Spyke

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autism

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What noise annoys you the most?

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Encouragement to do a double blind test on this one; box up some LED's with a power strip, one on and one off, have the person who set them randomize which are on and then you guess which (neither, R, L, both). Repeat a few times.

I know similar experiences aren't predictive, the sound is a kind of synesthesia with the concept of running electronics (which is itself pretty cool/interesting!).

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What are the most mindblowing things in mathematics?

For the uninitiated, the monty Hall problem is a good one.

Start with 3 closed doors, and an announcer who knows what's behind each. The announcer says that behind 2 of the doors is a goat, and behind the third door is a car student debt relief, but doesn't tell you which door leads to which. They then let you pick a door, and you will get what's behind the door. Before you open it, they open a different door than your choice and reveal a goat. Then the announcer says you are allowed to change your choice.

So should you switch?

The answer turns out to be yes. 2/3rds of the time you are better off switching. But even famous mathematicians didn't believe it at first.

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Are there actually any good mobile games?

Free, ad-free, open source phone games

Unciv: Civilization V clone that runs on a potato; a grand 4x strategy game. It seems pretty mechanically complete and has a lot of content. Easily modded. (Graphics may not be to everyone's taste)

Simon Tatham's portable puzzle collection: Mathematically inspired Puzzle games with a lot of customization and reasonable interface. This includes classics like untangle (graph planarity) and solo (sudoku, but generalized). I personally really enjoy Tower, and hadn't seen it elsewhere (and like 15 more games besides).

Chip defense: computer science themed tower defense. By the power of Turing, Noether, and Knuth you can strike down malicious packets attempting to corrupt your CPU. Good content, fun towers and educational bonus material, and I think it looks rather good. (Minor gripe/warning: early levels are optimally played with a lot of tapping that is not very ergonomic; this drops off after the first few levels.)

Honorable mentions (not FOSS, but still free, MTX free, and no ads beyond fishing for a rating). Higgster's game compendium: collection of games in a consistent and pleasing artstyle. Includes things like solitaire, wordle, binaro, and mastermind (20+ games total, several more have been added in the last year). This is really very well done, give it a look!

Flocks: Sliding puzzle game with excellent graphics and animations. Lots of levels, introduces new mechanics regularly, and easy to pickup or put down. I quite enjoy everything Robert has made, recommended!

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What is your preferred form of proportional representation, and why?

I remain a huge fan of sortition. You randomly pick a bunch of people who are willing (and/or able) to do the job, let guardrails veto some of them, train them and let them cook. An unordered list of things to love:

  • It's substantially faster than elections,
  • scales to any size polity,
  • is definitionally fair,
  • no foreign influence in elections,
  • parties really do not matter,
  • there's no good way to bribe future would-be politicians because that's everybody,
  • you can enact change by persuading folks one at a time, and every supporter improves your outcomes,
  • decision makers can become experts in one thing instead of being vaguely ignorant of everything,
  • incentivizes everyone governed to make others healthy, happy, well adjusted, and connected with reality,
  • how Athens did it,
  • by multiverse theory, there is some branch where all your friends got to make any given decision.

We already do this for the life-or-death task of juries. We have the technology.

(Second choice is RCV w\ MMP; fairvote does good work.)

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Cooling stuff does not require any energy!

I am pretty sure the base state isn't 0K, it's whatever the average temperature around the object is. If you have a universe that is 10^4 K everywhere, then objects will tend to that temperature. Because the earth is actually quite hot compared to 0 K, your fridge very much is constantly using energy to keep the extremely hot outsides from warming the inside. It would get easier if the earth was colder.

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Not responsible

For the hypothetical person who honestly believes something like:

  • Taking money from fascists is a good thing,
  • Abuse from fellow ICE agents is unlikely,
  • Taking an evil job and doing it badly is moral.

How would you persuade them not to sign up?

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How do we know what black holes do and do not do? I have never seen a video of one being active. How do we know it tears stuff apart?

(Not a professional physicist.)

My understanding is that we have a very good model for how gravity should work, and we've used that model to predict a lot of things we can observe. A few I can think of offhand:

  1. Light bending. We've taken many telescope readings through their general neighborhoods. In each case, we see the distortion and optical effects we would expect from our model. (A similar experiment is what really cemented relativity as accurate iirc.)
  2. We do have a photo of a black hole, and it looks as we would expect (accretion disk included!). It would be difficult to explain the torn apart hyper-accelerated cloud of atoms around the black hole if the black hole didn't tear things apart.
  3. There are computational models for galaxy formation and trajectory. My understanding is that (modulo dark energy/matter), these models match what we see reasonably well. I think the galaxies we see would be quite different if black holes never fed on matter (they would be much smaller, for example).

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Israeli society is truly gone so outrageously far right that translation from Hebrew is now disabled on X (#Twitter) as of Nov16

I don't understand this from a Grok, twitter, or Israeli perspective, and I think this is terrible evidence for the claim being made in the title/op.

If you wish to argue that the majority of Hebrew writers on twitter are nazi's, surely you could scrape the hebrew language tweets, apply basic translation, and do some clustering. Even just doing this on a handful of highly circulating recent examples.

Twitter is not exactly opposed to nazi content recently, so I don't understand the claimed policy.