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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)PI
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  • Suppose you're going to disney for a week as a family of 4.

    6 days of tickets for 4 people is $2,400. Cheap jetblue tickets on sale might be $1000; honestly, they're probably more. If you're staying at a $350/night hotel room, you're already up to $5,500.

    Then, figure at least $50 in food per person per day, or $100 for the adults if you get alcohol. That's another $1,200-1,800. And if you go to any of their fancier restaurants it'll be a lot more. Add in a couple hundred in souvenirs and you're there.

    Of course, if you're within road trip distance and just go to the park for two days, you could do it way cheaper.

  • The question about "calling for the Genocide of Jews" was couched in a statement about Pro-Palestine protestors using the term "Intifada", which isn't a call for Genocide but instead a call of support for Palestinians instead.

    If Americans remember much of anything about the intifadas, it's probably the many suicide bombings of busses, cafes, malls, night clubs, etc. during the second intifada about 20 years ago.

    Which is certainly not genocide, but you have to be living under a rock to not think that people aren't going to hear a call for global intifada as a call to commit antisemetic terrorist attacks...

  • Stick assembly is the key thing.

    You're not going to find a thread strong enough to pull a few tonnes of stone, but you can easily pull it with a large number of ropes pulled by a few hundred people.

    Similarly, a single 8x8 beam as a lever arm would just snap, but a dozen 8x8 beams as lever arms for a dozen levers probably wouldn't.

  • The 1931 census, carried out by the British, found a total population of a bit over a million people. Looking at other estimates doesn't have it increasing that much between 1931 and 1947.

    Israel's population is currently about 9.7 million, which doesn't count the ~5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. So about 15x the population as in 1931.

    In Israel, there's currently around 7 million Jews and 2 million Arabs. About 80% of Arab- Israelis are Sunni Muslim, 9% are Christian and 9% are Druze.

    So, uh, it looks like the Muslim population of the land that is current Israel has more than doubled since 1947?

  • The problem is mathematical.

    To win the presidential election, you need to win a majority of the vote in enough states to win a majority of electoral college votes.

    If no-one gets 270 electoral votes, then the House of Representatives meets. Each state delegation gets 1 vote. Right now, that means that the Republican wins, due to e.g. Wyoming and Alaska getting just as much of a vote as NY and California, and Republican gerrymandering of swing states.

    There's literally no way for third party candidates to be elected president. The best that a third party has ever done was in 1860, a 4 way race between a Democrat, Republican, Southern Democrat, and Constitutional Unionist.

    Lincoln, the Republican, got 39.8% of the vote but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes. The Democrat, Douglass, got 29.5% of the vote but only won a single state. Breckenridge got only 18.1% of the vote but carried most of the southern states. And Bell got 12.6% of the vote and carried 3 states - Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

    So Douglas ended up with more than twice as many actual votes as Bell, but got over 3x the electoral vote. And Breckenridge only got less than half as many electoral college votes that he'd need to win, and could realistically have only picked up Bell's.

    The last time a third party candidate won a single electoral college vote was in 1968, when George Wallace won Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the former governor of Alabama, and had left the Democratic party after the 1964 civil rights law and 1965 voting rights law were passed by Johnson.

    The Democrats are also more of a big tent than most parties in counties using party list PR would be. In Italy, AOC and Manchin wouldn't be in the same party, while in the US they basically have to be to win.

    The two party system exists for structural reasons. Plurality only works well in two candidate elections; third parties only do well in districts where they functionally replace a major party. Getting rid of the two party system is possible by changing the structure - switching to e.g. STAR voting in the senate and presidency and using e.g. MMP or STV in the House. But burying your head in the sand to pretend the structural issues don't exist just doesn't work.

  • What are some places that don't look like Linux but actually are?

    I'd think most PC games and other desktop GUI software runs on windows and looks like it runs on windows. And I'd imagine that a web browser on windows isn't secretly a Linux environment.

    But yeah, I've written way more code that runs on a web browser or a Linux server than runs on windows.

  • Sausages are also commonly inoculated with mold. The powdery coating on aged salami is Penicillium nalgiovense.

    And some of the fanciest, most expensive wines are made from moldy grapes. Botrytis cinerea, when consistently wet and humid, causes "grey rot" which spoils the grapes. When it dries out, though, it becomes the "noble rot" which is prized.

  • Airbnb didn't single-handedly destroy US housing stock. It's really not even the biggest part of the problem.

    Zoning codes that prevent the addition of any density to cities are way more of a problem than airbnb could dream of being. If Euclidean zoning existed 300 years ago, Manhattan would be 90% mcmansions, rather than being almost entirely low-, mid- and high-rises.

  • Homebrew is fairly different from pip, cargo or npm in that only python developers use pip, only rust developers use cargo, etc. And those are mostly used to manage libraries, rather than executables.

    Meanwhile, essentially everyone who uses the console uses homebrew regardless of what programming languages they might or might not use. I was making a joke about how good, useful and basically required homebrew is.

  • Israel has been involved in several wars against multiple other nations - for example, in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, it was invaded by Egypt, Syria, and a coalition that included Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Cuba, Jordan, etc.

    Israel is located at a fairly strategic location. Britain and France used Israel during the Suez crisis to stage an attack against Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal is one of the most important global trade routes.

    US support of Israel is a combination of funding American arms dealers and wanting Israel as a strategicly located partner. That's why we fought proxy wars with the soviet union over it like the Yom Kippur war. The aid is intended not to fight Hamas, but to keep Israel strong against e.g. Iran and other neighbors. They've had peace with Egypt for decades, but that might be more because of Israel being strong enough to not be worth attacking.

    I doubt Biden personally supports the Gaza war, but a lot of this stuff is more about realpolitik and strategic concerns than anything else.

  • Sure, the definition of grade school doesn't really matter too much. Because college texts are written in ways that violate pemdas.

    Look, for example, at https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_45.html

    For example, if f(x,y)=x2+yx, then (∂f/∂x)y=2x+y, and (∂f/∂y)x=x. We can extend this idea to higher derivatives: ∂2f/∂y2 or ∂^2f/∂y∂x. The latter symbol indicates that we first differentiate f with respect to x, treating y as a constant, then differentiate the result with respect to y, treating x as a constant. The actual order of differentiation is immaterial: ∂2f/∂x∂y=∂2f/∂y∂x.

    Notice: ∂2f/∂y∂x is clearly written to mean ∂2f/(∂y∂x).

  • Grade school is a US synonym for primary or elementary school; it doesn't seem to be used as a term in England or Australia. Apparently, they're often K-6 or K-8; my elementary school was K-4; some places have a middle school or junior high between grade school and high school.

  • That's not really true.

    You'll regularly see textbooks where 3x/2y is written to mean 3x/(2y) rather than (3x/2)*y because they don't want to format

     
        
    3x
    ----
    2y
    
    
      

    properly because that's a terrible waste of space in many contexts.

  • Keep in mind, though, AI progress is often more like punctuated equilibrium.

    Each new approach gets you much further, and polishing each approach gets you slight improvements until the next approach comes along. Improvements to chatgpt might plateau until the next big breakthrough architecture. Or maybe not.

  • It's BE(D=M)(A=S). Different places have slightly different acronyms - B for bracket vs P for parenthesis, for example.

    But multiplication and division are whichever comes first right to left in the expression, and likewise with subtraction.

    Although implicit multiplication is often treated as binding tighter than explicit. 1/2x is usually interpreted as 1/(2x), not (1/2)x.