mr_toad

38 ms·

841.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Many of the diseases that afflicted the old world may have evolved after humans crossed into North America, so there was never any resistance in the New World.
842.
by mr_toad 1y ago
The objects you can (eventually) reach are proportional to your speed. For example at half light speed you could catch up to objects nearly halfway to the Hubble Horizon, about 7 billion light years away.
843.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Screenwriters don’t understand much science.
844.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> It makes me wonder what kind of "life" could perform interstellar travel? That’s essentially the premise of Project Hail Mary. Good book.
845.
by mr_toad 1y ago
The journey will take 10,000 years for an external stationary observer and about 8695 years for the pilot.
846.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> that accelerating at 1G would get you to 0.1c in a month Minor problem is that we don’t have any technology that’s close to capable of that. And at 0.1c relativistic effects are barely noticeable.
847.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> Is light slow? It’s always faster than you or I. Even if we zipped around at relativistic speeds it would still appear the same.
848.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> I think we'll have a holodeck before we reach another star. And maybe that'll be enough. I agree, but not because of the relative difficulty of the technology, but because we spend way more on entertainment than space explora
849.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Do you mean why didn’t they fight? Probably they did. Chimpanzee tribes are highly aggressive, early hominid tribes probably were as well. Human level intelligence didn’t suddenly evolve, it was a gradual transition.
850.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Only if the circumference of the universe is small enough for light to have made the round trip since the universe began. But we think that the universe is much larger than that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particle_
851.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> with the cosmological horizon somehow (?) corresponding to the BH horizon as viewed from the outside. That’s not mentioned in the summary. After inflation the event horizon would not exist.
852.
by mr_toad 1y ago
The outer universe could have always existed, but unlike ours it eventually collapsed. By contrast ours did the reverse, and it looks like it will expand forever. There is a neat symmetry. I guess you could make the case that it’s really
853.
by mr_toad 1y ago
That was the first imperial conquest. The republic had been gobbling up states long before that.
854.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Increasing taxes does not always increase tax revenue. It’s easy to do enough damage to the economy that total tax revenues fall. Past that point is easy for the economy and government revenue to fall into a dwindling spiral.
855.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Do we know that? I thought that the evidence suggested that early hominids lost muscle mass, especially in our arms, as they came down from the trees. We also switched from stronger muscle fibres to high endurance muscles. You’re right th
856.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> Huge guys, massive swarms of them, sitting on people and backpacks in hundreds as they walked. They sound like sandflies. I wouldn’t expect mosquitoes that far north.
857.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> confusing planning with execution. Jira in four words.
858.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> Pricing based on individuals sounds illegal. It happens in every car dealership. And in enterprise sales. And in some countries in nearly every market and store.
859.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> "we think you can pay more, so we'll charge you more" type of thing. Is that a good/bad/ethical/predatory thing? Econ101 says it’s a bad thing because of the deadweight loss occurring versus a single marke
860.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Same goes for something as simple as setting up a server. You will forget, and if you don’t write it down you’ll have to figure it out again.
861.
by mr_toad 1y ago
I worry a bit about people who like writing code but don’t like reading and debugging it. There are enough “throw it over the wall” coders.
862.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> email is not the right tool for long discussions with multiple points of disagreement It’s still better than a teams call.
863.
by mr_toad 1y ago
The people who would actually benefit from that the most are the people who are too old to have children and are strongly opposed to immigration.
864.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Not everyone wants to deal with maintaining Python and untold dependencies on their web server. A C++ binary often has no additional dependencies, and even if it does they’ll be dealt with by the OS package manager.
865.
by mr_toad 1y ago
> Even the British courts, in sharp contrast to many other places, "deliver the law as it is, and not as we wish it to be" The English practically invented the idea of common law. Even today there are still important legal pri
866.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Big context windows are a poor substitute for updating the weights. Its like keeping a journal because your memory is failing.
867.
by mr_toad 1y ago
It’s difficult to get to the root of it.
868.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Back in the day when everyone used to watch broadcast TV, and stations synchronised their add breaks, water consumption would spike with every add break.
869.
by mr_toad 1y ago
Presumably you could use them on longer direct routes. London to Edinburgh non-stop is 4.5 hours, so a bit of extra time at each end wouldn’t make much difference.
870.
by mr_toad 1y ago
What sort of hacker can’t stay awake for 24+ hours?

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