Spyke

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Why are so many galaxies symmetrical?

The fact they spin and the bits interact gravitationally makes them symmetric. There are almost certainly some asymmetric galaxies as we know galaxies collide and they will be asymmetric for a bit afterwards, but the spinning and fiction of gravity will make them symmetric again fairly quickly on galactic time scales.

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Real quantum computers always look like cheesy sci-fi movie prop computers.

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Most of that is the helium dilution refrigerator. Most electronic quits work at near absolute zero, so all of what you see here is wiring for the quantum computer (all those co-ax cables) and the equipment needed to manipulate the helium mixture to cool things down (you need the right mixture of helium isotopes because they boil at different temperatures so boiling away one isotope allows the remaining isotope to get even colder).

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What's the appeal of a 100% inheritance tax?

Given that 70-80% of people in the US will inherit nothing under the current system, any inheritance tax largely only affects those that have generations wealth to begin with. The exceptions might be things like the family farm as small farmers trends to be rather can poor, but with our current healthcare system, I don't think it is likely they could hold onto the farm until death unless they die by suicide or farming accident.

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Anthropic has developed an AI 'brain scanner' to understand how LLMs work and it turns out the reason why chatbots are terrible at simple math and hallucinate is weirder than you thought

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A lot of ai research isn't published in journals but either posted to a corporate website or put up on the arxiv. There are some ai journals, but the ai community doesn't particularly value those journals (and threw a bit of a fit when they came out). This article is mostly marketing and doesn't show anything that should surprise anyone familiar with how neural networks work generically in my opinion.

memes

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It'll end up as "Vote stupid parties, win stupid prices"

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I can't find any figures showing an actual crime wave in Sweden (excepting a sharp spike in 2020 followed by a significant decline in 2021, but 2020 had other circumstances that contributes that are distinctly different from immigration). What are you talking about? Right-wing parties always talk about how much worse the crime rates are due to immigrants, but data never seems to appear which supports this.

memes

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It'll end up as "Vote stupid parties, win stupid prices"

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I can't seem to access the first, so I will focus on the second.

1.) It is a study of Norway, not Sweden.

2.) The categories all kinda fluctuate, but the specific rates that are higher appear to be non-violent and the largest increase is traffic violations.

3.) This does not show an increase in crime rates overall as a result of immigration.

4.) Immigrant communities tend to be overpoliced which may explain increases in non-violent crime rates amongst the immigrant population (see this link detailing how Norwegian police purposefully focused on immigrants over the native population as an example of over-policing: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1362480619873347).

I likely missed details in this report as I do not read or speak Norwegian, but if I missed something vital, feel free to highlight it.

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"Housing" Proposals

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But those regulations are largely controlled by local governments, not the federal government. Federal regulations can prevent building new housing in certain areas and conditions (like destroying habitat of an endangered species), but that is much rarer than a city council not approving projects or zoning changes because they want to keep property values high.

science

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Never tell a scientist it’s “just a theory”

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Laws aren't better than theories; they are generally statements about a narrow range of phenomena which can be expressed mathematically while a theory covers a wide range of phenomena. For example, theory explains the origin of all conservation laws in physics as being the result of symmetry. Each law covers a specific thing (i.e. conservation of momentum) while the theory covers all conserved quantities.