Hydrogen has one of the widest explosive ranges of all fuels. It will burn in air anywhere between 4% and 75% hydrogen by volume.

Ranked choice in the US is pretty much only instant-runoff (IRV).

All the votes are tallied for a voter’s first preference, if no majority winner then the ballots for the lowest-voted candidate are re-tallied for their next preference - repeat until some candidate gets a majority.

It is a terrible voting system, mathematically only barely better than first-past-the-post. The reason (in my opinion) that it has gotten some traction in the US is that it is the change that is least-threatening to the party duopoly, with the math telling us that is supports the same big-tent duopoly that FPTP does as an end-state.

A better form of it is the condorcet method, where candidates are compared pairwise based on preferences. E.g. on how many ballots is candidate A ranked above candidate B? The winner of such an election is the one who wins the greatest number of head-to-head elections.

STAR is interesting, but I personally find it too complex and it fails at preventing many different electoral pathologies.

Approval voting is the method I prefer (mark all candidates you approve for holding this office). Immune to spoilers, simple to explain, adaptable to single and multi-winner elections, and ensures that the candidate that has the broadest electoral support wins.

There are a few edge cases that are generally considered ‘bad’ and best avoided in the study of voting methods. Things such as voting for a candidate actually reducing the chance the voter receives an outcome they would be happy with, or of there being a single person whose vote could alter the outcome of the election.

The particular passage they linked is talking about the spoiler effect, where a candidate close in ideology to another candidate causes both of them to lose and a candidate of a different ideology than the one with the most support wins. E.g. in 1912 Roosevelt ran against Taft, allowing Woodrow Wilson to win with 40 ish percent of the vote, despite Taft and Teddy have a majority between them and being much closer on policy.

Arrow’s impossibility theorem is a formal statement (and accompanying proof) that any ordinal system of voting, where voters indicate relative preferences between candidates, is subject to the spoiler effect. First past the post and ranked choice voting are among the worst in this regard, creating spoilers even in cases where voter preferences do not require such a condition to exist.

Other majority-rule systems such as condorcet methods are less sensitive to spoilers and, under certain models of voter preferences (e.g. smooth ideological preference 'i like candidates on the right and I like them less the more left they are), is immune to spoilers.

The data would still be encrypted. Sure, they could try to brute-force the key but it is very unlikely they try that on some rando’s phone.

All the big tech companies are built on open source projects… No idea what the guy you replied to was on about.

Any useful thing you code will be used to feed the beast.

You need to learn about mass balances.

The article recommends gaslighting the public to sidestep opposition to the AI rollout, while embedding AI into education, healthcare, and routine governance.

Wonderful

He did a good job with the (admittedly small) part of the emperor in Dune.

Your traffic is encrypted, but it is still possible to see what sites you are visiting without a VPN.

With a VPN, all your traffic will just be to the VPN server, and any logs of the sites you visit will sit with the VPN operator.

That would prevent cell signals from inside, making it harder to (e.g.) call the fire department, or an ambulance.

What we know is that general relativity fails to explain gravitational interactions at very large scales for the matter we can see in telescopes.

The simplest answer for this conundrum is that there is extra matter that we can’t see in telescopes - aka it is ‘dark’ matter. This substance doesn’t appear to interact at all outside of gravity - which is a property we haven’t observed anywhere else. Further, in order to explain the motions we see, it would have to outweigh all the visible matter in the universe by a factor of 5, which seems to strain credibility given that - again - we have never seen anything like it.

Another answer for the observations is we are wrong about gravity, that it behaves differently at very large scales. This doesn’t require a massive amount of invisible magic substance conveniently spread throughout the universe, but to date no theory has been able to explain all the strange observations - and Dark Matter remains the moderate consensus view.

This doesn’t mean dark matter absolutely exists, it is just a hole in our current understanding. We’ve been looking for it for nearly a century and have yet to find direct evidence. In fact, there isn’t even one theory of Dark Matter because it also has difficulty explaining every available observation.

In summary: we have mountains and mountains of evidence that our current theory of gravity fail to explain the big stuff, we have exceedingly little evidence as to what the disconnect with reality is.

In fairness, seasons and varied terrain aren’t guaranteed.

Of all the bodies in the solar system, only Earth has such a wide variety of landscape. Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons. Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball. Etc.

Also, if humans were colonizing earth from outside, we would probably just build cities on the river deltas and skip the less habitable spots. Stories set here would then just be cityscape or river delta, even though the ice caps/mountains/jungles/deserts still exist. Colonized worlds will have different population distribution that organically settled ones.

The port is great.

Device manufacturers putting said port deep in the bowels of Erebus where no mortal man could hope to actuate the locking mechanism is less great.

Tests should be written from requirements. Using LLMs to write tests after the code is written (probably also by LLMs) is a huge anti-pattern:

The model looks at what the code is doing and writes tests that pass (or fail because they bungle the setup). What the model does not do, is understand what the code needs to do and write tests that ensure that functionality is present and correct.

Tests are the thing that should get the most human investment because they anchor the project to its real-world requirements. You will have tons more confidence in your vibe coded appslop if you at least thought through the test cases and built those out first. Then, whatever the shortcomings of the AI codebase, if the tests pass you can know it is doing something right.

I have KDE + Wayland on Arch using an Nvidia GPU and I have tons of nagging issues that seemingly cannot be resolved with current drivers.

More power to you if it all just works, but that isn’t universal

The end of your comment was

But the productivity and quality debates are absolutely ridiculous

Which is a general statement and not dealing with your specific circumstance. If a tool works for you, by all means keep using it.

However, broadly across software that is not the case. So the “productivity and quality debates” are not ridiculous … the data supports the sceptics.

Consider: the facts

People are very bad at judging their own productivity, and AI consistently makes devs feel like they are working faster, while in fact slowing them down.

I’ve experienced it myself - it feels fucking great to prompt a skeleton and have something brand new up and running in under an hour. The good chemicals come flooding in because I’m doing something new and interesting.

Then I need to take a scalpel to a hundred scattered lines to get CI to pass. Then I need to write tests that actually test functionality. Then I start extending things and realize the implementation is too rigid and I need to change the architecture.

It is as this point that I admit to myself that going in intentionally with a plan and building it myself the slow way would have saved all that pain and probably got the final product shipped sooner, even if the prototype was shipped later.

Cook bacon once and all that is now covered in grease

I’ve had good luck with their mid-high end kitchen appliances and washer/dryer.

Not impressed with the TV and the AI update made the UI very slow and unresponsive. Next one will not be LG.

Well… Earth’s rotation would mean that the top of the lorry would be moving at 3.3 million light years per second … Or you know, about 100 trillion times the speed of light.

That might break some things.