ericbarrett

> Blanets are planets that form in the accretion disk around a sufficiently large black hole.... [T]hey can be heated by either radiation from the black hole's accretion disk, or (this is whacky) the blueshifted cosmic microwave background if they're close enough to the hole.

Mindbending! Makes me wish I went into astronomy rather than tech, and not for the first time.

I don't fault your cynicism. There has been a lot of "looking the other way" lately.

For commercial and political texters in the U.S. there is quite a bit of FCC regulation. For scammers, obviously that doesn't matter. Probably a sign of the times that people can't tell the difference anymore, though

Did you ever provide your phone number at voter registration? I made this mistake once and got added to dozens of text lists, Democratic and Republican. Never had a problem from the usual leaks.

I have replied STOP a lot and the political texts do, in fact, stop - at least from that particular number (see my other comment for a rant about this). Of course if you do this to a scammer it is as you say.

I have replied STOP to many of these and it has reduced the flood, but I still get several a day. The bot's reply to "stop" is always some variant of:

> You have successfully been unsubscribed. You will not receive any more messages from this number.

"From this number" is clearly a legalese parsing of some law or regulation and the end result is that you cannot truly opt out. Infuriating.

You write well. I get the sense you have some interesting stories from your time in the cheese factory!

If you are a YouTube Premium subscriber you actually do get a button that skips in-video sponsor ads.

It wasn’t just the LLM language, the sections “The corpus” and “What the data supports” were disjointed and unconvincing. Likely due to lack of human wrangling. Unfortunately they were the core of the analysis.