avalys

“It wouldn’t be the last conflict between Helmuth and Springer Nature. Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash. This time, facing pressure from Springer Nature, she resigned.”

So, an activist editor in chief focused on social justice nonsense and identity politics instead of on science, the resulting distraction ran it into the ground, and what used to be a respected institution is now struggling to recover from this disastrously poor leadership. A familiar story.

I used to enjoy SciAm. A few years ago I picked up an issue and was annoyed by several articles that used the mantle of “science” to push social, political and cultural issues. Articles about how mathematics is misogynistic and how some other field was racist or white supremacist, etc. The same bullshit as the rest of the media, frankly. So I put it down and haven’t read it again since. Too bad.

Exactly as I suspected, your link doesn’t describe uploading any screenshots.

That’s a rather outrageous claim! Do you have evidence for this?

Is it perhaps the case that LG TVs do not literally do what you suggest here, i.e. upload literal screenshots of what might be private, confidential or proprietary information and sell those screenshots, and that you are being hyperbolic or repeating without verifying unsubstantiated claims made by someone else?

Why do you need it to last longer than ~20 hours?

“They could be involved in importing”

This is a manufactured propaganda issue by dishonest and/or innumerate people.

However, can’t data centers just use closed-loop cooling and avoid this whole thing? With all the money going into AI, it’s hard to imagine it being prohibitively costly.

Movie set pieces, as a motivation for Apple making these high-end configs available? That makes no sense.

For one thing, you can’t tell from a movie what the specs are. A $999 Mac Studio looks exactly the same as a $20,000 one.

For another, Apple updates the industrial design on their products so rarely, a 6-year-old Mac, iMac or MacBook also looks nearly indistinguishable from a brand-new one.

Most of this is self-censorship by people who believe they are being oppressed by all-powerful dark forces, whose malevolent schemes can nevertheless be foiled by simple character substitutions.

My favorite example of this is people self-censoring “shooter” as “sh**ter”, which I can’t help myself from always parsing as “shitter”.

“The shitter in Virginia has been apprehended”, etc.

> A thin-faced, introspective Montanan, Wolfe had recently quit his job as an assistant U.S. attorney in Helena to concentrate on running for the North Face’s global athletic team.

Well yeah, that seems more important. /s

Article is faintly ludicrous.

Extreme endurance exercise is bad for your body. Medicine has understood this for years. Marathon runners, cyclists and swimmers have one of the highest incidences of atrial fibrillation once they pass age 60. If you took a blood test right after running a marathon, doctors would think you’re having a heart attack.

> Back in Montana he started running 25, sometimes 30 hours a week, fasting to drop any extra weight off his already thin frame and beating himself up in the margins of his training logs.

> Skaggs told me after Hardrock, he took a single day off, then started training for a marathon. “Stupid-hard running,” he says, “and the symptoms just kept getting worse and worse.”

This article is about people who are damaging their bodies through extreme, unnatural exercise - and then they are surprised that they’ve damaged their bodies. This publication is blithely unaware of how ridiculous this sounds. Like reading a Reddit thread of coke addicts earnestly cheering each other on to consume more and more coke, then being disappointed when their nose disintegrates.

I suppose it’s scientifically interesting that we don’t know the cause down to the biomolecular level. But that’s not surprising either. Other than genetic disorders that can be traced to a single faulty protein, or those caused by some external causative agent like a toxin or a virus, we don’t really know the root cause of that many diseases.

Most of these are authored by what appear to be non-native English speakers. So, the most likely explanation is a translation issue.

In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.

Yes, and what I outlined is one reasonable way to implement “the consent of the governed”, and still a lot more democratic and inclusive than the system the authors of that statement implemented for the next ~150 years after writing it!

What is inherently unreasonable about the idea that only people who pay into the system get a say in how the system operates?

The constitution still guarantees fundamental human rights.

Another idea - everyone is eligible to vote for the presidency and House of Representatives, but only net taxpayers can vote for the Senate.

The idea that there should be some kind of checks and balances on spending taxpayer money, where the people who actually pay the taxes have a special status, isn’t fundamentally incompatible with any principle that I support.

Obviously the current system - where we collect $5T in taxes each year and spend $7T, creating an enormous and ever-growing debt that the system is clearly not able to control - is not working.

A privilege, really? Who bestows that privilege?

I am certainly sympathetic to people who are genuinely disabled.

That doesn’t mean we have to lie to ourselves that they are being productive by sitting around reading books.

If they are JS frameworks that enable other engineers to build applications that support farms, and banks, and taxi services and insurance companies and mines and factories, etc. then obviously that is productive.

If someone is willingly paying money for their labor then I see little point in questioning the worth of that exchange.

When JS engineers start asking for public money to support them writing JS frameworks that no one wants to pay for, we can revisit this topic.

Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc. while you airily define ‘productivity’ as reading the classics and spending time with friends?