doesn’t really prove anything. Non-superconducting diamagnetic can’t freely levitate due to a fundamental instability; they will always fall out of levitation (unless they’re spinning in a specific way). The superconductor in the video is in physical contact with the magnet beneath it, which is enough to resolve that unstable condition and keep the material steady.

Pardon me for asking what sounds like an aggressive or leading question, I assure you it’s not: if you have to take a pill to get your work done, could it be that you’re doing the wrong work? I always feel like if I have to take drugs to accomplish something non-medical, maybe I wasn’t meant to accomplish that thing.

#vanlife at least aspires to some level of tidy and conscientious housekeeping. Motivational speaker Matt Foley doesn’t have a string of solar-powered faerie lights adorning his collapsible breakfast nook. He has a clattering drift of beer cans that he can gather up around him for warmth.

Interesting point, and one that's difficult to dispute. Belief in the supernatural or divine is baked into human nature. There's significant research showing that human capacity for faith is genetic. So, as we're building a secular society, it's worth asking: what happens to that need for the divine? Failing to account for basic human nature drove vast amounts of suffering in the 20th century, I fear that making a similar mistake will do the same.

One of my favorite facts about sunspots is, they’re still in extremely bright, they’re only dark due to contrast. An electric arc against a sunspot would look black by comparison (given typical logarithmic brightness measurement).

Good lord. That sounds like a living death, and I’m sorry to hear you’re experiencing that. I can think of ten different optimistic aphorisms to spout at you right now, but instead I’ll respect you enough to simply acknowledge what you’re going through and agree that life should be better than that.