Is that how they invented chainmail?

Sane take.

I'm also very much a "car guy", but I fucking love that since covid and work-from-home I don't have to do day-to-day driving anymore. I do less than 20% of the mileage that I used to do.

So yeah don't get mad at car owners, get mad at return-to-office mandates and such.

They still have issues with tire dust, but yeah they're a lot better.

If ICE cars were banned for everything but racing/recreation I'd be very happy.

Racing series' do not need to make their race cars green. They need to make their logistics fleets green. Race cars need to be able to remain loud and dirty. The sights, sounds, and smells of racing combine to create the majesty that is racing.

I look forward to a future of efficient public transit, no new ICEs on the roads and V12s back in F1.

Get an EV. Get a garage charger. Put panels on your roof. The future is now!

Didn’t the 2nd gen Prius have a solar roof? It could only power the ac and accessories iirc.

Motorcycles are better than cars though. On average they get many more miles to the gallon and they cause less traffic than the giant SUVs that Americans are addicted to.

Stranger things

One Punch Man 😭

I just rewatched this last weekend, immediately thought of it.

Hopefully the new seasons are quality, and therefore worth the wait

There’s surprisingly a fair bit of overlap on the gear ratios of a 2 or 3x that makes a 1x11 or 12 have a similar range of ratios. However you do have to sacrifice either a bit of top end speed or climbing ability so you see a few more 2x on road bikes. I’ve never found myself wanting more from my 1x mtb drivetrain

superior due to the narrow-wide chainring

Fully agreed. Narrow-wide rings are absolutely a boon to mountain biking as are derailleur clutches. And 1x is superlative for hard trail riding on that factor alone.

A factor in the issue I take is the proprietary nature of modern bike drivetrains. With older drivetrains, we could mix and match to our hearts' content. But now, even within a component line, e.g. Deore XT or SRAM X[n], specs such as pull rates can be different even for the same cog count. "These are the only combinations of components we think you should use, and we will do everything we can to block you from customizing." Shimano is especially egregious about this expensive mess, and they know it, which is why they tried to un-hash things with CUES.

Pretty much everything 3x9 all works together. Road derailleur and cassette with mountain crank and bar-end shifters? Sure! Gear range for days. I sincerely believe this is to sell more bikes. Want to climb hard pack and mixed surface? You need a gravel bike! Want to get groceries? You need a commuter or loaded tourer! Want to go on a fast road ride? You need a road bike!

It used to be really easy to build up a bike that could perform most bicycle functions well. Mixed-surface, loaded, commuter/grocery-getter, randonneuring, snow, rain, club rides... one bike with maybe a wheel change*. Good luck with that now. Gravel bikes are kinda filling that niche now, but the components and frame manufacturers are again trying to fracture that even further. The gravel drivetrain won't have the range to cover all the use cases without a cassette or crank change.

Moar rant, moar example: my partner works in an LBS. We can literally afford to buy any bicycle we could want. She wants a general-purpose gravel bike, and it's not even a case of "just spend more money to get these additional features." Component selection on a pre-built, geometry, wheel selection... all tightly engineered to cover as few use cases as possible. Okay, we'll build from a naked frame. Oh, the more racy geometry frames lack braze-ons and can't fit a 50mm tire.

*It makes complete sense to have a full-squish mountain bike for the aggressive off-road stuff, and those bikes are necessarily different. Even for that case, I can hang with the LBS trail/flow rides on my do-almost-everything bike. My current do-everything took me more than six months to source compatible parts and troubleshoot. This used to be a matter of just pulling the trigger on the parts I wanted.

The root cause of what you describe is a build or maintenance issue. Properly built, tuned, and maintained bikes don't drop chains.

Lanternflies are so pretty! But there are so many of them again this year.

also people mistaken the asian lady beetle for native ones, and those are also invasive and very noxious.

"Watch to the end!"

Plant native species! Anything but lawn grass!! For the love of insects and ecological diversity.

I explained how I do my yard in the comment. I don't let it go crazy, I maintain it. I have made four garden beds here since getting the house, and that's in addition to the four already here. Both for flower and vegetables. I have a potted plant corner, and a "track" where the grass grows low or turns to dirt from my son doing laps around the house and playing baseball in the back. If I was a millionaire (I'd move) I'd like to put stone on the "track" he made because it follows the natural curves of the yard. The front yard is sparse, it's so dry and like sand, I don't have to mow that side, I hit it with the trimmer if it gets wild. I've seeded with clover and a native grass type. I keep a small patch over grown, circling around a tree, maintain it with weeding, and give space back for the insects. It's filled with purple flowers most of the year. A typical lawn care person would just mow it over.

What I'm getting at, is folks with brown grass they still mow weekly. Whether its going to rain or not, weather their grass is long or not, they mow it to check it off their list. Every weekend. Then, if you look, some houses like this, there's invasives just growing everywhere on the edges of their properties. So lazy. To mow ones lawn, fat ass on a riding mower for less than a quarter acre of lawn, just mow it and put it away, while thier tree line suffers with invasives.

My goal is to have no grass, but my son's track and baseball area, and the rest garden. As it stands I only have to mow maybe 40% of my yard, and I'll be damned if I'll fall in line to get a riding mower to kill beneficial plants every weekend, while leaving the harmful ones.

No. I get enough of this in the subreddits and communities where it comes up naturally, I'm not going to get into a debate about it here in a thread where the subject is specifically how annoying it is to debate this stuff.

Yes and no. Clades still have issues with things like hag fish.

That doesn’t really make it less agitating though. There is a group of birds called jays (like blue jay) and the word jay is scientifically meaningless. It is still infuriating to me that these birds aren’t even vaguely related to each other in many cases. Just name them something else. Make it make sense. Koalas are not bears; just call them koalas. Guinea pigs are not from Guinea and they aren’t pigs. Horned toads are lizards. There are many examples of this. The names of animals don’t have to describe what they are, but they should not be accepted when describing the animal as something it is not. Animals should not have names that conflict with their taxonomy.

I tend towards a variation on utilitarianism, from that point of view energy in a finite universe that could be used to support intelligent life in some way, but isnt, is unethical, and while that might not really demand much action from us right now given that space development is a very, very long term project by nature and we're already working on developing the most basic forms of the requisite technology, it still seems a bit frustrating to lose that which we cannot reach. Its not just us either, statistically speaking it should be extremely unlikely for life and advanced intelligence to occur once, but only once, so I take it as a given that theres more out there somewhere, but evidently it cant be that common or else hasnt gotten much further than us, given all the stars we can see out there.

I dont really think everything we touch turns to shit, I just think we judge ourselves much more harshly than we judge "natural" things. I dont really care that much if the people that go off to the stars do so because of some desire to harvest them for some kind of profit or put up a space-mcdonalds at alpha centauri or whatever, as long as someone goes. Obviously I would prefer they build a nicer society there than just a rehash of what we have here right now, but in my view even the crappiest society is preferable to a dead rock or inanimate clump of gas, even if it is an aesthetically pleasing rock. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say, and I think we can make beautiful things, or failing that, and least find the beauty in what we do make, if we try.

I pee in that bad boy every time. Sometimes when it's a real yellow one it smells like popcorn

I done fucked up. I'm leaving it.

If you breathe the days you risk hyperventilating.

Gotta be the moche sex pots, right!?

Good news for you, the CGPM decided in 2022 to abandon the leap second by 2035.

IMO Ncuti did a great job with what he was given, but the writing was pretty hit and miss

I can't even count the amount of times I've sent some variation of "Yeah, so I think we should reboot the server:wq" into irc

Nah, they're right, it is fantasy. I think some people have in their heads that particles spread out like waves in 3D space and Many Worlds is just like an objective collapse model where it collapses back into a particle when you look at it, but where all outcomes happen in a different branch of the multiverse rather than just having one outcome.

The reality is that it is only actually possible to consistently map quantum waves to 3D space when you have a single particle. The moment you introduce two or three, it quickly breaks down because the number of quantum waves grows exponentially. If you have 3 spin-1/2 particles then you would describe their state with 8 waves. You cannot consistently break apart 8 into 3. You end up quickly finding that it is actually impossible to assign the waves to any location at all in space or time, so you cannot think of them as something like a propagating field mode or anything like that.

These are waves made of nothing that do not exist anywhere and nobody can see them. One of the weirdest things about quantum mechanics I do not think people appreciate enough is how you evolve something that seems to have no relationship at all to the real-world system and yet it can predict its behavior statistically.

Most other interpretations see the waves as playing some role in determining where the particle in 3D space actually shows up. This is where MWI begins to make no sense: it denies that there ever even is a particle at all and physical reality is just the invisible waves. It does not actually posit that when an observation is made, the wave is reduced to an eigenstate on two different branches of a multiverse. It denies that there is ever a reduction at all.

Imagine a photon hits a beam splitter and has a 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted, and you have two detectors on either side. At the end of the day, you will detect one or the other. But MWI denies that you will detect one or the other. It does not actually posit that the universe literally splits into two branches where you detect one or the other, because if all that exists is the quantum state and the quantum state also never reduces to anything, then neither detectors actually ever enter into an eigenstate where you can say a detection was made.

If you take MWI seriously, then what it is literally doing is denying the entirety of the reality that we observe. Everything we observe is just a lie, and true reality merely consists of a single giant infinite-dimensional wave that exists nowhere, is made of nothing, and nobody can ever see it. But clearly that is not what we perceive in the real-world, so MWI proponents have to claim what we perceive is an "illusion" created by "consciousness," and then will just kick the can down the road and say that the mystery of why what we perceive is nothing like "true" reality is caught up in the "mystery of consciousness" and when we solve that then we will also understand how the "illusion" is created. It doesn't really "solve" anything but just shifts one loaded topic under the umbrella of another.

Tim Maudlin has a good lecture on this problem in particular.

MWI proponents also constantly misrepresents the state of MWI to make it seem more "proven" than it actually is, such as repeatedly making the false claim that it is "simpler" because it deletes the Born rule. The Born rule was not added because it is funny, it was added because it is necessary rule to actually make predictions with the theory, to tie the quantum waves back to what we actually observe. If you delete it, you are left without any ability to derive probabilities, at least without adding another assumption.

Lev Vaidman did a survey of all the attempts to derive the Born rule in the literature and found every single one of them ends up introducing some additional assumption somewhere. They always at some point need to take on an assumption as arbitrary as the Born rule itself. Sean himself published a paper where he tries to develop a "quantum epistemic separability principle" to derive it which is based on doing a partial trace on the universal wave function and treating the diagonal entries in the reduced density matrix as probabilities, yet Richard Dawid and Simon Friederich pointed out in a response paper that there is no coherent justification for his ESP-QM other than it simply being proposed for the purpose of deriving the Born rule, and there is no justification that the diagonals of a reduced density matrix even tell you anything about probabilities unless you're already assuming the Born rule.

You can derive the Born rule through Gleason's theorem, but Gleason's theorem relies on one of its assumptions the idea that the quantum state actually translates to classical probabilities across classical measurement devices. This is obviously something denied in MWI as there are no classical measurement devices, and so Gleason's theorem cannot be used to justify the Born rule for MWI.

There is also an issue with locality. The EPR paper is basically a no-go theorem against local psi-complete interpretations of quantum mechanics. You cannot have a local psi-complete interpretation. MWI proponents may try to say it is "local" in Hilbert space, but this is rather meaningless as locality refers to position in 3D space. Something that is nonlocal is superluminal, it moves through space faster than light, but quantum waves do not "move." They have no position. The concept of locality is hardly relevant to them. If you actually look at the behavior of particles in 3D space, then MWI is manifestly nonlocal. I am not even claiming it being nonlocal is inherently a flaw, but more that they always claim it is local when you just look at the mathematics and it is not meaningfully local in any sense.

Sean also likes to say misleading statements like MWI is just "taking the Schrodinger equation seriously." This plays into a myth pushed by David Deutsch, which I constantly see this fallacy repeated by MWI believers, which is that the only two interpretations are MWI, which says things always evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, or objective collapse models, which say they do not, and since it's trivial to prove that objective collapse models are not mathematically consistent with quantum mechanics, therefore if you just "take the Schrodinger equation seriously" then you must believe in MWI.

But this is fallacious because objective collapse models are incredibly niche and hardly anyone buys into objective collapse models anyways, except maybe Penrose and his crew these days, but it's literally like <1% of academics. No interpretation is an objective collapse model, because objective collapse models necessarily make different predictions, so they fall under the category of a whole different theoretical model. There are like a couple dozen interpretations in the literature and they all "take the Schrodinger equation seriously." Even Copenhagen does not claim that there is literally a physical collapse but treats it as merely epistemic.

Indeed, all interpretations treat the "collapse" as an epistemic measurement update in some way, including even MWI (as you are merely "realizing what branch you're on"). When it actually comes to interpretations, MWI's competition is other interpretations, not objective collapse theories. Poking holes in objective collapse theories doesn't somehow provide evidence that MWI is correct.

Pathetic troll

Weigh the produce before putting it in the bag.

Yep. We are ruled by idiots.

I’m not even a fan of Genesis. I have no ire towards the band, though, and some of their songs I enjoy, Land of Confusion is a banger, and I don’t know enough of his solo work outside of the Tarzan soundtrack to really have any valid critiques of his musical style and approach. I just want to punch that son of a bitch right in the mouth for some reason. He just triggers a fight response in my dumb monkey brain.

Nor should you.

is he a trumper too? christ, as if i needed another reason to hate that guy.

I don't have a giant hate for disney, in fact it's fair to say I'm relatively uninformed about their offerings.

But every Disney movie I've seen is basically the same script. "I have self doubt and I'm judged by my role models for my non-conformity. Now I'm going to go on a crazy adventure with sidekicks where I discover that the things that make me different actually give me strength!"

Why any adult would want to see this shit is beyond me.