Jap2-0

>> "...the production cost is estimated to be a trillion times the market price of gold."

> Wikipedia just pulled this one out of its butt.

It is worth checking before accusing someone of making something up...

This appears to come from https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l..., which states that the author of a 1980 experiment says "It would cost more than one quadrillion dollars per ounce to produce gold by this experiment." That appears (from skimming sources) to come from a running cost of $5000/hr to produce a few hundred atoms of gold per hour. Modern methods are probably more efficient, but the number didn't come from nowhere.

Addendum: And per https://home.cern/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc, the LHC can turn lead into gold at a rate of 89000 nuclei per second, which is ridiculously far from economically reasonable. The LHC cost $9 billion and uses a lot of power, so I'd say not "similar orders of magnitude to mines and refineries" used for gold.

> Has religiosity actually decreased?

This is fair* (and I expect many Christians would agree with you in generalities of "everyone worships something"); what I was getting at here was that (by the first numbers I found) those who regularly attend organized "god-based" worship has dropped by ~1/3 over the past 20 years or so, and so I would expect roughly a corresponding drop in attendance in parochial schools. If the drop is less than that,** that would seem to support the author's hypothesis.

> What were you hoping to add by mentioning this?

Along the same lines as the previous: even if more families aren't able to send their kids to private schools, but desire to do this, the could support two parts of his narrative: (1) decrease in social capital (of which he defines part as, to paraphrase, schools that people trust); and (2) that more essential parts of life (such as education, as opposed to television) are becoming rapidly more expensive.

(Not stating which of his points I agree with, but I think that "private school enrollment is declining" does not necessarily rebut the core of his arguments.)

* Though I think my meaning was clear

** Though of course this becomes more complicated when you look at figures for all private schools

Has it declined as much as we would expect, given the decrease in religiosity in the US over that time period? I've only found data going back to 1995,[0] which shows relatively flat numbers for the past 15 years or so.

(And the amount of parents which are interested in their children attending private schools vs those who have access to and can afford them is an entirely different discussion.)

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_205.10.a...

Consistency: the only case where he used BCE is in an image caption. The description on Wikimedia Commons uses BCE, so my guess is that he defaults to writing BC but reading that subconsciously put him in the frame of mind to write BCE. From a skim, he never uses CE or AD in this article.

Omission: this confused me at first, but really the entire article is set 3000 years ago, so it's not particularly ambiguous. If you think in the context of "lecture on the bronze age" you wouldn't expect him to specify every time.

> > Teachers can love their students.

> That's just such a weird point to make. It is great that my kids' primary school teachers are super kind and loving. But it's not what they're for, and it's definitely not what AI tutors are for. Nobody is claiming this will replace a hug from a parent.

This doesn't seem weird at all. Developmentally they need (kind, loving) human interaction. That's obviously not the only purpose of teachers, but if you think 7 hours a day without it wouldn't make a difference... just like a computer can't be held accountable, a computer can't have compassion.

At that age especially, play with other kids is time spent learning.

I rarely have online meetings, but what annoyed me most last time I did was that I had multiple AI note taking services magnanimously send me multiple emails each telling me how if I signed up for their service they could share their meeting notes with me. It wasn't even that important of a meeting!

This reminds me of some comments by C.S. Lewis (paraphrasing from memory) on three ways of writing for children, two good and one bad:

- Writing for a specific child (think telling a story to someone specific)

- Writing because you have something to say and a story is how you want to say it

- Writing generally what you think a group of people want (e.g. "children like food so I'm writing a story about food")

I think the essay is available online, he is much more eloquent than I

Firefox has been unloading tabs for several months or so (at least on nightly).

Is that with Firefox's built-in tracking prevention disabled?

Okay, because no one seems to be answering the Venice question:

- They had a strong navy (and shipbuilding capacity), making a blockade difficult

- They traded with many nations, so no one group could cut off their food supply

- Fish

- They had a near monopoly on the trade of salt and spices, the former of which was important to everyone and the latter of which was important to aristocrats

(note: I read a few sources but this is not thorough research)

For context, the lowest notes on most pipe organs are typically about 33 or 16 Hz (from a pipe that is 8', 16', or 32' long).

Correct.

This disappeared a few months ago for me, unfortunately.

> they are... the beneficiaries of a more brain-dead, more bored, more asleep student body

> 'peace and quiet' in the classroom is mistaken for educational success.

To clarify, do you think that phones or the removal of phones leads to these outcomes? Do you think that teachers like or dislike phones? Or is the point that there are many biases both ways?

> they have rose-tinted ideas about the way things used to be

Some do. Are teachers the only ones?

> if this was a serious attempt to gauge whether smartphones are [detrimental] or beneficial, we'd have a double-blind, standardised anonymously-graded test.... Funny how no-one seems to be eager to finance such a study.

I am not sure how you would set this up in a way that does not fall victim to a dozen confounding variables. There have been comparisons of standardized tests before and after phone bans, of course, but those also fall victim to similar statistical issues.

Would huge pages help with the mmap case?

I was thinking of https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1984333. Looks like that's only active when certain fingerprinting protection settings are on.

I might be wrong but I think I heard that Firefox and maybe Safari bin that to a couple common values. (Or maybe that's just in the tracking-prevention mode that Tor uses?)

Duh. Thanks for pointing that out.

Hmm, is it normal practice to rotate secrets before fixing the vulnerability?

Decreasingly so, but even in stuff written in the last hundred years or so you'll sometimes find words capitalized for emphasis or similar.

On Firefox 142 (nightly):

Cropout: After being stuck at 0% for a long while and 1200 network requests, it loads to a menu with a black background and will load a game but only UI elements show up. Seems to have a lot of errors parsing shaders, as well as a few other miscellaneous errors.

Car configurator: Several errors while at 0% (never loads), the first among them being `[223402304]: MessageBox type 0 Caption Message Text Game files required to initialize the global shader and cooked content are most likely missing. Refer to Engine log for details.`

I would concur with others that you should at least test this in Firefox before advertising it here.

Alt + = will put you in the equation editor fairly easily, and from there you can pretty much use LaTeX notation.

Yet Word is leagues ahead of Google docs... (shudders)

Actually, it goes back to Tiger lake (2020; 2021 for desktop). [0]

Addendum: AMD since RDNA2 (2020-2021-ish) [1], NVIDIA since 30 series (2020) [2], Apple since M3? (2023).

Note: GP's processor released in 2024 but is based on an architecture from 2020.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardwar...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next#Feature_set

[2] https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-sup...

> While the Harry Potter series may be fun reading, it doesn't provide information about anything that isn't better covered elsewhere

To address this point, and not other concerns: the benefits would be (1) pop culture knowledge and (2) having a variety of styles of edited/reasonably good-quality prose.

> We always build something new and bespoke, with extremely high complexity compared to any kind of building or infrastructure.

Maybe this is part of the problem?

> There's no evidence of it in contexts where we would expect something like this to be mentioned.

What are those contexts?

It's not just Firefox, and it's because https://threekindwords.com/words.json is not json.

But you didn't even lose two quarters. Shrug and move on.