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That’s because we’ve outsourced so much of our manufacturing to China. Of course ours is going down while theirs is going up.

What percentage of the 128-million-square-km cross-sectional area of the earth are you proposing to shade?

kinda obvious, the wealthy parts?

Their credibility and experience makes it more likely that they will have followed scientific procedures correctly, that their measuring techniques will not have obvious flaws and their findings reflect the evidence.

This is not an appeal to authority: the paper will be examined thoroughly by peer reviewers and likely by academics across the world, in part because of their credibility. That will take time. Meanwhile it should be taken seriously.


It’s bad at it. At least, it can’t be guaranteed to get nuance or context correct in a way that doesn’t feel artificial to a fluent speaker.

My favourite example I saw was where Google translated an information page of the Italian branch of a large multinational as “this is the UK branch of [multinational]”, presumably because the LLM thought that was more contextually appropriate in English.


I was annoyed the other day when Reddit asked for age verification (via a Palantir-run service, no less) for my 18-year-old Reddit account. Obviously no way I’m doing that.

In any case I doubt there’s a proof of age stronger than looking at the subreddits I subscribe to. A broad selection of middle-age hobbies and tedious interests. Without me proving my age they could probably place it to within a few weeks.


Photons are generated in the star’s core but the core is dense. The photons move around the core, bouncing off other particles, a random walk. It takes a vast amount of time for that photon to escape the sun and reach the Earth, as per monte-carlo simulations of this random walk.

However, as the photon collides with other particles during its random walk, some of its energy is transmitted to those other particles. Sometimes a collision transfers energy to it too.

In a simple model, the energy that originally belonged to the photon gets transmitted from particle to particle through convection, and can escape the star through radiation long before the original photon reaches the surface. I don’t think that model is supposed to be physically accurate, rather to be an illustration about the convention process inside a star.


The practical effects in the early seasons were truly fantastic. It was never quite the same after they switched to cgi.

I've said elsewhere on the "Babylon 5" discussion that Kubrick's "2001" has aged better in many ways than Hyams' "2010" which came out many years later. In the same vein, CGI has a nasty habit of aging more quickly than practical effects. There is stuff from the nineties which looks worse than the seventies as a result.

In the case of "Red Dwarf", the genius was in having the ship be an ugly industrial environment in the vein of "Dark Star", "Alien", "Outland" etc. That allowed for sets to be built easily and cheaply. I think some of it was even filmed in a BBC canteen/cafeteria.


I think the main issue with CGI is that it makes it easy to have big space battles, so everything is.

You see this with TNG v DS9. TNG would have one alien ship in an episode at best. It forces you to write story. Come DS9 and you can have 50 bajillion ships on screen so they write a story to make that happen. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, DS9 and B5 are good shows, but I miss the days when Captain Picard would mull over the implications of the prime directive with a cup of tea.


Oh, I think they admitted (a YouTube interview I saw) that the entire premise of "Red Dwarf" was inspired by "Dark Star"—not just the ship.

Oh yes. I remember them talking about the script and how low budget everything was. Like even the script was written to try to convince BBC it wouldn't cost much money. I think (paraphrasing) things like:

"We open on the corridor of a space ship. Space Odyssey this is not, no high tech serenity here. No, the is very much an ordinary, boring corridor. It could even have been a corridor in a TV studio..."


Worth mentioning that 16-year-olds will be able to vote in the next general election. Hopefully they will use that vote.

It might not run away to infinity, but it may well run away in the sense that the rate of change could continue to increase even if humans stop contributing to it.


Yeah, not only the huge required jump in raw fill rate, but to get the most out of a 4K TV you need higher detail models and textures and that means you also need a huge jump in VRAM, which never materialised.


The frame buffers/render targets alone for 8K are massive.

Basically 400MB for 12 bytes/pixel (64bit HDR RGBA + 32bit depth/stencil)

vs the 64000 bytes that Doom had to fill...


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