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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 19th, 2023

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  • That estimate is based on assuming that the ratio of matter to light output is the same between galaxies 10 billion years apart in age. The high light output of these young galaxies could also be supermassive stars that burn out very quickly, larger stars typically forming faster than smaller stars, or many other things.

    Blindly assuming a linear relationship between two things, then extrapolating is how you get the Windows loading bar circa 2000.

    Separately, but just as big a potential issue, the data itself may be incorrect. Previous galaxies measured at extreme redshift values were remeasured, and found to have less extreme values. This can be as simple as there aren’t that many photons from these galaxies reaching us, so a short measurement period might not be enough to get an accurate picture.








  • There’s a crucial distinction between someone that wants to have sex, but cannot, and someone that chooses to identify as that. To really become an “incel” in the negative sense, you lose the desire to have sex because being denied sexual contact by others is part of your identity now.

    People that merely don’t find others that are sexually interested in them can do things to help themselves, learn better grooming habits, dress nicer, practice approaching and talking to people, etc. Someone that has adopted the identity of “incel” can only help themselves by changing their perception away from the toxic void they found.



  • I don’t think anyone will actually make it, but it would be cool to have an arrangement of accelerometers and microphones that you can put on the side of a packaged gift, shake it, and get a guess about what it is.

    A harvesting robot that can tell how many days from ripe an avocado is, so the grocery store can have like… “ripe today” avocados, “ripe tomorrow” avocados, “ripe in 2 days” avocados. They’d come in small cardboard boxes, and they could just shift the boxes or signs over by one each day, and have more boxes if they get avocado deliveries less often.

    Machine learning clothing/hairstyle/general fashion advice would be neat, but probably too open to manipulation to sell certain brands to be practical.

    Tools to help developers put houses at the best spot on a lot, for things like water mitigation, tree safety, garden space in good sunlight, wind noise, and privacy.

    Search tools that aren’t terrible on shopping sites, and news sites, and research journals and things. The days of “we asked Google to do it for us” being good enough are long over.






  • Especially at the national level, most politicians hire staffers they trust to implement their policies in accordance with their principals, and harshly punish those that won’t. The closest advisors tend to be either referred from their state party, or people that have risen through the ranks with them, so they’re often decades old relationships, or at least people that have been in the same circles for years.

    The day to day does involve a lot of reading, meeting with lobbyists for specific issues (this includes a lot of non-money players, fwiw), and only rarely in depth policy discussion with advisors/other policy makers. They have to trust their staffers to highlight things they should hammer home/object to in legislation, and, because sometimes bills arrive in Congress already too complicated, they’re sometimes unable to actually read the whole thing before voting (even in a “you take 200 pages, you take 200 pages…” sense), so they’re essentially trusting that other people have reviewed it well enough.

    It’s a job with long hours, but a lot of that is essentially socializing, so not “hard” in the same sense as digging holes or whatnot is hard.



  • The boot you feel is the biological reality that we all need to eat (and more than just eat), and almost all of us need someone else to grow/raise/ sometimes prepare that food (and more than just food) for us. Supermarkets operate on extremely thin margins, and so do most farms, and so too most food factories. Most of them would go out of business if they cut prices by 5%.

    People stealing from supermarkets cost the other shoppers around them, either through raised prices, or closed stores, if it’s bad enough. This is a major reason for the “food desert” phenomena, and why wealthy areas typically have cheaper groceries.