I never really understood why "owning" a domain is any more owning than you own your Gmail address: a company is letting you use it and that works until they don't. What an I missing?
The contractual requirements that ICANN imposes upon registrars. They can’t just take your domain for any old reason. The rules are fairly well defined and registrars can lose their accreditation if they do not follow them.
You probably won't get hacked and have your domain taken down for distributing malware. But you also probably won't be randomly banned by Google/Proton. Neither feels like "full, unbannable control of my email" to me. If anything, I'm more concerned about my little old domain getting hijacked than getting banned from a hosted email account.
You aren't missing much only that domains are a bit more portable between registrars and they've historically been a bit more resistant against random bannings.
Are you arguing that whether something does or doesn't genocide can the boiled down to a percentage. As it turns out, a lot of people disagree with that view.
I just googled "science mastodon" and found plenty of results, including this reddit thread with some listed[0] and this list of academics on Mastodon[1]
Although, of course, you can follow any account you like from whatever instance you choose to use (assuming that instance doesn't block it.) A lot of people you may be interested in are on universeodon.com, although typically you'll discover things on Mastodon by searching hashtags, not people.
Just look at HN. Nominally an educated crowd, but talk about physics, and you immediately see terms like "ivory towers" or "return on investment", despite the fact that most on HN doesn't understand in fundamental science works.
There are _plenty_ of areas in physics where investment is paying off. Condensed matter physics, optics, material research and so on.
We mostly question the fundamental subatomic particle physics that is not producing any returns on the investment. E.g. the galvanic effect was discovered in 1780, and there were long-distance telegraph lines by 1845 - so 65 years.
The last major theoretical advance in particle physics was around 1965 (Higgs mechanism). That's already 60 years ago.
>She is speaking about physics in a very narrow sense.
In what respect? Did you bother to actually watch the video or read a transcript or did you just watch the first minute and a half and assume that was the point? It wasn't. the ensuing thirty-two minutes serve to debunk the idea that there hasn't been progress in physics over the past seventy years.
Which GP claimed was the case. GP is wrong.
And she covers a wide array of physics areas -- she even mentions that she could have gone year by year starting in 1953 and cover at least one advancement per year, but she limited it to just her top ten which was pretty wide ranging.
She's confirming my point. There are plenty of advances in physics outside of the foundational subatomic physics.
And literally nothing in subatomic physics. The theories from 1960-s made predictions that were later confirmed: Higgs boson, neutrino oscillations, etc.
A lot of the complaints here about physics have to do with focusing so heavily for decades on string theory (or M-theory) which hasn't produced much in the way of practical results. At some point we have to quit throwing good money after bad and redirect funding towards other lines of inquiry.
Yes, but this is cartoon shit. String theory was a major research program in theoretical physics for a few decades but theoretical physics involves quite a lot more than string theory and physics involves quite a lot more than theoretical physics and if you stacked up all the budgets you'd find that string theory is a minor footnote. And also, its been a few decades since people took it very seriously as a strong candidate for a TOE.
I really don't get it. As a total amount of any budget from any perspective, string theory has always been a blip whose cultural impact is much wider than its actual budgetary one. Like this critique about string theory is just a thing that people who are physics "enthusiasts" say and even to the extent that it is true, its really been more than a decade since it was a problem.
The problem is string theory was pushed by people who were really good at getting attention and so they appeared to be outsized. Eventually everyone realized they were never making good on their promises and it was time to quit given them money - but most people who are not physics insiders don't really understand the other parts and so the total budget was cut to punish string theory - but by more than just the string theory part.
There is a warning above about something, but I'm not sure exactly what.
I actually think that for the most part string theory and its detractors and its rise and fall have had little effect on total physics budgets in the last 30 years.
I will say that theoretical physics is in a hard spot, but the problem isn't string theory. It is that we are short experimental data because the domain of validity of our theories is currently somewhat larger (in most obvious ways, anyway) than the domains we can reach with experiment.
I don't think any amount of clever budget allocation is going to make progress in theoretical physics go faster, nor do I think we'd be in a different position if we had allocated the resources differently. Notably, LQG and similar approaches (of which there is hardly any shortage) have not made noticeable progress either.
My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.
> My perspective is this: string theorists are cheap. We may as well have a few for some long shot research, and while we fund them they teach kids math and physics. Seems like a good trade.
We need kids learning math because it is useful for engineering and other parts of life. However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all. (we need enough to teach rigorous logical thinking because that is useful in the real world - but there are lots of ways to get there)
Is there value in more theoretical physics - at what point do we know the constants to enough values? This is a reference to just before relativity was discovered when it was thought refining the constants was all that was left - it turned out that some major things were left, but is there anything more? This is an unanswerable question, but what if we redirected those working on string theory to a hobby if they want to and made their day job either teaching math (which they are already doing part time), or some engineering type job? If we distribute the workload that implies everyone could work half an hour less every day, is that a bad trade?
> However there are large parts of math that are useless in the real world and we don't need to each at all.
The way I see it is thus: life is objectively pointless. There is no god and time will erase everything anyone ever builds one way or another. Human life is predicated on doing work to survive, but that isn't the point of life. Instead of asking how we can only do what is useful, we should be asking how we can do more and more useless stuff while still providing for our bodily needs. Show me a mathematician working on pure math and I see a person at the absolute peak of human potential. I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place. I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.
> I do not resent the mathematician. On the contrary, I aspire to their place
Those two do not follow. I resent the mathematician because the world can only afford to pay a small number of them (we need to eat and that consumes far more people), not to mention shelter and such - I'm not one of those society has chosen to do math all day (for good reasons - I'm not that great at math - my math minor makes me a better choice than average, but still not anywhere near good enough). Even those who do math all day are mostly professors who do math between teaching classes and advising students. The time / taxes that are spent from my paycheck to pay someone to do math is time that I'm working for someone else to achieve a peak that I cannot and without them I could work less (we are talking a second per year or something, but still...)
Yes I'm admitting to jealousy here. I aspire to their place.
> . I guess you see one and you think they are useless and should be writing code for an ad company somewhere.
You picked a bad example. I'd call most ad work useless too - they are not informing me of something new that I need but trying to get me to buy something either I already know about or worse things that would make my life worse.
That's what I'm thinking. "making invalid states unrepresentable" is about avoiding variable data that shouldn't be possible by designing your types to not allow it.
A dumb example is something like a light bulb data structure
In psuedocode
Light(color: string, on:bool, off:bool)
above is bad because you have a string (which could be anything) and on and off which could both be true of false.
This is better (if your lang allows it) because no invalid state is possible
These people want to do things that they know are extremely dangerous, and some times die. I don't empathize. Compare to those people who die by no fault of their own. Drunk driver, war, etc. Am I callous to believe that the two are not equally deserving of our empathy?
I think making a point broadcasting that one doesn’t care if other people who weren’t harming anyone die is callous, yes. Doubly so when one does it on a news story about people dying.
The thing is, they can and do harm others. Not just family and friends when they perish, but rescue workers who risk their own lives to save people who get into trouble. The article talks of 2 people who delivered her supplies, one died, the other has gone to Germany for frostbite treatment - as fellow climbers maybe they don't count in quite the same way, but rescue workers do die or get injured as well.
Rescue workers do their job willingly. No one really forces them to (usual exceptions for North Korea et al. apply here). I know an old emergency doctor who once survived a helicopter crash. He still walks with a limp and still flies missions with a helo, even though he is pushing sixty.
It is a specific sort of mentality on their part and frankly my experience with them is that they neither need nor appreciate any white-knighting for their safety. If they wanted a safe job, they could easily switch to pushing papers around, there is no shortage of such jobs in the modern world.
TBH daily, about 150 000 humans die, and I don't have the capacity to mourn them all.
That said, as you say, broadcasting that one does not care without even being asked is already an attitude and I wouldn't like to be in any sort of relationship with a person which spontaneously emits such messages.
Hmm. I don't know. I am glad they're not harming anyone else, but also -- like, I have kids. And if they were to get into this sort of thing, I'd at the least be like "Well, that's STUPID. Why put yourselves in harm's way deliberately like this. Stressing me and mom out. Do something that helps someone else instead."
Drunk driver, war, etc. Am I callous to believe that the two are not equally deserving of our empathy?
I've always thought that a good comparison was drug addiction. Ultimately, what's the difference between someone who engages in high-risk extreme sports and someone who just sits at home doing meth in the basement?
They are both doing dangerous, unnecessary things to manipulate their brain chemistry, without creating or learning anything useful or affecting anything in the larger world around them. Why is one considered heroic and adventurous, and the other criminal or at best pathetic?
I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?
In general I agree with you, but a counterexample to our rejection of their supposed heroism (and ascription of it to brain-chemistry-seeking identical to heroin addiction) is Alex Honnold [0], famous for his free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite. There's an excellent documentary on him, Free Solo [1], where it's very clear that he's neuro-diverse and that extreme climbing efforts put him into the zone, calming and focussing him. There's zero machismo to it. For him, it's an act of supreme, extended concentration.
I suppose in some sense it's still just manipulating one's own brain chemistry, but it seems a very distinct kind from adrenaline junkies.
You didn't say it outright so this is not me correcting you specifically, but there's this semi-myth that "Honnold doesn't feel fear because that region of his brain is smaller than everyone else's". He, at least, disputes this. He feels fear but he knows how to focus it, and it's a combination of some kind of innate talent and conditioning as he's put himself in scary situations before
Not quite the same, but Youtuber Ally Law (known for climbing cranes and tall structures) started doing it specifically because he used to be terrified of heights and now seems to not have a problem with it
I do tend to agree that Honnold is an exception to the "why don't they just do drugs" argument. He's teaching us that we can do things we didn't think we could do, and I have to believe there's real value there. He's genuinely inspirational.
Climbing some random mountain in Russia, though... that's not "Holy fuck, what's this guy made of?!" but "Yeah, a bunch of other people already did that, and it was cool, I guess, except for the ones that died."
>I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?
the argument is probably that today's extreme sports risk takers were last epoch's explorers who helped humanity conquer the planet.
I'd be willing to buy that if she had died while diving in an unexplored cave system, for instance, working to bring us knowledge and insights about nature that we didn't already have.
But there was nothing left to discover on that mountain peak, except how much frostbite sucks.
I suspect high risk extreme sports are in fact worse, as they seem to require a constant ramp-up of the risk, and there does not seem to be any detox mechanism (other than old age) that would allow one to reset the required risk.
There is an appalling number of people in these sports who die young, e.g. Ueli Steck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ueli_Steck), recently Felix Baumgartner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner). Many of them had already see friends and family die in these sports (as had Natalia Nagovitsyna), so it's not like they were not aware of the dangers.
Life is for living silly bear. I cannot imagine anything worse than getting to the end of your life and finally realizing you never lived it. That you wasted this once in a live time experience. But that is just me.
I find the analogy quite apt. I have known drug addicts who I thought were recovered, but who could not fathom simply going to work and then going home to their families every night. They thought that was an incredibly boring life. Predictably, they relapsed. They could’ve caused significantly less stress to their families and loved ones by having more socially acceptable thrillseeking methods.
There is not caring about an unknown person which is default stance. And then there is going out of your way to make everyone know other people do not deserve empathy or whatever and how worthless they are to you. The two are not the same.
Why do you want us all to compare them to other people who died? You are not callous. You are angry and emotional over others having interest in the story.
I don't think a distinction exists as black and white as you're pretending. And in fact I think that your comment sounding so reasonable is partly to your usage of tendentious language:
You say that "cultural pride" is ok. Who can disagree, cultural pride sounds like a positive thing. But what is cultural pride exactly? In my experience, people who express pride in some attribute of a group that they're included in, only do so because other groups exist that don't have those attributes. So having "pride" and "feeling superior" are really the same thing.
Yes, I think that Jewish people who take pride in "look at how many Jews did X" are extremely sus.
You just read a comment that drew a distinction between racial supremacist claims and other claims and your rebuttal was that both kinds of claims are racial supremacist claims. Not interesting.
> your rebuttal was that both kinds of claims are racial supremacist claims
I said nothing about anything being racial or not. Perhaps you found it not interesting because you didn't pay attention to it and instead read into it what you already expected the rebuttal to be.
